A Pathognomy of Performance

A Pathognomy of Performance

Also by Simon Bayly ART ON TERROR: The Incendiary Device of Philosophy (co-authored with Hester Reeve, Bülent Diken and Tony Trehy)

A Pathognomy of Performance Simon Bayly

© Simon Bayly 2011 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–27169–2 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

While I, in silence, thought to brood on this composition and expected to inscribe with a stylus my tearful protest, it seemed to me that a woman appeared over my head, of a countenance exceedingly venerable. Her eyes gleamed with fire, and with a more than human intensity; her expression was full of colour, her vigour showed no trace of diminishment; and yet her years were indeed full, and she plainly seemed not of our time or generation. […] Seeing the Muses of Poetry standing over my bed and uttering words to my tears, she was momentarily angered: ‘Who,’ she demanded with fierce looks, ‘has permitted these play-acting wantons to have access to this dis-eased man?’ Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy

For anyone similarly dis-eased, and play-acting wantons everywhere

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Table of Contents List of Illustrations

viii

Acknowledgements

x

Introduction

1

1 Strains of Thought

10

2 Points of Suspension

19

3 Instants of Affection

36

4 Anomalous Appearances

62

5 The Borrowed Masks of Being

69

6 Logics of Expression

83

7 Wrinkles, Furrows and Folds

107

8 The Tonic of the Sonic

142

9 Deleted Expletives

161

10 Peals of Appeal

184

After the Event

190

Notes

203

Bibliography

224

Index

242

vii

List of Illustrations 1 The masks of comedy and tragedy

69

2 Face as icon

85

3 Uncropped photograph illustrating Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne’s method of localized electrization to elicit facial expression, in this case illustrating the emotion of ‘terror’, c.1860

107

4 Plates 82 and 83 from Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne, Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine, ou, Analyse Électro-physiologique de l’expression des passions

112

5 Plate 78 from Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne, Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine, ou, Analyse Électro-physiologique de l’expression des passions

113

6 Frontispiece to Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne, Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine, ou, Analyse Électro-physiologique de l’expression des passions

119

7 Plate 24 from Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne, Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine, ou, Analyse Électro-physiologique de l’expression des passions

121

8 Arthur Elsenaar with computer-controlled electrodes

122

9 Darwin’s engraved reproduction alongside the related section of Duchenne’s original photograph illustrating the expression of terror

124

10 The image known as ‘Ginx’s Baby’, made by Oscar Rejlander, used by Darwin to illustrate ‘suffering and weeping’

125

11 The photographer Oscar Rejlander (and another model) illustrating various emotions

126

12 Plate III from Charles Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals

128

13 Still images from Bill Viola’s LCD colour video triptych, Anima, 2000

131

14 ‘Grimace’, McDonald’s Corporation character costume

135

15

L’Enfance [Childhood], from the collection of lithographs by Louis-Léopold Boilly, ‘Les Grimaces. Recueil factice de 93 lithographies coloriées’, Paris, 1824 viii

136

List of Illustrations

16

Self-Portrait with a Cap, openmouthed, Rembrandt van Rijn, 1630

ix

138

17 Stop-motion image of a sneeze

161

18

165

Stills from Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze, January 7, 1894

19 Baby crying during the first day of life 20

Joel laughing

172 179

21 Thomas Alva Edison with the ‘Old’ Liberty Bell in 1915

189

22

191

Three Little Chavs, Cornwall, 2006

Acknowledgements Parts of Chapter 1 are taken from Simon Bayly, ‘Theatre and Public: Badiou, Rancière, Virno’, first published in Radical Philosophy. The first section of Chapter 5 and much of Chapter 6 are an extended and revised version of an essay, ‘Figuring the Face’, for the issue ‘On Appearance’ of the journal Performance Research. ‘After the Event’, the concluding chapter, is an extended version of ‘Spectacular Crisis’, which appears in A Life of Ethics and Performance edited by John Matthews and David Torevall (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010). I am grateful for permission from editors and publishers to include this material in revised versions here and full details of these publications are provided in the bibliography.

x

Introduction

Vocations, invocations and encounters This book is an encounter between two vocations: theatre and philosophy. Vocation itself is here evoked in its sense as a calling, an unready response to an insistent demand from elsewhere, rather than as a profession or occupation for which one is appropriately qualified. Such an encounter offers itself as an invocation to a theatre-philosophy, conceived neither as a philosophy of the theatre armed with the rigour of properly philosophical critique and analysis, nor as a corrective programme for thought considered lacking in a general theatricality – projects to which many others have been called since the beginnings of both theatre and philosophy. Instead, it finds itself suspended between the consolations of theatre and philosophy, seeking little more than to throw off the mourning and melancholia that hides out in the backward look of whatever is offered as consolation, in preference for the alien pleasures and possibilities of what was overlooked and what is yet to come. Pathognomy is an antique word, even less in use today than its antonym, physiognomy.1 As demonstrated by its most well-known practitioner, the eighteenth-century Swiss theologian Johann Caspar Lavater, physiognomy sets out to systematize the illustration of forms, imposing order on what appears infinitely variable or inconsistent. It operates according to the logic of the collector, gathering up more and more facts, examples and cases and setting them out in a grand scheme, confident in the possibility of a more or less universal truth. Its chief organ is the eye, organized around what contemporary theory has called ‘the gaze’, scoping the terrain in order to eliminate – or at least explain away – the anomalous. On the other hand, pathognomy operates by different methods. Its object is ‘the elusive expressiveness of the total organism’.2 Its tactics of operation are those of the hunt; its mode of looking is the glance or glimpse and it relies equally on the ear, nose and other senses. The pathognomist seeks out what is fleeting or ephemeral, qualities that remain close to the heart of so much practice 1

2 A Pathognomy of Performance

and scholarship of performance and are thus, like other heart-felt things, simultaneously celebrated and disavowed. The pathognomist takes as much pleasure in the fact that the quarry is as likely to evade seizure as to yield itself up for capture and consumption. Although acquainted with the deceptions, ploys, ruses, tracks and traces of what she seeks, the pathognomist knows that cunning only masquerades as understanding, given the mutable appearance of the prey. Barbara Stafford writes that: Physiognomics considered the face grammatically, abstracted from all fleeting signs which paint the actual situation of the soul. Pathognomics, on the other hand, hunted after symptomatic behavioural and gestural meaning in the layout of an exterior. Like the tracking of ambiguous traces and vanishing spoor, it was an unfolding art of pattern recognition.3 The face is the ur-phenomenon for both physiognomy and pathognomy, the pre-eminent site of their disputations and of their contrasting ethical orientations. Given that theatre appears inextricably and problematically bound up with the experience of coming face-to-face, the face itself figures centrally in the discussions that follow. On the face, both physiognomy and pathognomy practise an ethics, a view of human being and relating, of discerning the fake or forged from the authentic or genuine, the good from the bad. Physiognomics proposes to discern the human being by the form of its isolated outline, by its geometry, physics and biology, taking it as an entity that displays and betrays its internal organization upon delimited surfaces or anatomized interiors. Pathognomics, refusing the lure of mystic obfuscation in overcoming the pseudo-science of physiognomics, appeals to a different sensibility, thinking that: […] like a crystal, whose pure geometrical plans were never perfect when encountered in nature, human beings developed eccentrically. They turned into anomalies through social interaction, or adaptation carried out within an atmosphere. Other people and physical events – beyond control – not just moral actions – eroded our edges and distorted our contours.4 This book takes up the pathognomical cause, setting out to stalk events of sensation and expression in pursuit of an ethics of appearing. It thus exposes itself to uncertainty and discontinuity, to losing the thread and courting absurdity, none of which are necessarily admirable or, least of all, subversive. As well as being partial to moments of arrest and surprise, to what catches the attention as it exits or enters a perceptual encounter, the pathognomist also courts the danger of being left hanging.5 All too often, the object of interest disappears as soon as its appearance has been barely intuited. Suspension

Introduction 3

is thus a motif which returns repeatedly in what follows. To be in suspension is to be in between: in between times, in between one state, situation, thought or feeling and another. As everyone knows, to be ‘in between’ is both a source of pain and pleasure: thus the pre-orgasmic state is the state of suspension par excellence. Suspended, I am strung out, drawn up short, momentarily set aside from whatever it was that was about to happen, and also from myself. Accordingly, some points of suspension are later explored from the perspective of performance and philosophy. Here I wish to note that the present work is itself born out of another, less spectacular, point of suspension: a breaking off of a specific experience and practice of theatre, over a decade of trying to invent theatre works ‘from scratch’. That phrase seeks to evoke the notion of attempting new beginnings but also of the need to scratch a particular itch. To do so is to respond to a vague, but imperative sense that the theatre offers the potential to engage with a certain quality of encounter unavailable – but vital – to a secularized experience which approaches the many varieties of religious experience with extreme reluctance. The nature of this encounter is touched upon throughout what follows, but barely analysed or applied to a specific theatre practice or event as such. The current work chooses to elucidate its particular sense of theatre indirectly: it departs from theatre – indeed, from very specific instances – but it does not return there, except by way of a precarious conclusion. Performance has assumed ethical significance as a cultural paradigm that will build the relation between theory and practice voided by the failures of the various projects of philosophical praxis. In many of its self-styled ‘radical’ discourses, performance often seems to be the means by which thought will once again be able to get a grip on itself, allowing a newly-born subject to navigate ‘what happens’ in the confusions and contradictions of the contemporary moment. In fact, performance has become something of a critical sine qua non of the entire cultural enterprise of theory in Western post-industrial, media saturated societies: performance as the postmodern paradigm, in which the live and the recorded, the real and the fake dissolve into one another, revealing that each and every copy is just a copy of another copy without a foundational original. As being gives way to performance, self gives way to role, masquerade, mimicry and imitation. If this work has an ethical orientation, it is directed not towards the evolution of this version of the performance paradigm, but towards an understanding of the event of becoming unaccommodated.6 In so doing, the aim is to avoid replacing the so-called autonomous, auto-affective, ‘Cartesian’ notion of the individual with the traumatized, abject subject or its engaged, activist counterpart. Rather than venturing another conception of the subject, what follows is conceived as a series of interrupted investigations, since what lies at its core is in effect an appreciation of interruption itself – something that will inevitably require an interruption (or will it be a joining or rejoining?) of its own.

4 A Pathognomy of Performance

Dramatis personae and the action This book weaves together the thought of philosophers and non-philosophers who do not superficially seem to have much in common. As will become rapidly obvious, it is entirely unable to stand as a critique of any particular philosophical approach, nor as an interrogation that sets itself up within the discipline of philosophy itself. However, the perceived dominance of philosophical discourse within which this work wanders could be regarded as generating a certain homogeneity. It names the familiar names, celebrated and derided in equal measure in recent decades and, to some degree, rehearses arguments that have become similarly familiar. In doing so my hope is that, in working with these widely circulated discourses, the current work might overcome the limit of its own field of specialization. My preference is to declare for philosophy as what permits a thinking together of what is increasingly without relation in the disciplinary demarcations of contemporary intellectual life. Thus I have not hesitated to draw upon what seem to be pertinent examples, illustrations, theories, myths, half-truths and occult fictions taken from a wide range of disciplines and sources. If the result is a work that strains at its frame of reference, then, as I show in passing, it has much in common with a strain of contemporary writing about performance. On the other hand, it also seeks to avoid any pretence of striving for what has been called ‘performative’ writing or poesis, being somewhat at a loss to comprehend how such an approach might distinguish itself from writing in general. When poesis does manifest itself against these good intentions, it is hopefully interrupted. The canonical figures of philosophy who figure in what follows, such as Leibniz and Spinoza, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, Hegel and Kant, are read largely through their encounters with the thought of more contemporary figures; among them, Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, Alphonso Lingis, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Nancy. Using Nancy’s own distinction, one could place the first three thinkers under the sign of play and affirmation, in their attempt to renew the specific task of philosophy over and against a Heideggerian tradition of care and waiting. In very general terms, the latter strain of thought asserts that a certain tradition of Western philosophy – the era of metaphysics – is (or ought to be) now at an end and that philosophy will consist in its ‘unworking’, deconstruction, or replacement with a more or less eschatological ethics as ‘first philosophy’. On the side of play and affirmation, thinkers such as Badiou, Deleuze and Lingis refuse to acknowledge any exhaustion of philosophy and, in very different ways, propose a further renewal, which will no longer surrender its possibilities to art, science, politics or love, even though these are the conditions without which philosophy is itself entirely moribund.7 The aim in invoking potentially opposed philosophies is not to mount a critique, remaining within the realms of the discourse named, for example,

Introduction 5

‘Levinas’, which incorporates many things other than the authorial figure of a particular philosopher. Rather it is to take particular ideas or themes as they surface in the respective philosophies and in particular phenomena and to pursue them beyond their proper boundaries, taking them to meet their similars or familiars elsewhere. There is nothing daring or radical in doing this and I certainly make no claims for its political or ethical efficacy. The momentum behind this process is in fact a certain literalness or stupidity that comes from a specifically theatrical way of thinking: an urge to phenomalize, to bring into the fields of the sensible and sensibility, what in writing, ‘after theory’, hovers between the metaphorical (from the phenomenological point of view, ‘merely’ so in its enclosure in a hermeneutic circle) and the phenomenal (from the post-phenomenological view, merely naïve in its presumption to access directly ‘the things themselves’). A prime example is my treatment of Levinas’s figuration of the face in relation to his notion of the ethical. In what follows, the face is taken literally, made into a concrete theme: in Levinas’s work such a move is expressly forbidden, for complex reasons discussed later. From the perspective of Levinasian scholarship, such a move would appear to be at best counterintuitive, at worst a profound misreading. However, the strategy proposed here deliberately effects such a misreading, not simply for its own perverse purposes, but to bring to the fore what, to many other readings, is the basic tension at the heart of Levinas’s work. This is a tension which I will neither want to resolve nor to criticize, since it is what gives his work its excoriating and sometimes excruciating force. In effect, Levinas says that the face is not a phenomenon; it is not available to the scrutiny of understanding. One faces. But, using the ‘as if’ at the heart of the theatre, I am going to both acknowledge the possible truth of such a view whilst at the same time pretend as if it were possible to do just that: make, for example, the face a theme without destroying what Levinas wants to provoke with his very specific understanding of facing. In a similar fashion, opposing a philosophy of care and waiting to one of play and affirmation sets up a dialectic that Deleuze and the Deleuzians might regard as profoundly misplaced: for them, one must simply nail one’s colours to the mast, follow Deleuze’s Spinoza in paying less attention to the negative passions, and instead take the side of life as an immanent principle, have done with the end of philosophy and proceed with the task of creating concepts, undertaking deterritorializations, imagining rhizomes and so forth. But can one so easily move beyond the careful and sombre analyses of those on the side of care and waiting, who, like Derrida, demand an infinite patience and a vigilant hesitation (or dangerous obfuscation, according to more than a few others) before the suggestion of even a tentative, provisional assertion? The thought undertaken here cannot contemplate such a move and so starts out already suspended between these two poles.

6 A Pathognomy of Performance

For a theatre-philosophy, the work of Alain Badiou offers new sustenance, notably as one of the few philosophers of contemporary significance to have directly addressed the theatre – in his Rhapsodie pour le Théâtre – and also worked in it as a playwright and critical commentator.8 Badiou is in many ways a follower of Deleuze, but also one of his chief critics, given that he has dedicated an entire book and several shorter pieces to the critique of Deleuze’s ontology.9 The differences between the ontologies of Badiou and Deleuze are complex and Badiou’s assertions of these differences are not always convincing. But it would be impossible to mistake his direct, cheerful and somewhat bludgeoning style for the convoluted nuances of a deconstructive analysis. Key concepts, such as immanence and multiplicity, have essentially similar functions and significance in the thinking of both Deleuze and Badiou. Where they come closest is in the significance they both attach to the iconic concept of the event and this is my particular point of access in Chapter 3. I do not undertake an analysis (improbable venture) of the Deleuzian system, not simply because his work deploys a series of elusive nomadic concepts that oppose any system-building imperative, but also because there exist many excellent studies of his work in English. I thus assume at least some degree of familiarity with its main concerns. Given that we are now, according to the widely quoted suggestion of Michel Foucault, in the Deleuzian century, this will hopefully not be an excessive assumption. On the other hand, what marks out Badiou’s work is its declared status as a philosophical system, manifest most formally in Being and Event and its sequel, Logics of Worlds.10 What is most striking in that work is Badiou’s grounding of his ontology in mathematics, a discipline that is little more than a vague memory for much contemporary philosophy. Whilst the argument is difficult to follow for those not acquainted with the principles of set theory, its conclusions are set forth with a clarity that makes them readily comprehensible, especially where they are set off against the context of a more familiar contemporary philosophical background, as in the compact Manifesto for Philosophy.11 For this reason, I undertake in Chapter 3 a rapid summation of his approach in terms of its bearing on my subject. Indeed, Badiou’s Rhapsodie pour le Théâtre is in effect a figuration of his entire philosophical system read through the phenomenon – cultural, political, ethical and ontological – of theatre itself. In the context of Badiou’s system, this is a significant fact given his insistence that philosophy must supposedly ‘de-suture’ itself from what are termed its four ‘conditions’: art, science, politics and love. As is the case with Deleuze, Levinas’s work is increasingly familiar beyond both France and philosophy. In the ethical ‘turn’ taken by so much contemporary critical thinking during the last decade, including within theatre and performance studies, it is hard to underestimate the continuing impact of Levinas’s thought.12 During his long career (his first published works date

Introduction 7

from the 1930s when he was in his early twenties), Levinas’s concern remains entirely consistent – the encounter with alterity in the Other as the ground of human existence and hence ethics as first philosophy – and concepts that are taken up in the early works endure right through to their final articulation in Otherwise Than Being, Or Beyond Essence.13 That work and its precursor Totality and Infinity rightly form the basis of contemporary Levinasian analyses and it is in the latter that the concept of the face receives its fullest treatment.14 Whilst I pursue the theme of the face in Levinas in conjunction with appearance in Deleuze’s work, I do not elaborate upon related concepts, such as the hostage and substitution. The face is the primary, if not the only, figure that Levinas is content to deploy in his thought and, as is explored later, its iconic appearance is framed and contained by the discursive aspect of speaking set forth as a saying which exceeds the denotative or communicative dimension of language (the said ) as well as the objectifying aspect of the visual gaze. For Levinas, speaking follows directly upon the event of facing, even if such an imperative is refused or denied in practice. However, there is an aspect of Levinas’s early thinking that remains buried rather deeply within the analyses of his later works. If Levinas’s work as a whole might be defined as a kind of sacrificial ethics in which the ‘I’ is made entirely incumbent on its encounter with the Other, there is another dynamic at work in early texts such as Existence and Existents and, most specifically, in On Escape.15 There, a more self-propelled conception of ecstatic subjectivity is elaborated in the concept of evasion, the need of the ‘I’ to be quit of its egocentricity in favour of an eccentric, libidinal orientation. This sensibility is thus briefly explored in Chapter 6. Such a sensibility is also to be found in the work of Alphonso Lingis, the translator of many of Levinas’s major works into English. Lingis’s own philosophy supplements a Deleuzian vitalism with a Levinasian conception of alterity. It also displaces Deleuze’s preference for the percepts and affects of art with an erotics of the elements: the night, the deep, extremes of landscape and climate, animal (including human) behaviour and display.16 In many respects, the persona Lingis dramatizes in his increasingly ecological meditations on the commanding power of alterity is that of Robinson Crusoe – not that of Defoe’s novel but of Michel Tournier’s inverted retelling of that narrative in his book, Friday.17 This text also provides Deleuze with the occasion to set out his own understanding of alterity, not as the encounter with the Other, but as the imagination of a world without others. Rather than replicating the order of civilization upon his island, Tournier’s Robinson, who finally gives up organizing projects that end only in dissolution and disarray, is instead both ‘elementalized’ and sexualized by the inhuman forces of the island itself. As Deleuze writes: ‘Robinson’s final goal […] is “dehumanization”, the coming together of the libido and the free elements, the discovery of a cosmic energy or of a great elemental Health which can surge only on the isle.’18 Lingis himself has literally

8 A Pathognomy of Performance

conducted his own ‘Robinsonade’, combining an engagement with the philosophical tradition with encounters in forests, oceans, mountains and deserts as well as with the faces and bodies of non-Western individuals. As such, his texts stand as an intense multiplication and phenomenalization of Levinasian alterity, which generally avoids any reference to ‘the things themselves’ beyond the figure of the face. They also invoke a thoroughly active subject, exposed to the displacing force of the elements or the Other in the form of an imperative. With the renewed notion of the imperative, Lingis makes a link between a Levinasian and a Kantian ethics. In doing so, he reanimates the conception of the subject as a power, subject not simply to Kant’s abstract notion of duty but to a cultivated Spinozan ‘capacity to be affected’. Lingis refuses the trauma that characterizes the conception of aporetic subject so often proposed by deconstructive thinking but equally declines the heroic militancy afforded by Badiou’s ‘subject to truth’, preferring an approach more akin to a late Foucauldian ethics, founded on the practice of ‘the arts of the self’ – a practice explicitly bound up with questions of performance. Pursuing these varied themes according to the pathognomic impulse, each of the subsequent chapters seeks to surprise its predecessor, tracking its elusive phenomena across a very varied terrain. Often these hunting expeditions find that their quarry has ‘gone to ground’ and so are forced to find the trail afresh. Some of the phenomena in question are not easily defined and their mutability continually throws into question the reality of their existence. Yet by their nature, such phenomena unravel hard and fast distinctions between observable events or objects and dreams, fantasies or hallucinations. However, much of what follows attempts to find a means of testifying to the affective and ethical significance of their evanescent appearance, an appearance which belongs no less to the realm of the true for being what Deleuze has described as virtual rather than actual. Finally, for a work that makes much of the instant and the ephemeral, this book has been very long in gestation. Many of its themes and concerns are reflected in the rapidly shifting landscape of intellectual fashion of the past decade – the various ‘turns’ from, for example, the political to the ethical, to the social and back again, from the voraciously transdisciplinary adventures of the ‘non-discipline’ of performance studies to a return to a specific, materialist investigation of the theatrical and its particular affects and effects. Indeed, this period has been characterized as one marked by a transition from a long regime of ‘theory’ in the arts and humanities to one more open to the ostensible freedoms that come with being ‘after theory’, in which something like deconstruction can often appear, for better or for worse, as almost an abandoned practice.19 Indeed, when reviewing this book for publication, there was a strong temptation to ‘update’ it through a process of the excision of references to thinkers whose work no longer seems to exercise academic discourse quite as much as it did even only a

Introduction 9

few years ago. But I make no apologies for spending time with philosophy whose ‘evental’ impact might seem to have passed. This is particularly the case for Jacques Derrida, whose thinking many might consider has suffered from serious overuse and abuse within arts and humanities scholarship. But while Derrida might no longer be the fashionable staple of the critical reading list, I want to argue that many of the arguments and paradoxes he articulated, specifically in relation to terms that concern performance (such as ‘presence’), are still very much with us. As an activity that inescapably operates within the logic of fashion, we can also be sure that the thinking that demands attention today will be supplanted by another in a year or two, if not quite tomorrow. Yet, like fashion, it works through a process of rediscovery and reinvention, in which whatever is discarded or dated inevitably comes around again, reanimated in different inflections and combinations. Furthermore, in an era when an idea or turn of phrase can ‘go viral’ within a matter of days and months, the publication of an ‘academic’ book can surely no longer be, as the blurb usually suggests, quite so ‘timely’? Indeed, the concept of event that suffuses this book unfolds a retrospective temporal logic in which an event as such is only ever manifest through a durational process of staying faithful to its reverberations that can work it through. The book might then appeal to a different temporal rhythm, paradoxically seeking what is yet to come by sifting back through what would otherwise be discarded, or regarded as ‘over’, rather than rush on with the energetic pursuit of something else. Nevertheless, there is some sense that the event of ‘the event’ in contemporary thought would seem to have taken place and that those who concern themselves with thinking about it are in the difficult process of figuring out what it might mean to be faithful to it. Thus the final chapter of the book attempts to answer the concluding question of its predecessor (what calls or summons the collective now?), in the context of the aftermath of the event’s own intellectual happening.

1 Strains of Thought

The longings of performance Whilst I have declared for a theatre-philosophy, it is the imperatives of performance and performativity per se which have provided the ground of a renewed encounter between philosophy and the thinking of the theatrical. Much of the work which places itself in proximity to performance stakes a great deal on its interrogation of knowledge-as-theory via practices or other forms of ‘know-how’ that are occluded within institutionalized forms of knowledge, including philosophy. Amongst these might be the plural arts of the everyday, of the colonized, oppressed or forgotten, or of the non-cognitive dimensions of human perception and communication. Despite this diversity, what has become ‘performance studies’ still constitutes itself as a body of writings, a loose community of inscriptions – however much this or that particular work gestures towards its own scriptural limitations. In marking the limits of the textual or scriptural, performance and the performative have come to play significant, and often contradictory, roles in formulating what might be called an ethics of the beyond. In this approach, the discourses of both philosophy and performance seek to establish a relationship to the ethical and the political based on an aporetic principle of the enigmatic signifier or trace. This work, alongside similar literary and philosophical traditions, finds itself in the somewhat schizophrenic position of writing which wants ideally to escape the condition of the written or, at a bare minimum, to testify to what cannot be inscribed. This tendency is something which many of those participating in as well as witnessing the proliferation of performance as a critical paradigm might be unsure whether to regard as curse, blessing or irrelevance. Drawing heavily on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and Derridean deconstruction, theorists central to the evolution of the performance paradigm, such as Judith Butler, Herbert Blau and Peggy Phelan, have elaborated diverse ontologies of performance as the play of appearances. These theories explore mimesis and mimicry as carried out in a space of separation, 10

Strains of Thought 11

deferral, difference – which is itself ‘blooded thought’, thought made flesh, and so always already in and of the mind, structuring the divided psyche. However, for many of these theories, performance is, at its ‘insane root’, organized around disappearance, around what is missing, what cannot be shown, seen or represented, around what it is not and can never be.1 Thus what matters both ethically and politically always happens – literally and metaphorically – either offstage, in the wings or margins of the event, or in the incalculable effects and affects of the individual spectator’s engagement. Theatre or performance shows, shows up, traces or ghosts this very disappearing. It is this ‘ghosting’ that makes what is absent somehow present for those willing to act as witnesses. In this sense, to bear witness is to offer a kind of minimal testimony to the hope for the future of illusion that is life otherwise subjected to a generalized principle of (theatrical) representation. For those theories of performance seeking a refuge from the logic of representation or the ideology of the gaze, it is ‘the body’ which has provided the most capacious hideout. The recalcitrant, resistant and abject body, subjected to all manner of penetrations, dismemberments and interpretations, has become a resting place for many approaches to performance seeking to establish the importance of qualities of experience and the transmission of knowledges that are not regulated by the aggressive exercise of so-called cognitive rationality. Yet despite the ubiquity of the body within contemporary academic discourses, the philosophies of embodiment often seem curiously bereft of any differentiation of what is often vaguely described as bodily, embodied or simply ‘felt’ experience. Anthropologies and ethologies have followed psychoanalysis in alerting us to the body as primarily the site of trauma, worked over by the victimizing forces of physical, political and psychic oppression or repression. Within the discipline of performance studies these themes have been taken up by the theoretical work of, amongst others, Peggy Phelan, where the mimetic basis of performance itself is conceived as the scene of the re-experiencing of trauma: Mimicry, I am more and more certain, is the fundamental performance of this cultural moment. At the heart of mimicry is a fear that the match will not hold and that “the thing itself” will disappear before we can reproduce it […] I want less to describe and preserve performances than to enact and mimic the losses that beat away within them. In this mimicry, loss itself helps transform the repetitive force of trauma and might bring about a way to overcome it.2 Phelan’s widely cited ontology of ‘unmarked’ performance that escapes the regime of visibility and the law of representation has become the slogan for a particular ethics of performance.3 This ontology has in turned produced some of the liveliest debate in the field, since one of the inaugural moments

12 A Pathognomy of Performance

of performance studies was the mounting of a deconstructive critique of just such a positing of performance outside economies of representation. Judith Butler has provided a different understanding of the performative, adopting an Althusserian approach to the function of ideology in the formation of the subject. During the 1990s, Butler produced four highly influential books which have had considerable impact on critical thinking, disseminated via the growth of feminist and queer studies.4 Taken as a whole, Butler’s project during this period might be seen as a compelling demonstration of the hard-won conclusion that the human subject as the carrier of ontology – being or existence as such – is a normative effect of the performative. Whether that discovery is an occasion for hope or mourning remains a question of the prospects for human agency and volition with regard to social practices. In the pathology of the so-called postmodern condition, social fragmentation and the ecological vicissitudes of global capitalism, the current prospects are generally not regarded as altogether promising. At the time, others noted the etiolation of Judith Butler’s notions of the resistant force of recitation and mimicry as they were reworked via her use of psychoanalysis, arguing that the latter inevitably brings with it a sense of melancholic desolation and political impasse.5 As Vikki Bell noted, mimicry and mimesis have been given less melancholic interpretations, but for Butler’s focus on the primacy of gender they are increasingly ruled by notions of excessive cultural risk, inevitable recuperation and punishment under the law of hegemonic norms. Butler herself acknowledged the consequent melancholic turn in her work and its concerns with ‘the public foreclosure of grieving for certain things’.6 This appears to have made the possibility of a politics, which many critics appear to wish to coax out of Butler’s work, much more difficult to envisage. It is worth reciting Butler’s resistance, following in what she calls the ‘noble tradition of the refusal of politics’, to the demands of her interlocutor in a 1999 interview: But a politics, you want me to move to the politics… (Police car siren sound) …there’s politics… a state of emergency… I actually believe that politics has a character of contingency and context to it that cannot be predicted at the level of theory.7 Butler herself has fortunately found this lack of transitivity between theory and practice more paradoxically productive than her critics. Her more recent work offers new thinking on ‘the experience of becoming undone in both good and bad ways’, a phrase which evokes an ethics of unaccommodation similar, in some ways, to that explored here.8 Unable to sustain a belief in either a revolutionary praxis or a sense of the ‘ludic’, this thinking of performance and performativity has been characterized (and possibly caricatured) as beset by an overriding tonality of

Strains of Thought 13

trauma, mourning and melancholia at the service of a tragic scenario of loss, lack and disappearance.9 Indeed, such a sensibility is explicit in the rendering of performance as a minimally promising occasion for hope in which, for example, ‘the generation and reproduction of this doubt may be the most significant achievement of the unmarked performance of the Real’10 or by a faith put in ‘the abiding incongruity of the speaking body’.11 This indeterminacy is echoed by what Phelan calls the body’s ‘uncertainty’ – ‘too big to be warm, to warm to be comfortable, too comfortable to be alert in’.12 Here, the body becomes the repository for what might be described as a mysterious animation. As such, it functions as a site of continual unsettlement and discomposure, a discombobulating shift from silence and paralysis into a speaking that is not discourse and a motion that is both more and less than a stylized repetition of acts. The rhetoric of loss and lack substitutes a notion of empowered agency and embodied plenitude with one that is prepared to pay the price of a certain depletion and disablement for a more relational and affective engagement. Phelan herself notes this, suggesting that ‘[t]hese accents on castration and loss may sound a bit pessimistic, but it is exactly because the gaze is “not all” that empathy and symbolic identification are possible’.13 Phelan extends this sense of mourning to the realm of critical writing itself, suggesting that ‘with its citations, quotations, allusiveness, and intertextual resonances’ it is ‘a field of grief and longing’.14 Her remark finds its own intertextual resonance in many others scattered in the literatures and philosophies exhausted by the totality of the regime of representation. Emmanuel Levinas writes: The most lucid writer finds himself in the world bewitched by its images. He speaks in enigmas, by allusions, by suggestion, in equivocations, as though he moved in a world of shadows, as though he lacked the force to arouse realities, as though he could not go to them without wavering, as though, bloodless and awkward, he always committed himself further than he had decided to do, as though he is spilling half the water he is bringing us.15 While this figuration of the performance of the subject and the subject of performance as constructed out of melancholia and loss (perhaps the unavoidable fate of thought as writing, bewitched by images) would seem to have given way to more confident assertions of its ‘radical’ effects and affects, must what escapes the logic of the visible, the written or the represented always be allied with performance as the manifestation of the ineffable? While more recent revaluations of the performative primacy of the ‘unmarked’, such as Alan Read’s Theatre, Intimacy and Engagement, seek out alternative and less melancholic possibilities, they often continue a solicitation of the demand to fulfil the promise of performance so that it might enter into (or infect) the body of existing knowledge – knowledge as what can be inscribed and

14 A Pathognomy of Performance

so feeds power – and thus mutate it via a parasitical inhabiting. As artists of performance regain access to the academy through the recent uptake of the ‘practice-as-research’ PhD, but find themselves still obliged to generate ‘new knowledge or insights’ as the price of re-entry, so performance is once more defined as possessed of its own idiosyncratic, hands-on and always ‘embodied’ ways of knowing, inimical to the ostensibly bloodless abstractions of conventional research practice.16 Yet when arguments are made that an artwork is a thesis, how will the notion of a ‘doctor of philosophy’ be understood as more than simply a badge of some indeterminate creative proficiency? Such a question raises others regarding the formal constraints of both a practical philosophy and a philosophical practice. But, wholly against the grain of the twentieth-century artistic avant-garde’s attempts to overcome the divisions between art forms and between art and life, what is actually gained for performance by a continued assertion of its, for example, always untranslatable or contingent essence, which can only be set forth as itself, or failing that, via some sort of poesis or testimony that faithfully mimes the recalcitrance of performance itself to whatever it is not? Why must a contemporary declaration for performance still require of ‘[performance] making that it flee writing, that which can be written, phrased, knowing, its purpose being to leap into the void of not-knowing’?17 And what might a thinking through theatre contribute to responses to these questions, without seeking some sort of aesthetic primacy for an art form that has protested (too) much of its various writerly foreclosures?

The other strain of thought, or, what is theatre-philosophy? Scholars of theatre have long been fond of asserting the etymological roots of theatre and theory. They seek to establish the study of theatre as an enterprise that could also say something philosophical in its own name, rather than be spoken for by the older academic traditions of poetry, literature and drama. Yet, the history of the relationship between theatre and philosophy in Western thought is the history of a troubled encounter. Neither sibling can escape the other or their shared Greek inheritance, but each desires to free itself from the influence of the other. Such a history is evidenced in the minds and bodies of those who have thought and felt the contact between theatre and philosophy most severely: one thinks of the insomniac Kierkegaard, utterly frustrated by his inability to re-experience the thrilling satisfaction of a play at a second and subsequent viewings;18 Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s abandonment of the theatre in favour of the philosophical celebration of civic festivals which refuse the separation of stage and audience;19 or of Antonin Artaud, carrying out to the letter Deleuze’s project of ‘severe operations of depersonalization’ in his literally maddening attempt to overcome both philosophy and theatre using nothing but philosophy and theatre, thinking and performing.

Strains of Thought 15

Perverse to the last, Deleuze, the global icon of the modern French philosopher, hated cheese and going abroad, but he loved the cinema almost as much as philosophy. As its readers will be all too aware, Deleuze’s writing on the cinema does not in fact function as work ‘on’ cinema, or even as a philosophy of the cinema.20 Instead, it sets forth a cinema-philosophy, which is simply to say that in this writing Deleuze expresses philosophical thought in his own name, much as he does in his books ostensibly about other philosophers (such as Bergson, Spinoza, Hume, Leibniz and Kant) or in other original works, such as the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, written with Félix Guattari, which have secured his international reputation. Just as the professional philosopher may not recognize his or her Spinoza in Deleuze’s Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, so the cinephile may not recognize cinema studies in the Cinema 1: The Time-Image and the Cinema 2: The Movement-Image.21 Yet, as Jean-Luc Nancy has suggested, they contain the projective principle of his ‘virtual’ philosophy – a cinema-thought that seeks to effectuate its own autonomous universe ‘in the sense of having its own order and screen, a singular plane of construction, of displacements and dramatization of concepts’. Nancy adds: If one wanted to take this further, and seek out the fold, one would have to ask oneself in what way the other strain of thought is a matter of the theatre [… which] has to do with the real, which plunges into it, even if it means losing itself there. This is why the former places itself under the sign of play and affirmation, the latter under the sign of care and waiting.22 Nancy does not pursue this matter of the theatre with regard to philosophy, either in this text or elsewhere, though there is much that is theatrical in his thought. Similarly, although the theatre features significantly as a trope in Deleuze’s discussions of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard at the start of Difference and Repetition and is the overt focus of the later ‘One Less Manifesto’ (on the work of Italian director Carmelo Bene), this does not quite seem a sufficient basis to claim Deleuze as intervening ‘critically in the field [of theatre and performance studies] with the production of a new vision of performance as a vital philosophical and political force’.23 Given its obvious Artaudian heritage and passing points of reference to the American and European avant-garde of the 1960s, Deleuze’s ‘vision’ was hardly new, even at the time of its original publication. As Laura Cull points out, Deleuze’s later work with Guattari is often profoundly hostile to the theatre (‘Shit on your whole mortifying, imaginary, and symbolic theater!’).24 But to then claim that this denigration refers to ‘only really a specifically representational theatre’ (was there ever such a specific theatre?) is surely complicated by Deleuze’s own attempt to supersede the strictures of representation in his theorization of repetition, in which his well-known anti-representational language is often qualified or even contradicted by a more ambiguous understanding.25 Perhaps limited

16 A Pathognomy of Performance

by an inability to adequately express ‘non-representational’ experience, this book takes up Nancy’s ‘other strain of thought’, the thought that plunges into the real, but as a ‘matter of the theatre’ that is productively (pace some of Deleuze’s own prescriptions) bound up with representation and its various self-differentiations, disguises, maskings and so forth. However, it does not, as Nancy appears to do in his text, fold it underneath its Deleuzian counterpart, a fold that would mark off the virtual from the real, the surface of the screen or image from the fathomless depths of experience. The pursuit of this ‘other strain’ is perhaps not entitled to ennoble itself with the label ‘philosophy’ at all – though what is good and lasting in philosophy has often arisen out of a willingness to spend time and thought on such things. It might, then, be better described as an enthusiasm, an impulse to philosophy that is desirous of a certain style of questioning. Such a theatre-philosophy constitutes itself both as an ethics and a phenomenology. Ethical, not because of any particular claim for (im)moral probity or critical self-awareness, but simply because the theatre concerns itself with how the human species appears to itself; how it recognizes what counts as ‘human’ and what cannot be recognized as such; how we show or present ourselves to each other; how we appear (and disappear) vis-à-vis, face-to-face with our so-called fellow humans, with our so-called communities. Of course, the manner in which this takes place is differently inflected in differing cultures. But the opening question of Hamlet – ‘Who’s there?’ – is the question with which the theatre invokes its audiences everywhere. Here, what is important is that the experience of audience is aligned with the audience of experience, how the very structure of theatre entails an encounter with alterity based in an asymmetrical but productive passivity. Phenomenological, because the theatre cannot escape its fundamental connection with the presenting of presence. Theatre deals with what comes to presence, with ‘the things themselves’ as they come to presence in experience, even if presence as such is never achieved, or at least, maintained. This is the ground of theatre as performance: theatre not as the deployment of character, narrative and plot in the elaboration of a drama, nor as the iteration of representations as the production of so many cultural meanings, but as the scene of what appears to be coming to presence, and going from it. Performance and thinking with performance in mind have always provided stimulating, even critically useful ways to pay attention to this unbalancing act, with, of course, a kind of attention that is itself ready to be distracted from its own best intentions. It seems today that we increasingly obtain our sense of our interiority from the outside in, by appropriation, mimicry and exhibition. These are familiar tropes for those disposed to think about theatre and performance, a terminological stock in trade. Once upon a time (not so very long ago), this understanding seemed to be a hard-won critical insight. However, today it would seem simply to be common-sense knowledge that is not merely known by everyone, but enacted in the everyday arts of

Strains of Thought 17

getting by and making do. In the era of the ‘flexible personality’, the cardinal feature of contemporary labour is its transformation into an activity in which the generation of a separate end-product gives way to the figure of the worker as embodying his or her labour through virtuosic, contingent acts of human communication that require the presence (actual or virtual) of others.26 As Paulo Virno suggests in A Grammar of the Multitude, virtuosic acts of communication are not restricted to sets of professionals or experts: they are the characteristic behaviour of almost anyone in the postFordist era because ‘the fundamental model of virtuosity, the experience which is the base of the concept, is the activity of the speaker.’27 As Virno writes, this is not to say that ‘car dashboards are no longer produced’, but that ‘the communication industry (or rather, the spectacle, or even yet, the culture industry) is an industry among others, with its specific techniques, its particular procedures, its peculiar profits, etc.; on the other hand, it also plays the role of industry of the means of production.’28 Whereas politics was historically the discreet social activity that was ‘without end product’ and which required the presence of others, speakers and audiences and publicly organized space, now these elements saturate the politico-aesthetic world of work. The upshot of this is that real ‘public space’ is now the reconfigured space-time of perpetual labour, which no longer conforms to older patterns of clear divisions between work time and ‘free’ or leisure time. Except that now work is not only increasingly figured as an opportunity for participatory conviviality and generalized sociability geared towards the production of communication, but also, more invisibly, as politics. In Virno’s grammar, what cements this analogy between virtuosity and politics is a notion of the organization of this generalized form of public space through the creation of performances and audiences; in effect, through the setting up of a series of pseudo-theatres, asymmetric scenes of communication, display and selfpresentation ‘in role’. Part of this project engages with the growing sense of a need for a renegotiation of notions of collectivity. Such a renegotiation has then to come to terms with a word now almost completely evacuated of meaning by political rhetoric: ‘community’. Later chapters explore the possibilities of rethinking the notion of community from a specifically theatrical perspective. Here, I simply note that significant, positive notions of the power of the crowd or congregation (such as that of ‘multitude’, popularized in the influential work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri) name an ever-emergent collective social subject that is unmediated, revolutionary, immanent and affirmative, refusing any form of historically established organization or mode of specularization.29 The most powerful articulations of otherness available today are manifestos of antagonism, dissensus and disagreement, not of community.30 For Levinas, the philosopher of alterity writing out of the Holocaust, to constantly reiterate the ethical encounter – in no way dialogic or communitarian – with the ‘absolutely’ Other was imperative. To continue

18 A Pathognomy of Performance

that vigilance may well still be ethically and politically imperative today. Yet reading Levinas, it often feels as if such an encounter takes place in a depopulated philosophical wilderness. Awe is the dominant emotional mood in this thought, in which the force of the Other’s presence is sensed even at a vast distance, as if across an empty plain. Perhaps this is why phenomenology always seems to start with the lonely ‘I’, the one who perceives, either as a transcendental consciousness (Husserl) or as a singular one-who-is-forthe-other (Levinas), whether resolute in its own most being-towards-death (Heidegger) or voyaging on a risky libidinal adventure in the mountains, deserts, oceans, cities and forgotten villages of the world (Lingis). However, thinking with theatre in mind calls upon a more agnostic phenomenology, sceptical about the heroism of a Dasein, the magnificence of sensory plenitude, or the utopian possibilities of an existence imagined as the solicitation of the eros of alterity. Phenomenology means many things to few people. It might be best characterized as simply ‘an abiding interest in the spectacular possibilities of the world (the voice, sound, physical material, behaviour) which one uncovers in perception and at once feels the pleasure of the discovery’. That loose phrase is not in fact a definition of phenomenology, but Bert States’s description of the place where a theory of performance should begin.31 The similarities are highly appropriate, excepting a suggestion and an important modification: firstly, we might be better off without a theory of performance that places the uncovering pleasure of perception under the sign of the aesthetic (another set of arguments altogether) and, secondly, the phenomenological ‘I’ does not do the uncovering as such – it happens to us. Such a happening is not simply pleasurable, but ethically imperative: we are the beings to whom such things must happen.

2 Points of Suspension

Scene setting What is an experiment without a little explosion? Astrophysicists do not yet know what makes up the bulk of our universe. Their calculations show that the quantity of ordinary matter detected so far, such as that observed in planets, stars and interstellar gas clouds, can only account for between 2 and 15 per cent of its total mass. While some infer from these calculations, first made back in the 1930s, that our basic theories of matter and gravitation are fundamentally incorrect, the larger scientific consensus concludes that there must be other forms of matter – so-called dark matter and dark energy. So experiments are constructed to detect WIMPs – weakly interacting massive particles possessed of qualities so different from the structure of matter that makes up our planet that they generally pass straight through it and through everything within and upon its surface. The proponents of one of these experiments claim that over a billion such particles will have passed through you in the time taken to read the last few words of this sentence.1 However, statistical probability indicates that sooner or later, one of these particles must strike the nucleus of an earthly atom and cause a potentially observable event: the production of, to give one example among the many types of detection systems in use, another particle – the muon – that emits the blue Cherenkov light that can be detected by photomultiplier tubes. To the available measuring instruments, such an event appears very much like the countless other events caused by the impact of cosmic rays and other subatomic activity. So these instruments must be secured away from the intrusions of such everyday impacts, either through extensive shielding or through siting them as deep as possible in the earth’s interior. Consequently, experimental apparatus has been placed at the bottom of disused mine shafts containing thousands of tonnes of percholoroethylene, liquid gallium or pure water, or into holes bored several hundred metres into the polar icecaps, a sterile medium where only a few cosmic rays penetrate. Hundreds of photomultiplier tubes, like so many ultra-sensitive eyes, surround 19

20 A Pathognomy of Performance

the huge volume of liquid, awaiting the arrival of the particle that will collide with a nucleus and produce a tell-tale trace of subatomic evidence that will testify to its existence. In front of their instruments, turned towards the contained volume of the ‘host’ medium, the audience of scientists waits expectantly for singular events. Their sensibilities, like those of their experimental apparatus, have been specifically educated to register and interpret the traces of the random but inevitable impacts that will be over in an instant. Some of these experiments record such events – of at least, what look like potential candidates for such events on a regular basis, at the rates between hundreds per month to none at all. But it remains problematic trying to square these rates with statistical forecasts based on the predicated mass of such particles, if they are to constitute the missing majority of what exists. So the search continues. Meanwhile, the scientists, as specialist practitioners of pathognomy, wait and try to make better theories and more sensitive experimental setups that will permit them to perceive what they think must exist, but as yet eludes capture. The fantastically implausible but nevertheless observable event of the dark matter-matter collision is a moment of performance similar in kind, if not in degree, to those evoked by a contemporary theorist of theatre and performance, Herbert Blau. He describes them as: [t]he inaugural moments and instances when the theater appears – unless all the world is a stage – from whatever it is that it’s not. More theater, less theater: in the doing of theater we solicit, rebuff, try to entrap that thing (has it appeared again tonight?), though we’re never quite sure we have it or that the audience can or should see it when, for a moment out of memory, we think we know what it is.2 Blau imagines an experimental theatre that might be worthy of such a description. Its task would be the creation of an apparatus able to detect and register spontaneous disclosures of the human (whatever one decides ‘the human’ is), or at least what is thrown up in the aftermath of their momentary occurrence. Seeking the guarantee of a system that might produce such events, like the dark matter scientists, we may have to wait a very long time, only to find that we were mistaken in our expectations. But meanwhile, facing a paucity of experimental evidence, pathognomists of performance elaborate theories and other forms of representation that will permit them to register the value and significance of what escapes as performance, of what they obscurely intuit as necessarily existing but remaining indeterminate, unthought, or even unrepresentable. Such theories are made using the currently available tools to formulate a retrospective image of such events, born out of experience of previous, momentary manifestations.

Points of Suspension 21

Upsetting scenes 1 A restaurant in a small French port. To give the parents some time alone, the brothers, aged about 8 and 11 respectively, are sent out to play in the humid night air. They wander aimlessly up the quiet street, along the quayside and within a few hundred yards they come across an outdoor circus in mid-performance – or perhaps it’s just a rehearsal, hard to tell. There is music but there are no seats. The brothers take up a position on the edge of a loose assembly of less than a dozen people, gathered informally at various distances from the action. After some pronouncements in a foreign language, a man starts his walk across the high wire, about 60 feet up, the balance pole between his hands. There is no safety net. Around the halfway point, the figure hesitates, falls and thuds onto the stone of the quayside. He does not move. Other members of the troupe rush around him, agitated, upset. The music is turned off. The audience, such as it is, remain. It appears that some of them, the brothers included, are unsure as to the exact nature of what is taking place. Minutes go by. Two or three people are bent over the prone figure. A white ambulance van arrives, its blue emergency light pulsing silently. The paramedics emerge and gently ease the body of the wirewalker onto a stretcher and then into the van, which drives off. The spectators disperse. Amazed and somewhat confused, the brothers return to the restaurant and tell their parents the story of what they have witnessed, about how the high wire walker stepped out onto the wire so high up, fell off onto the ground, did not move and was taken away by an ambulance. Just like that, just now, a few minutes ago. No one seems to believe them… 2 Lady Macbeth wears a diaphanous, silky gown with a long train trailing behind her. It’s a court scene; other actors are spread about on the rostra over which she glides, her feet invisible. Suddenly, she draws abruptly to a halt. She keeps on speaking and makes to move off again, but stalls. Her glance swivels behind and down, over her left shoulder, towards her train draped over the edge of the rostrum. The dress is caught on something; a protruding nail or a frayed timber edge left by the stage carpenter. The blocking demands she move off, to greet whoever it is and embrace them courteously. But the blocking itself is blocked: the dress holds fast and the dialogue runs out. She tugs at the train, but encounters only resistance. The recalcitrant matinee audience of schoolchildren that has hardly been in attendance finds its interest aroused and focuses its collective disbelief towards the event now taking place on stage. There, in compact choreography of bodies supposed to depict a web of loyalties of kinship and power, everyone suddenly appears a long way from everybody else, but with too much in common. Eyes have nowhere to look, hands have nothing to do, bodies have nothing to represent. Some other kind of time passes, neither real time nor our time – it seems like hours, but it’s probably only a few seconds. Emerging from this frozen time, one of the actors moves awkwardly into the space separating him from the others. As he kneels to detect

22 A Pathognomy of Performance

the hidden source of the problem, his hands disappear beneath the folds of the dress, palpating its fabric. Others break ranks to join him. The dress is deftly unhooked, the performer released, and in a reverse movement of the breakdown that has occurred, the professionals take control. Everything on stage morphs seamlessly back into the space-time of the play. In a parallel motion, the young audience withdraws into itself, unhooking an attention that had also been caught on that nail, coagulating again around its own substance and sustenances. The performance must have gone on to conclude as it usually does, Burnam Wood did come to high Dunsinane Hill, everything went off pretty well, despite the embarrassing hiccup. But another version of the performance was already over after that hiatus; it had its moment, something of interest had flared up briefly and then vanished… Two dramatic moments, the first all the more theatrical for not even taking place in a theatre; a moment of disaster and a moment of fiasco. Disaster: a sudden misfortune, due in older traditions to baleful stellar or planetary aspects, a mishap on a grand or public scale often involving loss of life; or, more obscurely, a personal bodily affliction, an internal upset. Disaster has found a certain philosophical pedigree, from Kant’s detection of apocalyptic tones in the philosophy of his age to Maurice Blanchot’s ‘writing of the disaster’, a theme captured in his eponymous book which, in the aftermath of a postHolocaust European experience, marks the apogee of thought as overcome by disaster in the act of its own inscription.3 John Captuo, writing a Levinasian (anti-)ethics of obligation, takes up Blanchot’s term and asserts that the force of obligation makes itself felt as disaster; not as pain or suffering, but as an unrecoverable loss, an ungrounding that is without principle or concept.4 Disaster for Caputo is encountered via its unhopeful names: for example, Hiroshima and Nagasaki 1945, Budapest 1956, Sarajevo 1992, all overshadowed by the name of Auschwitz. These are singular and catastrophic events after which things can never be the same. This is disaster thought as major event, always approaching what may in fact be ‘unthinkable’ or what will negate philosophy (or performance) as purposeful enterprise. But what of disaster as a minor event, as aberration or upset? Are the only important events those that alter states of affairs on the grand stage of history? Blanchot suggests otherwise when he writes: ‘The disaster: stress upon minutiae, sovereignty of the accidental.’5 What is explored here is the possibility that, in its minor forms, disaster becomes less easy to differentiate from fiasco, but no less significant in its ability to shape experience. ‘Fiasco’ is a strange term of Italian origin, meaning literally ‘the bottle’ and metaphorically, the interruption of a theatrical spectacle. More generally, it evokes the notion of collapse, disintegration and disaster mixed with a sense of the ludicrous and implausible. Italian etymologists hazard guesses at its obscure provenance, even citing specific theatrical events as the occasion of its origination. But its sense, as opposed to its meaning, is best complicated by the mention in the Oxford English Dictionary of the archaic Bologna

Points of Suspension 23

bottles, unannealed glass vessels of the seventeenth century. According to the Renaissance chronicler Richard Grafton, such bottles did not shatter when dropped from considerable height on to a solid floor, ‘but if you drop into them some hard little bodies, they will burst in pieces’.6 With this phenomenological observation, ‘fiasco’ acquires the sense of a breaking up that is a breaking out. Weakness and fragility are revealed in a structure otherwise durable and resilient, happening from the inside out rather than from the outside in. This event is not the result of the disastrous and spectacular impact of two solid bodies contacting each other via their external surfaces, but rather of a process whereby one, much smaller, body finds it way into the invaginated inside of the other and encounters its inner surface. It is this structural anomaly, a kind of built-in principle of auto-disintegration that is activated only under certain conditions, that is of abiding interest here. In a consideration of theatre close to the one put forward here, Nicholas Ridout seeks a similar principle of fiasco as immanent to a certain practice of estranged performing: One might have to imagine a performance in which the performer loses her double, in which whatever she might be pointing to or laughing at has disappeared. Is this perhaps the origin of the term ‘to corpse’? The moment when the laughter annihilates the represented being, leaving the performer alone on stage, helpless? The performer does not ‘die’, but rather commits an act upon the illusionary character: ‘corpsing’ it. The thing you were offering up, showing, demonstrating, has turned to dust in your hands […] I suggest this possibility because it sheds light on the peculiar pleasure of fiasco […] The pleasure an audience takes in such moments is far from Schadenfreude. It is closer to the connoisseur’s delight at seeing how the mechanism works at the moment of its breakdown.7 The occasion of the laughter referred to here is returned to in the next chapter, but at this point, Ridout’s suggestion performs an appropriate ‘minorization’ of disaster, as well as binding it to a specifically theatrical understanding.8 Disaster and fiasco: two types of unforeseen event that disrupt the planned unfolding of a rehearsed situation. The disaster described above is overtly death-bound and portentous, demeaned by anecdote. The fiasco verges on the trivial, superficially hardly worth the telling. Both were equally thrilling, pleasurable even, both in the witnessing and the remembering, but strange and horrible too. Both are accidents of performance that led to starkly different corpsings, about either of which one could, in bad taste, voice the theatrical adage that the unfortunate performer ‘really died out there tonight’. But distasteful unease defines the nature of these instants, the unexpected thrills of spectatorship normally occluded by performative competence. They thrive on the epistemological uncertainty surrounding what actually takes place and what is ‘merely’ performed. They are at once enthralling

24 A Pathognomy of Performance

and revolting: one wants to watch and to look away. Is this not precisely the definition of the spectatorial frisson, a particular version of the aesthetic ‘shudder’ theorized by Theodor Adorno?9 Both of the thrilling moments recounted earlier lodged into the memory of a child and became sedimented there, awaiting another encounter that would disturb them. For him, these instants came to stand as an inauguration into a possible theatre: a minor theatre of the existential-phenomenological thrill; theatre as the incessant effort to solicit the collision between the infinitely agile flight of thought and the obdurate materiality of the pseudo-competent body. Appropriate, then, for the first of these memorable scenes to be reanimated years later by an encounter with Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. After descending from his self-imposed mountain solitude, he chances upon the tightrope walker in a town square. ‘Behold, I bring you the Superman’, he announces to the assembled crowd and, being presumed a performer, Zarathustra obtains his first hearing from the people, who take him as the circus ringmaster announcing the tightrope artist’s performance. Here is the moment of Zarathustra’s inauguration into his own self-appointed drama: Then, however, something happened which made every mouth dumb and every eye rigid. For meanwhile the tight-rope walker had begun his performance: he had stepped out of a small door, and was walking over the rope, stretched between two towers and suspended over the marketplace and the people. When he had reached the exact middle of his course the small door opened once more and a fellow in motley clothes, looking like a jester, jumped out and followed the first one with quick steps. ‘Forward, lamefoot,’ he shouted in an awe-inspiring voice, ‘Forward lazy-bones, smuggler, pale-face, or I shall tickle you with my heel! What are you doing here between the towers? The tower is where you belong. You ought to be locked up; you block the way for one better than yourself!’ And with every word he came closer and closer; but when he was but one step behind, the dreadful thing happened which made every mouth dumb and every eye rigid: he uttered a devilish cry and jumped over the man who stood in his way. This man, however, seeing his rival win, lost his head and the rope, tossed away the pole, and plunged into the depths even faster, a whirlpool of arms and legs. The market place became as the sea when a tempest pierces it: the people rushed apart and over one another, especially at the place where the body must hit the ground. Zarathustra, however, did not move; and it was right next to him that the body fell, badly maimed and disfigured, but not yet dead. After a while the shattered man recovered consciousness and saw Zarathustra kneeling beside him. ‘What are you doing there?’ he asked at last, ‘I have long known that the devil would trip me. Now he will drag me to hell. Would you prevent him?’10

Points of Suspension 25

No passive spectator, Zarathustra then offers the fallen tightrope walker the consolation of his philosophy, takes his body into the forest but then leaves it in the hollow of a tree. Here, the performing body appears rather more disposable than the metaphor for which it is summoned into Nietzsche’s text. For what matters for Nietzsche is more the rope as idea, less the ropewalker as fallen hero: Man is a rope stretched between beast and overman – a rope over an abyss. A dangerous crossing, a dangerous across, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and stopping. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under.11 Between the disinterring of childhood memories and an encounter with Nietzsche, two other events intervene, the first as retold by Herbert Blau in his book The Audience. There, in a discussion of Brecht and the Verfremdungseffekt, he suggests that theatre since Brecht asks for an audience in suspension, open to the deconstructive dislocation and deferral that structures the gestus of properly alienated performance. He suggests the existential peril of such a possibility with the literalization of the motif of suspension, describing what he regards as ‘a perfected image of Alienation: the self-observing distance of a body so adept it hardly seemed carnal, no less commodified, more like an ideograph of the mind aloft at its extremity’.12 The body in question, and the second of the intervening events mentioned above, is that of equilibrist Philippe Petit, walking across a wire stretched illegally between two skyscrapers in downtown Manhattan in the early morning of 6 August 1974. However, unlike the moments of performance narrated above, there was no accident during that August morning: Petit retained his balance and composure. He ‘became’ the wire and did not fall. But the two buildings that literally sustained his performance, the twin towers of the World Trade Center (like the Titanic, supposedly constructed to survive the worst threat to their integrity that their architects could imagine) did not remain standing some 27 years later, after the instant of their own disaster. Petit’s stepping out across the void was recalled in several newspaper reports in the immediate aftermath of the destruction of the World Trade Center and more recently dramatized in the 2008 film Man on Wire.13 We learn that he did not just walk once across the 40-odd metres separating the towers, but seven times; that he was arrested and eventually sentenced to entertain the public for a day at ground level in Central Park, that on being released by the police his first act was to make love with a passing admirer, and so forth. Petit’s stunt surely stands as the Nietzschean symbol of a heroic yet utterly impersonal humanity pitted against the dizzying inhumanity of the edifice itself and its history, which ended with the disaster inflicted upon it and its

26 A Pathognomy of Performance

occupants. But then again, as the most clandestine of performances, perhaps Petit’s performance was contained only in the present of its unfolding. Blau’s unknowing symbolic prescience permits another act of theatrical recollection. Downtown Manhattan at the time of the construction of the twin towers was also the home territory of the renaissance of the American performing avant-garde. ‘If you were walking in Manhattan and happened to look up, you might have seen dancers [of the Trisha Brown company] walking down the façade of a building.’14 On the same page, Blau also quotes the German playwright Heiner Müller, who, when asked where he would prefer to direct and watch his plays, replied: ‘I would like to stage Macbeth on top of the World Trade Center for an audience in helicopters.’15 One does not have to read Müller’s implicit and self-recriminating indictment of the logic of theatrical spectacle in order to sense a terrifying proximity and an eerie play of substitution between these instants of imagined or actual performance and ‘real’ events. Such a juxtaposition braids the private and public contexts of their historical significance, confusing the distinctions between who or what – man or building – is doing the balancing or falling, what happens to them and who is watching. Nietzsche’s metaphor has proved invaluable for the thinking that has been elaborated around the concept of performance in the last decade. For both philosophy and performance, ethics has become a vertiginous business: unpredictable, undecidable, incalculably full of difficulty, a little mystery and a degree of stoical heroism. To become an equilibrist is no easy vocation in either profession: to read Nietzsche is to read the autobiography of a heavyweight neurotic in the guise of a gravity-defying wirewalker, literally strung out between the twin towers of his philosophy. Similar tensions also figure in writing on performance that seeks to testify to the performative passage of the ineffable with the weight of words. Apparently as far from Nietzsche as it is possible to get and in the single most influential discourse on ethics in the last half century, Emmanuel Levinas’s thinking of what accosts being in the ethical encounter also comes from on high, very close to the most high, which is barely distinguishable from the divine. Writing of performance and psychoanalysis as practices for the rehearsal of loss and mourning, Peggy Phelan makes her move towards an ethical orientation in stating that ‘[t]he mutual performance of these absences constitute our only possible relations with one another, inside and outside the psychoanalytic room.’16 She concludes that it ‘is only through hearing or bearing aural witness as the attempt to walk (and live) on the rackety bridge between self and other – and not to attempt to arrive at one side or the other – that we discover real hope’.17 It might be possible to make distinctions between the modes of self-determination of this taking hostage of the self by the other. Each evocation of ethical vertigo chooses its own bridging technology: the uncanny force of Levinas’s ‘face-to-face’, the dilapidations and vulnerability of Phelan’s rackety bridge or the macho hardness of the taut and unyielding

Points of Suspension 27

steel cable which Petit’s high-wire artist must prepare with loving care (the ideal cable is best left to rust in a field for a few years before use). Heidegger has made a similar set of distinctions regarding the question concerning technology, in his comparisons between the stone bridge over a river and a motorway flyover. Each is a different revelation of the essence of technology, which is nothing less than the historical determination of being qua being in the Heideggerian schema. But what these determinations share is a fascination with what is difficult, with a demand for a perpetual vigilance against the deathly compromise of a falling that would also be a moral failing. The metaphor of chasm-crossing exaggerates the drama of the ethical scene, constructing a spectacle in an expansion of the relationship between stage and auditorium. Curiously, the import of this expanded scene to a thinker like Blau increases in proportion to its contradictions of scale. Petit made the sky his backdrop and an entire city downtown area his auditorium. Yet he was almost invisible from street level; there was very little to see, nothing to hear other than the roar of the traffic. Pressing these instants of spectatorship and of spectral performance (did what is remembered as happening actually take place?) up against invocations of the ethical as a Sisyphean balancing act, it is difficult to avoid the unedifying thought of the disaster as spectacle. This is a scene witnessed voyeuristically by a remote spectator who, unlike the hapless ingénue of theatrical myth rushing upon the stage to stay Othello’s arm, cannot entertain the reality of the event, whilst simultaneously in full possession of the knowledge that it is really taking place. The very act of imagining such an audience, as Alphonso Lingis notes, encounters the possibility that ‘we have already evolved into pure spectators, the Mouse Folk Kafka imagined, with huge eyes feeding into massive brains, floating in the air, with miniscule atrophied limbs dangling’.18 Lacking the vocation of a Zarathustra, such an audience requires the assignation of the role of hero to those who pick through the ruins of civilization for the remains on its behalf.19 The corollary of this ethics of spectatorial passivity, in which an audience witnesses its own (de)formation in the so-called society of the spectacle, is the postmodern performative subject – split, de-centred, traumatized, fragmented, deferred and disseminated, if not entirely dispatched, in the discourses of performance and performativity. Such a conception seems to offer minimal hope in terms of its ethical orientation. For there is something irredeemable in theatre conceived as the scene of representation, over and against the possibilities for evidencing the potent tenderness of the ‘unmarked’, and however much it desires communication, dialogue or even communion with its audience. Theatre, as representation, cannot escape its relation to spectacle as a separating power that reproduces itself everywhere as the surplus of representation: ‘[t]here is no way of assessing it as meaningful activity or productive labor, nor of making it […] politically

28 A Pathognomy of Performance

accountable […] since for all the clear magnitude of its apparency, it escapes attention, oversight, revaluation, and critique.’20 It was precisely this problematic that caused Jean-Jacques Rousseau, another aficionado of the stage, to ultimately abandon his aesthetic and political hopes for the theatre. In the Letter to M. d’Alembert, Rousseau suggests that both theatre and philosophy are self-aggrandizing acts of alienation whose claims for virtue are entirely without basis. He then sets out the reasons why the drama of representation must give way to the event of a society’s selfcelebration in public space. But for Rousseau’s civic carnival to completely eclipse the theatre to which he opposes it, the philosopher would surely have to stop philosophizing, stop writing, give up his role as the last spectator, come away from the window and descend to the marketplace to join the multitude. In Rousseau’s vision of an organic community, there is ultimately no place for the witness, or for thinking. There is room only for dancing, in a place of communion to which, as I discuss later, another significant strain of contemporary philosophy is implacably opposed. In this understanding of the tales of the tightrope artist and the notion of disaster, theatre and philosophy are braided together as tragically separating regimes of representation. In Blanchot’s ‘writing of the disaster’, subjectivity itself is conceived as the very form of this tragic exile from experience: exile is ‘the disaster’. But as Blanchot intimates, there is no disaster proper, no tragedy or catharsis to be had in the writing or thinking of it. There can be no engagement with disaster, since once disaster is thought as such, as a theme, then it is no longer ‘the disaster’. Thus not even disaster itself is immune from the possibility of its own ignominious forgetting. To think theatre, one cannot avoid its separating power. As the house lights are extinguished, the contemporary theatre that forms the background to this work initiates and defines itself in much the same way as its Western historical progenitors: with a descent into darkness, silence, isolation. The audience have purchased their allotted places in the heart of a typically windowless space. They agree to remain fixed in their seats, separated from the stage, consenting to their muteness and facing an apparently empty black void. The performance then fills that void, animating it with the dimming and brightening of lights, the striking up and fading away of sounds, music, words, gestures, cinematic or televisual images, with exits and entries, with bodies and their gamut of expressive physical and vocal possibilities displayed in costumes, with appearances and disappearances, acts and intervals, boredom and refreshments. Finally, it performs its own closure in a messy leave-taking that is also a peculiar act of recognition, the curtain call, a little-considered theatrical convention addressed below. Of course, many forms of performance do not conform to these conventions, either in contemporary European culture or elsewhere. The practices of, for example, circus, street theatre and live art, rightly contest the hegemony of the dominant proscenium form. But this is hardly a new state of affairs

Points of Suspension 29

and the power of the latter continues to exert itself. Is this purely a question of cultural politics? Faced with non-conventional performance settings, such as promenade performances, contemporary audiences often seem to resist surrendering their seated passivity. Is this simply ingrained cultural habit? As Tim Etchells has asked: What is it about those human persons who […] ‘Like to sit in the dark and watch other people do it?’ People (like me and maybe you) who pay money to sit down and watch others act things out, pay money to see pretending. And people (like me, and maybe you) who want to see more pain than anything else. The death scene. The crisis. The agony. The anger. The grief. Done convincingly, done with distance or irony, but done nonetheless […] a desire […] for nakedness, defencelessness. An exposure that does not have a name. Something beyond.21 As Forced Entertainment, the theatre co-operative Etchells directs and writes for, have discovered, possibly somewhat to their surprise after 30 years of work from the margin to something like the centre of at least one sphere of British theatrical culture, such persons do indeed exist in not insignificant numbers. What is evidenced in this remark is the rediscovery of a specifically ethical experience of audience that, while it has never disappeared, has been obscured in the rejection of conventional theatrical form by various avant-garde practices of performance and in the relative decline in theatre as a form that carries symbolic cultural capital in the ‘digital’ era of networked information. Etchells is explicitly raising the questions of ethical necessity, desire and obligation that seem to underscore the asymmetrical structure of the contemporary Western theatrical experience and that have come to the fore ever since its theatre went increasingly ‘indoors’ during the early part of the seventeenth century. Whilst he inflects this structure with a distinctly voyeuristic and sadomasochistic sensibility, it remains the case that theatre is indeed premised on ‘an exposure that does not have a name’. This is a primordial exposure of facing and being faced, of appearing in the space of mutual relation, which may be as much obscured as revealed by the acting out – ironic or not – of pain, grief, crisis, agony or death. This experience is entirely different from that envisaged, say, by the communitarian impulse of Rousseau, for whom the ideal was the abandonment of theatre by a community united in folk carnival in a city marketplace, oblivious to the artificial divisions of spectator and participant, stage and auditorium, public and private. Later in this chapter, the communitarian hopes and possibilities of performance are explored further, but this book nevertheless attests to such a profound difference as indeed an ethical necessity, at least in the culture within which it is immersed. Such a culture is ultimately constituted as a community of those who have nothing in common. That might be

30 A Pathognomy of Performance

an appropriate definition of contemporary theatre audiences, except that what is shared, what is indeed still in common in the theatrical event, is the bare fact of mutual separation. The nature of this separation is at the heart of a theatrical ethics. It is a separation, but not an alienation. Theatre engages a facing and a voicing, a seeing and a hearing that is not underscored by the easy cliché of the impossibility of communication or the falsity of language and of appearances.22

The house is open Blau posits the audience, public and community that does not exist at the heart of the representational structure of theatre and as the source of its political and ethical value. For Blau, theatre gathers its audience together as always already alienated, each member split psychically by the logic of appearance as well as by division between stage and auditorium.23 As Blau notes, theatrical performance has increasingly come to constitute the audience as the substance of performance itself, something he finds in the enduring classics of drama as well as in contemporary innovations. Peter Handke’s play text Offending the Audience stands as the mise-en-abyme of this tendency, a play that attempts to divest itself of all theatricality – no stage setting, no costumes, no lighting changes, no movement – but remains entirely theatrical in spite of, or rather because of, that.24 The text speaks only of its audiences: it defines them, defies them and defames them. But without them, it cannot take place. Offending the Audience baldly restates the basic theatrical premise, as Stanley Cavell eloquently puts it in an early essay about King Lear, that the only essential difference between them (the actors) and me is that they are there and I am not. The other one, the actor, is there, separate from me. I cannot approach him. This is not to say that I could not or that I must not, but that to do so would dissolve the specific experience of theatre without touching upon the general power of theatricality. Cavell continues: Their fate [the actors], up there, out there, is that they must act, they are in the arena in which action is ineluctable. My freedom is that I am not now in the arena. Everything which can be done is being done. The present in which action is alone possible is fully occupied. It is not that my space is different from theirs but that I have no space within which I can move. It is not that my time is different from theirs but that I have no present apart from theirs […] But if I do nothing because there is nothing to do, where that means that I have given over the time and space in which action is mine and consequently that I am in awe before that fact that I cannot do and suffer what it is another’s to do and suffer, then I confirm the final fact of our separateness. And that is the unity of our condition.25

Points of Suspension 31

Cavell is writing in the context of an analysis of a Shakespearian drama, of tragedy in general and from a unfashionably humanistic literary critical perspective. But his remarks seem to construe the ethical basis of the experience of theatre in a similar fashion to that of Blau. He is implicitly defining the event of theatre as a positive act of testifying, witnessing and accounting, as an asymmetrical face-to-face relation predicated on the separating power of alterity: I am I here; you are you there. For Cavell, there is an inherent destitution in theatre that accounts for its true realism: [T]he conditions of theater literalize the conditions we exact for existence outside – hiddenness, silence, isolation – hence make that existence plain. Theater does not expect us to stop theatricalizing; it knows we can theatricalize its conditions as we can theatricalize any others. But in giving us a place within which hiddenness and silence and separation are accounted for, it gives us a chance to stop […] It is right to think that in a theater something is omitted which must be made good outside. But what is omitted is not the claim upon us, and what would make good the omission is not necessarily approaching the other. For approaching him outside does not satisfy the claim, apart from making ourselves present.26 It is striking how this claim is made to reverberate in a significant number of contemporary theatre works. A number of performances I have attended whilst undertaking this project have been remarkable for their diversity and for one essential similarity. 27 They have all started in silence. The actors enter and take their stationary places upon the stage, facing the audience. They are empty-handed, bare of both pretext and context, standing still upon a stage with little or no décor. Under stark white light, they look out to us, neither eyeballing individuals in a persecutory fashion, nor surveying us en masse. They appear neither afraid, nor particularly confident. It seems that something must, as the phrase goes, take place: the show must go on. But there is a reluctance to simply engage with pretence. Sometimes they appear to be silently asking for something: inspiration, something to do, just to be excused for carrying on. They do not speak and barely move, often for several minutes. One hears the sound of creaking metal as the lighting lanterns heat up, the hum of electrical equipment, the muted coughing and rustling of the audience that, unable to focus its attention, must fidget as if to prevent itself from lapsing into a general catatonia. Finally, a word is said, a gesture is made, and what is to be performed begins its inevitable unfurling, each event in its own idiom, but each also entirely in the shadow of those first few minutes. What is it that these works are testifying to in these introductions? Their beginnings resemble nothing so much as drawn-out versions of the minute’s silence traditionally requested at performances upon the death of a famous public person, or of an actor formerly in a long-running production. What is it that they are asking us to witness while we wait for what has been promised?

32 A Pathognomy of Performance

Such opening moments might best be considered as the inverse of the curtain call, that time-honoured theatrical ritual in which actors and audience supposedly unite in the necessary self-disclosure of illusion. Like the interval, the curtain call does not feature prominently in the theoretical literature of performance: in theatrical practice as well, the curtain-call has been all but eliminated in work that wishes to distance itself from convention. Today, the final leave-taking is often a token and muted affair, undertaken in an aura of begrudging and uncomfortable duress. Anything more appears to expose an infantile narcissism at the core of theatrical appearing, a fundamental lack of seriousness. But as the phenomenon which functions to demarcate theatre from what it is not, the ends (and the beginnings) of playing are worthy of more of the kind of attention paid to them by one of the few phenomenologists of theatre, Bert States. What I have marked out as significant instants of performance, moments of fiasco or disaster, States sees as sublimated by the virtuosity required of performance by dramatic form, but as emergent in the choreography and iconography of the curtain call. A complete drama in its own right, to which the preceding performance may in fact be just a prelude, the curtain call offers up the slight embarrassment, the minor confusion over positions and orders of precedence among the actors, the misbehaving prop, the traces of the role that refuses to be cast off, the fake blood still flowing as a result of the faked fatal blow. These are all spontaneous disclosures of the human that have, until the curtain call, been repressed within the play as a closed field of representational forces. States has described the curtain call as a ‘decompression chamber’ in which art and manners are allowed to encounter each other in an act of recognition – applause – that is at once a consolation, a transition and an easement.28 In this understanding, the curtain call is where the theatre formally acknowledges an ethics that remains otherwise implicit, since ‘in the theatre our sympathetic involvement with the characters is attended by a secondary, and largely subliminal, line of empathy born of the possibility that the illusion may be at any moment shattered by a mistake or an accident.’29 Again, the figure of the aerialist is invoked to illustrate this sense of ethical exposure predicated upon disaster: One might liken the actor to the aerialist who works with a net. His performance is no less a thing of beauty than that of the stage actor, but is relieved of all possibility of disaster except that of poor acting. But the theatre offers the actor no net: the play is one long danger.30 In remarks such as these, States is sensitive to the significance of moments of performative fissure, moments which disturb the mysterious sense that the stage is immune from the laws of nature. But he also grounds them in a confident assertion of the stability of dramatic form: ‘theatre is, after all, representation […] behind the representational mode of performance, and

Points of Suspension 33

our perception of it, is the shared sense that we come to the theatre primarily to see a play, not a performance.’31 In such a view, those moments of fissure function only as meaningful signs within a field of representation where nothing is left to chance, nothing occurs at random, everything can be recuperated as a sign. The hair extracted from the mouth during a rehearsal becomes a chance event that can be recreated and replayed as a pure sign in performance after performance and which will mean something in the economy of the drama; not just anything, but rather a precise and controlled exterior manifestation of a specific interior state of a stage character possessed of a psyche all its own, of an unconscious life that seeks and finds the form of its own expression, which is successfully communicated and recognized. From both a current critical perspective on performance and from a seat in the auditorium of any of the performances whose opening moments are described above, this is palpably no longer the case. Today, more than ever, it seems that there is an audience that continues to go to the theatre in the hope of witnessing a performance, rather than a play, and a performance that will, only momentarily, escape the gravity of the logic of representation without succumbing to its spectacular surplus. These opening moments of contemporary theatre seem to function as acts of remembrance, where what is remembered is an ancient possibility that they could indeed herald such a performance. But such an act is rendered as remembrance, as the presence of what can no longer take place here and now, by a sense of the inescapable necessity that the play will have to start, go on and finish: we are in a theatre, there will be acting, pretence, appearance (in a word, representation). But that fact is barely tolerable to those who appear, almost under duress it seems, although they are there of their own accord, awaiting ours. Earlier I quoted Tim Etchells’s experience of the demand of a contemporary audience for an ‘exposure that does not have a name’. He continues: ‘[i]sn’t that the constant frustration for play? That it isn’t real? No surprise then that play always dreams of its other. The thing has aspirations. Go too far, go too far. More storm. More storm. More storm.’32 This is one strategy: push the game harder, too hard, until it hurts: The chairs routine was already dangerous. It was before we had the rubber floor and the studio floor was lethal once wet. We hadn’t even worked out how to do the taping-up properly so sometimes people got taped in such a way that they couldn’t protect themselves when falling.33 But by the time performance comes, the taping up is done properly: no one gets hurt. The ‘real’ recedes just as it comes into partial view. What the audience appears to be demanding is the rehearsal: the space of transition, the sphere of preparation and repetition, getting it (the performance) right and wrong, now transmuted into the sphere of origination: a private place where the studio floor was really ‘lethal’.

34 A Pathognomy of Performance

When the company with which I have worked as a director for many years billed a showing of some work-in-progress as an ‘open rehearsal’, the venue was inundated with bookings. After the event, there was a vague sense of disappointment. Several spectators expressed the desire for an actual rehearsal, not an unfinished piece of work. There was a sense that what was expected should have been analogous to the performance of a faith healer or an illusionist: they work publicly, the process of cure or transformation is witnessed, before your very eyes. Something of this inadequacy in the face of the audience’s demand can also be seen just after the conclusion of theatre performances, usually those in small spaces where there is a minimal distance between audience and performance. Once the house lights are up, and both stage and auditorium rejoined, a few spectators step over an invisible line and tentatively finger the scenery, smell the empty whisky bottle, scan the piece of scrawled-on paper, as if to test their veracity, to see what was really written there. What are they hoping to read, what is the secret they feel might have been withheld? Under the conditions of the generalized theatricality of (post)modernity, it seems that a certain strain of contemporary performance is acutely aware that there is nothing to read, that there is no secret. There is only the failure to generate one at all. The performers arrive on stage with only the failure, and the accompanying anxiety around it, to offer. They know the audience wants more. If so, what is left to do, to act, to perform?34 It seems that everything being played out in advance is in fact a necessary structural component of performance, indicative of its supplementary nature to rehearsal. Performance, feeling the demand of the audience that brought it into being, is always gesturing beyond – or more precisely, behind – itself, and never more so than when it goes for broke in playing for real, trying to invoke the secret ‘real’ of rehearsal and make it present again in public. Thus the playing of rehearsal is foreshadowed and foreclosed by the anticipation of the very event – performance – that legitimizes it. The reappearance of the naked, cut and bleeding body within the practices of British-based live art during the 1990s (for example, in the work of Franko B and Kira O’Reilly) could be considered as another manifestation of the desire to do away with this sense of mimetic foreclosure. Where there is rehearsal, the audience is always silently present. This creates demands, expectations and judgments. In the making and doing of theatrical performance, everyone is still expecting everyone else to ‘perform’. All involved are no less in thrall than anyone else to the principle of efficacious performance that Jon Mackenzie has analysed as characterizing the social, cultural and economic dimensions of consumer capitalism.35 Performers expect the director to facilitate their playing, the director expects the performers to deliver themselves or versions thereof, and the audience expects an experience. Indeed, much of the paraphernalia of the rehearsal could be seen as an attempt to keep defusing these demands in an effort to allow

Points of Suspension 35

something not already played out in advance to take place: the games, relaxation exercises, task-orientated activities of rehearsal, the drawn out tea-breaks. All that seems available for performance is a ‘going through the motions’, in which the actor functions merely as a ‘stand-in’, repeating what is already played out. Given the impossibility of repetition, this is precisely what generates the significant moment of performance: the possibility of disaster or fiasco. Performance ends when it is overcome by major disaster or fiasco: the show cannot go on. But it is generally robust enough to withstand the minor slips, trips, snags, stammers, hitches and glitches that affect the undertaking of any complex enterprise. According to the sensibility that has informed this book so far, such events form brief, temporary outgrowths from the main body of performance. Generated by the slippages of repetition (even to place one foot in front of another can be difficult on a stage, not just on a high wire) which can never quite manage perfect replication, they form quasi-autonomous regions which must either be re-absorbed by the logic of performance (the show must go on) or destroy themselves in terminating it. It seems that such events are the necessary corollary of others, moments of surplus, when everything goes right, beyond expectation. Something else comes to presence, in excess of what was planned or anticipated. These are the affecting instants of performance, marked by the flaring up of what otherwise remains inexpressible, born out of the momentary suspension of the intentional arc of representation.

3 Instants of Affection

The experience of audience The previous chapter began with the experience of two inaugural moments of performance, a disaster and a fiasco. Both touched on a particular spectatorial sensibility, that of the ‘existential-phenomenological thrill’. However, in a consideration of the drama of disaster and the separating power of spectacle, the experience of audience has been neglected in favour of the audience of experience, marked by the alienating power of representation momentarily overcome in what I have called points of suspension. The imperative of convocation and public gathering continues to be an essential condition of the theatre, perpetuated increasingly as myth or as the tantalizing promise of utopian possibilities rather than as social fact. Despite the enduring and, it must be said, fitfully successful efforts to induct a Western audience into politically charged participative performances, the structural separation at the heart of theatre would appear to remain essentially unchanged. As with Rousseau, more often than not, critical art practice that starts out from theatrical origins finds itself increasingly obliged to abandon the theatre itself, given its constitutive dependence on the production of spectators. Nevertheless, when performance has been suppressed by forces other than its own, it is usually because it brings too many people too close together in too confined space for ideological comfort. Even an ethics of performance based around disappearances, absences and blind spots takes sustenance from the bare fact of mutual co-presence: ‘[p]erformance honours the idea that a limited number of people in a specific time/space can have an experience of value which leaves no visible trace afterward.’1 Here, performance maintains its traditional function as the proper art of community, as ‘one of the most powerful and efficacious procedures that human society has developed for the endlessly fascinating process of cultural and personal self-reflection and experimentation’.2 Very much against the pessimistic thematics of failure and separation outlined above, other theatre practitioners, artists and thinkers 36

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(some discussed below) still hold out for the utopian, transformative promise of performance as at least a place which might – always ‘provisionally’ and more often that not ‘potentially’ – present opportunities for a properly sentimental or affective experience of different orders of public association and collectivity experiences of the ‘social’ often gathered under the term ‘community’. However, community as a term has been rapidly etiolated by political rhetoric. It is called upon ceaselessly to summon organic, cohesive yet diverse bodies of common sense or popular opinion, united by a supposed internal self-identity or at least the identification of a common source of oppression. To invoke community is supposedly to invoke a singular yet heterogeneous, passionate, yet rationally motivated voice speaking out of a stable sense of its own values and perspectives against the obfuscations and manipulations of toxic abstractions, usually labelled as ‘power’ or ‘capital’. As everyone is supposed to know, not merely the moral prospects of ‘society’ but the very possibility of its ecological survival depend on this community of communities. Yet this proliferation suggests that community is in fact no longer available as a simple experience at the level of the quotidian. Surely the one for whom community has become an ‘issue’ is already once removed from it? The very fact of this lack of appearance of a collective political subject is embraced by contemporary philosophies of multitude, which refuse any sense of the necessity for specularization that underpins the conception of the public. In its Hobbesian origins, the self-destructive and dangerously indeterminate multitude must be transformed into the people by being bound into singular subjection to the state, its laws and ultimate monarchical authority. This subjection takes place through myriad forms of visibility, initially enforced and subsequently self-administered, in which the spectatorial relationship is central. In the contemporary revaluation of multitude, its Hobbesian disavowal is entirely inverted. In this understanding, peoples and citizens become reactionary formations allied with an anachronistic statism in rapid retreat in the face of ‘empire’, a world structured primarily by the transglobal flows of capital and economic migration. Under the regime of empire, those collections of individuals previously named as the masses, the proletariat or the working class come to constitute a ‘multitude’, a term which acquires an almost incantatory, prophetic status as the name of an ever-emergent collective social subject that is unmediated, revolutionary, immanent and affirmative, refusing any form of historically established organization or mode of specularization. This thinking explicitly affirms that the very possibility of a human future is often predicated on the emergence of multitude in a manner that has to remain axiomatically unpredictable yet entirely necessary. However, it is not at all clear how ‘multitude’ as either political (non-)formation or philosophical concept can simply do without specularization. It is perhaps equally questionable whether its declared

38 A Pathognomy of Performance

survival strategies of imperceptibility, exit and escape within the organizing logic of the powers-that-be do not in fact manifest themselves through an aesthetic that uses at least some theatrical means. In fact, it is precisely towards the theatricalized appearance of different constituencies of multitude that so-called ‘relational’ or ‘socially-engaged’ art practices have orientated themselves. Significant recent publications that gather up the eclectic array of artistic practice in this field include Nicolas Bourriaud’s much cited and derided Relational Aesthetics, Bruno Latour’s curating of the exhibition and editing of the accompanying catalogue Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, and Grant Kester’s Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art.3 Alongside Jill Dolan’s Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater and Erika Fisher-Lichte’s The Transformative Power of Performance and several other significant works of the last decade, these texts explore a wide range of contemporary theatre and art (and non-art) practices which share an interest in diverse forms of audience participation and engagement in which the remaking of social relations is central.4 They include Rirkrit Tiravanja’s genial invitations to gallery-goers to join him in cooking and eating Thai food in recreations of his own apartment, Suzanne Lacy’s stagings of a series of non-fictional largescale interactions between Californian police and youth gangs in a parking lot or basketball court, as well as a range of more antagonistic or interventionist works by individual artists and collectives, alongside works that operate within (and often against) more traditional stage-auditorium settings. Many of these works take place in locations and with people identified as either the post-colonial victims of global capital (economic migrants, criminalized sectors of the populace such as prostitutes or drug users, the inhabitants of urban neighbourhoods undergoing gentrification) or, at the other extreme, in antagonistic or playful confrontations with its chief orchestrators (multinational corporations, free market trade organizations, civic authorities). An example here would be the on-going project Je et Nous by the collective Campement Urbain. This consists of an orchestrated and documented process of ‘community’ consultation in an economically depressed, ethnically diverse, Parisian suburb, otherwise notorious only as a centre for the violence of the riots of 2000. The central proposal of the project is the collective construction and upkeep of a ‘useless, fragile and non-productive’ contemplative space for a single person – a kind of anti-panopticon – situated in a local open space. Its main function is to offer ‘a place open to everyone, where people can step away from the community under the protection of the community […] a place for hanging out and getting together but a “oneseater”, as it were, where people can sample the attractions of solitude.’5 The political significations here are fairly clear; this is a place that suffers not so much from a deficiency of the social bond but its dysfunctional excess, in which a solitary place for thinking and reflection is almost unimaginable. Other aspects of the project include the creation of a series of videos and

Instants of Affection 39

photographs of residents wearing black T-shirts emblazoned with texts of their own improvisation, such as ‘I often like to be alone, it helps me to concentrate’, ‘I want an empty word that I could fill’ and ‘Here is how others see me’. Like many works of its kind, Je et Nous does not offer itself up as an aesthetic experience for the casual viewer in the typical art contexts in which its documentary traces are disseminated. Indeed, its inimicality to such contexts is part of the politics of its aesthetic. This paradoxically gives it an inaccessible exclusivity more familiar from the you-had-to-be-there of the theatre performance, but with the added qualification that simply being there might itself be inadequate in comparison to being a participant in the extended temporality of the work itself. From a critical perspective that broadly commends this type of work (as well as articulating its often problematic status as art), the task for art in the ‘post-democratic’ era is to make things public, in all the connotations of that phrase, including a preference for a certain kind of transparency and the rejection of tricky mimetic or fictionalizing strategies, which often do not translate well to the transnational spaces of display in the art world. In practical terms, art’s paradoxically perverse task then becomes the modelling of localized forms and places of collective subjectivity – association, gathering, meeting, encounter, congregation – that use theatrical means to overcome theatre as a separating power, one that is essentially allied to encysted and reactionary forms of social organization. This task is not pursued solely through a Brechtian-style, representational critique, but in the transformation of the terms of the aesthetic encounter itself. At the heart of this process is the thorough reorganization of the ‘address’ of the artwork itself, both in terms of its location and the temporal and spatial configuration of its stagings of audience, actor and event, which, like Je et Nous, refuse unitary conceptions of both artwork and authorship. In its solicitation of the desire for individuality, solitude and contemplation in the midst of multitude, Je et Nous draws on another thinking of the public (via its related term, community) that we can provisionally mark as recommencing in earnest with Nancy’s The Inoperative Community and Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community, a pair of texts that set the scene for this line of thought during the 1980s.6 This line of thought evidences a profound suspicion of the communitarian, the collective and any other notion that seeks to displace the primacy of the self-emancipated individualas-singularity or other non-Cartesian forms of the subject. To exaggerate, for these thinkers, literally nothing good can come from attempting to think the public as such, let alone make the public happen or appear as such, because it is precisely this sort of totalizing gesture that annihilates the fundamental equality and heterogeneity of an axiomatically indefinable social formation that is always ‘to come’. (It is precisely such perpetually deferred formation that the philosophy of multitude so insistently revalues as already here.) Put in theatrical terms, what emerges from this perspective

40 A Pathognomy of Performance

is the necessity of a space of distance and difference in which the right to silence, non-participation and the possibility of unprescribed individual acts of critical imagination are paramount. Summarizing a widespread sense of the ‘fall of public man’ that symbolizes the post-1968 global polity for a broadly leftist thinking, Nancy has remarked, ‘[t]he gravest and most painful testimony of the modern world, the one that possibly involves all other testimonies to which this epoch must answer […] is the testimony of the dissolution, or the conflagration of community.’7 In his hyperbolic but illuminating essay, Nancy attempts a rethinking of the exhausted concept of community. For Nancy, the reverberation of communism in community sustains the desire to rediscover a place ‘beyond social divisions and beyond subordination to technopolitical domination, and thereby beyond such wasting away of liberty, of speech, or of simple happiness as comes about whenever these become subjugated to the exclusive order of privatization’.8 Yet he maintains that both communism and community were and are everywhere compromised by their assumption of ‘human beings defined (one might even add: human beings defined at all), and fundamentally as the producers of their own essence in the form of their labor or their work’.9 Here, a normative model of community is construed as one that works towards a fusion under the sign of the essence of humanness, a transparent immanence of human beings to one another – or, in other words for Nancy, totalitarianism. Nancy suggests that this situation (community itself as the very stumbling block to a thinking of community) has come about due to the Western preoccupation with the individual as the norm by which all collective or communitarian undertakings are measured: ‘a thinking of the subject thwarts a thinking of community’.10 Again, pace more recent attempts to theorize a militant subject that does not correspond to humanist notions of the individual, this antipathy has become almost an unquestioned aspect of progressive philosophical and political thinking. Importantly, Nancy’s work also attempts to think beyond the commonplace of man as simply the social animal, which for him is an inadequate formulation of the true thought required by community.11 He suggests, instead, that the individual is merely the residue of the dissolution of community, the isolated, abstract remnant of a primordial decomposition. The intention here, however, is precisely not to evoke some original practice of community, whether prelapsarian or ‘discovered’ among other cultures. Nancy demands a rigorous suspicion towards a consciousness ‘given over to the nostalgia for a more archaic community that has disappeared, and to deploring a loss of familiarity, fraternity and conviviality’.12 Nothing has been lost and therefore nothing is lost, other than the loss of an impossible and mortifying fantasy of an intimate communion – which is, Nancy says, not a loss at all. Instead, community, ‘far from what society has crushed or lost, is what happens to us – question, waiting, event, imperative – in the wake of society’.13

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It is just such a community ‘in suspension’ that Herbert Blau has recognized as constituted by the phenomenon of audience in the theatre, the audience as the already alienated expression of its impossible desire for cohesion or unity.14 Nancy’s poetics of community is complex and allusive and to attempt to draw it out here would involve an extensive detour. (These persistent questions of performance, spectatorship and the collective are revisited towards the end of this book.) However, a central motif in his understanding of what takes the place of community is that of désoeuvrement: Maurice Blanchot’s term denoting ‘unworking’ or de-composition, ‘which no longer having to do either with production or with completion, encounters interruption, fragmentation, suspension’.15 The task of philosophy is thus understood as the ‘unworking’ of community: Community in turn compears [Nancy’s neologism for a process of revelation]: for example in literary communication. But this is not an example: ‘literature’ does not designate here what this word ordinarily indicates. What is in fact involved is the following: that there is an inscription of the communitarian exposition, and that this exposition, as such, can only be inscribed, or can be offered only by way of an inscription. It is not only, or even primarily, a matter of amorous or ‘literary’ literature here, but solely of the unworking of literature – all unworked ‘communication’, literary as well as philosophical, scientific, ethical, aesthetic, and political.16 In other words, literary inscription is the space in which community as the ‘unworking’ of community actually takes place. For Nancy, the possibility of a politics (which I take to be an ethics, rather than a particular political project) for such a thinking lies in writing, in writing as waiting. There is no ‘move to a politics’ for such a thinking: writing is the justified limit of its own, always unrealized, ethical possibility: If the political is not dissolved in the sociotechnical element of forces and needs (in which, it seems to be dissolving under our eyes), it must inscribe the sharing of community. The outline of singularity would be ‘political’ – as would be the outline of its communication and its ecstasy. ‘Political’ would mean a community ordering itself to the unworking of its communication, or destined to this unworking: a community consciously undergoing the experience of its sharing. To attain to such a signification of the ‘political’ […] implies being already engaged in community, that is to say, undergoing, in whatever manner, the experience of community as communication: it implies writing. We must not stop writing, or letting the singular outline of our being-incommon expose itself.17

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Nancy has expressed this writing of community as ‘literary communism’, two words he regards as almost emptied of their ‘proper’ meaning by history, and thus potentially open to reinvigoration: ‘Literary communism’ indicates at least the following: that community, in its infinite resistance to everything that would bring it to completion (in every sense of the word achever – which can also mean ‘finish off’), signifies an irrepressible political exigency, and that this exigency in its turn demands something of ‘literature’, the inscription of our infinite resistance.18 Whilst I do not want to take up either Nancy’s somewhat messianic rhetoric nor its emphasis on the importance of writing, what is of interest here is the notion of community ‘unworking’ itself, a coming together that is not a form of communion. With regard to theatre as convocation, as opposed to, say, the private anonymity of the filmgoer, or the sweaty crush of the club or the rush-hour train, what marks out the spectator is the proximity in passivity required in the confrontation with a stage. It this very proximity which provokes a host of hyperactive, symptom-like behaviours: virulent outbreaks of laughter, coughing, sniffing, sweating, twitching, fidgeting, mumbling, whispering, rustling, creaking, shouting out, heckling, crying: the audience as a heterogeneous collection of bodies subject not to a merging or cohesion but to something more like an unceasing discombobulation. In 1874, the French symbolist, Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, incensed about the failure of his play La Révolte, satirized the Parisian theatre and its public in the ‘La machine à gloire’.19 This short text transforms the phenomenon of la claque, the hired clappers of the Parisian theatre, into an entirely mechanized ‘glory-production machine’, complete with pipes for relaying laughing and tear gases into the auditorium, devices to hurl bouquets upon the stage and machine-operated canes secreted in chairs. The effect is ultimately to do away with the dramatist, actor and stage and instead turn the auditorium into its own self-destructive spectacle, so intense that it will literally bring the house down. Villiers elaborates this ludicrous transformation by degrees: he notes how beyond simple clapping, there are also innumerable vocal effects: bravo soon mutates into brao, and rapidly disintegrates into an animalistic Oua-Ouaou, which in turn evolves into a delirious bawling, Bra-oua-ouaou. This is to mention but one aspect of the ‘becoming-machine’ of the art of la claque, which expands to include: Screams of frightened women, choked Sobs, truly communicative Tears, little brusque Laughs […] Howls, Chokings, Encore!, Recalls, silent Tears, Threats, Recalls with additional Howls, Pounding of approbation, uttered Opinions, Wreaths, Principles, Convictions, moral Tendencies, epileptic Attacks, Childbirth, Insults, Suicides, Noises of discussions (Art-for-art’s-sake, Form and Idea), etc.20

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The ultimate coup de théâtre of this art is when the claque itself shouts ‘Down with the claque!’ and then gives itself a standing ovation. Under the intoxicating influence of Villers’s fanciful evocation of a theatre without the theatre, connoisseurs of performance might well wax nostalgic for more Dionysian times of theatrical spectatorship, glimpsed in the vibrant squalor of Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, the curious whoops of appreciation still heard from experienced spectators of the Kabuki theatre, or even on the football terrace. As described above, an altogether more subliminal, even unconscious, activity characterizes the modern theatre spectator, whose fits and starts seem to be the remnants of this earlier extrovert vitality. However, the audience construed according to Villiers’s fantasy functions as a kind of figure for a collective dimension of the process of becoming unaccommodated which is being explored here.

The unworking of the event Alain Badiou provides a different understanding of the relation between the theatre and its audience, but one that resonates with Nancy’s desire for the ‘unworking’ of community. One of his more provocative assertions is the nature of the relationship between theatre and ‘the state’. Here, the state is conceived both as a political entity and as the network of relations which structure what Badiou calls the ‘situation’, the latter being something akin to the set of discrete elements simply counted in a ‘pure’ numerical fashion as a multiplicity.21 Badiou opposes ‘the theatre’ to ‘Theatre’, echoing his philosophical distinction between the state and the situation. The former denotes the art of the state of things as a closed set of relations, a status quo governed by power grounded in a specific set of knowledges (what Badiou terms the ‘encyclopaedia’). Representing representations, it states the State, so to speak, as the set of organized opinions which form the necessary basis of all sociality – even if it purports to represent revolution – but without saying anything about it. ‘Theatre’, on the other hand, says the State as a situation not as a form of description or analysis at the level of content, but rather as what delimits the ‘stateliness’ of theatre. In such a saying, Theatre exposes ‘the theatre’ to the militancy of the event; Theatre will have been that which interrupted ‘the theatre’ and is thus a rare and anomalous phenomenon which can be encompassed by neither a political programme nor a theatrical style. As such, Theatre is a momentary but momentous event for the spectator equipped with a sensibility that is primed for such occurrences. His act of witnessing and subsequent public declaration for the event (did you see that?) inaugurates both the actualization of the event itself and the becoming-subject of the one (or many) engaged in such an act of fidelity. Badiou remarks that, contra the typical discourses surrounding the arts, theatre does not in fact address a public; rather, it addresses a spectator.22

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Only the cinema, the art of capital, requires a public: anonymous, general, a whole whose parts are infinitely replaceable. A National Theatre can be imagined and indeed effectuated; but a National Cinema? Cinema is international, global, but private, Badiou continues; it bears no relation to the State. However, if there have been times when theatre has literally been summoned in and out of existence by royal command, every theatre performance today still carries a sense of being a ‘command performance’. According to Badiou, the theatre (small ‘t’) is the art of the State, isomorphic with politics and so, even today, all theatre is official in an obscure sense, with or without the ‘royal’ or ‘national’ epithets. Whilst I would want to resist such a hard and fast distinction between theatre and cinema in terms of the politics of spectatorship, there is nevertheless a strong resonance in his remark that ‘what is said in the theatre, even in a school hall with two lanterns, is said en majesté’’.23 It demands a spectator whom it can address as a citizen-subject, someone who in some obscure way, consents to being, as it were, put in his or her place. For Badiou, Theatre will thus be an event – something that happens, something particular, localized and situated – that upsets this address, emerging from within theatre itself, out of a certain ‘void’ within it, in a manner similar to the affecting instants of performance articulated earlier. As is so often the case in the realm of matter and energy, bodies and forces, there might not be much to separate disaster from fiasco: the latter frequently comes to pass when the former is averted at the last minute. Both are actualizations of what I have been calling, after Badiou, the event.24 Deleuze, another thinker for whom the event is of paramount importance, presages Badiou’s ‘ethic of truths’ when he writes that philosophy’s only task is to become worthy of the event, an ethical responsibility in as much as ethics ‘either makes no sense at all, or this is what it means and has nothing else to say: not to be unworthy of what happens to us’.25 The concept of the militant or unaccommodating event is taken up below. Bearing in mind the notion of fiasco briefly touched upon earlier, a desire for unaccommodation might be understood as an enthusiasm for what confounds human beings in the incessant and often barely tolerable loss and reinstatement of (self) composure. In fact, what is named by the term event is precisely this power of encounter and intervention. From this perspective, the demand placed upon both the theatre and philosophy is essentially for the cultivation of a capacity to be affected by what disrupts or interrupts the ‘I’ opening onto the world not under the laws of perception, but under the imperative of sensory affection, as exposure and susceptibility. This implies a different existential horizon from that set out by the beingtowards-death of a Heideggerian philosophy or a Freudian psychology and different conceptions of both the activity of performing and of the passivity of spectatorship.

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Something very much akin to this sensibility is alluded to by Nicolas Ridout, in the unpublished paper quoted from earlier, entitled ‘Undecidable Pleasures or Who Does Cathy Naden Think She Is?’. Instancing the notion of fiasco proposed earlier, the particular pleasure he describes is set forth in ‘undecidable’ instants of performance when one cannot read the moment right. His primary example is that of the multiple overtones of performative being summoned by the drunken laughter performed by Cathy Naden of the long-standing British theatre company, Forced Entertainment. As Ridout suggests, these thrilling moments are characterized by a certain resistance to semiotics. They take place at the precise point where the semiotic gives out and, moreover, they explicitly function to evidence such an exhaustion of the sign. On hearing the word ‘semiotic’, interest instinctively recoils and extends. It recoils at a gigantic architecture of signification that covers all bases. However, it also extends, thanks of course to that same structure of signification, to the possibility of sensing ‘semiosis’ in the ‘semiotic’ and so to ‘osmosis’, and notions of permeable membranes, invisible infiltrations, mysterious leaks and spills. This is, I hope, more than mere word play. There is (or there ought to be) something seismic in semiosis, in its verbal form as a word that names an activity, a making and unmaking of sense, rather than its designation of the holy trinity of sign, signifier, signified.26 In semiosis, there is something akin to a process taking place in a complex circulatory system, where something else has gone awry: an insult has disturbed the regulated flows, introducing an inassimilable substance. Ridout appears to see the laughter he experienced in performance as functioning in just such a way. An affecting surplus arises out of the performer, becoming the site of a contest between what is performed and what is spontaneous, the one feeding the other. Such a surplus does not belong to the order of representation. Naden’s laughter is literally senseless. It has no cause or object that would merit such an extended and exaggerated cultivation. It is anomalous, both in terms of its excess of studied intensity and of its placement within the context of the entire performance. Such a propensity for anomaly also extends to the company’s work as a whole, which has made much out of prolonging the apparently pointless beyond the point of no return.

Symptoms of enjoyment Offstage, Cathy Naden’s laughter might fall under the classification of the ‘hysterical’, an unmanly indulgence lacking a material cause, a symptom of some inner debility deriving from what were once termed ‘female problems’. Whatever the contemporary status of hysteria as a psychosomatic entity, what catches the attention here is threefold: firstly, the perceived origin of the symptom in dis-ease, a psychically induced blockage in the system which leads to the undoing or unhousing of the organism. Secondly, the thrilling nature of the symptomatic process, how the compulsion to

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repeat provides enjoyment, an unwilled but not undesired sensation that is fascinating and repellent, pleasurable and painful in equal measure – both to the patient performer and to the analyst spectator. Thirdly, that hysteria, in a purely lay understanding that psychoanalysis articulates quite differently, can be catching. Virus-like, it spreads contagiously through a medium, more intangible than even the moisture carried on the breath or secreted through the skin. These two understandings of hysteria converge in its association with uncontrollable laughter (to be ‘in hysterics’), an association evidenced in sporadic epidemics of infectious and debilitating laughter that break out in certain populations undergoing profound cultural change.27 The hysterical laugh functions not solely as a feature of desire in the individual psyche, but as the affective counterpart to the instant of fiasco in a public dimension. The symptom escapes the gravity of psychic interiority and is displayed. It is expressed, set forth in the being of human being in a manner neither intentional nor involuntary. It is taken up once more by others, made fit for the purpose, as it were, of receiving it. In Peggy Phelan’s ontology of performance, underwritten by a melancholic interpretation of the ethics of psychoanalysis, the symptom ‘which speaks’ is presented as a primordial unit of performance: Freud and Breuer admitted that the body can express things that consciousness and its discursive formations cannot. Within psychoanalysis, these bodily expressions are called symptoms. Symptoms are somatic expressions which signal the work of repression; they are the bodily place holders for material that consciousness cannot fully absorb. Symptoms are condensed indexes of a not-yet-consciously-narrativized event. Therefore, symptoms can only occur in the present tense; once the event finds a past tense, the symptom (temporarily) disappears.28 The symptom imagined in this way appears to emerge into and then disappear from the transitional space between the domain of somatic expression and the bringing-to-consciousness of discourse. Its tragic fate is to be interpreted and thereby accommodated into the discursive realm of the desiring subject, as the work of the elaboration of meaning: The phantasmic is always operative within the codes of the rational. Without according space to the phantasmatical, we have tended to take on faith the coherence of rationality itself. This (false) coherence leads to a repression of the force of the incoherence of affect itself.29 But in invoking the contagion of laughter (to which I return later), something arises which does not start and end with identity or the individual psyche, nor with the crowd, power and mass psychology. Such a phenomenon deals in the life of sensations, according to a principle of blatancy rather than

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of phantasmic secrecy. Semiotics and psychoanalysis, at least as they are conventionally constructed, are insufficient to express such a life. What is required, as Deleuze has quietly articulated in his less clamorous works, is a logic of sense, which is also the logic of expression. This is the subject of Chapter 6. This life of sensations invokes that Deleuzian notion of sensations as forms of life, with human materiality as their medium, continuous with the natural, non-human and inhuman order. In the Freudian schema, the human subject functions as an enclosed but porous system, opening on to its environment because of an inner lack. In pursuit of needs which become intractable desires, sensation escapes from the organism as expression, behaviour or even performance. Deleuze and others – who could be described as ‘neo-vitalists’ – ask us to imagine a sort of underbelly to this economy in which sensation and strong emotions derive not from the drive to fill an inner emptiness, but from excess energies seeking to expend themselves. Rather than just draining away or evaporating, they proliferate. Like the infrastructure of vital circulating substances – such as water, gas, electricity or trains – on which we unhappily depend both for survival and our prosperity as competent individuals achieving projects and outcomes, our systems do not simply leak unnoticed into the earth or air. They erupt publicly, with both creative and destructive potential. Just as our bodily processes are defined in part by what interferes with and disorders them, our encounters with materiality and the forces of alterity (whether human or inhuman) unhouse us from our comfortable comportment in dealing with ourselves, our gear, our worlds of things and plans. In the Deleuzian idiom, these encounters evidence the multiplicity within identity, setting the being of human being in a more fluid, infantile economy of flows and ebbs, current and eddies, local but imprecise loci of intensities and relaxations, constrictions and outpourings. This other, fluid economy is subject not only to an entropic process of exhaustion but also to the positive force of excitation, excitement and expenditure without return. This Deleuzian conception of subjectivity as pre-personal singularity suggests a principle of dynamogenesis operating as the basic condition of life: life as an insuppressible liveliness, actualized in organisms seeking their own preservation in the cracks of repressive regimes of signification and pitted against their own entropic destiny. The contemporary phenomenologist of eros, Alphonso Lingis, harnesses this libidinal striving to the work of Immanuel Kant and Emmanuel Levinas to describe sensation thus conceived as imperative: that is, it does not arise through an act of will or self-representation or involuntary reflex, but appeals to, contests and commands us prior to any act of cognition.30 Sensation and perception are here organized around the principle of alterity – of what is alien, other, inassimilable – which, in Levinas’s principal concept, faces me and to which I am primordially compelled to respond. As Lingis suggests, Kant’s concept

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of the categorical imperative is properly revealed not as a concept, but as a fact, the first fact: Each time thought sets out to effectively think something, that is to represent something coherently before itself in the relative exteriority of this represented presence, it acknowledges the absolute exteriority of the imperative that weighs on it.31 Following Kant, Lingis describes the imperative as that which commands thought to think. As such a force, it is ungroundable and unrepresentable. Kantian thought identifies a sensibility that testifies to the imperative that commands us to think; it is ‘something like fear, something like inclination’, something called respect. For Kant, the imperative is evidenced positively as respect in thought’s inclination to produce ‘representations of exterior objects and of the system of those objects, whose consistency testifies to the mind’s obedience’.32 Lingis allows us to think afresh what Kant conceived with his notion of the imperative, without opting for the easy dismissal of oppressive rationality or a transcendental subject that one finds frequently expressed in discourses of postmodernity. But as he suggests, and has shown in other writings, the force of the imperative does not emanate solely from the self-reflexive command for thought to think and to reason correctly in obedience to the laws of rationality. What the force of the imperative impresses upon our sensibility is the force of what is not yet coded, yet which makes itself felt within the domain of the coded, and performs much work there. It is not a homogeneous realm of pure sensation or disordered feeling, passively awaiting the processes of signification and the elaboration of meaning. Like the weather, it is more like a chaotic system, a system of densities and intensities that follow discrete yet unpredictable patterns, issuing along lines of force that are altered by what flows along and around them. What is imperative does not emanate from the void conceived as a nothingness or silence. It is the noise out of which sense emerges, the chatter out of which talk and conversation take shape, the web of facial musculature which is animated by expression, the latency in our sensorymotor complex that projects and extends our body in co-ordinated actions that are responses prior to being intentions. It is what we sense behind the eyes of the stranger who glances at us a moment too long, something that does not originate from that glance, the eyes or the processes that direct them, but from elsewhere. What is imperative has yet to gather itself into an object that could be grasped by cognition, a sense not yet assimilated into the logic of representation. The forms of alterity do not engage me as rational agent in full command of my powers of thought and right reason. Rather, they disarm, confound, and interrupt the necessary image I have of myself as an autonomous moral agent. They do so not by the force of

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superior power, but in their coming to presence in contact with a sensibility that is vulnerable and susceptible to what it encounters face-to-face, emptyhanded, bare of pretext. In being bodies – an experience which is different from having a body or being embodied – we testify to sensations in manifesting and disseminating them. But we also become answerable, commanded to formulate a response. This is also the work that performance can do, though ‘perform’ is the wrong word because it posits the performer as both the competent and conscious producer and judge of her thoughts, actions and entire sensory-motor apparatus. Conventionally, to act effectively, both on- and offstage, seems to require as much. However, the two anecdotal instances that opened the previous chapter function as an invitation to imagine a doing that is not a performing per se and to a theatre – and a philosophy – that does something differently, sensitive to the aberrant and the errant, to what interrupts and confounds us. This entails no radical political claims for the power of the excess, or for the marginal or for that which defies the imperative of the economic in favour of the gratuitous. Simply put, we are always exceeding and overreaching ourselves, physically and psychically. With Catherine Clément, I define these instants of undoing as instances of syncope: literally, moments of fainting, swooning, short-lived lapses of consciousness or ‘little deaths’ from which one returns – or, as has been described, on occasion does not return – to another, more regular experience of life. Clément makes an entire philosophy out of syncope, articulating a thinking of rupture as a philosophy of rapture. For her, Western thought has been ‘obsessed with the autonomous and aware Subject’, which sought to master the interruption of time and the fissures in consciousness.33 Against this tradition, in which the usual suspects (Plato, Descartes, Hegel) are deployed as the philosophical bogeymen, Clément elaborates a poetics of aporia, of the gaps in thought: its omissions, blank spots and blackouts. She summons Kierkegaard and Nietzsche as the chief Western proponents of such a poetics, Lacan as its pivotal theoretician, but also medieval mystics, particle physics, Indian metaphysics, music, dancing and the power of love. Her fervour on behalf of syncope is intoxicating, inspiring and hopelessly romantic. Her book, a philosophical revolution of life imagined as surviving only on what interrupts it, gives the concept of syncope a heroic grandeur and a world-shattering potency. However, as Clément also proposes throughout her philosophy of rapture, syncope often originates as something small and fleeting: the barest arhythmia marked out by the pen of the ECG, a momentary dizziness or a beat skipped in a musical phrase.34 It is from these humble beginnings that syncope derives its power to put life in abeyance. As such, the event of syncope is a punctal moment, an instant not just of delay or deferral but also of derangement and delinquency that summons the possibility that there will be no return to the equanimity of the on-going situation. A syncopic

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event suspends the flow of time and the sense of self experienced as in full command of its faculties, which is suddenly abused of its self-possession and made aware of its contingency. Such moments are highly personal; each of us might collect his or her own particular series, whose significance would remain entirely obscure to anyone else. Nevertheless, to recall and re-tell a personal history of such instances would be not just to carry out a peculiar form of autobiography, but to give oneself away in attesting to what one finds affecting beyond the assertive opacities of ‘I like’ or ‘ I don’t like’. Given that possibility, and not being a philosopher, it seems required that I give myself away one more time in a literal manner: the pricking moment of syncope has a specific performative relevance for my own psychosomatic constitution. It acts as both fundamental cause and occasion of its invocation here. In 30 years of voluntarily attending theatrical and cinematic performances, I have blacked out four times. On each occasion, a fit of fainting came upon me as a consequence of either the evocation or the actual event of an individual drawing his or her own blood, or willingly undergoing blood-letting. It seems that it is the voluntary component of the act that is significant, since my state of consciousness is not altered by the sight of blood involuntarily let. These events include the heady sacrificial rhetoric of an early morning Christian hymn in a school assembly; the self-administration of an HIV test in This Is Not a Test (viewed at a distance of more than 30 metres, the needle itself entirely invisible) carried out by an American drag performer whose name I have been unable to trace; the matter-of-fact cutting of the wrists by the tormented adolescent boy in Kieslowski’s A Short Film About Love; Bob Flanagan’s piercings at the hands of his lover and nurse (he suffered from the terminal lung disorder cystic fibrosis); Sheree Rose in Kirby Dick’s 1997 documentary Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist. On the first two occasions, the syncope was total, requiring mild physical resuscitation; as a result of these events, I was able on the subsequent occasions to avoid complete collapse by taking early evasive action (closing my eyes, slumping in my seat, head between my legs, actively absenting my mind from the scene, lest it absent itself). Since the Flanagan encounter, I now feel obliged (or is it merely cowardice?) to avoid all scenes of self-laceration. This is something of a disappointment from a spectatorial point of view, since such scenes have featured prominently in some of the memorable moments of recent British performance art – or so I am led to believe by the descriptions, commentaries and images that circulate in their aftermath. Taking up this spectatorial theme, Roland Barthes elaborates an infinitely more resonant personal history of aesthetic syncope in Camera Lucida.35 As is well-known, for Barthes the syncopic event is engendered by the punctum he detects in the photographs upon which he mediates, although he appears to desire a different perspective to that of what he deems the Spectator. He describes the punctum as that which cuts into the field of

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the studium, the ideologically and culturally determined meaning of an image that is generally recognized as what a particular photograph ‘wants to say’. For Barthes, to identify the studium is to draw up a contract with the image and to endow it with so many functions and to organize its overt significations. ‘And I, the Spectator, I recognize them with more or less pleasure: I invest them with my studium (which is never my delight or my pain).’36 In contrast, the punctum is an entirely ordinary detail in an image, but one that ‘rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me’.37 For Barthes, the punctum is a minor wounding, ‘a sting, speck, cut, a little hole […] that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)’.38 Camera Lucida presents and finesses Barthes’s personal puncta: insignificant items of clothing, a bandaged finger, a half-formed expression, an ambiguous gesture at the edge of the frame. Barthes finds the diminutive and inscriptive dimension of the punctuating punctum well suited to his elegiac purposes. Though initially presented as a singular sign of life within the generality of an image, its ultimate power is to align the photograph with the full stop of death, as the enduring presence of what has passed away or will pass away into absence. André Bazin arrived at the same conclusion regarding the ontology of the cinematic image, itself a technology of syncope, since each frame is interpolated by a moment of blackness, achieving a sense of continuity thanks only to the brain’s willing suspension of disbelief.39 Not surprisingly, the study of cinema has further elaborated these observations into an entire theory of cinephilia or, rather, of the cinephiliac moment. Film scholar Paul Willemen writes that this moment: […] pertains to the relationship between viewer and image, a momentary flash of recognition, or a moment when the look at […] something suddenly flares up with a particular affective, emotional intensity. The founding aspect of cinematic quality […] is located not in the recognition of an artistic sensibility or intentionality beyond the screen, as it were, but in the particular relationship supported or constituted by the spectatorial look, between projected image and viewer.40 By placing cinephilia etymologically in proximity to necrophilia, this approach invites a sensuous encounter with death in the evocation of imagistic epiphanies that no-one else may even notice. For these are moments to which, thanks to the technologies of cinema and video, one can return time and time again. One can anticipate them at each repeated viewing, marvel at a moment always surprising. In an essay that picks up on Willemen’s notion, Christian Keathley provides a few examples from the literature of cinephilia: the colour of Cary Grant’s socks in the crop-duster scene from North by Northwest; Lauren Bacall’s hand clutching and unclutching at the back of the chair in the background of a tense scene in Huston’s Key Largo, a last plate

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settling slowly and noisily in 55 Days at Peking.41 This is a highly theatrical way of looking at a film, since conventionally it is the camera’s function to choose what is looked at in the cinema. The spectatorial prerogative which would admit the time and space to let the senses wander to take in that which is ‘on show’ but was not meant ‘for show’ appears, if not particular to the theatre, at least to run against the grain of the relentlessness of the technology of cinema. It is as if these cinephiliacs, and those film directors who have insisted on forcing the camera to dwell, attempt to momentarily colonize the motion of the motion picture, implicit in even the cinematic instant, and to slow it down into real, theatrical time in which there is time enough to savour the signs. But these are harmless, if morbid pleasures. Is not Mark Lewis, the filmmaker-as-anti-hero of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, the personification of the cinephiliac collector? As himself a victim with a compulsion to repeat, he manufactures and catalogues his own collection of ‘unrepresentable’ punctual instants by spearing his victims with the end of his tripod as he films them witnessing their own demise. Similarly, the cinephiliac can enjoy his or her moments of choice at leisure, painlessly secure in the knowledge that they will remain permanently available in the era of video and digital archiving. This security of possession in turn denies them the possibility of assuming the status of what Alain Badiou calls a truth. Truth is an apparently implausible and redundant category within contemporary thought but one which an ethics of the event (of which fiasco, disaster and syncope are sub-categories) desires to reanimate for philosophy, via one or other of its conditions: art, science, politics and love. The possibility of such a claim for truth will be articulated below. Here, it will suffice to observe that truths are not events that one can anticipate or preserve in a catalogue; rather, whatever manifests as a truth will do so as the recognition of what has already taken place, of the eruption of the anomalous out of the status quo of a situation, which remains altered by this intrusion even as the event itself recedes. With regard to the productive look of the cinephiliac, one can conceive such pleasures as productive of, say, a different history of cinema from one constructed around the ideology of the gaze or representations of cultural identity. But is such a look, driven by an appetite for alterity, not itself in danger of being recuperated by the industry of inscription that it attempts to look past or through? The specific instances of this look itemized above cannot by themselves carry the weight of significance imputed to them by the cinephiliac (I have seen none of these films and even if I have, without being able to recall the fact, these moments remain opaque to me). But what is meaningful – or rather, truthful – is what Badiou calls the generic part of an such an event, or what I have called the anomalous, a property akin to the relation between the studium (situation-as-state) and the punctum (event). From the point of view of the situation, the punctum is, as it were, invisible or indiscernible: it is literally overlooked. But, as Barthes does, one

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can declare publicly for the punctum or event, ‘owning up’ to being seized, pained or pricked by it and so making a relation between what is particular and what is universal. In any one image, my particular punctum may be different from yours. What was an event for me may have passed you by completely. But nevertheless, as capable of feeling such affections, we both know what we are talking about, not always to the extent that I might be willing to sign up for your declaration, but at least to the point where what was apparently indiscernible or ‘void’ has been raised up to a level of intelligibility and discursive possibility which fundamentally alters and reorganizes the ‘on-going’ situation. Thus the punctal instant will amount to more than a series of its isolated instances. It functions not so much as a Platonic idea or ideal, but rather as what testifies to what Badiou calls a wandering excess, a supplementary manifestation of sense that forms retroactively in the wake of an event: something happened, something recognized only by the fact that it stands out from the situation of which it has also become a part. But the fig-leaf of security which adheres to the cinematic or photographic punctum by virtue of its availability in the archive is denied to the connoisseur of such moments of performed fiasco, disaster or uncanny epiphany: you had to be there, and then. A true event is not an iterable phenomenon. As Clément asserts, ‘[w]hen syncope becomes the object of an art – mystical technique or stage art? – it is bound not to occur.’42 If an event can be said to be what punctuates experience and so becomes available to be produced itself as an event, the theatre evoked here is no more than a place where one attempts, against the odds, to solicit a density of events which are generically rare – infrequent, unanticipated, anomalous. In the end, such a theatre will simply be a circumscribed space where life as a generality is subject to an intensified discipline of controlled variables, in the hope of making something happen, constituted out of the following elements: actors, a director, décor, costumes, a text (or what stands in for one), a place, spectators. As such, theatre will be an experiment, though not all (perhaps hardly any) theatre will sign up to its conditions. Neither will theatre that deems itself ‘experimental’ necessarily achieve them. Under such conditions, the possibility is raised that the spectacle will become, momentarily, the event of a truth process. For a truth (it seems that such a thing is indeed at stake here), as Badiou has described, is only manifest as a retroactive naming of whathas-been, of an event that erupts out of, disturbs and so alters a situation. It is important to understand that the event is not something added to a situation from the outside. Its possibility is immanent in the situation as a universe of untotalizable multiplicities: thus the event is realized as a coup de théâtre rather than a deus ex machina. Truth as an event will be thus what confounds knowledge as an encyclopaedic description of the situation; no Truth, but only truths as generic multiplicities, plural truths as what make holes in knowledge.43

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In truth, the instants of disaster and fiasco recounted earlier were constituted as events only in the process of reflecting upon them. They were imbued with significance only when exposed to the intervention of a thinking itself exposed to a philosophical imperative. From another perspective, another life, they may have been ultimately unremarkable. Events such as these do not carry the guarantee of their conversion into a process of a truth, no matter how minor. Not only will such events not be recognized as such until they have already happened, but it will not be a matter of re-cognition, of assimilating the unfamiliar under a pre-existing category, but rather of the naming of the event itself. As Badiou indicates and as the earlier evocations of fiasco and disaster suggest, one can never be sure that an event has happened and so one can never be recruited to the cause of an event while it is, so to speak, under way.44 As what is opposed to Being (conceived as what endures over and above its multiple determinations), the event of non-Being, as what interrupts the situation, is strictly undecidable. Thus there are two possibilities for the event. Either it will dissolve back into the state or situation from which it sprang – which, according to Badiou’s mathematical ontology, must include its possibility but not have assimilated it – and so will, in effect, not have happened at all. Or, it will be seized in an act of naming – it happened – in an intervention which accepts the consequences of the event. Such an act of fidelity converts the event into the process of a truth. To become the subject of such a truth, one declares for the event, goes through the motions, acting ‘as if’ it had really happened, placing a wager on the possibility that in doing so, things will indeed be different ‘after the event’. The gathering together of the names of that-which-has-happened is, for Badiou, the privileged (and hugely ambitious) task that philosophy must reclaim from the poem, or art in general – to which post-Heideggerian philosophy has surrendered its possibilities and potential. Given that, the theatre-philosophy attempted here cannot be the handing over of philosophy to the theatre. Neither can one make raids on philosophy from the theatre and return to it with theoretical plunder in order to apply philosophical insight or to make the theatre more philosophical. Rather, one perpetually departs from the theatre via philosophy; there is no return. The discourses of performance offer the temptation to suture a de-natured theatre to philosophy. Each appears to possess something the other desires: philosophy has the idea, the concept and the system; performance has desire, the phenomena and the event. But as Badiou suggests, there are no truths or events as such in philosophy, but only in its conditions or ‘generic procedures’, of which art is one (and theatre an often occluded sub-set). ‘The specific role of philosophy is to produce a unified conceptual space in which naming takes place of events that serve as the point of departure for truth procedures […] It does not establish any truth but it sets a locus of truths.’45 For this reason, philosophy must resist suturing itself to its conditions (for Badiou: art, science, politics and love) and vice versa.46

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An ethics of experiment As suggested in the opening of the previous chapter, the ethics of the theatrical event are an ethics of experiment, both for actor and spectator: such an ethics is the ‘subject matter’ of all theatrical performance, even if it remains entirely unacknowledged, disavowed or otherwise obliterated. A basic condition of theatre will then be that ‘the subject’ – the questions of who is constituted as subjected, by whom, and for what end – is indeed the matter. The question of what is the matter of and with ‘the subject’ is in turn subject to an experimental procedure, which will be designed to manipulate its conditions in order to improve the statistical probability that an event equal to the question will happen. As Badiou writes, in this understanding, theatre is a mode of thought infected by desire, by the desire for what is other than representation, for the ‘real’. The latter is not grasped but sensed, in an ‘encounter with the eternal in the elucidation of the instant’.47 The elements of theatre function as the experimental apparatus; they are not presented to represent the content of an already formed truth as a series of propositions that could be translated into, say, gestures, tones of voice or lighting states, or collected under the settled sign of a drama and hence communicated to a public. Rather they are assembled as a machine for generating potential events that may or may not be actualized by the spectator. Similarly, to act is to conduct an experiment on the self (currently the self as ‘the subject’, though there are and will be other historical formations), not simply, albeit skilfully, to deploy one’s bodily and psychological capabilities in the illustration of an idea called ‘character’. Thus the task for a philosophically inclined actor is no longer to build a character, nor to deconstruct it; neither to insist on a simple appearing after the death of character has been pronounced, nor to engage in a hermetic and ascetic self-absorption, however ostensibly rigorous according to the fetish of a psychosomatic disciplinary system. The contemporary actor appears in order to discover and examine the conditions of the experiment of his or her appearing. To appear in this way is to engage a Brechtianism de-sutured from its fixation with social and political efficacy with regard to an identified set of socio-historical conditions; a waiting for Godot conducted without the existential consolation of Beckett’s play. Such an experimental appearing is, or ought to be, an event that itself solicits the event, which is never manifest ‘in itself’, but only actualized in a specific mode in which the invariant encounters the contingent at a temporal crossroads. Stressing the event as something whose truth (or sense) does not simply deliver itself up, Deleuze declares it ‘an obscure, humorous conformity’: The splendor and the magnificence of the event is sense. The event is not what occurs (an accident), it is rather inside what occurs, the purely expressed. It signals and awaits us […] it is what must be understood, willed and represented in that which occurs.48

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In a thought that indicates his proximity to Badiou’s consideration of the theatre, Deleuze continues: The actor or actress represents, but what he or she represents is always still in the future and already in the past, whereas his or her representation is impassable and divided, unfolded without being ruptured, neither acting nor being acted upon. It is in this sense that there is an actor’s paradox; the actor maintains himself in the instant in order to act out something perpetually anticipated and delayed, hoped for and recalled. The role played is never that of a character; it is a theme (the complex theme or sense) constituted by the components of the event, that is, by the communicating singularities effectively liberated from the limits of individuals and persons. The actor strains his entire personality in a moment which is always further divisible in order to open himself up to the impersonal and pre-individual role. The actor is always acting out other roles when acting one role. The role has the same relation to the actor as the future and past have to the instantaneous present which corresponds to the line of the Aion. The actor thus actualizes the event, but in a way which is entirely different from the actualization of the event in the depth of things. Or rather, the actor redoubles this cosmic, or physical actualization, in his own way, which is singularly superficial – but because of it more distinct, trenchant and pure. Thus, the actor delimits the original, disengages it from an abstract line, and keeps from the event only its contour and its splendor, becoming thereby the actor of one’s own events – a counter-actualization.49 No one should be under the illusion that the kind of performance that Deleuze describes is anything other than extremely rare and altogether anomalous within the conventional understandings of ‘good acting’. Deleuzian acting will be simply (but perhaps impossibly) an experimental, second-order procedure designed to distinguish between the event and the accident, and so to momentarily conjoin them. In this understanding, to act is to try to wrest what is merely accidental away from its trajectory into oblivion by relating it to what is ideal or eternal, that is, to the event itself as the condition of a truth. Experiments are difficult, time-consuming and frustrating operations. Whilst most fail to prove anything, experimental design nonetheless recognizes the importance of the creative failure. More significantly, it is forced retrospectively to acknowledge the knowledge produced by the fiascos and disasters that overcome experiments themselves, as well as the experimenters and those experimented upon. The major histories of both experimental theory and practice are littered with productive and often conceptually beautiful insights produced by human error, as well as the minor – but no less significant – histories of abuse, exploitation, pain and suffering with

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regard to sensate beings as the subjects of experimentation. Theatre occurs in the points of suspension at which these discontinuous narratives traverse each other, the minor erupting through the surface of the major in an event of syncopic delinquency. It is registered as an internal deviation in a theatrical ‘system’ of presentation rather than represented by it as a sign made at some prior time. The suggestion here is that, while the truths evidenced by an experimental ethos of performance remain rare and elusive, their negative but productive images are encountered in the instants of fiasco or disaster that punctuate the presentations of more conventional theatrical systems, which have other agendas. Theatre (capital ‘T’) survives in a parasitical relationship to theatre. Furthermore, in an age of consent, to appear within an experimental scene always raises the ethical as a problematic and not just a problem, just as for the Greeks to be an actor or spectator was not a question of consumer choice but of civic responsibility, or ideological coercion, depending upon one’s political perspective.50 As exponents and spectators of performance are habitually prone to confess, a visual record, whether snapshot or high definition video recording, will never do justice to such moments or to their ‘positive’ counterparts. If it is true that poetry makes nothing happen, then even the most poetic description can only testify to its inability to capture the essence of what happened, whilst simultaneously conveying something of what may have been. This is not to privilege the authenticating power of what theory labels with the term ‘presence’, nor to proclaim an ontology of performance as the ethical ground of that which escapes the violent rationality of representation. A philosophy of the event as what will have been readily admits that ‘presence’ is never coexistent with its experience. It does not restrict itself to mourning that fact with elegiac meditation upon the traces, ghosts, spectres, ashes and cinders surviving after the ending of philosophy or performance, nor to a perpetual hesitation under the mesmeric spell of the undecidable. But it also recognizes that the ‘liveness’ of human (co-) presence is still something profoundly and doggedly meaningful – socially and even politically significant – which will not be brought to book in a move that would see it as simply a romanticized artefact of the mediatized or put in its place on an equal footing with the performing presence of images, documents, archives or objects. Alan Read and others are surely on to something in asserting, with a long line of ecological thought, that sustainable attempts to ‘recall the collective’ must ‘place things in the centre and us at the periphery, or even better still, things all around us and within them […] like the performing parasites that we are’.51 But the very need to draw our attention to this necessary redistribution indicates the on-going obdurate resistance of the human to its de-centring. This is something to which I return, after the event, in the closing section of this book.

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In the mathematics that informs Badiou’s philosophical system, the undecidable does not mark the repeated encounter with an impasse – presented as a threshold that thought cannot cross – as it does in the strain of philosophy previously identified with care and waiting. Instead, it is a means to skirt round an impasse, leaving it intact in order to conserve energy for the discovery of new, more fertile terrain.52 Accordingly, what follows does not elaborate further examples of theatrical events as proof of the assertions made so far. Such a list would desiccate into drab inconsequentiality as soon as it had been committed to paper. Under imaginary duress from his imaginary interlocutor, Badiou finds occasion to give several lists of productions and performances in his rhapsody for the theatre. But, as he forewarns, they are devoid of import for this reader, who has not encountered any of them, even as theatrical hearsay.53 More significantly, what would be gained by listing one’s ‘greatest hits’ and then elaborating a nostalgia for their passing? What consolation is provided by saying of this or that theatrical occasion that it will have been important to have been there, other than the conceit of inventing post-hoc an exclusive club of significant cultural experiences? In contrast, I have drawn upon a minor flop and a minor falling (although with major consequences), which made temporarily remarkable what otherwise remains at best incidental, as a means to initial and initiate an experimental ontology of performance. Neither exceptional nor momentous except at a singular level (but, given that the singular Badioudian subject can be one or many individuals, the singular is perhaps the most important level there is), nor the guarantee of the ethical worthiness of an entire art form, they serve no other purpose than a point of entry into a mode of thought. To elaborate them is to attempt to make intelligible what would otherwise remain obscure or simply ‘private’. However, the theatre-philosophy attempted here admits that the theatre in and of itself is never entirely sufficient. As ontologists of performance, such as Butler, Phelan and Blau, have described, there is a void at the heart of appearing. But rather than simply existing as something missing, a lack or gap, this void is possessed of a latent potentiality that is the ‘point of purchase’ for a thinking of theatre in terms of the event: one returns to the theatre night after night in the hope of an encounter with an event. But major events are necessarily few and far between. Consequently, in subsequent chapters, theatrical events are substituted with a phenomenological dramatization of the human face and voice, precisely those phenomena regarded as the emblems of phonocentric, phallocentric presence and abused as such by recent theoretically inclined research. For the face and voice belong as much to the realm of the everyday as to theatre and philosophy, as well as the various sciences that have studied them. They are the chief means beyond a general consideration of the body, briefly examined earlier in its importance for the thinking of performance, by which ‘the subject’ presents itself and is represented, that is, how it appears. But rather than reclaim them as

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the singular signs of humanity or as merely the base material for so many cultural or ideological codings, the proposal here is to articulate the face and voice as scenes of the event. As such, they exist as multiplicities of the inhuman, as much as of the human, of what can be inscribed as much as of what escapes inscription. In Badiou’s philosophy, events are epoch-making things, declarations that change the course of history. In shifting focus on to the face and voice, from a macro to a micro level, there arises the possibility of the existence of events of which we are unaware at the gross level of historical consciousness, events to which we nonetheless respond in our encounters with others.

Pricklings But is there any more to the objectless phenomenon that I have attempted to evidence through the tropes of fiasco and disaster, punctum and syncope? Certain vague but significant notions are drawn together in these phenomena: encounter, event, the instant, affect, experiment, infans and expression (the latter two are articulated later). But in what overall notion does the affective quality of this phenomenon inhere? If Barthes’s punctum gives a sense of the sensitive event of encounter with alterity, then the illogic of pathognomy suggests that the punctum be replaced with pricklings: the singular with the multiple, the discrete with the indiscrete, the sophisticated Latin with the cheerful crudity of antiquated Anglo-Saxon, a noun with a verb – that also masquerades as a noun. This term acts as an entity in which its concepts encounter each other. If the punctum allies itself to the clear graphic mark of punctuation, prickling denotes a more nebulous sensation, one that is both multiple and diffuse, rising up indiscernibly but rapidly in a body before issuing forth into a full-blown effect. Such a sensation might be better described as the onset of affect, a term more generally associated with the early development of psychology and psychoanalysis and used to denote the realm of sensation considered beyond the specificity of, for example, a feeling, an emotion or a mood. If the punctum is a painful wound, a hypodermic invasion of the organism by something alien that emanates from the exterior, prickling would be the experience of the discovery that the alien is already inside, but not yet identified, working its way towards the surface where it will be evidenced or expressed: an experience that has yet to resolve itself into a pain or a pleasure. Deleuze provides us with an admirable description of the infinitely smaller percepts and affects that compose a prickling: Micro-perceptions or representatives of the world are these little folds that unravel in every direction, folds in folds, over folds following folds […] And these are minute, obscure, confused perceptions that make up our macro-perceptions, our conscious, clear and distinct apperceptions.

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Had it failed to bring together an infinite sum of minute perceptions that destabilize the preceding macro-perception while preparing the following one, a conscious perception would never happen. How could a pain follow pleasure if a thousand tiny pains or, rather, half-pains were not already dispersed in pleasure, which will then be united in conscious pain? However abruptly I may flog my dog who eats his meal, the animal will have experienced the minute perceptions of my stealthy arrival on tiptoes, my hostile odour, and my lifting of the rod that subtend the conversion of a pleasure into pain. How could a feeling of hunger follow one of satisfaction if a thousand tiny, elementary forms of hunger (for salts, for sugar, butter, etc.) were not released at diverse and indiscernible rhythms? And inversely, if satisfaction follows hunger, it is through the sating of all these particular and imperceptible hungers. Tiny perceptions are as much the passage from one perception to another as they are components of each perception. They constitute the animal or animated state par excellence: disquiet. These are the “pricklings” or little foldings that are no less present in pleasure than in pain. The pricklings are the representatives of the world in the closed monad. The animal that anxiously looks about, or the soul that watches out, signifies that there exist minute perceptions that are not integrated into present perception, but also minute perceptions that are not integrated into the preceding one and that nourish the one that comes along (‘so it was that!’).54 One can substitute ‘sensation’ for ‘perception’ in this evocative passage with the minimum alteration of its sense. For the Deleuze of this text, as in his other later works, perception and sensation are essentially indiscernible, which is not to say that they are identical. As both perceptions and sensations, pricklings are tiny and evanescent, micro-events that might issue forth with large-scale impact or simply fade away; the advent of the instant, an index of the smallest part of anything, a jot, a whit, a tingling, a particle, the sign of something that has not quite entered the semiotic order and may not survive the transition into it unchanged. But as the ‘representatives of the world in the closed monad’, the pricklings also found an ethics: they are the events which give beings away to each other, the means by which one subject is exposed to another, not as so many representations for interpretation, but as vital signs which function imperatively as directives to a percept-affect system called ‘the human’. Furthermore, small as they may be, pricklings invite another direct ethical association, according to the title of the fourteenth-century anonymous Anglo-Norman text Ayenbite of Inwyt, (commonly translated as The Prick of Conscience), with the wound of in-looking, or the repeated hurt of selfexamination. If that connection jumps too quickly to assume the moral high ground, it would be wise to note the more contemporary English slang

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usage of ‘prick’, as applied to individuals who make themselves offensive by their insupportable attitudes or abusive and unjust behaviour. To be called a prick is indeed a shameful thing and pricklings touch upon shame and the brutal comedy of being ashamed, since their destiny is never to amount to anything, never to endure in their own substance, but instead to pass continually into a state of mute latency in the aftermath of their own dissolution. But pricklings are neither a plea for a more embodied mode of knowing, nor a demand for thought to become literally incorporated after its solitary confinement in a so-called Cartesian dream of an essential self uncorrupted by language and social relations. Indeed, a consideration of prickling demands that there be one more Cartesian meditation, one more effort to grasp, if not the ‘things themselves’, at least events themselves as they appear to the consciousness of whatever kind of thinking being, according to the history of Western philosophy, will have come after ‘the subject’. Like William Blake’s tear, a prickling is an intellectual thing, complex from the outset and negligent of unwieldy oppositions between mind, body, brain and world. Pricklings are the vital signs in the ethics of affect, organized in the drama of spectatorial pain and pleasure. In this setting, the spectator is not the inert locus of an impassive gaze of mastery but someone potentially and actively exposed to a truth of an event in the disruption of a representation. The spectator is animated by the event, not inducted as a Bacchanalian participant or instructed by a Brechtian dialectics. A certain passivity is required in order that he or she can undergo this experience. But as Badiou suggests, this passivity is an active achievement: ‘Theatre’ is opposed to laziness. Which is not to say that it is opposed to doziness, since, as anyone who has felt the affect of a particularly stimulating sentence encountered in a book will testify, sleep comes on rapidly after an intense mental challenge. Hence the ancient prescription to the spectator of the Japanese Noh theatre: ‘dozing encouraged’. I confessed earlier that specific theatrical events would be absent from what follows, since it was suggested that it is in the disasters and fiascos that befall the theatre that ‘Theatre’ momentarily comes to pass. But to make the claims outlined above, an appeal has been made to theatre as a possible space for the evidencing of the significant out of the unimportant, as a place of ethical reckoning and deliberation. To support that appeal with another to an ethics of the apparently accidental seems barely adequate, even when considered in light of Badiou’s philosophy of the event. Before the theatre is left behind, it seems important to examine whether it is only at the point of its own accidental self-abandon that the theatre becomes the ‘Theatre’ of Badiou’s theatrophile, a theatre worthy of what happens, of the event, or whether there are other kinds of theatrical appearing that permit such an encounter.

4 Anomalous Appearances

Celebrity skin and the fortunes of the flesh The tradition of the British Christmas pantomime has thrived on appearances in the flesh by innumerable TV soap opera actors, presenters, comedians and sports personalities. Yet these performances were – and to a great extent still are – strictly local, low-brow, tongue-in-cheek events. However, internationally known actors, whose celebrity has been entirely manufactured by the industry of cinema, have ‘returned’ to the stage, notably in London’s West End, for serious roles in more or less serious drama. Older luminaries such as Donald Sutherland and Kathleen Turner through Kevin Spacey, Nicole Kidman, Juliette Binoche to younger actors such as Jude Law, Rachel Weisz and Keira Knightley are among dozens who have appeared on London’s stages in recent years, many of them in productions at the Almeida or Donmar Warehouse theatres, regarded as the jewels in the crown of sophisticated production houses in London. Regardless of the confessions of the celebrities themselves to the excitement, fear and trembling that they feel at the honourable idea of performing ‘live’ after so many years of so many cinematic takes, a cynical view might assess this phenomenon as a somewhat tawdry but successful attempt by companies facing financial difficulties and rapidly ageing audiences to attract a wider public, usurping the integrity of the drama itself. Such a view might consider that any new audience drawn into the theatre by the name of a Hollywood star, possibly with the promise that he or she will be delivered in a state of undress, will merely have reflected back to them the image of celebrity that has already been formed in their minds by the ideology of commercial cinema. The play, whatever it is, will be irrelevant, functioning only as the pretext for the appearance of the star in the likeness or his or her own image. To the eyes and ears of such a sensibility, the Hollywood cinema star on stage is almost repulsive, because utterly bare of pretext, his or her presence destroys the context of the drama in the very act of appearing. Such a sensibility, just a fiction exaggerated for rhetorical purposes here, would appear to be the 62

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height of theatrical snobbery. But at the same time, the star on stage does cause something of an upset in the drama of representation. In that capacity, he or she shares something with the bodybuilder, a performing persona that is generally depicted as difficult to comprehend, if not overtly risible. In his defence of character in the phenomenology of theatre, States asserts that ‘philosophy, in the theatre, must unfold itself as the thinking of the body’.1 Most philosophers of performance would appear to concur with that. But States insists that body itself, bare of pretext (like the actors in opening moments of performance described above), is simply offensive, likening it to that of the ‘muscleman, whose body, produced of an extraordinary discipline, is put to no use: it becomes nothing else, it presents nothing beyond its own grotesque possibilities. And because there is no pretext, no shield, the muscleman’s display is the incarnation of vanity.’2 Here, the performing body bereft of character is an abomination, an abject and degraded version of the properly theatrical body that orders its representations about itself. Yet States has also premised his sense of the disaster that underpins all theatrical performance on just this possibility of the falling away of character. Alphonso Lingis provides a different appreciation of the bodybuilder that assists in an understanding of what it might mean to try to exhibit oneself bare of pretext, which is, as States intuits, to undermine the foundations of what it is to perform properly at all. Lingis notes the pervasive public resentment of the exhibitionism of body builders.3 Their display is built around a cult, with its ‘clandestine repairs, its passwords, its initiations, its legends, its rituals, its undeciphered codes’, not an enterprise that might be integrated into a general economy. ‘Their arms that handle but poles without fulcrum and wheels that grind nothing are uneconomic, detaching or transforming nothing from the raw or recycled materials of nature and industry.’4 The excess of the presentation of generic, hardened, oiled muscle upon the stages of spartan school halls and shabby exhibition centres is not integrated into meaningful representations that one might interpret. Its audience is only that of the participants themselves, their spouses, children and close relatives. Others are left to wonder at the nature of a psyche that would concern itself with the pure elaboration of muscle within a daily regimen made up of endless cycles of weight exercise repetitions, costly pseudo-scientific nutritional supplements and artless posing. To such a general public, how indeed could this exhibition appear other than as the incarnation of vanity? ‘One sees them narcissistically pumping themselves into ostentatious sex symbols – but symbols the sexually liberated public recognizes as the obsolete figure of virile protector, who was a phallocrat and wife-beater. When the mind finds itself seduced to look where there is no cause written, it turns away in resentment.’5 Lingis suggests that such antipathy is not built on any cultural resentment of physical exhibitionism. Beyond the desexualized display of male

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and female athletes, exhibited bodies pervade the image culture of our era, encoded according to the permissible norms, whether as the pornographic variations of the unathletic female body or the nudity of the male body engaged in purposeful activity: ‘the justified baring of the arms to operate machinery, baring of the legs for speed, stripping for underwater welding’.6 This sense of purpose underpins the conventions of theatre: a stage set, however minimally, with props, characters, costumes, a plot and a chain of consequences. Without such paraphernalia, as even the most desultory pornographic film fully evidences, the display of both male and female anatomies is simply ridiculous. Lingis describes such a stage as: a theatre of adventure […] a space maintained alongside the politicoeconomic fields of our enterprises. Maleness is exhibited in an enterprise, where the causes that produce results are also the causes of our industrious and mercantile zones; femaleness is denuded in a theatre, where the causes are lavatory and the chain of consequences an adventure.7 The voyeuristic spectator of such a theatre ‘fiercely resents those women who, rebuilding their bodies out of muscle, are ruining the anatomy of the central character required for the theater of adventure’.8 Lingis asserts that this resentment is founded on the sense of a virility, of a pointless architecture of muscle that is not restricted to male bodies, insulated from death: ‘there is a feeling at large that the musculature gained in work and in rule-governed contests, the bodies of construction workers, deep-sea divers, and boxers, is virile and virtuous; the musculature built in the rituals of the body builder’s cult, grotesque.’9 Refusing to be shamed by the unsympathetic regard of a general public, the body builder heralds another set of possibilities, another form of work on the self. The death that the body builder’s training disavows is that which emanates from the exterior. The phallic, oiled hardness of such a body functions symbolically as an armour that appears to bounce back not only the voyeur’s gaze but also the death-dealing assaults that any physical organism, especially those made of a thin-skinned fleshiness, must defy in order to survive. But the body builder brings him or herself in contact with another kind of death, one forged out of an approach to an internal limit. Lingis writes: Our genes harbour another death, an inner death; as soon as we are born we are old enough to die, says an ancient wisdom. In pushing back to the genetic coding of the genus, one pushes one’s way to the death sentence written in the individual by the immortality of the genetic formula. The living organism, Freud taught, discharges its forces to ward off the death exterior to it only in order to seek its own death, its own advance to the death that is its own. The courage that forces us into this internal

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death, this death that is for each his or her own, is the very courage with which we are born […] The body builder tears down, muscle system by muscle system, all the strength in his-her fibers and cells against the death of the steel, and he-she knows that the hard will that takes him-her all the way to the limits of his-her exhaustion is the very movement by which power, and new, greater, power is born […] There is then in the force with which the body builder assumes all that is and could have been born in him-her also a courage and a splendour. Even if, viewed from the outside, it appears as the monstrous excrescence of maternity in the virile figure of power.10 Like the body builder, the celebrity on stage is the incarnation of a sensibility that is a little monstrous, but neither vain, nor in vain. When the global celebrity steps out into the lights in front of an audience in a foreign city, on to the stage that may be equally uncharted territory, she has infinitely farther to fall than the aspiring local professional playing opposite her. Her presence there raises the sense of disaster or fiasco that underpins all theatrical performance to another level. This does not depend on whether she excels or fails in the role. Generous to the end, we, the audience, can easily forgive that, since virtuosity was neither expected nor demanded. The celebrity has no real need of a role; by definition, she already has an excess of character. Is it not the case that our desire is to witness the uncanny spectacle of the incarnation of such an excess? The celebrity enters and performs behind the mask of a perfected identity, all the more strange for not really being a mask at all, but something like the aura surrounding a work of art. Is not the body of the celebrity embodied by one who does not actually inhabit it, who will have to occupy the space with a personal mechanism not entirely under her control? Such an incarnation will be one that has to walk the width of the stage without stumbling, recite lines of dialogue on cue with a voice that may possibly not remain untroubled, whose costume buttons may fail to perform effectively, whose chest will have to rise and fall in the effort to catch its breath after some particularly strenuous scene, whose pores will inevitably open to release sweat under the heat of the lights. All the while, she must labour under the halo of celebrity that appears more and more like a carapace, the product of an imagistic discipline even more extraordinary than that of the body builder. For the cinema celebrity on stage, the very act of appearing before the public in the flesh is in itself a kind of minor disaster, a collapse of the virtual into the actual. She does not, however, assume ‘all that is and could have been born in him-her’;11 the celebrity does not have even the consolation of that philosophy, born of the anonymity of the musculature that pervades the world of the body builder. Instead, in a continuing desire to appear (which might simply be a personal financial necessity), she must assume all that is and has been created for and around her by the technologies

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and representational forms that produce an individual as an icon. A celebrity trades only on past appearances, not on those to come; on what she has agreed to be, not on potential possibilities. This unhappy fate one sees set forth in the body, face, speech and gestures of a retired Muhammad Ali, displayed in the claustrophobic comfort of the chat show armchair. In terms of spontaneous disclosures of the human, all that is left to Ali as celebrity by a career in the ring are the trembling hands and the slurred speech of early onset Parkinson’s disease. Rather than the nadir of a certain theatrical tradition, the celebrity on stage is possibly another incarnation of a ‘performing degree zero’, a style of appearing which seems to burrow out from under the weight of its own iterations and expropriations in the very act of appearing. That is what Roland Barthes appears to be enjoying in the nightclub drag act that finally redeems the theatre for him and it might be possible to redeem the celebrity stage appearance in a similar fashion.12 However, wishing to avoid the potential absurdity of claiming the celebrity as symbolic bearer of the existential burden of a theatricalized culture, it would be more telling to recall the experience of watching the theatrical appearing of those much closer to home; our friends, lovers, spouses, parents and, most notably, our children. Their performances permit a phenomenology of appearing that engages with an explicitly ethical understanding.

Infant figures Child performers – and a Judy Garland, a Michael Jackson or a Macaulay Culkin are but the extreme end of a continuous spectrum – arouse profound uncertainties about what it means to appear before an audience. When a child appears onstage, one does not simply sit back and watch it take up its allotted role in the drama. One finds oneself asking: whose child is this? Which is also to ask, by whose volition or consent does this child appear as other than him or herself? Such a question is raised by the very failure of becoming that so often characterizes the child’s entry into the theatrical system. Surely in almost every culture, the child’s initiation into the artifice of theatrical ritual is synonymous with his or her initiation into the core values of the culture at large? Within the tradition of religious education in a Judeo-Christian context, this initiation is exemplified by the school nativity play, which simultaneously confirms the universal validity of both a particular religious narrative and a set of theatrical conventions.13 At such events, parents come to spectate upon their children, ostensibly garbed in costumes appropriate to their role as, say Mary, Joseph, a shepherd or a sheep, equipped with props and suitable dialogue memorized by rote. There are rows of seats for the audience, a programme, refreshments, a producer. There may even be lights, a curtain, backstage and a prompter. But what

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takes place as the drama unfolds, perhaps exposed to possibilities of disaster and fiasco unmatched by any other kind of performance, is not experienced by its audience as drama at all. This drama narrates the coming into the world of baby Jesus. But that persona is the missing body at the heart of the performance, usually played by a plastic doll or even an empty bundle of blankets. To the parental audience, the familiar story of his nativity is significant only in so far as it echoes an altogether different birth to presence; that of their own child, their homemade celebrity, set forth as spectacle. In the infant theatre, one watches one’s own child appear. From the perspective of the parental spectator, he or she appears not more or less convincingly as Mary or Joseph, but as an intensified and concentrated collection of postures, gestures, facial and vocal expressions that one knows intimately from elsewhere and from before. Yet these expressions are somehow altered and deformed by the requirement to be set forth upon a stage. The bodies and faces of other people’s children, bodies that we have not touched or stroked, faces we have neither seen take shape or take up expressions by which we recognize the growth of a specific intelligence or an autonomous personality, strike us differently. They must perform, go through the motions, do what they have to do, however begrudging, endearing or overzealous they appear. To our eyes and ears, they reveal neither more nor less of themselves for being onstage. In fact, in their obliviousness to the theatrical conventions to which they are being required to conform, they seem almost opaque to the scrutiny of our gaze. Whatever pleasure they take, it is in the performance, in the encounter between the dressing up, the gently but rigorously enforced choreographic hierarchies that ensure the drama will prevail, the dynamics of classroom friendships, the beneficent maternal and paternal eyes of the watching audience and the institution. But our own child appears to emit a disturbing double image: a distillation of his or her psychophysical organism that is at the same time impersonal, even generic or uniform, corralled within the confines of a makeshift costume or the burden of a leading role. This is not a function of possession or genetic inheritance; on stage, a child is mine not by his or her passing physical resemblance to me, or by our shared hair or eye colour, but by the fact that his or her expressive capabilities have been formed to a considerable extent in relation to my own. And, in turn, to the extent that I have been able to play the role of parent with any degree of conviction, my own expressive capabilities have been reshaped and redirected by my initiatives and my responses in relation to the child. This is not to say that such capabilities are synchronized in an interpersonal choreography of world–sharing embodiment, as described by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his phenomenology of perception. Despite the behavioural determinism dictated by genetics, systems of nurture and the mimetic capacity that defines the human for thinkers as diverse as Aristotle and Walter Benjamin, the child – non-compliant, incorrigible, requiring of education – retains

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an alterity, a recalcitrant otherness. Indeed, the child, like the animal, is in itself the very figure of contemporary alterity and hence must suffer the attribution of the quality of absolute evil as well as absolute good. In fact, is an event such as the nativity play not only the initiation into a theatre and a culture of appearance, but also its culmination? As psychoanalysis has shown, the theatre is formative in the foundation of the psyche, whether in Freud’s example of the fort-da game or in Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage. But does the initiation not start much earlier, as we look down upon the infant body exhibited in the stage that is the confined space of cot, crib or basket? There, its limbs are convulsed by seemingly directionless neurological activity, leaving its face and voice as the primary site for a play of variegated expressions, sometimes utterly opaque, at other times simple and clear. We attempt to interpret such expressions and return our own as distinct and exaggerated signs. Furthermore, is such a scene of natality not inaugurated by the setting up of the empty baby basket or cot, complete with the paraphernalia required to ensure survival and comfort, anticipating its function as receptacle for the child still secured inside its mother’s womb? Is there not more than rhetorical sense in the idea of the theatre of infancy, and so the infancy of theatre itself? In subsequent chapters, I return to the significance of the expressive primacy of the face and voice in relation to a thinking of theatre, acting and a philosophy of expression. Here, I have suggested that the projective presence of the child, the body builder and the celebrity on stage disturb the logic of theatre as a closed field of semiotic systems. The faces, voices and bodies of children and celebrities are figured forth onstage differently by the expressive possibilities and the behavioural codes made available to them by their personal and public histories and by the norms of the cultural form and milieu in which they appear. They conform neither to the conventions of theatrical appearing nor to those of studious ‘non-acting’ demanded by other forms of art performance. They appear to us as anomalous, just as an audience made up entirely of friends and relations of the actors, or a theatrical cast made up entirely of cinema celebrities, might appear anomalous, a fiasco in its very conception.14 Yet one only has to look at the performance traditions of other cultures and eras to see that far from being unusual, this is a common state of affairs. Thus an understanding of theatre – and the culture which continues to create it out of more than economic necessity – as the mutual co-presence of strangers brought together to experience and to testify to the conditions of their estrangement seems far more irregular.

5 The Borrowed Masks of Being

Masks or faces? The masks of comedy and tragedy: the mask as persona, the faces of the dramatis personae. They also signify as per sona, through sound, deploying the voice to reveal the hidden face itself. Or, rather, not to reveal it as the expression of a self, but as what it impersonates.1

Figure 1 The masks of comedy and tragedy Source: author’s personal collection.

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But, let’s face it, this is a bad start, this sign is not a good sign. As the icon for classic theatrical and dramatic form for centuries, the personae appear to have degraded into crudely line-drawn caricatures, the grotesque grimaces of an inane grin and an utterly artificial sadness. They have become, in the current jargon, emoticons: the progenitors of the dreaded smiley face that never seems entirely to fade from popular fashion. The smiley has returned with a vengeance in the many variations now used in email and text messaging to graphically convey emotional attitudes usually carried by the face or voice in social interaction. The personae have become even more iconic as the self-satisfied symbols of that other interface, of human and machine, as once used by Apple Macintosh computers during their start-up routines: as the system completes its self-check hardware diagnostic after being switched on, the screen presented either the ‘happy Mac’ indicating all is well, or the ‘sad Mac’ indicating that something is badly, even terminally, amiss in its electronic innards. Martin Heidegger recalls the etymology of persona as the actor’s mask in one of his lectures collected in the series published as What is Called Thinking? After declaring that man is ‘the animal that confronts face-to-face’, he adds: ‘since man is the percipient who perceives what is, we can think of him as the persona, the mask, of being’.2 But not even the gravitas of a Heideggerian thinking can foreclose a certain instinctive revulsion towards the symbol of the personae, especially on behalf of those engaged in the philosophically respectable advancement of performance as a theoretical paradigm. One finds this symbol in supermarket notice board adverts for amateur dramatic events, decorating the facades of some commercial theatres, lurking as historical relics in passageways of more modern venues, even in corporate graphics for projects in affective computing. But it is not generally found, say, in the promotional literature for university courses in the study of performance. There is more to this revulsion than distaste for artless graphic design. In the forms of representation these masks have taken, is there not simply ugliness, but also falsity, pretence, dissimulation, even something diabolical? In fact, does this symbol not justify the ancient antitheatrical prejudice, which pronounces the theatre’s essential moral sickness, a form of playacting that is merely a debased, or even demonic, infantilism? Is a sophisticated thinking of theatre not finally ashamed of this symbol, shamed by it and also wishing shame upon it so that it would hide its ridiculous, gurning faces forever? Shame was not invoked in the earlier evocation of instances of performance. In itself, this may be a shameful omission. But at this point it suffices to note that shame exerts its most powerful influence whilst it remains unacknowledged and unnamed. For, contrary to the popular cliché, to name is not to shame, but to attribute guilt, a responsibility that one can accept, refuse, or even argue in a court of law. One cannot accept or refuse shame. Shame brooks no argument: an event all by itself, it happens, in an instant, in a

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rush and with an excruciating blush, as one becomes a spectacle to oneself and to everyone else. As many of those who have written on shame seem to have understood, shame is more than a metaphorical loss of face: shame is a mask, something that literally de-faces whilst at the same time nailing down the ‘I’ to its very ipseity.3 And in that respect, the symbol of the personae shames us – or at least me – into another understanding of how shame is inextricably bound up with the theatre. No doubt, this is a characteristic exaggeration, itself symptomatic of a secret passion for histrionics, which, when its passions are ignited (all too easy) cannot stop hoping to attract attention by some self-aggrandizingly rhetorical self-depreciation. To be properly creditable, pretence should come pseudo-po-faced, bearing an expression of insufficiently disguised distaste that is itself insufficiently disguised. This is pretence to the nth power, where n is as high an integer as you can fake it and still look scrutably inscrutable, a facial manoeuvre that has left the building before the body even knows it. Within a Judeo-Christian heritage, the shameful symbol of the personae commits the ultimate travesty of erasing the difference between masks and faces. Christianity has conferred an entirely negative value on the mask. If man is indeed made in God’s image, then it must follow that everything that serves to dissimulate or disfigure his appearance must be the work of the devil, a manifestation of the folly of humanity in the grip of spiritual malaise. In other religions too, a properly spiritual countenance is a picture of serenity: is the limpid face of the Buddha not in some way the same as that imprinted on, for example, the Turin shroud? But it suffices to be reminded that the latter is a face of a dead man, or at least a great, fake impression of one. The life behind it, or immanent in it, has vanished. And the Buddha seems barely alive: he is without desire and his symmetrical face remains empty, devoid of expression, the eyes merely depressions in the stone. Only his hands, often bent at the wrist in anatomically impossible angles, hint at the operation of an autonomous intelligence, but one that is situated in an ineffable ‘elsewhere’.4 On the other hand, depictions of devils across the gamut of cultures show faces deformed and distorted, shadowy, craggy, hairy, wrinkled, bedecked with horns, misshapen ears, gigantic noses, and wearing leering grins or snarling with teeth exposed. Their faces are violently animated as well as animalistic, almost unable to contain the expressive forces of malevolence that play in and out of their convoluted surfaces. The malificence of masking, its roots in shamanic ritual and its connection to the supernatural is well established in many cultures and has a long and rich history in ethology and anthropology. At a secular level, the distinction between mask and face has been reconstituted throughout the history of Western performance as the paradox of acting. Put simply, that paradox suggests that the actor, rather than personally or internally undergoing the emotions he or she represents, requires

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only the skilled and conscious deployment of the behaviour or signs that correlate to the relevant emotions. In other words, when it comes to a truly convincing performance, going through the motions will be more successful than undergoing the emotions. Denis Diderot’s well-known eponymous essay on this subject, written between 1773 and 1778, obviously stands as a pivotal work in the history of this paradox, but it exercised the minds of many of those who thought about theatre before and after its dissemination, and still holds sway over, for example, competing conceptions of acting technique.5 In 1888, William Archer, unhappy with Diderot’s cold-hearted dictums, published his own investigations into the paradox, producing a work distilled from biographical and journalistic research into actors’ own sense of their craft, entitled Masks or Faces?. Archer’s rhetorical title literally focuses the paradox of acting upon the human face, where it has remained in the subsequent elucidation of human emotion in philosophy and psychology, and in the rapidly developing science of the interface, or human-computer relations. But rather than considering this symbol as the cruel travesty of a sophisticated thinking of theatre’s cultural value, I want to suggest that it might be reinvigorated by thinking it directly, and thus through and past it. In this understanding, the personae do not stand for the comforting conjunction of comedy and tragedy, nor of humour and pathos, but for a philosophical physiology of the composure and de-composure of being, the making and unmaking of so-called ‘identity’. This is to bring a balanced and coherent rationality into immediate proximity with the derangements of infantility, animality and senility. In erasing the distinction between mask and face, the graphic symbol of the personae announces the impossibility of a pure appearing, of a simple revelation of selfhood, of a coming into presence that is not already bound up with its own representations. In other words, facing is unthinkable without masking, voicing without ventriloquism. This is what the theatre shows us and what a theatre-philosophy can think. Yet, from another perspective, a project that chooses to focus on the face and the voice, over and above the body as a whole, might seem to rely on an outdated humanism and a repressed and repressive theatre in which, as the critical adage has it, the actor is dead from the neck down. I have suggested that a psychoanalytically informed philosophy of the body makes a fetish of the tragedy of abjection, offering a melancholy anatomy which, in its most extreme formulations, forecloses an encounter with a thinking not polarized around the opposition of a rational mind and an irrational body. On the other hand, a theory of consciousness informed by neuroscience fashions a functional but inelegant materialism whose appeal is restricted to the adherents of the hard-headed realism of the philosophy of mind. One of the more popular moves for postmodern theory in a variety of disciplines, from neuroscience to performance studies, is a critique of the so-called continued dominance of Cartesianism. Indeed, in an appropriate conjunction for this

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work, an influential work in the new neuroscience of emotion takes its title from what its author considers to be ‘Descartes’ Error’: the notion of the self or subject as the staging of a ‘Cartesian theatre’ in the mind – a kind of mental homunculus installed in seat in the brain and passing judgment on the representations paraded before it by the sense organs.6 Yet it seems pertinent to ask whether such a monolithic Cartesianism is actually to be found in the works of René Descartes – or anywhere else for that matter, except in works that propose new appreciations of ‘the body’. Is it not the case, over 100 years after Nietzsche’s revelation of the body as ‘the mighty ruler’, that we continue to ask: why does it feel as if I still have both a mind and a body, on regular occasions so mutually recalcitrant? What are the conditions of, for example, infancy and senility, other than the most overt expressions of the installation of this recalcitrance as a way of life? And rather than taking this as evidence of the subliminal ruse of a Cartesian ideology, could this condition not be taken as the basis for a different thinking about the encounter between mind, body, world and others? As is well-known, in seeking a solution to the problem of the mind/body split of which he was only too aware, Descartes proposed the pineal gland as the single site of their meeting and mutual transformation, a notion supposedly rendered patently aberrant by modern science. But to what extent does today’s experimental neuroscience represent a philosophical advance on Descartes’s position, or that of Franz Gall, the eighteenth-century proponent of phrenology and of no less than 27 discrete cerebral ‘organs’, when it puts forward the following theses?: There are rather well defined brain regions responsible for emotion. The brain stem (at the top of the spinal cord) is involved in virtually all of them; the hypothalamus (a subcortical structure) and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex are responsible for sadness, but never for anger or fear; and the amygdala (another subcortical structure) is mainly responsible for fear and for the recognition of fearful expression.7 As organisms acquired greater complexity, ‘brain-caused’ actions require more intermediate processing. Other neurons were interpolated between the stimulus neuron and the response neuron, and varied parallel circuits were thus set up, but it did not follow that the organisms with that more complicated brain necessarily had a mind. Brains can have many intervening steps in the circuits mediating between stimulus and response, and still have no mind, if they do not meet an essential condition: the ability to display images internally and to order those images in a process called thought.8 Whilst in the effort to develop a theory of consciousness, we might not want to get overly concerned with unavoidably awkward metaphorical descriptions,

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it might still be worth asking whether, for example, the notions of brain regions having ‘responsibility’ or thought as the ordering of internally displayed images (displayed to whom or what?) are philosophically defensible or even useful. As the prime philosopher of the flesh but also an aficionado of the neurological case study, Merleau-Ponty might have made much of A. R. Luria’s classic neuroscience text, The Mind of a Mnemonist, the story of a newspaper reporter with an unusually developed faculty of memory, which he deployed as a performing artist. The mnemonist’s extraordinary capacity for perfect recall seems to have also provoked in him a profound phenomenological sensibility: This sense I had of my mother: up to the time I began to recognize her, it was simply a feeling – ‘ This is good.’ No form, no face, just something bending over me, from which good would come […] Pleasant […] Seeing my mother was like looking at something through the lens of a camera. At first you can’t make anything out, just a round cloudy spot […] then a face appears, then its features become sharper. My mother picks me up […] I lie there and it feels like ‘this’.9 Following the mnemonist, it is with phenomena such as the face and voice as the primary sites of the force of affect and expression, rather than with the pineal gland, the amygdala or cingulate cortex, or even ‘the body’, that phenomenology can overcome its own peculiar form of blindsight. Such a project is in no way opposed to scientific modes of creating knowledge. On the contrary, it is science that has confirmed the primacy of the face and voice for our being-in-the world. Developmental psychology has shown that the infant, who can initially control only its own face and voice, acquires within days the ability to identify the faces and voices of its primary caregivers with a startling degree of acuity, as compared to its discernment of other phenomena.10 Neurobiology has demonstrated that the human brain has areas specialized in the recognition of faces, damage to which results in the strange pathology of prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize faces, whilst maintaining the ability to recognize almost everything else. Interestingly, some prosopagnosiacs report on-going difficulties in navigating through environments which they may have used daily for years; for them, the loss of the power of facial recognition is also a loss of primary orientation.11 It may be that the relative neglect of the face and voice as a necessary part of a phenomenological analysis of embodiment is partly to do with their attributed complicity with a ‘metaphysics of presence’. From the perspective of a certain critical orthodoxy, a focus on the face and voice which does not understand them as codings of cultural difference and power, is in the grip of an essentializing phonocentrism. Such an approach is taken to depend

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on the concept of an autonomous, self-hearing speaking subject, posited by the philosophies of modernity and assiduously unravelled by Derridean deconstruction. Similarly, the thinking of looking and being looked at has, since Sartre’s lengthy chapter on ‘the look’ in Being and Nothingness, been preoccupied with the scopic desire of the gaze and the optics of surveillance as elaborated in the writings of Lacan and Foucault, themselves taken up in the discourses of feminism and film theory. Yet it seems that there might be other dimensions to be recovered from the face and voice. There is more to them as phenomena than a set of representations which operate purely to shore up a metaphysics of presence, the self-possession of the transcendental ego or a patriarchal ideology of objectification. As will be explored later, the face has become central in the study of human emotion. And what was once the domain of psychology and ethology has now been occupied by the industry of affective computing, which is attempting to install the face and voice as the talking heads of future, ‘user-friendly’, human-machine interfaces. Even within philosophy, one cannot escape the force of a revised thinking of the face and voice, as it has been expressed by the pre-eminent contemporary philosopher of ethics, and of facing and speaking, Emmanuel Levinas.

The ethics of the face In invoking Levinas, is it not straightaway obvious that in selecting the visual icon of the personae as a motif for thought, I have once again fallen prey to the dominating and distancing force of vision to which so many phenomenologists have alerted us? Have I not already begun to speak exclusively of the face as an image system at the expense of language and discourse? Does not phenomenology also warn of the ethical dangers and responsibilities in anatomizing being-in-the-world, in treating the senses as discrete systems of perception and sensation that can be added to, or subtracted from, a substrate labelled ‘the subject’? If I disregard such a warning, then it will be partly due to a submission to the disciplinary boundaries that divide knowledge today. They permit only a quasi-anatomical specialism for those who practise the arts and the sciences relating to the human organism: this surgeon operates only on the nose, that psychologist has made his life’s work out of our perception of colour, you are an expert in the musical structures of the Balinese gamelan, she knows more than anyone about the phonetic evolution of Slavonic languages. This division of labour is especially prevalent in the study and practice of human expression. Just as the theatre has its acting and voice coaches, singing teachers, movement specialists and combat instructors, the medical sciences require experts of the nose, the throat, the ear, the eye, of speech, or physical movement and its disorders. In fact, medicine traditionally divides the senses

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somewhat differently, as evidenced by the legacy of the nineteenth-century architecture of medical care. Whilst the eye (along with the lung and the heart) often merits its own hospital buildings and outpatient units, medicine, following anatomy, puts ear, nose and throat into a more than an administrative proximity. The existence of eponymous ear, nose and throat hospitals is reflected in the Latinate designation for the medical specialty dealing with these organs: otorhinolaryngology, a tongue-twisting composite term that has metaphorical affinities with the tragical-comical-pastoral drama of which Polonius speaks; ostensibly discrete organs or modes of performance experienced as inextricably connected and mutually implicated, as one discovers on laughing whilst drinking. However, nobody could fail to admit that the face and voice function in different sensory realms, according to different modes of perception and expression. There rightly exists a rich array of knowledges, technologies and artistic forms that have elaborated each independently. Yet it remains impossible philosophically (and theatrically) to think one without the other. To do otherwise is to perform an essential violence. Levinas writes: ‘I have attempted a “phenomenology” of sociality starting from the face of the other person – from proximity – by understanding in its rectitude a voice that commands.’12 Levinas’s thought will be a prime concern later, but at this point it will suffice to notice his chiasmic intertwining of faciality and vocality, of the face and voice of the Other that, to use Levinas’s own rhetoric, appeal to me and contest me prior to any mode of cognitive knowing. Indeed, there is a sense in Levinas that to think the face and the voice separately is the fundamental violence of such a mode because, at a phenomenological level (which is also an ethical level), there is a basic reciprocity between them: facing invokes a speaking and vice versa. ‘The face is a living presence. The face speaks. The manifestation of the face is already discourse.’13 This mutual implication of face and voice in Levinas’s thinking is absolutely fundamental to its ethical import: the ultimate form of the relationship to the Other is one of conversation considered not as communication – the exchange of what can be said – but as saying, as what exceeds the content of the said in the moment of its expression. A silent face that faces us is an affective anomaly, a source of accusation and anxiety; a voice that remains faceless is a source of apprehension and fear. In his cultural history of ventriloquism, Steven Connor has shown how the wilder, metaphysical forces of the disembodied voice, evidenced in phenomena such as the ancient Greek oracles or the nineteenth-century séance, gradually became domesticated via their introjection into the body of the ventriloquist’s dummy. The dummy as a ‘character’ came to be defined not so much by its body (it did not really have one to speak of) as by a singular face (or is it a mask?): the rosy red cheeks, fixed grin and wide, staring eyes of a delinquent schoolboy.14 Similarly, the conventional secular logic of film requires that face and voice, image and sound, perform a duet of mutual verification: sound that is left faceless, without the identification provided

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by visual depiction of its source, immediately introduces an uncertainty that becomes a herald of the uncanny.15 Film is the medium par excellence that can perform the separation of the visual and the aural. In the production of many contemporary films, the entire soundtrack is constructed separately from the cinematography. This possibility is exploited frequently to cinema’s own advantage, as in the evocation of objectless fear in the horror movie, or of the spiritual, as in the cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky. But if, as Michel Chion, the pre-eminent philosopher of cinematic sound, asserts that there is no soundtrack – since the dominant impetus in manipulations of the aural is to ensure they coagulate around the image – then the cinema is ultimately also in thrall to the necessary conjunction of the face and the voice.16 Levinas is perhaps right to consider the phenomenological sundering of face and voice as involved in an act of violence. To the extent that, for Levinas, the entire body as expressive medium can be considered as face, then he is resisting an anatomical or dissectory mode of thought that would approach the body piecemeal, organ by organ, sense by sense, carving up an essential unity of corporeal and vocal expression. Against such a melancholy anatomy, Levinas proposes the face which addresses me, which appeals to me, as a form of speech prior to any actual verbal enunciation. The face is a unity that signifies the infinity of responsibility that the other commands in me. But, as Levinas knows only too well, this is a violence that is performed everywhere and every day, by scientific and critical modes of analysis, as well as by whatever dissimulates. Kant provides an image of the ideal citizen, whose existence is exemplary, suffused with the sentiment of respect imbued in him by the force of the categorical imperative. As Alphonso Lingis describes, for him: acting autonomously consists in not taking oneself as an exception. The speech of the sovereign one formulates and his deeds diagram the universal and the necessary, put forth the essential for everyone. No word, no gesture, no move admits any divergence between its public meaning and its private intention. Nothing in his existence is contrived to dissimulate […] Sovereign existence is an existence always promulgating, public, not only without private interests but without privacy.17 Within a theatre-philosophy, this citizen cannot exist, even if he remains imperative as an ideal in the thought of Kant or Levinas. For the theatre, such a citizen is inconceivable because he represents a being who does not know anything of the theatre, made as it is out of the question of dissimulation (what is really happening?), taking place in the divergence between public meaning and private intention. But the theatre has only life as its material. It has no exclusive rights on this divergence, which is also a divergence between the expressive capabilities and significatory regimes of the face and the voice. Consequently, I follow that divergence, venturing an

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exploration of the appearance of the face in the play of expression, before contemplating what the voice has to say.

The ‘face-to-face’ and the theatre of aesthetics In bringing Levinas’s thought into proximity with the theatre and with the symbol of the personae, an apparently unbridgeable chasm looms rapidly into view. As far as I am aware, Levinas does not make his feelings on the theatre known anywhere, even though Shakespeare is one of the few nonphilosophical reference points to which he returns. However, I think we can be sure that for Levinas, the symbol of personae would represent the basest degradation of the ethical dimension of facing and speaking. Almost alone amongst contemporary thinkers, Levinas has no time or thought for the expressive or representational possibilities of artistic endeavour. Whilst one might want to argue with Levinas’s subsumption of all art under the ideology of a Kantian aesthetic of the beautiful, there is no escaping his absolute hostility to what he sees as the massive distraction and deception performed by the artwork of whatever historical period: Art is the pre-eminent exposition in which the said is reduced to a pure theme, to absolute exposition, even to shamelessness capable of holding all looks for which it is exclusively destined. The said is reduced to the Beautiful, which supports Western ontology.18 One does not need to be overly familiar with Levinas’s concept of the saying and the said as different dimensions of language to understand that to shamelessly reduce something to a pure theme is diametrically opposed to his project to ground ethics as a first philosophy that is not subsumed by a Western ontology. In comparison with his exhortatory ethical rhetoric, there is something very refreshing about Levinas’s brusque dismissal of art and the aesthetic in an era when a basic faith in the ethical force of art has achieved an almost unquestioned status in an intellectual milieu. It chimes with a theatrical sensibility that wants nothing more than to be rid of everything to do with the theatre, whilst nevertheless proceeding remorselessly to performance with all the creaky paraphernalia of theatrical representation. It almost goes without saying that Levinas’s rejection is not a simple Philistinism directed at modern or postmodern artistic practices; he is familiar with a culture in which an artwork achieves its status as art precisely to the extent that it does not conform to pre-existing notions of the aesthetic. And that, for Levinas, is art’s problem and the source of its perpetual failure: The palette of colours, the gamut of sounds, the system of vocables, and the meandering of forms are realized as a pure how; in the touch of

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colour and pencil, the secrecy of words, the sonority of sounds – all these modal notions – there is resonance of essence. The research of modern art, or perhaps, more exactly, art in the stage of a search, a stage never overcome, seems in all its aesthetics to look for and understand this resonance or production of essence in the form of works of art.19 It would not be difficult to construct any number of convincing arguments as to the generalizations and aporias in Levinas’s conception of art, mobilizing the arguments set out in Jacques Derrida’s early essay, ‘Violence and Metaphysics’.20 To summarize very crudely, Derrida reveals how Levinas’s own philosophical concerns cannot escape the logic of representation whilst they continue to be expressed as writing (i.e., expressed at all). The only alternative is silence, an option that Levinas evidently did not wish to pursue. However, it is worth noting that Derrida rarely approaches the work of another, unless it is a spur to his own thought. This is to say that, for Derrida, it contains within it a true question, a knot of thought that cannot simply be ‘deconstructed’ in the (non-Derridean) sense of being unravelled and thus eliminated. To the extent that the work of someone like Derrida took so distinctly ‘Levinasian’ a turn during the 1990s in its analysis of notions of, for example, the gift, friendship and hospitality, one might want to take Levinas’s aversion to art seriously. Attempting to then recruit his oeuvre on behalf of an argument for an ethics of theatre or performance would seem perverse. But the temptation is great, not just because his work has become foundational for versions of ethics that seek to set themselves apart from accusations of post-structuralist nihilism and political indifference. For example, if in instancing the ethical dimensions of the instants of performance considered in Chapter 3, I noted the centrality of facing to a ‘zero degree’ of theatre, then it would seem that Levinas’s philosophy of the face-to-face ought to provide considerable sustenance.21 For Levinas insists that ‘[t]he way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we here name face’.22 To the extent that theatre itself is predicated on a face-to-face encounter, on a mutual presencing (however much haunted by spectral absences), it would seem that it is possibly the art form that might redeem the aesthetic for Levinas’s conception of ethics. But Levinas’s thinking of the face resolutely objects to any direct phenomenological consideration of the face in its appearing. For, to put it simply, in Levinas’s metaphysical phenomenology, the face is not a phenomenon; it cannot appear. The face just faces. It does not represent and cannot be represented without a fundamental betrayal or violence. The face is everywhere as a force of radical passivity in Levinas’s texts, yet nowhere described, differentiated, articulated, examined or scrutinized, either as an active power or as a coded surface. The face is meaning all by itself. You are you. In this sense, one can say that the face is not ‘seen’. It is what cannot become a content which your

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thought would embrace; it is uncontainable, it leads you beyond. It is in this that the signification of the face makes its escape from being, as a correlate of knowing. Vision, to the contrary, is a search for adequation; it is what par excellence absorbs being. But the relation to the face is straightway ethical.23 Elsewhere he maintains: The face is present in its refusal to be contained. In this sense it cannot be comprehended, that is encompassed. It is neither seen nor touched – for in visual or tactile sensation the identity of the I envelops the alterity of the object, which becomes precisely a content.24 Thus, for Levinas, the face is not given as a set of data to perception: the sum of the eyes slightly narrowed, the brow wrinkled, the lip curled, the corners of the mouth raised or depressed. Neither is it a ‘gestalt’, a composite figure against a ground, nor a succession of expressions geared around the production of an intentionality. The face simply faces, addresses and commands. To the extent that the face surrenders to its phenomenality, it surrenders its ethical significance; it becomes just ‘a face’, an image or representation, a set of features for conveying information. But Levinas is equally clear that this ethical dimension ‘opens in the sensible appearance of the face’.25 How, then, are we to understand the way in which the face and facing in experience have the primordial significance that Levinas attributes to them? David Levin has analysed the problematic of this invisible face of humanity in Levinas’s work, drawing out the ambiguities and paradoxes of a phenomenology of the face which is not a phenomenon. In seeking a phenomenological narrative for the face, reduced in the later work to no more than ‘the trace of a trace of an abandon’ that Levinas does not supply, Levin asks us to think that the obligation in the address of the face: […] first takes hold of us bodily – in the flesh – in a time that is, at each and every moment, i.e., both synchronically and diachronically, prior to schematizing consciousness, prior to reflective cognition, and therefore prior to the ego’s construction of a worldly temporal order […] morality is first of all a bodily carried sense of obligation, an imperative sense of responsibility immediately, but not consciously felt in the flesh: a bodily responsiveness that, unless severely damaged by the brutality of early life experiences, the ‘I’ cannot avoid undergoing – at least to some extent – when face-to-face with the other.26 Here, the undifferentiated body-as-flesh is invoked as the inchoate site of an ethical signification beyond what is available to knowledge. Is this body

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any more ‘phenomenal’ than the vision of a face that is no more vision, but listening and word? In attempting to articulate this sensibility, Levin invokes a peculiar reading of Levinas’s project: For him, the formation of the moral self involves tearing off the masks, returning to one’s exposedness, making felt contact with that existential condition and living from out of that, without the mediation of the masks. From an ego-logical point of view, this exposure of the face to the face of the other would be the unspeakable terror of self-effacement, the most extreme deconstruction of the identity of the ‘self’ as the culture of modernity has conceived it. There is no telling what identityshattering effect this exposure of the face behind the mask could have on the eyewitness, the one who sees it […].27 For Levin, the mask hides and – even as it indicates what it hides – betrays the face, which ought to remain as the name for what is hidden, made neither into image nor symbol. In this understanding, the mask (and our newly recuperated symbol of the personae) is simply a disgrace, a grotesque rendering of what ought to remain unrendered but nevertheless felt or otherwise experienced. However, Levinas himself implicitly provides another way to understand the relation between mask and face. This relation is but a figure for the wider question of signification, a relation between interior and exterior: the concept of expression. Levin, like many other commentators on Levinas, avoids any comment on a term that occurs frequently in the latter’s explication of the ethical relation. For example, Levinas writes: The face of the Other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me, the idea existing to my own measure and to the measure of its ideatum – the adequate idea. It does not manifest itself by these qualities, but kath’auto. It expresses itself. The face brings a notion of truth which, in contradistinction to contemporary ontology, is not the disclosure of the impersonal Neuter, but expression: the existent breaks through all the envelopings and generalities of Being to spread out in its ‘form’ the totality of its ‘content’, finally abolishing the distinction between form and content.28 Levinas’s own emphases in this passage and elsewhere preclude us from passing over ‘expression’ as simply an apposite turn of phrase. That his use of the word does not raise critical comment indicates that expression itself is not currently considered as a concept meriting much attention, perhaps not even a concept at all. Indeed, the conventional notion of ex-pression, of something pressed out from an interior into an exterior where it is registered as its own likeness, appears to carry the burden of ideas of intentionality and representation that are no longer held to be plausible.

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However, from another perspective, Levinas’s face is the primary site where a renewed philosophy of expression literally takes place. If anything is immanent in the apparent tautology of the face that expresses itself, it is that expression has its own logic which has been forgotten. To the extent that one can read Levinas’s work as a philosophy of expression, then it has much in common with the work of another dissenting thinker, Gilles Deleuze, to which it might otherwise appear to have an entirely allergic relation.

6 Logics of Expression

The face: what a horror… In Deleuze’s writing, concepts are nomadic things: always on the move, always being created anew. Nevertheless, in an early thesis submitted for his professorship, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, Deleuze began to articulate a philosophy of immanence which never subsequently disappeared from his thought, though it went by several other names. The logics of sense or ‘becoming’ in Deleuze’s more well-known works are but mutations of the logic of expression that he reads into his beloved Spinoza, ‘the “prince” of philosophers’.1 But, before engaging with that logic in relation to the face, there is no avoiding a characteristic statement of Deleuze’s that is almost a battle cry: ‘A horror story, the face is a horror story.’2 For Deleuze, as it is for Levinas, the face that culture faces us with today is no longer worthy of the name. Abused and disabused in a glut of identifying imagings and imaginings, the face, like the symbol of the personae, has become a parody of itself, a physiognomical rictus inspiring only disgust. But just what or whose face is this, produced and disseminated by what Deleuze and Guattari call the abstract machine of faciality? It is a face all too familiar to the theatre, dealing as it does in the pseudo-economy of appearance. One of the first tasks of the aspiring professional actor is to be properly photographed. The images thus created provide the basic element in a marketing strategy of literal self-promotion. There is nothing vain about this, except in an entirely trivial or superficial way (the cliché of the actor’s essential narcissism); it is a professional necessity. In Britain at least, the major trade directory for performers used until recently to divide performers into volumes for ‘leading’ men and women, another for so-called ‘character’ actors.3 This division opposes the charismatic to the ordinary, the alluring to the plain, the beautiful and enigmatic to the ugly and obvious. Each of these massive volumes is filled with thousands of faces for hire. Each face attempts an expression that wants to be neutral but yet not blank, interesting yet 83

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not peculiar, hovering between its own distinctive identity and those of the other roles and characters it wishes to become: I am I, but I can become other, says each image. Only those people content with trading explicitly on their physical particularities – say, a shortness of stature, a distinctive wrinkliness, ears that stick out too far – can afford a singular expression: a pseudo-relaxed joviality or quirky grimace. Beneath the image (usually in black and white) of each of these virtual faces, there is a description, colouring in the detail the image itself cannot convey, along the lines of: Height: 5' 11" Hair: Blonde Eyes: Blue/Green Accents: RP, Dorset, Yorkshire, London, Liverpool, General + Southern American. A list of more or less fixed physical characteristics by which the owner of the face might, in an identical manner to the criminal, be visually identified and distinguished from somebody else. Such a list is set off against a list of vocal capabilities through which the face suggests it can transform itself, become local (‘Dorset’), regional (‘South American’), global (‘General’) – at any rate, differ from itself, be other. At the level of industry, this dialectic could be read as a tension between the traditional demands of the filmic and the theatrical. The dominant aesthetics of the televisual demands easily legible types and characters. Within the relative freedom granted by the stage, it is the actor’s mimetic abilities that ostensibly matter, thus permitting the possibility of a casting that can ignore the defining features of height, hair and skin colour, race, gender, social class, regional accent and pulchritude. For the camera, the performer has to look and sound the part, whatever that may mean in sociocultural terms, with a minimum degree of conviction. In the theatre, it is in some ways more the effort to do so that constitutes the performance. But the actor’s entry in the casting directory merely foregrounds what he or she has in common with every other human: the face as the index not just of identity, of being somebody rather than just anybody, but of humanity in general. To a great extent, ‘I’ am immanent in my face; it is the primary expressive means, along with my voice, gestures, stance and gait, by which I exist for and appear to others as members of the same species. We take the pattern of facial expressions and accompanying gestures as the sine qua non of the existence of another consciousness like ours, setting itself forth in ways which permit the sharing of meanings that can be understood and interpreted. Indeed, to be without face surely means to be exiled to the threshold of a humanity, to be just a body, any body, flesh. The medical clinician Jonathan Cole has written of the experiences of those who are more or less without face, from the physically disfigured, to those with Moebius syndrome, whose faces are

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neurologically incapable of expression, or those with Asperger’s syndrome or forms of autism who cannot ‘read’ the facial expressions of emotion in others. The most severely affected of these individuals experience serious problems in making and maintaining human relationships, literally isolated from others by their exclusion from the sphere of faciality.4 Those who are not thus excluded cherish the faces of their loved ones as the expressive sites from which they are projected into a shared world, through which they come to exist, to be present. Equally, it is the face of the stranger that primarily commands our attention as we seek to determine his or her willingness to engage with us as enemy or friend. Even beyond the species boundary, as homo sapiens, the non-human is recognized – humanized – insomuch as it has a face. As we look animals in the face, the effort required by the Darwinian theory of evolution to convince late Victorian society of its basic truth seems bizarre. For while animal bodies and behaviours differ widely from that of homo sapiens, the basic structure of facial organization is remarkably consistent. Eliding the two mask-faces of the personae so as to cancel out their expressive opposition, but pushing their graphical reduction to its minimal conclusion, we arrive at the simplest of pictorial devices to figure the face (Figure 2). Two eyes above a nose, underlined by a mouth is all that is required to indicate the presence of some kind of agent or life form behind the plane of their inscription. Encountering an entity that projects itself into our world with such a configuration, we sense that it, too, has the kind of world that permits it to encounter us: something we can relate to, however minimally.

Figure 2 Face as icon Source: author’s personal collection.

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Such a privilege accorded to the face is but one further manifestation of a certain proclivity to see faces and intelligences everywhere, even where reason assures us there can be none: in the layout of holes in the power socket, in the clouds, on the surface of the moon and the planet Mars, in the distribution of distant stars and galaxies. But there is another aspect to this universalizing humanism of the face. It makes me a subject who can be known, identified, recognized, encoded: identity as ID. There is more than a metaphorical conjunction between the fingering implicit in the very term ‘digital’ and the colloquial ‘fingering’ of the criminal finally matched up with his crime. The technologies of the security and criminal justice systems of the twenty-first century will no longer rely on the antiquated and messy process of fingerprinting and identity parade. Digital techniques already permit the instant coding and identification of a face that is captured by a few dozen pixels on a CCTV camera, against any background, in even dim lighting conditions and amidst a sea of other faces.5 Such technologies can even read a face through its alterations, as the result of attempted disguise or simple ageing. There is something vaguely terrifying in these possibilities, beyond the paranoia of the conspiracy theory or the libertarian anxieties over the reality that one’s personal details will be encoded and distributed everywhere in the era of the networked computer, just as leafing through the casting directory rapidly becomes a disquieting and depressing experience. The face reduced to data, to the codings of representation, is a violation; a sense that the image really does steal the soul, as the old tourist-anthropologist cliché has it, concerning so-called primitive cultures. For them, the photograph entails a spiritual cost which must be redeemed, even if only in the monetary payment the Masai villager requires in return. Is it not the same violation that we rebel against when we, the camera-ready contemporaries of the developed world, still mug, pulling a face for the unwanted lens? We deform our features to de-face ourselves, making our faces express nothing, refusing access to an interiority that might be read behind our visage. Does not the celebrity – almost by definition one who exists to be photographed – emerging late at night from the restaurant or night club and caught unawares by the press photographers react instinctively like a hunted animal, no longer with a threatening hand to the lens, but with something far more effective: a deliberate grimace, a snarl, the tongue stuck out, a gaping mouth, a mockery of the face the camera wants to see and record? In fact, today, one cannot think about the face without the camera, without thinking about the camera – and thus the entire literal and rhetorical apparatus of visual representation. One would have to take seriously the proposition that Levinas could not have written his peculiar phenomenology of the non-appearing face in a culture not caught up in proliferation and democratization of the technologies of imaging. Whilst the advent of photography did not invent the regime of faciality, it nevertheless literally

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brought the problem of the face as mask (the flipside of the face as index to character, soul or truth) into tighter focus than had been previously possible. In the evolution of the study of faces and facial expression there is a bewildering knot of problems bound up with competing philosophies of human emotion and moral improvement, issues of scientific objectivity and the ethics of experimentation, and, above all, questions of acting, performance and theatre. It is to this knot of problems that I will turn subsequently, but here I note that as the symbol of the drama indicates, there are thus two eigenfaces, two proper physiognomies.6 The face as where I reside in my ownmost self, my very own layout of skin, musculature, nerves, organs and orifices over the anonymity of the bony skull; the face as my comforting, singular, fleshy signature. A smiling face that can say: I know who I am. In contrast, there is another, inhuman physiognomy, where the face is the sad sign of the impossibility of my ever differing from myself. This face is what rivets me to an identity, to an essential inertia in my existence; the face that looks in the mirror and, ashamed, wants to look away. Both these eigenfaces function within a logic of recognition. Indeed, much of what has been said previously has dealt only with the significance of the face in a generalized economy of recognition. Such a system is orientated around the identification of what reappears as the same, as part of a personal lexicon of the recognizable which divides the phenomena it encounters into either the known or the unknown, the familiar or the strange. This logic is one of representation, which, with Christopher Rivers, I term ‘physiognomical thought’, a thinking that takes the physical as the semiotic index of the metaphysical, the face as the index of the character or soul. 7 One of the earliest uses of the French word sémiotique in fact occurs in the work of the most well-known exponent of physiognomical thought, Johann Caspar Lavater (1741–1801), where it is used to denote the study of medical symptoms. With nearly two dozen editions in English alone, Lavater’s work marked the high point in the development of the concept of character as something that could be read directly off the face.8 He considered his entire project as a semiotics in which he aimed to explicate the science of ‘deciphering the original language of Nature, inscribed on the face of man and on his entire exterior’.9 Whilst structuralist semiotics was finally happy to admit to the arbitrariness of the sign, Lavaterian semiotics was convinced of a direct correlation between sign, signified and signifier, between interior and exterior. For Lavater, the face is not simply a window to the soul, it is the soul’s mirror, reflecting ‘that which passeth show’ for a beholder possessed of the requisite interpretive skills. Lavater’s work was fuelled by an explicitly moral, theological agenda and an ethical programme that, if disseminated successfully, would supposedly enable the members of humankind to love each other better (as suggested by the full title of Lavater’s chief work on the subject, Essays on Physiognomy, designed to promote the Knowledge and love of

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Mankind ). But, as all those who study Lavater’s works today quickly realize, there is no system, no semiotics; all of the diagrams, schemas, measurements and categories reveal a profound incoherence and arbitrariness. One cannot become a physiognomist because there is no facial semiotics, no system, nothing to learn. Of course, this pseudo-logic has an infamous history, from Pythagoras’s assessment of the faces of would-be students of his academy, through Lavaterian physiognomy and its close companion, phrenology, to the early twentieth-century facial eugenics of Herbert Spencer and the murderous scientism of the use of facial measurements by the Nazi regime to assess an individual’s degree of ‘Jewishness’. Yet the logic persists. Handbooks and do-it-yourself manuals of physiognomy continue to be published, their systems infused with the ‘ancient wisdom of the Orient’ as an ostensibly benign counterpoint to their dubious Western heritage. The rigour with which scholars who have examined Lavater’s work point out its obvious scientific fallaciousness belies the sense that physiognomical thinking is not a mere aberration of deluded minds from less informed eras. Just as the dim sensation of the immanence of moral behaviour in the fleshy morphology of the body, face or head refuses to disappear, so the logic of judging by appearances seems to resist its easy dismissal. For is it not the same logic of, for example, a phenomenology that wishes to apprehend ‘the things themselves’ as they are given to perception? Or of a medical symptomology that must work with the signs that disease inscribes upon the body? Many human genetic disorders do not reveal themselves as immediate and overt problems of the body’s physical make-up, its metabolism or neurology. Instead, their manifestation may reveal itself in, for example, progressive and severe neurological impairment much later in childhood. Parents who had a child who went on to develop such a condition had, until very recently, no way of knowing if any subsequent children would also carry the same defective gene or set of genes. Even today, molecular biology and fetal cell testing are unable to supply such knowledge in many instances. In the vast terrain of the genome, one has to know what one is looking for and many of the thousands of inherited syndromes have yet to have their precise genetic component identified. However, many patients who suffer from these syndromes, (the latter often named after the physician who first identified them), have a recognizable facial appearance. There is a branch of medical genetics called dysmorphology – literally, the study of the misshapen – which depends on, amongst other things, skilled readings of these facial features or gestalts. As the loci of a number of discrete but related organs set within a complex topology, the face is a space where the codings of DNA are writ large. Using these facial (and other) cues, dysmorphologists can narrow down the range of syndromic possibilities, permitting the molecular biologists in turn to limit their investigations to a particular chromosome or gene sequence that has been noted as potentially involved

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in such conditions. Here, the exterior is indeed an index to the interior. The logic of DNA means that what is encoded in my chromosomes is directly inscribed upon my face, determining the complex pattern of the folds of my ears, the length between the bottom of my nose and the top of my lip, the curvature of my eyebrows, the microscopic composition of my hair. Dysmorphologists operate in the twilight zone of the physiognomical logic of recognition, between the dysmorphic and the non-dysmorphic, the physiological and the neurological, the diseased and the healthy, the normal and the abnormal, the body and the soul. They have to operate at the shifting boundary with which science and culture together divide one from the other. At this limit, there may be a minimal distance between a child diagnosed with a genetically caused behavioural disorder and one labelled elsewhere as wilful, violent or bad-tempered. The ethical diligence the task of the dysmorphologist requires means he must resist the popularizing and often scientifically incorrect sloganeering that declares the gene found for breast cancer, for homosexuality, for heart disease, for criminal behaviour, for a propensity to addiction, whilst at the same time possessing the knowledge that a child with an unusually large number of repeating patterns of DNA in one short portion of the short arm of chromosome 4 will surely go on to develop Huntington’s chorea and its extensive array of debilitating neurological symptoms and personality changes by the time she or he has reached the age of 40. The art and ethics of dysmorphology illustrate that the logic of physiognomical thought continues to exercise its force in a world where science has not so much eliminated the metaphysical but rather internalized or introverted it. The mysterious or the ineffable now lies within the physical as an immanent force, rather than external to it as a superior power, a force that is no longer logically unavailable to the extending reach of scientific knowledge. Physiognomical thought re-rehearses the eternal debates over what belongs to nature and what to culture in the sphere of the human, what belongs to the body, what to the mind, of what is innate and what is learned. It is this style of thinking that Deleuze wishes to de-face in his ventriloquizing of the apparently impersonal, scientific languages of the molar and the molecular, of strata, rhizomes and multiplicities. For Deleuze, the task of philosophy is the creation of concepts in order to release the force immanent to life imprisoned in the logic of the physiognomic and deflect it toward the pursuit of its own lines of flight, its becomings and deterritorializations. But as Deleuze and Levinas both recognize, physiognomical thought contains a powerful deterministic logic of causation that cannot be simply dismissed, since it remains at work in many of our basic assumptions. It has a philosophical parallel in versions of phenomenology that Alphorns Lingis describes as refusing ‘to see anything in the phenomena but exhibitions – exhibitions of reality that only wanted to show itself, and to be taken as it

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shows itself to be, wanted the way it shows itself to be the truth’. Lingis continues, asserting the ethical aporia of this phenomenological physiognomy: ‘flattening the surfaces of the phenomena to the plane of reality and its truth, phenomenology loses sight of the other’.10 This is the violence that Levinas sees in the face reduced to surface, the negation of the other face that is the face of the Other. French makes a useful distinction between these two faces which is not available to English: face versus visage, the latter term usually reserved exclusively for what is human in the face. One can see Levinas’s evocation of the face as driven by the paradoxical demand to set forth visage, to bring it into the light from out of the annihilating shadow of face, but which must be otherwise illuminated and so given not to the eye as vision, but to the ear and the voice as language, discourse, conversation. In a not entirely different understanding, Deleuze and Guattari, in a central chapter of A Thousand Plateaus entitled ‘Year Zero: Faciality’, describe the logic of physiognomical thought as the abstract machine of faciality. This machine works at the intersection between the axes of significance and subjectifcation, making ‘a broad face with white cheeks, a chalk face with eyes cut in for a black hole. Clown head, white clown, moon-white mime, angel of Death, Holy Shroud’.11 They call the face a white wall/black hole system, a machinic process of the installation of meaning in the logic of recognition, where ‘the face constructs the wall that the signifier needs in order to bounce off of [… and] digs the hole that subjectification needs in order to break through.’12 For Levinas, the face is the site of a primary unveiling or exposure, the expressive in the Other. Without the face, the Other cannot be encountered, alterity cannot be experienced and so without the face there is no ethical (un)grounding of existence. But for Deleuze and Guattari, the face is also a politics and a history, not a universal. Hence the linking of faciality with a specific historical juncture, the birth of Christianity, ‘year zero’: The face is not a universal. It is not even that of a white man; it is White Man himself, with his broad white cheeks and the black hole of his eyes. His face is Christ […] Not a universal, but facies totius universi. Jesus Christ superstar; he invented the facialization of the entire body and spread it everywhere […].13 Deleuze and Guattari alert us to the fact that certain assemblages of power require a face, and others do not. In this understanding, face can once more be considered under the category of phenomena, as what could literally ‘take shape’ differently under differing regimes of faciality. But where the Face is required (and it is required almost everywhere in the contemporary capitalist milieu that Deleuze and Guattari wish to schizoanalyse), it always functions in two ways, according to the binary logic of recognition described earlier.

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However, the abstract machine of faciality is not limited to operations upon the face alone. Levinas writes that ‘the whole body – a hand or a curve of the shoulder – can express as the face’ and the face is ‘the expressive in the Other (and the whole human body is in this sense more or less face)’.14 But where for Levinas this proliferation of the visage as fetish is a positive force, for Deleuze and Guattari the face in faciality is almost entirely negative, if equally impressive, because the face is the first, the primary instance and instantiation of signification as subjectification. You are you, a face, the Face. As such, facialization exceeds even the body and comes to embrace the entire regime of signification. ‘It is precisely because the face depends on an abstract machine that it is not content to cover the head, but touches all other parts of the body, and even, if necessary, other objects without resemblance.’15 As such, this Face is the sworn enemy of the various becomings and deterritorializations that populate the gay science of the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: […] if human beings have destiny, it is rather to escape the face, to dismantle the face and facializations, to become imperceptible, to become clandestine, not by returning to animality, nor even by returning to the head, but by quite spiritual and special becomingsanimal, by strange true becomings that get past the wall and get out of the black holes, that make faciality traits themselves finally elude the organisation of the face […].16 Dismantle the face! Become imperceptible! Get past the wall! While the rhetoric of Deleuze and Guattari is alien to that of Levinas, they are united in their refusal of the face as produced in the gridded space of subjectification, as what rivets the ego to itself and limits what it can encounter to vision, to a look that can see only what it recognizes in the other. But whereas Levinas elucidates a visage that cannot – and must not – be recuperated by the phenomenological regime of face, Deleuze and Guattari, utopian pragmatists as ever, have other questions, other ideas: ‘How do you get out of the black hole? How do you break through the wall? How do you dismantle the face?’17 Yet after reading Levinas, their response may seem a little perplexing, since Deleuze and Guattari deliver the task of dismantling the face over to a practice that Levinas has summarily dismissed as always passing over truth for its shadow: art. And not the outer reaches of some extreme cultural practice: the novels of Hardy, Lawrence, Melville and Miller, Chinese painting, and even the religious iconography of Giotto are up to the task. As in Deleuze and Guattari’s last work together, What is Philosophy?, the aesthetic taste at work in Capitalism and Schizophrenia seems curiously at odds with the philosophical and political positions staked out in its pages. Is the modernist novel really the scene

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of an answer to the question of dismantling the face, which is, after all, ‘no mean affair’?18 Does not the face itself bring into question their irrepressible faith in the power of art in the project of becomings? Is not the abstract machine of faciality from the outset also an aesthetic machine, precisely because the face is the pre-eminent site of human signification? In short, is not the face the very inauguration of the aesthetic? It would seem that such a possibility finally takes hold of the thought of Deleuze and Guattari, since their first example of the concept in What is Philosophy? is none other than that of another person, manifest in the appearing of a face and described in distinctly Levinasian tones: Let us proceed in a summary fashion: we will consider a field of experience taken as a real world no longer in relation to a self but to a simple ‘there is’. There is, at some moment, a calm and restful world. Suddenly a frightened face looms up that looks at something out of the field. The other person appears here as neither subject nor object but as something very different: a possible world, the possibility of a frightening world. This possible world is not real, or not yet, but it exists nonetheless: it is an expressed that exists only in its expression – the face, or the equivalent of the face.19 In a short essay written in 1901, the German sociologist Georg Simmel addressed just this possibility. In ‘The Aesthetic Significance of the Face’, Simmel asks what it is about the human face that has made it of such unique importance in the history of the fine arts.20 Supported by a thoroughly Kantian view of the aesthetic, Simmel is able to declare that it does, because ‘[w]ithin the perceptible world, there is no other structure like the human face which merges such a great variety of shapes and surfaces into an absolute unity of meaning.’21 This unity of meaning is something that not only lies ‘behind the features of the face and yet visible in them’ – something Simmel is happy to call nothing less than ‘soul’ – but is also an organizing ethical force: ‘the spirit of a society’.22 Simmel’s essay is so instructive because, slipping continually between art and life, it sets out so clearly the precise operations of the abstract machine of faciality in a manner more Cartesian than even Descartes: ‘For aesthetic effect, a form must embrace its parts and hold them together. Any stretching and spreading of its extremities is ugly because it interrupts and weakens their connection with the centre of the phenomenon; that is, it weakens the perceivable domination of the mind over the circumference of our being.’23 In other words, the properly human face arrives in each and every of its manifestations already inscribed with an aesthetic signature – I made this – the mark of a controlling and unifying force ‘behind’ its various presentations. Ugliness is thus not simply a matter of taste, but the advent of the inhuman or moral sickness which undermines the face’s aesthetic unity. For Simmel, when one gapes or stares there is an

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indication of ‘“the loss of the senses”, the spiritual paralysis, the momentary absence of spiritual control’.24 The sense of fragile stability in Simmel’s conception of the face leads anthropologist James Siegel to an interesting conclusion: The very sensitivity of the face to slight changes invokes, for Simmel, the ‘ideal of conservation of energy’. Which implies that there is much more energy to be used than is normally at use. And, further, that one sees in the face an explosive power precisely in the refined quality of facial expression. The less motion it takes to alter facial expression, the more power is left to break through forms. The breaking of form is inherent in the logic of the face; the very aesthetic character of the face carries within it the implication – and the actuality – of disruption as the behind of the face becomes not only the location of control but a repository of energy.25 Break the form, dismantle the face! Levinas incites us to a similar rebellion when, echoing Blanchot’s notion of ‘unworking’, he writes: ‘Le visage est défait’, ‘the face is unmade’.26 This condensed assertion can be understood as the demand for an ‘unmaking’ that can redeem a face otherwise desecrated – defaced – by its inscription in the world of image, representation, exchange and measure. However, Siegel’s remarks indicate another possibility: is this micro-revolution not in fact a perpetual work-in-progress that is enacted in the soft assemblage of sense organs, nerves, muscle, skin and nerves that animates the face in and around the hard, bony architecture of the skull? As such, the face is its own unmaking, a dense, intense and sensitive nervous system which would seem to exceed determination as a straightforward dialectic between face and mask, between veiling and unveiling. However, it would be premature to think that the face is capable of the complete unhinging of dialectics, something that will become increasingly evident as this investigation proceeds. In their conception of the machine of faciality as abstract, operating beyond the boundaries of resemblance, do Deleuze and Guattari not miss the deterritorializing force that is bound up in this making and unmaking of face, and so make an impossible and implausible demand on art to unmake the aesthetic? Of course, they do not miss it; but is it not enough for them: Dismantling the face is no mean affair […] The organisation of the face is a strong one. We could say that the face holds within its rectangle or circle a whole set of traits, faciality traits, which it subsumes and places at the service of significance and subjectification. What is a tic? It is precisely the continually refought battle between a faciality trait that tries to escape the sovereign organisation of the face and the face itself, which clamps back down on the trait, takes hold of it again, blocks its

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line of flight, and reimposes organization upon it […] But if dismantling the face is a major affair, it is because it is not simply a question of tics, or an amateur’s or aesthete’s adventure. If the face is a politics, dismantling the face is also a politics involving real becomings, an entire becoming-clandestine.27 Without rejecting outright the grand designs of the project of becomings, is it possible to stay with the face, to make something more of the event of the tic? To do so is to engage a micro-politics or a micro-ethics that takes up another of Deleuze and Guattari’s exhortations: ‘Find your black holes and white walls, know them, know your faces; it is the only way you will be able to dismantle them and draw your lines of flight.’28 To attempt to know one’s faces (which will also mean to know one’s masks) in fact unravels what it is to know something at all, in the sense of comprehending it, drawing it in and mastering it within a cognitive scheme. In other words, a thinking of the face must sooner or later encounter the sense that one is not a oneself to whom such knowledge might belong. Which is to understand the ‘I’ as a function of the persona in a logic of expression, not simply in a dialectic of representation or signification: There is no unitary function of the mask, except a negative one (in no case does the mask serve to dissimulate, to hide, even while showing or revealing.) Either the mask assures the head’s belonging to the body, or its becoming-animal, as was the case in primitive societies. Or, as is the case now, the mask assumes the construction of the face, the facialization of the head and the body: the mask is now the face itself, the abstraction of the operation of the face itself. The inhumanity of the face.29 That last ‘inhumanity’ should not be taken at the face value so important to Simmel and to the empty commonplace of the so-called alienating and selfoppressing masks that social convention obliges us to wear. Anthropology might intrigue us with, for example, Deleuzian notions of face, eyes, mouths and noses that wander about the bodies invented by other cultures, as in the lending and ‘throwing’ of the entire face in Ibo folklore. But it also reminds us that the bunker or poker face was not invented in the West: the status and power of an expressionless mein is central to, for example, the Yoruba notion of tutu, the maintenance of an unruffled and serene countenance in the face of the outrageous, disturbing, exciting or shaming.30 For when Deleuze and Guattari talk of inhumanity, then they are always in the immediate proximity of what is secretly most human for them, a secret they freely make public: Earlier, when we contrasted the primitive, spiritual head, with the inhuman face, we were falling victim to a nostalgia for a return or a regression.

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In truth, there are only inhumanities, humans are made exclusively of inhumanities, but very different ones, of very different natures and speeds.31 Levinas too permits us to recover the human, all too human, importance of the inhumanity of the mask-face, albeit in a language that is more difficult to fathom: Prior to the return to itself proper to consciousness, the hypostasis, when it shows itself, does so under the borrowed mask of being. The event in which this unity or uniqueness of the hypostasis is brought out is not the grasping of self in consciousness. It is an assignation to answer without evasions, which assigns the self to be a self. Prior to the play of being, before the present, older than the time of consciousness that is accessible in memory, in its ‘deep yore, never remote enough,’ the oneself is exposed as a hypostasis, of which the being it is as an entity is but as mask. It bears the name as a borrowed name, a pseudonym, a pro-noun. In itself, the oneself is the one or the unique separated from being.32 Many theatrical masks have the power to illuminate, rather than to obscure, this pseudonymous zone of becoming of which Levinas speaks. Or rather, their power of revelation is proportionate to their very disruption of faciality in the sense that their twisted, exaggerated surfaces appear animated by an autonomous energy that does not correspond to anything like an ‘inner’ shaping of the ‘outer’. Similarly, the eye-crossing of the Japanese Kabuki actor at particular moments of heightened emotion in the drama appear to deny the familiar function of the eyes as sense organs connected to a controlling intelligence. Slipping with Simmel from art to life, beyond the codes of Kabuki, what particular emotion is signified by crossed eyes? In refusing to render unto the eyes what belongs to the eyes, do they not also deny, or rather, confuse the sense of the expression of emotion entirely? The crossed eyes, like the protruded tongue, indicate that there is nothing to be read on, in or behind this particular instance of the face, a blanket refusal of the possibility of an interior soul that might be intuited from an exterior sign. Hence the typical cartoon twinning of crossed eyes with the cessation of consciousness. In different ways, Levinas, Deleuze and Guattari, and Simmel ‘unwork’ a physiognomics that might otherwise mark the limit of what is available to think today about and through the face. In their graphic monstrosity, the masks of the personae indicate that physiognomy does not exhaust the possibilities of the face. The symbol that refuses to disappear shows two maskfaces frozen in differing strong emotions. They contain and fix a violent flow of facial movement, each verging on a grimace, a parody of itself. In doing so, they suggest that there is another logic to the face, in which the tic

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is a significant and anomalous event. This is the logic of pathognomy: the dynamic movement of the facial features that constitutes the passage of expression, the performance of the passions and emotions. In fact, the archphysiognomist Lavater knew as much already: Each perfect portrait is an important painting, since it displays the human mind with the peculiarities of personal character. In such a portrait, we contemplate a being in which understanding, inclinations, sensations, passions, good and bad qualities of mind and heart, are mingled in a manner peculiar to itself. Here we see them better, more frequently than in nature herself; since in nature nothing is fixed, all is swift, all transient.33 To engage with such a pathognomy, the notion of the face in its singular or undifferentiated aspect will have to be surrendered: the face seen front-on, impassive, immobile, impeaching. In the perverse but honourable philosophical tradition of asserting the non-existence of what appears to be staring one right in the face, let us declare: the face does not exist. Which is not to deny the significance of the face, aesthetic or otherwise. Writing this time of Leibniz, Deleuze declares: ‘[m]onads are not only expressions, but they also express the same world that does not exist outside of its expressions.’34 Let the same be said of faces.

The vertigo of philosophy: expression and immanence What is ‘expression’? What is the meaning of the difference proposed above between physiognomy and pathognomy? The sample sentences preferred by ordinary language philosophy, that always seem to express so much more than they mean to say, designate the difference: S1. A sad expression is a mark of a thoroughbred beagle. S2. An expression of sadness crossed her face as she watched him close the gate.35 In this contrasting pair of statements, there is the immediate sense that a physiognomics of expression is a fixed, barely animate state, while a pathognomics is an event, an instant even. And, concomitantly, is not the first sentence merely descriptive of a physiognomical state of affairs whilst the latter is more an affair of the theatre, the inauguration of a drama? Indeed, today, it is difficult to think the concept of expression outside of its connection with the melodrama of the artistic movement known as Expressionism. Whether exemplified by the contorted figure of Edvard Munch’s The Scream or by the tortured biographical details read into the limpid surface of a Rothko canvas, the idea of Expressionism forms an understanding of expression as the outpouring of pent-up, viscerally generated

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emotion seeking a form, in the Sturm und Drang of a subjectivity wrestling with its own contradictions. Consequently, expression is thus usually considered only in relation to theories of the aesthetic. Such theories, including those of R. G. Collingwood or John Dewey and their followers, propose that the real meaning of expression is to be found in the practice of making aesthetically pleasing objects, or more specifically, in those objects themselves. A schematic version of such theories has been articulated by Alan Tormey, in one of the few explicitly philosophical treatments of the concept of expression. In his study published in 1971, Tormey defines ‘Expression Theory’ thus: If art object O has expressive quality Q, then there was a prior activity C of the artist A such that in doing C, A expressed his F for X by imparting Q to O (where F is a feeling state and Q is the qualitative analogue of F).36 In most contemporary understandings of creative expression, it is not just the bald syntactic logic of this definition that appears curiously obscure; the very idea that anyone has ever found its logic remotely plausible seems beyond belief.37 Today, we are supposedly at ease with the notion of artworks and individual entities (including human entities) as productions, as stagings of representations or deployments of surface effects, not as expressions of authorial feeling emanating from the depths of a hidden interiority. If it is possible to take the face as the signatory phenomenon of expression, Simmel’s dictum that in the features of the face the soul finds it clearest expression appears hopelessly romantic and essentialist from a contemporary perspective. Today, the face is a surface which one owns only to the extent that one is able to manipulate its appearance in representation. Alan Trachtenberg, writing of the history of portrait photography, suggests a postmodern aesthetic reveals the ‘face as theatre, “soul” as performance’: We distrust depths, interiors, hidden ‘truths’. Meanings lie on surfaces, artefacts of an occasion rather than truths about persons. We speak of ‘persons’, even with some trepidation. It’s ‘identity’ that one looks for in photo-portraits, how it’s ‘constructed’, the assumed, the imposed, the improvisatory gambits of which all identities consist. In place of persons with revealing faces we look for contingencies, signs of constructedness, cracks and fissures in facades which disclose the paint and wires. Name resolves into contingent appearance, ‘soul’ into a glint in the eye, a lucky event of angled light.38 This is a familiar trope, which I earlier identified with the rhetoric of performativity, whose familiarity reveals the profound changes wrought in intellectual discourse over the last two decades, which saw the almost complete eclipse of the postmodern as a critical term. But its very plausibility is predicated on

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the implicit knowledge that there is a little bit of the physiognomist in us all, a nagging predilection to plumb the depths from the judgement of appearances. To achieve its critical purchase, the post-postmodern logic requires that somewhere in the non-existent depths of our hearts, we actually continue to believe in the depths of our hearts, in a minimum degree of substantiality of the ‘I’, in just a hint of the veiling and unveiling of the soul, in a glimpse of the charismatic power of emanation, and all manner of other prohibited essentialisms. This belief is neither an act of faith nor the activity of a (bad) consciousness. Rather, it continually makes itself felt, arising unbidden to the macro-level awareness from the micro level of the moment-to-moment unfurling of perception and sensation. It is precisely this swarming of ‘little perceptions’ that I deployed earlier as the descriptive term for the incipient sensation of ethical encounter: pricklings. To repeat the quotation from Deleuze: Microperceptions or representatives of the world are these little folds that unravel in every direction, folds in folds, over folds following folds […] And these are minute, obscure, confused perceptions that make up our macroperceptions, our conscious, clear and distinct apperceptions […] Tiny perceptions are as much the passage from one perception to another as they are components of each perception. They constitute the animal or animated state par excellence: disquiet. These are the ‘pricklings’ or little foldings that are no less present in pleasure than in pain. The pricklings are the representatives of the world in the closed monad.39 In recovering Leibniz’s notion of the monad for contemporary thought, Deleuze acknowledges that it is insufficient to simply think that one can theorize or legislate away notions of the I, the soul, or the individual. For to declare that ‘I is not – am not – a subject’ is not to nullify the question of subjectivity but rather to ask another question: who comes after the subject?40 With notions such as monad or singularity, Deleuze desires to make a space for another conception of subjectivity, to say that who comes after the subject is indeed something that can be called ‘who’ rather than ‘what’, even if ‘who’ never actually arrives, but perpetually comes or becomes, in an instant of arrival on to the scene of existence that is infinitely elongated in the philosophical rhetoric of a thinker such as Jean-Luc Nancy. The basic mood of being of such a figure is not the Heideggerian horizon of anxiety, but disquiet, thought not as a tragic destiny set out against the horizon of death but as a kind of incipient, restless waiting: an energetic dithering that is both a form and a force of life, as likely to disintegrate into helpless laughter as into a resolute commitment. In his early works, Levinas grounds the basic mood of existence in a similar way, with a sense captured in the title of one his lesser known texts, De L’Évasion.41 In the later Levinas, evasion or escape is precisely what the

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ethical force of the face disallows; one cannot refuse the face, even in turning away from it. But in the earlier works, evasion is essentially what prepares the coming encounter with the face. There, being is not opposed to the Sartrean nothingness, but to the il y a, the ‘there is’, something like an incessant and barely tolerable buzz of existence from and against which each and every existent is figured forth. It is against or in reaction to the il y a that there is a generalized inclination for there to be existents, living beings, at all. Thus there is a basic dynamism at the heart of Levinas’s conception of existence, not heard so clearly in his later emphasis on the notions of responsibility, passivity, obligation and the self-as-hostage. For Levinas, the structure of human self vis-à-vis the il y a is essentially dramatic. The identity of the ego that finds itself distinct and separate is a suffering; not a heroic or saintly suffering, but a more mundane one in which existence is something that just has to be undergone but to which what exists also has an allergic reaction. Levinas characterizes this suffering with basic moods rather unfamiliar to the ambitions of philosophy: lassitude, dilatoriness, fatigue. There is a distinctly Beckettian flavour to this drama, a certain resistance or vacillation with regard to existence, exertion or effort, a restless torpor mixed with a fear of beginning anything. But as well as this sense of inertia characterizing the being thrust upon human being, there is also an invitation to evasion, the need to be quit of one’s unwieldy ipseity. The propensity for evasion is neither motivated by the desire for death, merging or abandon, nor by the desire to save one’s life, overcome the finitude of existence or enter a state of mindless oblivion. Rather, it is a need that cannot be satisfied, an itch than cannot be scratched, but from which Levinas thinks that we can nonetheless be delivered in the encounter with alterity in the drama of the face outlined earlier. But such an encounter is grounded in this allergic self-reaction, in which existence attempts to escape its enchainment via the affectivity of pleasure and enjoyment understood as nourishment: Nourishment, as a means of invigoration, is the transmutation of the other into the same, which is the essence of enjoyment; an energy that is other, recognized as other, recognized [...] as sustaining the very act that is directed upon it becomes, in enjoyment, my own energy, my strength, me.42 This is a notion similar to a Spinozan determination of being as conatus, the effort or tendency for each being to persevere in its being, to exercise the forces immanent in its faculties, to maximize what affects it positively with regard to its own perseverance and to minimize what affects it negatively. But such an escape is also resistant to the ‘higher’ faculties in human being, to the activity of the will or thought. The answer to Spinoza’s rhetorical question of being – what can a body do? – is not formulated in the mind, but

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in action and in enjoyment understood in the sense of drawing sustenance from what lies outside. Conceived as such, being is from the start ex-static, impelled by an internal tension to exit from itself, to overcome its own containing outline in a movement or action that is not a volition. But for Levinas, enjoyment as such always falls short or fails in the transmutation of other into the same, primarily because it is latent in the structure of alterity that the other, the source of what might nourish me, resists (simply by existing) such an incorporation. The ethical ‘ought’ appears in this encounter with what I cannot assimilate but nevertheless cannot escape, which is what Levinas compacts into his notion of the face. While this is the aspect of Levinas’s work that generally receives the most attention, it is worth recalling that it rests upon an active, ecstatic conception of existence that is formed out of an internal movement or self-differentiation. Such a conception is in many ways akin not to the possession of subjectivity, but the movement or the event of being possessed as what makes ‘the subject’ possible at all. (There is a good deal of resonance here with more recent thinking about the subject, such as that of Badiou, which appears to eschew any kind of Leviasian influence.) Furthermore, my being so possessed is what demands to be expressed in me: the gene that both makes me and survives in me and through me; the tic that breaks out in the corrugations of the brow. The ethical imperative surfaces again here, in what Merleau-Ponty calls this ‘same tireless demand [that] arises from every lived thing (at times trifling), namely, the demand to be expressed’.43 Deleuze provocatively encapsulates this sensibility as he ventriloquizes Leibniz: I must have a body, it’s a moral necessity, a ‘requirement’. And in the first place, I must have a body because an obscure object lives in me […] the mind is obscure, the depths of the mind are dark, and this dark nature is what explains and requires a body […] Nothing obscure lives in us because we have a body, but we must have a body because there is an obscure object in us […] But this first argument gives way to another, which seems to contradict it and which is even more original. This time, we must have a body because our mind possesses a favoured – clear and distinct – zone of expression. Now it is this clear zone that is the requirement for having a body.44 In this blatant reversal of contemporary orthodoxy regarding relations between mind and body, Deleuze forces us to think again and offers the possibility that in doing so we might permit the thoughts that thought wants to think to go off on a tangent under the impetus of their own disquiet. Similarly, I have been attempting to recover the theatre via the personae as offering another set of possibilities over and against the opposition of depth and surface, face and mask, authenticity and dissimulation. Expression is

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the enabling notion in this respect. Thought theatrically, expression offers an escape route from the sterile dichotomies between interiors and exteriors, between what is either performed (and so manifest) or inchoate (and so must remain obscure). Perhaps no surprise, then, to find that in certain philosophical treatments of expression, the theatre finds itself once again an unwelcome guest. Rather than revisit the major figures in the well-rehearsed history of this rejection, we can return to the definition of expression explored at the beginning of this section. In rejecting the naïve correlations of earlier theories of expression, Tormey repeats the famous exclusionary move used by J. L. Austin in his definition of performative speech acts. Austin declared theatrical utterances essentially parasitical upon bona fide performative utterances (and subsequently on all speech, since Austin quickly gave up on the category of the performative), which are necessarily bound up in the structure of intentionality.45 Similarly, in his effort to create a theory of aesthetic expression and of the artwork as an ambiguously self-expressive object, Tormey has to make all forms of acting and pretending parasitical upon so-called sincere expressions of any kind: The child who pretends, the actor who portrays, the mime who imitates, and the hypocrite who feigns, all attempt, in differing ways, to strip the surface of expressive behaviour from the character it normally reveals […] But I shall argue that these activities, rather than being alternate or peripheral modes of expression, are best understood as standing in varyingly parasitical relations to expression, and that we must distinguish the genuine expression from activities that merely wear the mask of expressive behaviour.46 Here, ‘character’ is the figure whose revelation must be protected by the mental hygiene of expression from the superficially confusing practices of acting: To say that an actor is expressing despair, for instance, is often to say something that is logically oblique. When Evans portrays the despair of Lear, it is Lear’s despair and not Evans’ that is expressed in the actor’s gestures. The actor is distinct from the character he portrays, and the thoughts and emotions he ‘expresses’, if he is successful, are those of the character he presents and not his own.47 Even the Method actor cannot escape this prophylactic logic: ‘We should rather say that he is both expressing his own grief and representing Lear-expressing-Lear’s grief […] this single sequence requires two distinct descriptions just because it is a theatrical portrayal. There are segments of two life histories before us.’48 Finally, then, ‘acting is best thought of not as

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a species of expressive behaviour but rather as an activity which appropriates the surface of expressive behaviour for representational purposes.’49 While certain practices of a contemporary theatre might be content with such a definition of acting, it is unnecessary to rehearse the Derridean critique of the exclusion and occlusion of the theatrical in the Austinian concept of the performative in order to feel more than logically unhappy with its prescriptive formula in relation to the concept of expression. But Tormey’s thesis justifies itself for our purposes, not least for considering expression as a concept worth our attention in the first place. For in its exclusions, his analysis reveals the ethical problem raised by the notion of expression in human behaviour and language in a world apparently threatened by the very theatricality it wishes to set aside. For the satisfying notion of the autonomous work of art as ‘ambiguously self-expressive’ is predicated on the fact that, with a little help from reason, we ought to be able to demarcate expression as the revelation of character in life from the dubious and inseparable arts of lying, miming, pretending and acting. As Tormey notes, ‘much of our time is taken up with such pursuits, both in play and in earnest’. But he adds: ‘nothing will be gained by assimilating such activities and by regarding them as variant forms of expression’.50 Perhaps nothing will be gained for what I have been so far calling the logic of expression. If that logic functions only to permit the artwork to assume its self-expressive possibilities, then it will be important to continue to look beyond the confines of the autonomy of the aesthetic – which has always opposed itself to the theatre – seeking instead what is pathological in expression, the expression of its own disquiet.

A passion for expression What is the reader to make of the title of Deleuze’s extraordinary doctoral thesis, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, written at the high noon of structuralism? Spinoza and expression in philosophy, perhaps; but expressionism? For who, in the history of philosophy, could be considered less expressionistic than Spinoza, despite his youthful interest in appearing on the stage? As it turns out, Deleuze’s book has nothing to do with Expressionism per se, in much the same way, as he informs us at the outset, that while Spinoza neither uses nor defines the concept of expression, it is to be found at work everywhere in the Ethics. Deleuze’s text on Spinoza is one of several dealing with other philosophers that followed each other in a parallel series to those written ‘in his own name’ and with Félix Guattari. In that series, the early work on Spinoza may be paired with the much later text on Leibniz (The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, also invoking an unfashionable artistic movement) which I have drawn on earlier. While one might thus take Deleuze’s use of expressionism or the baroque as a wilful recuperation of what, in a popular opinion, appears intellectually dubious, there is a

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profound moral seriousness to his writing on (some might say rewriting of) Spinoza and Leibniz, beyond a purely philological analysis: ‘Expression takes place at the heart of the individual, in his soul and in his body, his passions and his actions, his causes and his effects. And Leibniz by monad, no less than Spinoza by mode, understands nothing other than an individual as an expressive center.’51 Anyone familiar with the more well known of Deleuze’s works with Félix Guattari such as Anti-Oedipus or A Thousand Plateaus will very likely be startled by the concatenation of terms in this declaration: ‘expression’, ‘individual’, ‘soul’, ‘passion’. Where is the philosophy of impersonal forces, the pre-individual singularities, the zones of intensity, the rhizomatics, the schizoanalysis? How can these polyvalent neologisms agree with an ontology of expression, of the individual as an expressive centre? What can Deleuze, the thinker of difference, possibly take from Spinoza, the thinker of being as one infinite substance? Leaving aside the question of whether what Deleuze finds in Spinoza is actually available to be read in the Ethics, it is clear what the former discovers as he reads between the lines: the paradox of expression. The notion of expression is essentially triadic: we must distinguish what expresses itself, the expression itself, and what is expressed. The paradox is that ‘what is expressed’ has no existence outside its expression, yet bears no resemblance to it, but relates essentially to what expresses itself, as distinct from the expression itself. Expression thus bears within it a double movement: one either takes what is expressed as involved, implicit, wound up, in its expression, and so retains only the couple ‘expresser-expression’; or one unfolds, explicates, unwinds expression so as to restore what is expressed (leaving the couple ‘expresser-expressed’).52 And the upshot of this triadic structure? ‘What is expressed is sense: deeper than the relation of causality, deeper than the relation of representation.’53 Obviously, whatever might be deeper than the relation of causality or representation merits attention here. Deleuze takes his triadic structure from Spinoza’s own articulation of being into the triad of substance, attribute and mode. 54 In the Ethics, Spinoza proposes that Being is univocal; it is an undivided ground in which everything that ‘is’ inheres. Furthermore, whatever ‘is’, and is grounded in univocal Being, exists by virtue not of a superior creator from which it emanates, but by being thus grounded by, or immanent in, the one, infinite substance. Everything that is, is but a modification of the essence of substance, whose essence is the unlimited power to exist and to generate effects. But substance does not exist outside of what Spinoza calls its modes, its actual determinations as entities. However, interposed

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between the notions of substance and mode is that of attribute, a difficult concept to grasp, but which can be understood as a particular propensity or capacity to exist, whereas substance is, by definition an unlimited power. There is no temporal order in the relation between these terms and they do not each propose a different manner of existence for entities. Rather, they are three aspects under which one can examine what exists, similar to the way physics chooses to study elementary particles either as point-like entities with discrete spatio-temporal co-ordinates or as patterns of energy with certain wavelengths. The particle-wave duality does not propose that the entities it studies are either particles or waves, only that they can be differently understood under each of these aspects. The same applies to the triad of substance, attribute and mode; the latter pair are not additional things in and of themselves. In the theory of quantum chromodynamics, contemporary physics also provides a further loose analogy to assist in understanding Spinoza’s terms.55 Current theories of physics assert that there is no negativity, no void or vacuum in nature, a view Spinoza also propounds in the Ethics. In order for there to be something rather than nothing, the origin (and end) of the universe is posited as a field of mutually annihilating particles. (Even this is a metaphorical description, since this activity is taking place prior to the unfolding of the dimensions of time and space. Ultimately, its reality is purely mathematical.) This field can be considered as analogous to Spinozan substance, although it is perhaps a little too virtual for Spinoza, for whom substance appears to be something that definitely is, since God is immanent in it. Nothing yet exists as such, but there is, so to speak, a kind of potential for existence, since quantum theory allows for a random fluctuation in this field, which creates a momentary imbalance in this zero sum game in which matter can be created. Physics proposes that the matter which exists in our universe is made up of constituent subatomic particles – quarks – which, according to the terminology, come in a variety of flavours, colours and spin directions. The concept of the quark could be understood as a Spinozan attribute (for Spinoza, things such as extension or thought are attributes), since the quark is a determination of substance, but has no existence as an independent entity; there is no such thing as a free quark in nature. Instead, in the fantastically complex relations of subatomic theory, quarks inhere in systems of subatomic organization, the collective and immanent force in the larger entities of proton, neutron, atom, molecule, cell, and multicellular or molecular structures, such as a rock, a hammer or a human being, all of which can be understood under the category of Spinozan mode. Thus attributes express the essence of substance in a particular way and the modes are conceived through attributes in a secondary (but again not temporally subsequent) movement of expression. Thus Deleuze’s triadic notion of expression, in which there is a kind of doubling of expression itself, derives from his understanding of the Spinozan

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schema of substance, attribute and mode. Once substance has come under the category of one attribute or another in which it finds its expression, it is then re-expressed at a second level, or rather ‘the attributes are in their turn expressed: they express themselves in modes which designate them, the modes expressing a modification.’56 In subsequent works, Deleuze develops this schema somewhat differently, as constituted by the virtual and the actual. While I do not wish to pursue his ontology directly here, what is important to note is that it attempts to ‘make substance turn around the modes – in other words, to realize univocity in the form of repetition’.57 That is to say, simply put, modes are all there is. For Deleuze, substance and attribute are ‘said’ or expressed only in and of the modes, things that exist, but these things are made out of difference, of what ungrounds them from substance and distinguishes them from other entities. Hence the concept that has become something of a Deleuzian signature – immanence – arises out of this revised sense of expression: ‘Immanence is the very vertigo of philosophy, and is inseparable from the concept of expression (from the double immanence of expression in what expresses itself, and of what is expressed in its signification).’58 There is much to unpack from this immanent bestowal or donation of sense in expression, which Deleuze takes up repeatedly in his writing. As the vertigo of philosophy, immanence and expression are thus also sources of its own internal disquiet. There are three significant aspects that are useful for us to retain here; firstly, the notion of the lack of resemblance between an expression and what is expressed; secondly, the sense of movement in the idea of expression, where sense itself is determined as event; and, thirdly, the violence of expression. But in the attempt to approach the ‘heart’ of expression in the evocation and elaboration of these terms, it seems the current chapter runs the risk of deserting the phenomena and becoming more distant and detached from the event of expression itself. If so, it is possible to understand why Deleuze retains the word ‘expressionism’ in his title; as much as one might like to remain aloof and dispassionate, expression will always be a matter of emotions, of affects as much as percepts, of sensation as much as perception. That is to say, it is a matter of passion, that archaic term now largely superseded by the concept of emotion, but which donates the sense of violence in expression that is missing from the sense of ‘emotion’. I have an emotion, or, despite my bunker-face, I betray it. But I undergo a passion or I am seized by it, or at least I want to be so seized and if I am not, or not as much as I might like, then I want to know that there are others that are so seized, outside of all rhetoric, beyond all analysis. Whatever testifies to their capacity for undergoing such passions or affects, is my guarantee of the reality of an ethical imperative whose immanence I have been trying to trace in the face. And, failing that, I have to study the tactics of passion in order to seek the burden of proof that might contradict the strategies of

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rhetoric and so reveal, as Richard Foreman, director of the Ontological-Hysteric theatre, might put it, that my personal mechanism is not entirely under my full control. Rather than proceed with an analytical proof of the three aspects of expression identified as relevant here, let us return to the face as both the source and the primary site of the play that is expression at work, which is also the work of the play of expression. Let that return be an interval, or rather an interruption in the argument, which will be not a diversion but an occasion to continue it by other means.

7 Wrinkles, Furrows and Folds

Expressive mechanisms and mechanical expressions The scene in Figure 3 depicts, without doubt, a disquieting event: a dramatic instant of expression both violent and ambiguous. What is the proper

Figure 3 Uncropped photograph illustrating Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne’s method of localized electrization to elicit facial expression, in this case illustrating the emotion of ‘terror’, c.1860 Source: Ecole Nationale Supérieure, Beaux-arts, Paris.

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emotional response to such an image, evidently staged for our benefit? Perhaps an instinctive mirroring of the fear (or is it terror?) expressly inscribed on the chalky white face of the Christ-like innocent at the centre of the photograph, surrounded by the darker forces of God knows what. But, then again, is this event a tragedy or a comedy? Should one laugh or cry? Or permit one’s interest to be led by the gaze, mobilizing the critical faculty of thought, or rather, out of respect, feign disinterest? Or look away in disgust or avert one’s eyes out of shame? And is not the cause of our confusion precisely the issue of resemblance, or lack of it, at the heart of expression? For, in the shadow of the preceding discussion, what appears to be being expressed in this image is the fear (which is also a form of excitation) that not only does ‘what is expressed’ bear no resemblance to the expression (fear of what? – what is there to be afraid of in this picture, or just beyond the margins of its frame?) but that it no longer even relates essentially to what expresses itself, to the figure whose face bears an expression that does not seem to belong to him. If so, we might conclude that what appears in the instant fixed by this image is the very horror of the abstract machine of faciality itself, which has demonically installed itself in the body of a human being and is making its face express – what? Is not this image a sublime allegory of expression, an iconic repository of its immanent force, which expresses more than we might ever say or write about expression; a picture that, for once, might indeed be worth many thousands of words? In his meditation on the uncanny effects of masking and unmasking, Michael Taussig asks: ‘could the face, as both window and mask, ur-border and mother of all borders, be allegory, thus defined?’1 In a reading of Walter Benjamin on allegory, Taussig goes on to suggest that the allegorical object is ‘incapable of emanating any meaning or significance of its own; such significance as it has, it acquires from the allegorist. He is […] within it and stands behind it not in a psychological but in an ontological sense […] and it becomes for him a key to the realm of hidden knowledge.’2 As an experimental scene that is also a primitive theatre, this particular facial staging seems to engage Benjamin’s notion of allegory to the letter. For this photograph’s raison d’être is not simply to stand as the record of an experimental procedure, clearly showing an allegorist literally – as well as psychologically or ontologically – at work, but as the very evidence of a truth that is the inscription of the theatrical, of the representation of that which exceeds representation. But perhaps this is already to read far too much into what is after all only one image among an infinity, and into what merely appears to be written on the face of its central protagonist. In making a crisis out of the drama of this particular image, is too much credit given to the power of the abstract machine of faciality in completing the imaging of the world? In the 1840s, the French physician Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne began the first application of the then recent technology of electricity to

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the treatment of patients under his care at the massive Salpêtrière hospital on the outskirts of Paris, thus single-handedly inventing the discipline of neurology. In fact, Salpêtrière was more of a city of urban rejects than a hospital, at one time occupying over 40 buildings with a population numbering up to 20,000. Using a large, semi-portable battery, Duchenne applied electric current to the bodies of patients suffering a variety of physiological and psychological conditions, with apparently surprising and reportedly beneficial effects. During the course of his treatments, Duchenne observed that electro-stimulation of particular muscles always provoked specific and regular physical behaviour – the jerking of a limb in the same way, or the twitching of an eyebrow. It was, above all, the animation of the facial muscles that caught Duchenne’s scientific interest and also his aesthetic ambition. At the time, the anatomy and musculature of the face were poorly understood, the face being the sole site in the human body where muscles are attached not only to the skeleton, but also to the epidermis, to the fascia or skin. Thus the immanence of the face in its own fleshy substance evidenced itself even at the level of anatomy, where the invasive procedures of dissection destroyed the very mechanism of its functioning. His interest aroused, Duchenne, in an effort to map the facial musculature and nervous system, began a series of electrical experiments on the heads of cadavers and, apparently, on those of the recently executed, which he had delivered to him directly from the guillotine. However, the lack of a ‘live’ face for these experiments severely inhibited his progress, since the available ‘dead’ heads rapidly lost their nervous function after they had actually died in clinical terms. But during his medical work Duchenne came across an elderly man who suffered from almost complete facial anaesthesia – an ideal subject for the experiments, who was thus quickly recruited to the project. It appears that Duchenne was able to so modulate his electrical apparatus that he could later employ the faces of willing ‘live’ subjects, without inflicting excessively unpleasant sensations upon them. One of these subjects, in what is a minor but seminal moment in the history of the study of human facial expression and emotion, happened to be an actor as well as an anatomist. Duchenne presented the results of his experiments in 1862 with the publication of Mécanisme de la Physionomie Humane où Analyse ÉlectroPhysiologique de L’Expression des Passions, a work which was to have a profound effect on the study of emotion and facial expression and thus on an important chain of subsequent deliberations on the phenomenology of ‘human nature’.3 Mécanisme was a landmark publication in another way, in that it required the innovations not just of electricity to produce its findings, but of another then emerging technology to present them: photography. In many ways, the advent of photography inaugurated the systematic study of human facial expression and the scientific study

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of emotion of which it is a primary aspect. In his foreword, Duchenne writes: Photography, as true as a mirror, can illustrate my electrophysiological experiments and help to judge the value of the deductions that I have made from them. From 1852, convinced of the impossibility of popularizing or even of publishing this research without the aid of photography, I approached some talented and artistic photographers. These first trials were not, and could not be, successful. In photography, as in painting or sculpture, you can only transmit well what you perceive well. Art does not rely only on technical skills. For my research, it was necessary to know how to put each expressive line into relief by a skilful play of light. This skill was beyond the most dextrous artist; he did not understand the physiological facts I was trying to demonstrate. Thus I needed to initiate myself into the art of photography.4 Duchenne did indeed engage in such an initiation, not just for want of a person with the requisite talent, but also so he could declare that ‘I photographed most of the 73 plates that make up the Scientific Section of this Album myself, or presided over their execution, and so that none shall doubt the facts presented here, I have made sure that not one of the photographs has been retouched.’5 Here, emotion, representation and authenticity are woven together in a manner that remains important for both scientific and aesthetic investigations of the expression of the passions. By use of electrical stimulation, Duchenne was able to ‘freeze’ expression on the faces of his subjects for the several seconds required by contemporary photographic technology, thus fixing what Lavater had noted as all too swift and transient. The result was a series of extraordinary images (some which are shown in Figures 4–8) reproduced alongside the text of Mécanisme, one of the first publications containing photographs, rather than drawings or engravings: the plates Duchenne used to illustrate and demonstrate his findings had to be pasted by hand into each volume, resulting in a very limited print run. The book is usually referred to as an album or atlas, since the images are really its prime content, with the text taking an explanatory and interpretative role. In fact, the image shown in Figure 3 above does not appear in Mécanisme. Like the majority of images in the album, it appears as a substantially cropped version of the original photograph.6 In the originals, the entire experimental scene is depicted, including the electrical apparatus and the dark-suited Duchenne and his assistant, working with apparently intense concentration as they apply the electrodes to the faces of their experimental subjects. The cropping of the images for publication was presumably to focus the reader’s attention on the subject to hand, the painting of ‘the expressive lines of the

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emotions of the soul on the face of man’.7 Duchenne considered his task achieved since ‘in spite of these restrictions [of the electrical and photographic technologies] and the unfortunate presence of electrodes and the hands in my plates, the artificial expressions I photographed remain grippingly true.’8 Duchenne envisaged his project as having multifarious ramifications for not only anatomy and physiology, but also for psychology, philosophy and the fine arts. Indeed, there is an evident sense that Duchenne’s assumed audience was made up of artists as much as physicians, and the book was reviewed in popular contemporary newspapers as well as in medical journals. The text of Mécanisme is divided into two separate sections, one ‘scientific’ and the other ‘aesthetic’. In the former, the face is divided according to a system of one-to-one correlations between particular facial muscles and specific emotions: ‘I sacrificed everything to the demonstration of expressive lines and to truth of expression.’9 For each muscle/emotion pair, Duchenne presents an image of his experimental subjects undergoing localized electro-stimulation of that muscle. Thus he presents images illustrating the activity of the muscles of attention, reflection, aggression, pain, joy and benevolence, lasciviousness, sadness, weeping and whimpering, fright and terror, and so forth.10 In the ‘aesthetic’ section, Duchenne ‘corrects’ the facial expression of various Greek and Roman sculptures, deemed deficient in their verisimilitude due to the artists’ poor understanding of the physiology of facial expression. More adventurously, he also stages some electrophysiological scenes of emotion, many of which are produced as dramatic excerpts, adding costume and gesture to the stimulation of facial expression. Plates 82 and 83 (figure 4), depicting one of Duchenne’s blind female patients and involving the stimulation of the ‘muscle of aggression’, are described as explicit stagings of moments from Shakespeare’s Macbeth: Plate 82: Lady Macbeth: Had he not resembled My father as he slept, I had done’t. Moderate expression of cruelty. Feeble electrical contraction of m.procereus […] Plate 83: Lady Macbeth – about to assassinate King Duncan. Expression of ferocious cruelty. Maximal electrical contraction of the m.procerus.11 Of the latter image, Duchenne reveals the extent of his dramatic imagination by adding: ‘[w]e see that these darkened features are singularly ugly. I have imagined that Lady Macbeth, in recognizing a resemblance between King Duncan and her sleeping father, lost her courage to strike and collapsed onto a seat. (This scene is not in Shakespeare.)’12 But the most significant ‘staging’ of the face in these images is that inscribed differentially within the unity of expression that Simmel held so

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Figure 4 Plates 82 and 83 from Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne, Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine, ou, Analyse Électro-physiologique de l’expression des passions, Paris: Chez Ve. Jules Renouard, 1862 Source: Houghton Library, Harvard University.

important to the face’s aesthetic (and ethical) significance. In many plates Duchenne divides the face of his performers in two in order ‘to demonstrate the general modifying effect of one expressive muscle on all the other facial features’. He adds: ‘[t]hus I often put a voluntary expression on one side of the face, comparing it to the expression on the other side, which was artificially produced by electro-stimulation.’13 The reader is then invited to revisit the scene of this struggle of expression by covering first one half of the face, and then the other, so as to perceive two differing emotional states. For example, the legend for Plate 78 (Figure 5) reads: I wanted to show a little comedy, a scene of coquetry, a gentleman surprises a young lady while she is dressing […]. The young man was becoming more audacious, but the words ‘Get out!’ pronounced in a scornful way by the girl, stops him in is enterprise (see only the left side of the lower half of the face). The mocking laughter that accompanies the amorous rejection (see the right side of the lower half of the face), we believe to mean ‘Conceited ass!’. Perhaps she also says, lower still, ‘the fool, if he had dared…’.14 Here, rather than the features of the face as the clearest expression of the soul, the face is itself a theatre of war, the site of the struggle for expression

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Figure 5 Plate 78 from Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne, Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine, ou, Analyse Électro-physiologique de l’expression des passions, Paris: Chez Ve. Jules Renouard, 1862 Source: Houghton Library, Harvard University.

between opposing forces of the psyche. About the Macbeth illustration shown above (Figure 4), Duchenne notes: ‘Her mouth is smiling in saying “Your servant ever.” But what a smile (cover the right side of the mouth and of the cheek)! See how the eye is cold and freezes the smile. It is a smile that kills […].’15 Duchenne’s claims for the ‘idealized realism’ of his aesthetic studies would seem to be merely curious or amusing from a contemporary perspective, if it were not for the Frankenstein-like overtones of torture, technophilia and the mad scientist about his work. But they were not universally regarded as successful even at the time of their publication. Reviewing Mécanisme in a French medical journal in 1862, a doctor Verneuil noted that he found ‘the combination of artist, scientist, and worst of all, photographer, abhorrent!’.16 Duchenne himself admitted to the shortcomings of his aesthetic compositions, remarking on his own lack of creative talent.17 Consequently, it is the images from the ‘scientific’ section of the album, those of the old man, that have received the most attention. This is largely due to their selective reproduction in Charles

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Darwin’s popular text The Expression of The Emotions in Man and Animals, published some ten years after Duchenne’s album. However, the theatricality for which Duchenne appears to have had an obvious flair is as integral to these ‘scientific’ images as it is to their ‘aesthetic’ counterparts. For one of the many striking aspects of Duchenne’s work is its explicit obsession with artifice and with intervention – or even invention – in relation to experimental method. In a contemporary era in which the natural and social sciences are equally concerned with both the practical, theoretical and ethical importance of objectivity in data collection, of awareness of bias introduced by methodology or cultural assumptions, of ‘contamination’ of data by anything from the researcher’s own cellular material to his or her act of witnessing, and of issues of consent surrounding lay participation in professional research practices, Duchenne’s experiments appear as anathema to the extent that they are what I am calling, literally, an experimental theatre. The theatrical or performative dimension of the photo-portrait has come to the fore in recent studies of the history of photography. While Duchenne’s photographs might be usefully considered as a kind of portraiture (he was assisted by Adrian Tournachon, the brother of the pioneering French portrait photographer, Félix Nadar) the mutual inclination between camera and the human face that seems almost self-evident today was considered at the time not only technically difficult, due to the long exposure times required, but also aesthetically disturbing. Writing in the 1840s, the French scientist N. P. Lerebours thought the initial efforts at photographic portraiture produced ‘cadaverous-looking specimens’ and that ‘the very idea of a portrait by daguerreotype excited a repulsive feeling.’18 Similarly, the American critic Lewis Gaylord Clark asserted that ‘the Daguerreotype will never do “for portrait painting”, its pictures are quite too natural.’19 Interestingly, in these remarks, it is photography’s inability to capture the instant or to fix a fleeting expression as an emanation of the soul that makes the face a horror and initiates the relationship between photography and death with which we are now so familiar: the sitter of the early photographic portrait must make up for the technical deficit of the apparatus by rendering him or herself literally inanimate. But as the technology improved and shorter exposure times became feasible, Trachtenberg notes that it is […] in Daguerrean portraits that photographic-space first appears as theatrical space, a place gotten up to resemble another place, or, better, empty space furnished with an illusion of ‘place’ […] provisional, abstract, elusive, a ‘there’ which refers to nowhere (all signs removed that the scene was also a site of work) a fictive place where ‘portrait’ occurs can be taken as an analogue to the bourgeois idea of the discrete, autonomous, self-governing individual.20

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But the thinking of theatre I am attempting here reveals such an idea – an abstract bourgeois ‘then’ when the people that mattered supposedly believed in and, more importantly, lived as discrete, autonomous, self-governing individuals – as itself a necessary fiction. This fiction is what stares out at us from the faces of those Duchenne animated in his experiments. In these images, the wires are literally showing, the scene as a site of work is palpably explicit. Duchenne’s technique requires a definitive tactile contact between experimenter and subject, a literal completion of the circuit that will make expression take place and take shape. His hands and electrodes are as much part of the elicited expression as the skin and muscles of the subject’s face. To remove them, the entire scene and event of expression would have to be redrawn (as Darwin later discovered) and thus de-authenticated, in much the same way as anatomical dissection destroyed what it attempted to reveal of the facial mask of musculature. Thus Mécanisme displays a curious human puppetry in which the interior Cartesian theatre of the mind is turned inside out and made into a theatrical system of individuals and technologies, channelling and capturing the interconnected forces of electricity and expression. Whilst Duchenne was unhappy about the presence of himself, his hands and electrodes in the images, it is just this presence that renders the images devoid of the kind of theatricality now visible in the traditional nineteenthcentury portrait. Duchenne’s images stand as both an unintentional critique and a literal mockery of the conventional portrait. There is no illusion of inwardness created on behalf of the subject, certainly no self-expression, illusory or not; neither is there masquerade, a play with identity or the manipulation of a role. What is given to be seen here is a different kind of event, perhaps more akin to what Hegel described in a refutation of physiognomy: ‘the deed, the act, in the sense of a reality separated and cut off from the individual […] outer expression in which the individual no longer retains possession of himself per se, but lets the inner get right outside him, and surrenders it to something else’.21 Indeed, the acts that Duchenne depicts are separated and cut off from the individuals undergoing them, since they are inscribed upon the face by the involuntary forces of externally stimulated muscle contraction. But something beyond Hegel’s phenomenology is also expressed: the sense that ‘I’ am not the one letting the inner get right outside, nor surrendering it to something else, but rather that it is happening in me, or, better, that ‘I am’ such a happening, and one that determines the fluctuating limit of the self-knowledge of a self-conscious, rational agent. But, in turn, this description is inadequate, because such a sense of being possessed does not absorb or swallow up the I in a totality of delusion or ecstasy; rather, this sense arises out of what Deleuze calls (after Leibniz) my clear zone of expression, my understanding of what the body (or face) can do, what affects it can undergo, as something that I must know. This is what Levinas also knows when he writes of the face in connection

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with the idea of violence and war introduced earlier: ‘The visage of being that shows itself in war is fixed in the concept of totality, which dominates Western philosophy. Individuals are reduced to being bearers of forces that command them unbeknown to themselves.’22 In that last qualifier – ‘unbeknown to themselves’ – Levinas seems to be implicitly trying to distance himself from a Nietzschean thinking of the impersonality of being. Yet what Nietzsche avows and Levinas disavows coincide in an ethical imperative expressed not as a demand for total peace, which is just another totality, but rather for the attempt to comprehend in what way one is a ‘bearer of forces’. As such a being, one is not simply the passive subject of an electrode or an ideology, but both the scene and event of the active coming into existence or the expression of such forces. To undergo such a ‘becoming’ is, as Deleuze and Guattari say, also to know the extent of one’s own repression, to know one’s faces. The task, or conscience, of philosophy (and perhaps of an impossible theatre) would then be to attend to the ways in which the war-like ‘pricklings’ of the microperceptions rise to macroperceptive consciousness.23 With a glance to Levinas, expression thus understood constitutes both a kind of testimony and a witnessing: Expression does not radiate as a splendour that spreads unbeknown to the radiating being – which is perhaps the definition of beauty. To manifest oneself in attending to one’s own manifestation is to invoke the interlocutor and expose oneself to his response and his questioning.24 With these remarks, Levinas, despite himself, undoes the hygienic regime he normally deploys to prevent the aesthetic from impinging on the ethical. To manifest oneself in attending to one’s own manifestation: is this not the idea of acting as appearing, tentatively suggested earlier, in which the actor sets forth his or her clear zone of expression? Is this clear zone the one apparent neither in the Method or Brechtian actor, nor in the twin poles of Diderot’s paradox, but in certain instants of contemporary performance and in the theatrical appearing of the body builder, the celebrity and the child? Looking at Duchenne’s images today, notably those which focus expressly on the face, they too have a clear zone of expression. But it is not that of the particular emotion the electrodes have apparently formed in the facial musculature of the experimental subjects; each of these expressions, fixed at the moment of their artificial excitation, is ultimately a grimace, a graphology of defacement. Rather, their clear zones of expression take the form of a series of related questions addressed directly to the viewer as Levinasian interlocutor, that appear to emanate from the voiceless face of the one who is being defaced at the centre of each image: Who is doing this to me? In whose name is this being done to me? What is happening? In fact, the chain of questions is endless, made all the more so because, taking up Duchenne’s

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album, we already know the answers. Such questions are the product of our own mental ventriloquism, which ‘frames’ us as witnesses, implicating us unwittingly in the experimental set-up. These effects are compounded by Duchenne’s use of the series in producing the differing emotions on the same subject in a similar experimental and photographic set-up; the old man is run through the gamut of facial expressions, his face subjected to a lifetime of emotion, the extremes of which perhaps he, like the rest of us, barely approached in life with any degree of awareness. In an opposed fashion, the contemporary art of the photographic portrait generally prefers to present faces as solitary enigmas; perhaps most clearly exemplified by the early work of Thomas Ruff or Wolfgang Tillmans, its ethical responsibility is to respect the integrity of its subject – the individual – in the act of exposure, however extreme or gratuitous. Various inflections of theatricality have become a well-established feature of contemporary art photography, from Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s 1990 Streetwork series, Cindy Sherman’s multiple masquerades, to the work of a younger generation of female photographers such as Anna Gaskell and Justine Kurland. These works know that they can offer only surfaces; depths are constituted by the viewer as an act of ‘reading’. Hence even the professional pornographic movie actor reveals nothing of him or herself, precisely to the degree that his or her performance conforms to a certain standard of ‘professionalism’. One has to look to the domain of the amateur, to the domestic snapshot (usually part of a series) or home video (in its unedited form more like an extended series of stills), to find a different kind of presentation of self and others, event and context, organized around a narrative of some kind: a birth, a party, a holiday or the risible yet endearing pretexts for a drama that characterize ‘vintage’ pornographic film. But Duchenne’s old man has no context, narrative or role of his own: he appears, like the performers evoked earlier, bare of pretext. Yet we see his face apparently in the throes of terror and transformed by joy, in mild dejection and moderate good humour, in expressions of feeling that he neither initiates nor imitates. Even in Duchenne’s unconnected stagings and their halfhearted attempts at theatrical signification, the young blind woman appears almost behind or to one side of her appearances as Lady Macbeth, a coquette, a saint in ecstasy, a mother in turmoil, a Madonna, sometimes assuming two personae at the same time, according to the logic of Duchenne’s unilateral electrizations. Despite our knowledge of the fact that the expressions they wear are not their own, as individuals they become familiar: our familiars or representatives. This is reinforced by the appearance of other faces – a young girl, an opium addict, an old woman – in the series; after their anonymous, anomalous interjections, we return to the faces we have apparently come to know. And, all-seeing, we ask another question: who are they? That this question makes itself felt with increasing force on perusing Duchenne’s album is perhaps related to the fact that the individuals depicted

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in the images are not themselves given to be seen in the staging of the image: they are merely expressive vehicles. (Paradoxically, this passivity is what gives them such a strong aura of ‘identity’ to the contemporary eye.) Duchenne’s subjects were selected on the basis of whether or not their physiological and psychological characteristics made their faces suitable surfaces for inscription by electro-stimulation. Their lack of conventional pulchritude is turned to aesthetic advantage: I have preferred this coarse face to one of noble, beautiful features, not because in order to be true to nature one must show her imperfections; I simply wanted to prove that, despite defects of shape and lack of plastic beauty, every human face can become spiritually beautiful through the accurate rendering of emotions.25 In his chief protagonist, a shoemaker by profession suffering from ‘complicated anaesthetic condition of the face’, he had found an almost ideal model: ‘an old toothless man, with a thin face, whose features, without being absolutely ugly, approached ordinary triviality and whose facial expression was in perfect agreement with his inoffensive character and his restricted intelligence’.26 Duchenne considers that the man’s heavily lined and thin features ‘favoured the development of expressive lines, and at the same time facilitated localized electrization of the muscles of his face’.27 For his ‘aesthetic’ series, Duchenne selected a partially sighted female patient: ‘[s]he is large, fairly well built, suitable for the external study of the shape of her body’, with a face ‘neither pretty nor ugly but has rather regular features; her face is not very expressive; however, we shall see in the following figures that she is completely transformed under the influence of various expressions that I have given her, and that she even gains in beauty.’28 The experimental suitability of these individuals for Duchenne’s purposes was thus also predicated on both their expressive and intellectual indifference to the actual nature of the experiments themselves: ‘she cannot understand the gestures or poses that I show her, so that I am obliged to position her and dress her as if she were a mannequin.’29 The old man proved similarly recalcitrant: ‘[m]y experiment could not be complete without comparing natural expressive movements with those produced by localized electrization […] Unfortunately, the old man referred to above was of too low intelligence to produce himself the expressions that I have produced artificially on his face.’30 Duchenne’s paradox – that his subjects’ indifference made them simultaneously compliant and recalcitrant in relation to his experimental designs – could be read simply as an excuse for the apparently grotesque methods he used upon them. But the paradox also evidences in another way the violence in expression: as the instancing of the disruption immanent in the face as a repository of forces whose location of control is indeterminate.

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Despite superficial appearances, Duchenne is not Dr Frankenstein: he is not making life where there is none or none is meant to be according to conventional discrimination. His electrodes extend the path of the facial nerves outwards into the environment by direct contact, exteriorizing the normal flow of the impulse between the internal nervous and muscular systems, making explicit what is inherently implicit: this is what a face can do. But the agency of its making and unmaking appears immanent only to the world of the experimental system, rather than to any of its specific elements or entities, human or otherwise. Lest we think we are about to rationalize the mysteries of expression in overcoming the theatrical, Duchenne plays a trick on us. The image pasted into the frontispiece of the Album depicts Duchenne side-by-side with the old man. The electrical apparatus and electrodes are in full view, applied to the latter’s face and apparently inducing a disconcerting smile that resembles nothing more than the spasmic grin fixed on the mask of comedy (Figure 6). At first glance, Duchenne himself seems to take up the complementary, tragic mask of expression, or at least an appropriately sober and dispassionate air.

Figure 6 Frontispiece to Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne, Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine, ou, Analyse Électro-physiologique de l’expression des passions, Paris: Chez Ve. Jules Renouard, 1862 Source: Houghton Library, Harvard University.

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But looking again, the old man’s smile resurfaces again, muted but visible, upon Duchenne’s face, as if manufactured there by some unforeseen electrical feedback mechanism that reproduces, in his own organism, the smile he is producing on the face of the other. There seems to be something happening in Duchenne’s self-presentation: a pathognomic moment of transition. The unhappy ethics of experiment submerged in the drama of the Album ‘proper’ here appear apparently unadorned; the two expressions clearly do not express identically, the image overtly shows who is ostensibly doing what to whom. Yet, as an aside, much later in the text, which is itself an adjunct to the images (this is really an early coffee-table book – a deluxe version was promised but seemingly never printed), Duchenne lets us in on a secret: Frontispiece A to this text volume illustrates the method of electrization that I have used to obtain an isolated contraction of the facial muscles. The electrodes, held in my right hand, communicate with my induction apparatus via some conducting wires and are positioned to stimulate the muscles of joy (I, Plate 1). The expressive lines of joy would have appeared on the face of the subject if I had current through my apparatus. But I must say that in this case the laughter is natural! I merely wanted to show a simulation of one of my electrophysiological experiments in this figure.31 The image is a joke. Within its conceit, is Duchenne trying his best to keep a straight face? Thus what ‘fronts’ the Album – its face, so to speak – is the representation of a simulation of an artificial stimulation of an artificial expression of joy expressing natural joy. How does one begin to untangle the logic of expression or the performance of pretence here? The last laugh must be that immanent in Duchenne’s own expression, masked (but not hidden) behind the front cover of his own picture book, where the reader is almost bound to overlook it in the desire to plunge directly into what will be presumed as the heart of the matter, the album ‘itself’. The sense of performance I am ex-pressing out of Duchenne’s album here is all the more marked in contrast to the literal presence of theatre therein. In addition to the decidedly crude spectacle of the young blind woman put through various bit parts, a bona fide actor also appears in Duchenne’s album in five plates, ‘an artist of talent and at the same time an anatomist’, chosen specifically because after much practice, he could perform a large range of eyebrow movements. Unlike the other recalcitrant subjects, this actor could ‘by calling on his feelings […] produce perfectly most of the expressions portrayed by each of the muscles of the eyebrow’, thus perhaps inaugurating the art of ‘eyebrow acting’, first hinted at by the eighteenth-century French artist and theoretician Charles Le Brun and brought to maturity by Roger Moore and Sean Connery in the various James Bond movies.32

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Figure 7 Plate 24 from Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne, Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine, ou, Analyse Électro-physiologique de l’expression des passions, Paris: Chez Ve. Jules Renouard, 1862 Source: Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Indeed, the art of film acting is often partly defined as the ability to do next to nothing with one’s face, a task perhaps as equally difficult as bringing the eyebrows independently under the control of the will. Even Duchenne’s actor-anatomist could only manage to control one of his eyebrows, a deficiency he made up for by conforming to ‘the requirements of physical beauty […] evident in his portrait (Plate 4), where, in repose, his features are handsome and regular’.33 Here, the actor, who to modern eyes is a picture of foppish affectation (see Figure 7), is presented as the gold standard of a healthy, dynamic and authentic faciality against the degraded but passive faces of the neurologically impaired. Strange how, in the sense of theatre proposed here, he is the least theatrical figure in the album.

The further experimental trials of expression Beyond this actorly appearance and the ‘other’ theatricality of Duchenne’s frontispiece, theatre, acting, performance, ethics and, strangely enough,

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electric shock go on to become intimately bound up with the study of human emotion, notions of the voluntary and involuntary, the power of the will and the will to power. In a direct lineage from Duchenne, the contemporary Dutch artist Arthur Elsenaar replicates the former’s experiments on his own face (see Figure 8), literally ‘playing’ his features through a computer interface attached to a number of electrodes.34 Amongst other types of performances, Elsenaar gives lectures in which he assumes a Duchenne-like role of detached researcher mediated via voice synthesis software, demonstrating electrically induced expressions on the simple human creature known as ‘Arthur Elsenaar’. Elsenaar also gives his face over to manipulation via the Internet, in virtual performances in which several participants can trigger any of two dozen muscles at the same time, thus converting the artist’s face into something resembling a macabre muscular battleground, a procedure which the artist Stelarc later translated to his entire body. However, a more complex history (but no less bound up with imitation) unfolds in relation to the study of emotion after Duchenne’s work. The littleknown psychologist Silvan Tomkins, whose work on affect, emotion and, in particular, shame, has been revalued in the light of developments in neurophysiology, started his career during the 1940s in the field of electro-shock experiments (where current really was passed), exploring the phenomenology of sensation. Before the publication of his massive three-volume work Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, Tomkins even wrote a procedural manual for the

Figure 8 Arthur Elsenaar with computer-controlled electrodes Source: Arthur Elsenaar.

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application and assessment of electro-shock techniques.35 His subsequent work included research into the face as the primary site of affects, taken up by one of his students, Paul Ekman, now one of the foremost psychologists of the facial expression of emotions and whose sub-speciality is the domain of lying and deception.36 Early in his career with the face, Ekman and his colleagues improved upon Duchenne’s medical ethics by electrifying their own faces as the first experimental move in an on-going and controversial debate about the universals in expression of basic emotions in humans. Such experiments were intended to revisit the biological and evolutionary theories first propounded by Charles Darwin, in the classic The Expression of The Emotions in Man and Animals, originally published in 1872 (hereafter referred to as Expression). As an editor, Ekman saw fit to air his version of the ‘universals’ argument, including descriptions of face-offs with luminaries such as the anthropologist Margaret Mead, in the 1998 edition of Expression.37 Following on from The Origin of Species, Expression was the product of research Darwin undertook to provide support for the theory of evolution by showing that basic emotional expressions were common across time, cultures and even species and were the result of the evolution of innate biological response mechanisms, as, for example, in the uncovering of the teeth in the expression of anger.38 Like Mécanisme, Expression was one of the first books reproduced containing photographs, this time using the newly invented heliotype process which involved the use of printing plates rather than laborious and expensive process of pasting photographic prints in by hand, which had so limited Duchenne’s print run. As well as photographic reproductions, the text also contains engravings, the then traditional method for mass-produced illustrations. The historian of Darwinian illustration, Philip Prodger, suggests that in addition to being considerably cheaper to reproduce, the engravings are limited to the depiction of expressions of animals and of fear, terror and insanity. He adds that ‘the visual distinction between the two types of illustration may have also been intended to add dramatic emphasis to the sections on “normal” human expression.’39 Unlike Duchenne, Darwin was not a photographer, but for similar reasons, required photographic images to lend weight to his arguments, especially since he was seeking universals of expression. Thus he had to source images from elsewhere – and so Duchenne’s old man and the actor reappear in Darwin’s text in several photographs and engravings, copied with permission directly from the original published photographs. Interestingly, Darwin had Duchenne’s images cropped further still, eliminating any sense of the experimental scene. However, the electrodes remained disturbingly visible and, accordingly, Darwin had two of the images depicting fear or terror rendered as engravings (see Figure 9), requesting the engraver to ‘attend to the wrinkles on the neck & forehead – form of mouth. Omit galvanic instruments and hands of operator’.40

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Figure 9 Darwin’s engraved reproduction alongside the related section of Duchenne’s original photograph illustrating the expression of terror Source (left image): Charles Darwin, Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, London: John Murray, 1904, p. 322. Source (right image): Ecole Nationale Supérieure, Beaux-arts, Paris.

Darwin had other problems in obtaining photographs of naturally occurring expressions, notably that of ‘a young baby screaming or crying badly’.41 Several such images appear in Expression, but one went on to achieve particular notoriety, since it was subsequently reproduced separately, selling over 300,000 copies, such a high volume of sales due to it being one of the first publicly available photographs depicting an instant, an image of transience captured. However, this image, which became known as ‘Ginx’s Baby’ (Figure 10), after the title of a popular novel, was not in fact a photograph, but a photographic copy of a drawing made from an original photograph. In the original image, there is no chair. It was added by the well-known Victorian photographer, Oscar Rejlander, who came late to Darwin’s aid as he struggled to find appropriate images. Prodger adds that the chair ‘serves to ground the child in a domestic setting that would have been instantly recognizable to Darwin’s audience. It helps to make the image seem plausible, and provides it with a personal intimacy lacking in the photographic original’.42 Rejlander’s abilities were not limited to sophisticated graphic manipulation. Running out of time and ‘natural’ subjects, Rejlander turned to acting in order to supply Darwin with the requisite illustrations of emotional expression. He appears in several images, notably those illustrating contempt, disgust and related emotions (Figure 11), with his wife making a striking one-off appearance with a wonderfully executed snarl. Curiously, Rejlander’s facial expressions are not dominant aspects of these images, since not only does

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Figure 10 The image known as ‘Ginx’s Baby’, made by Oscar Rejlander, used by Darwin to illustrate ‘suffering and weeping’ Source: Charles Darwin, Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 2nd edn, London: John Murray, 1904, p. 150.

he sport a substantial beard but each image is around three-quarter length, showing bodily stance and gestures of the arms. Yet within Darwin’s illustrative strategy, these images gather, by association with the representations of animals and children – who, by implication, are transparent as expressive ways of being – an aura of authentic corroborating evidence. In this confusion of genuine and acted expression of emotion, as with the variance between engraving and photograph, there is, as Prodger suggests, also a blurring between evidence and illustration, between what is real and what is really made up. This is something generally considered as having entered the culture of representation only recently.43 On the cusp of substantial changes in not only the technologies of representation but also in concepts of human nature and scientific knowledge, Darwin’s text enacts such a bridging in its often arbitrary juxtaposition of images and styles of representation. This is why its ‘failed’ imagistic strategy, arbitrarily mixing evidence and illustration, is so expressive in its own right. In turn, the fact that half of the 30-odd images in Expression are of children stands as further evidence of Darwin’s uneasy illustrative strategy, with its overtones

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4 Figure 11 The photographer Oscar Rejlander (and another model) illustrating various emotions Source: Darwin, Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 2nd edn, London: John Murray, 1904, Plate VI.

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of a sense of the authentic and the true immanent as evidence in children’s expressions. Writing of guilt, Darwin notes: I may add, that I have observed a guilty expression, without a shade of fear, in some of my own children at a very early age. In one instance, the expression was unmistakeably clear in a child two years and seven months old, and led to the detection of his little crime. It was shown, as I record in my notes made at the time, by an unnatural brightness in the eyes, and by an odd, affected manner, impossible to describe.44 And perhaps equally impossible to photograph. This sense of interior truth emanating in expression is both redoubled and confounded in Plate III of Darwin’s text where the smiling faces of three young girls are juxtaposed with three images of Duchenne’s (equally innocent?) shoemaker (Figure 12), although in the second frame he seems far from happy, despite the absence of electrodes. Darwin is no Victorian sentimentalist, despite the fact that, unlike the exotic adventures from which The Origin of Species arose, Expression was written out of research conducted entirely from his study at home. To his eyes and ears, the domestic household provided an ethological adventure all of its own. As the above quotation demonstrates, his own children found themselves the subject of acute and often unforgiving behavioural observations, rather than an easy romanticism. As one of the first mass-produced books to engage the popular imagination via its use of photographs, Expression, in putting the emotional realm of adult humanity in direct proximity with the infantile and the animal, animates the less accessible conclusions of The Origin of Species. In the West, previous juxtapositions of man and animal in art and literature were restricted to a self-justifying and tautological metaphorical relation: a woman with a face like a lion will possess a lion-like nature; a man with a face like a baby will be appropriately unsophisticated in his mental faculties. But Darwin’s theories dissolved this purely analogical relation and proposed a direct species continuum between the ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ forms of life, paving the way for the science of genetics which now demonstrates that at the level of genetic determination, individual humans are more different from each other than they are from not just the primates, but even from other invertebrates such as certain species of fish. Nevertheless, Darwin’s use of image and illustration, his covert deployment of a histrionics via the work of Rejlander and his edited borrowings from Duchenne contradict the direct and unproblematic referentiality he wishes to make between certain emotions and expressions. Whilst Darwin in no way asserts that all expressions of emotion are innate or biological in origin (he is very interested in the variety of cultural inflection of expression described to him by his colonial informants), he does want to delimit a certain set of basic human emotions (such as joy, fear, anger and disgust)

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Figure 12 Plate III from Charles Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals Source: Charles Darwin, Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 2nd edn, London: John Murray, 1904, p. 208.

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in whose expressive form he detects the evolutionary remnants of innate animal behaviours. But it is the anomalous diversity of Darwin’s images in both manner of production and reproduction that unsettles the very oneto-one correlations they are being asked to support. Such a blurring is made all the more apparent in direct proportion to the extent photography, as a technology of Deleuzian facialization, approaches the face itself and its expressive pathognomy. For that approach is made with a view to producing and selecting only those expressions that are regarded as clear, discrete and unambiguous. And when capturing emotion ‘in the wild’ proves practically and ethically difficult (one wonders what had to happen to the crying infants whose images appear in Expression in order for their tantrums to coincide so happily with the arrival of the photographer and his substantial apparatus), then the researchers of emotion turn readily to those capable of either inducing expression via other means, such as via electro-stimulation of the facial muscles, or simply by faking it. What Duchenne’s images express overtly, and what Darwin’s edited reproductions attempt to veil, is the presence of theatre in the play of expression and emotion, the chiasmatic intertwining of evidence and illustration. Such a presence belongs to that intertwining as a whole rather than to any one of its elements. The scientists who have taken up Darwin’s theories of universal expressions of the basic emotions have tried hard to bring experimental clarity and objectivity to their research. Ekman has dedicated much of his career to refining Darwin’s theory whilst adhering to its basic tenets. In addition to restricting the basic set of human emotions (though there are almost as many variations to this set as there are research approaches), psychology now makes variable distinctions between reflexes, affects, feelings, emotions and moods. Quantitative research has shown that not all facial movements are expressions of emotion. The latter term Ekman now restricts to involuntary expression alone and many facial movements are now regarded as voluntary, if habitual, modifiers of underlying emotional expression, or as conversational signals or as complex emblems conveying cultural attitudes. Communication studies and non-verbal communication research – as well as performance studies – have further complicated the field. There now exist standardized sets of emotion-eliciting images and of cross-cultural facial expressions, Ekman’s own FACS software for coding facial movements and computer-based applications that can record, model and reproduce human facial activity with increasing verisimilitude.45 Yet actors and acting continue to be essential in this field of research, required to supply suitably ‘correct’ and unambiguous presentations; like Duchenne’s old man, the same faces crop up in the examples provided in the literature. This trusting use of the histrionic sensibility appears to raise few methodological problems, despite the fact that what seems to be unavailable or unobservable outside of the research environment must be artificially induced and created for the camera in order to justify conclusions

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about the expression of emotion ‘in the wild’. Seeking better forms of evidence, researchers have embraced the video camera with enthusiasm and not a little postmodern self-reflexivity. A well-known series of experiments involved the video recording of subjects watching various film excerpts depicting varying degrees of violence and tranquillity, with researchers especially interested in the effect of the presence of the researcher as authority figure on subjects’ overt expression of facial emotion.46

Acting out: the pathos of expression A Darwinian approach to expression and the deployment of new technologies of representation also comes together in recent works by the American video artist Bill Viola. Viola is a well-established and highly respected artist, credited as one of the pioneers of the use of video as an art form. Embracing high-end projection technologies, Viola has created large-scale video works with explicitly spiritual or meditative overtones (as in Nantes Triptych (1992), the three panels of which display his mother near death, his wife giving birth, and a sequence of a man diving into water), often using looped, slowmotion sequences, as with the recent Five Angels for the Millennium (2001), also using slow-motion diving sequences. Critics have frequently noted the extent to which Viola uses video to reinvent the much older tradition of European Renaissance religious painting. He appears to have pursued this connection explicitly in works which use flat liquid crystal display (LCD) panels. Both in physical characteristics and in terms of the depth of colour and luminescence they are capable of displaying, LCD panels do indeed appear like the densely worked surfaces of classical oil painting, so much so that Viola has created a series of LCD works (Catherine’s Room, 2001) that explicitly evoke both the scale and subject matter, as well as the handling of light and colour, found in the work of Jan Vermeer. However, in two significant exhibitions, Viola has displayed LCD panel work that involves another departure: the use of actors.47 After attending a period as a research fellow in an extended programme on the representation of the passions sponsored by the Getty Research Institute in 1998, Viola, for the first time, worked with actors to create a series of silent, slow-motion depictions of expression, many of which concentrate specifically on the face. Unlike Duchenne or Darwin, Viola is not concerned with cataloguing or correlating emotion and expression: the titles of the works refuse such literal connections. But, nevertheless, the works themselves show the faces and upper bodies of performers in neutral surroundings, dressed in ‘everyday’ costumes, going through emotions that can indeed be identified approximately (Figure 13), often segueing one into another (as in Mater, 2001), or in an extended display of one particular emotion as it is tumesces and detumesces. Silent Mountain (2001) uses two almost life-size vertically orientated panels to show a man and woman dressed in loose, grey clothing,

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Figure 13 Still images from Bill Viola’s LCD colour video triptych, Anima, 2000 Source: Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York.

going through what might be described as a kind of raging torment, full of flailing arms, twisted torsos and contorted facial features. In a particularly ‘Darwinian’ work, four panels alongside each other (Witness, 2001) show the faces of three women of different ethnic backgrounds going through

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the same set of emotions: joy, sadness, anger and fear, again in the slowest of slow motion, to such an extent that, at a glance, the images appear to be static.48 The combined effect of these works, especially in relation to others in the exhibition which are quite different (the homage-to-Vermeer overtones of Catherine’s Room and large-scale, near-abstract projections of water broken by the body of a diver in Five Angels), is peculiar. In the contemplative space of the gallery, the silence of these moving images, their sombre slowed motion and their overt status as icons of modern technology made to resemble 600-year-old paintings, leads one, as with much of Viola’s work, to believe that one is intuiting the presence of the spiritually authentic, or at least that which approaches some idea of human essence. Viola’s LCD images render with startling clarity the Simmelian idea of the face as the clearest expression of the soul.49 However, at a more immediate level, another appreciation is overwhelmed by a sense of pure, hysterical histrionics. An overwhelming surfeit of expression is set forth, attached neither to subject nor context. What is performed and depicted in the moving images appears literally superficial, both acted out and ‘painted on’. It seems that Viola’s assumption in choosing actors is that they have some privileged, or at least heightened, understanding of what it is to feel. Their particular skill lies in their ability to convince us unambiguously of the quality of such feeling (even if that feeling itself is mired in ambiguity) via the expressive means – their faces, bodies and gestures – sensitized and ‘educated’ by their professional vocation. And who are we to doubt that? After all, is acting not the very essence of a certain art of expression? Do not the anecdotes of theatre history give special place to the expressive variety of a Kean, a Garrick, or a Bernhardt or the equally expressive inarticulacy of a Brando or a de Niro? As high-resolution moving images of properly performed expression, slowed so that the viewer can see the emerging patterns of wrinkles, furrows and folds even before they have fully formed, surely the LCD video image offers the ultimate means of representing the pathognomy I have been opposing to the strict logic of physiognomy? On the faces of Viola’s actors, surely the evidence, the actual traces of Deleuze’s ‘pricklings’, the micromovements and microsensations that gather and disperse in the movement of expression finally become visible? Are these performers not also in complete accord with Levinas’s definition of expression, manifesting themselves in attending to their own manifestation? For better or for worse, however, they appear to disappoint. Ultimately, they offer another form of disquiet, defined as the maximum presence of both what attracts and repels in the same phenomenon. In the foregrounding of the expression of emotion as a discrete activity, isolated from its social context, in the gathering together of its variations into a system, a series of aesthetic works, an album, a set of standardized images (as employed by psychologists of emotion), the very sense of the face as the site of a correlation between the interior and exterior, and also of that

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which would surpass the binarism of such a correlation, breaks down. To put it somewhat extremely, under these conditions the face comes to be not the clearest expression of the soul but the abomination of sense: the scene of its utter desecration, the site of the energetic production of meaninglessness. Rather than asking ‘who?’ as was the case with Duchenne’s old man, instead are we not faced with an implacable ‘why?’ Why is this happening, this massive exertion of intention in which the voluntary entirely annexes the involuntary in a beautiful, richly-hued, luminescent mise-en-abyme of the theatre? It seems that, once more, the leering masks of comedy and tragedy preside over the scene and Levinas’s injunctions against the annexing impetus of the aesthetic gain a little more credibility. Even as moving images capable of capturing the transience of pathognomy, the fleeting play of expression, Viola’s LCD panels do not escape this condition, which is ultimately that of the grimace.

The face of non-sense One could possibly write a history or a genealogy of the grimace, a pseudonarrative made up entirely of interruptions and interventions in the regime of faciality. The grimace seems to have two aspects. The first makes itself felt the more pathognomy is corralled by the discipline of physiognomy, the more what is fleeting and transient is rendered as fixed or everlasting: in the passing smile held a moment too long so as to match the unaccommodating rhythm of the camera’s intervention in its unfolding, the grimace congeals in an instant. The smile is surrendered, given over to another time, an alien discourse. This grimace is the remnant of the demise of a romantic view of expressive faciality: the detritus of a spoiled spontaneity. Duchenne located this transformation of smile into grimace at the micro level of the facial musculature, asserting that a genuine smile could be detected by noting the presence or absence of the activation of the lateral portion of the orbicularis oculi. Later research confirmed that this muscle is not generally under voluntary control, and therefore its effect of wrinkling the skin around the corners of the eyes is absent in the fake or ‘performed’ smile.50 According to this line of research, there may well be other voluntaryinvoluntary muscle combinations that would permit the discernment of authenticity in other facial expressions of emotion. Taking that surmise to its pathological conclusion, all the expressions of all the actors who ever posed for a photograph to illustrate the correlation of a particular facial expression with a particular emotion, all the faces of those ‘subjects’ in the experiments of social psychology and anthropology asked to ‘pull a face’ to indicate the emotion expressed in a simple narrative, could be considered as but the glacial emblems of a ‘tender’ faciality under threat from the brutal colonizing regime of signification, even if the face itself makes such a regime possible. Here, the face is the victim of the excess of its own semiotic success.

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In its second aspect, the grimace expresses the refusal of just such a semiosis. It functions as a kind of willed facial death, a self-defacement made in response to the all too meaningful luminescence of the face as the site of so much meaning, so much soul. As a deliberate disintegration of the expressive system of facial organization, the grimace is the face worn by a soul disgusted at the abomination of sense achieved by the abstract machine of faciality, and would prefer to have nothing more to do with it. To the extent that the grimace is related to disgust, it involves the rejection of what would otherwise harm the organism: Darwin asserts that the screwing up of the face in disgust involves the constriction of the muscles around the eyes and those of the buccal and laryngeal pathways necessary for the expulsion of a disagreeable substance.51 In this sense, the grimace is a blocking up of the sensory conduits so as not to admit any further traffic. It enacts a hardening of the normally soft, sensitive and receptive sense organs of the face, welding them into an armour secured to the solidity of the skull. Grimace is the expression that wants to put an end to the legibility of expression itself. Indeed, no sooner had the photograph been introduced as the legal touchstone of identity and criminality in the 1870s, than those thus identified turned to the gurn and the grimace as the appropriate means to refuse it.52 Even in the blinding light of the wide smiles of corporate consumerism, it appears that the grimace must be acknowledged and given its due, however small. Such a determination of grimace is familiar to even the marketing strategists of global corporations: the ‘Ronald MacDonald’ happy clown face character-cum-logo of the ubiquitous MacDonald’s restaurant chain once had a more sinister colleague; an amorphous, purple, blob-shaped, shiny entity called Grimace, who appears to have been prematurely retired. Grimace appears to be recognizably neither human, nor animal, nor inhuman. Introduced in 1971 as the ‘Evil Grimace’ it had four arms, then lost the ‘evil’ moniker and the extra arms in 1974, but retained the dome-shaped head, large eyes with thick eyebrows, a large bow-shaped mouth, a prominent red tongue, and a permanently happy disposition (Figure 14), all good diagnostic ‘handles’ for the dysmorphologist. But Grimace carries no genetic mutation; a determination of his identity is made more possible by the teddy-bear prop usually clutched under one arm or paw. Grimace is ostensibly an infant, if for no other reason than infancy (the state of being in-fans, without speech) is the domain of the grimace par excellence. ‘Watch the wind doesn’t change or your face will stay like that forever!’53 The impulse of grimace is essentially infantile, and by association also that of the senile or the insane. These are ways of being in which the sense of a normative healthy adulthood gives way to nonsense, disease and disquiet, whilst at the same time defining itself against them. In strategies similar to those articulated by Foucault in relation to sex or the penal system, sense does not silence or render invisible the purveyors of non-sense, but instead constructs ever more elaborate systems of representation and discourse

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Figure 14 ‘Grimace’, McDonald’s Corporation character costume Source: Courtesy of Todd Franklin.

around them. In the infant, the grimace enacts a vigorous facial disobedience, graphically captured by the early nineteenth-century French artist Boilly (Figure 15) in one of a series of drawings given over to the infinite varieties of auto-defacement. Boilly’s tousled-haired, disembodied cherubs exercise a profound derangement in the order of faciality: not as the expression of a latent malignancy or animality (the ‘other’ face of the angelic infant), but of a creative indifference to their assimilation into the grown-up world of the logic of recognition. If, as Silvan Tomkins suggests, the face as the primary site of affect is literally supported by the facial ‘nurturing’ offered by the hand that strokes the chin, tugs at the earlobe or cradles the cheek, then Boilly’s children, clawing at their own facial organs and orifices as well as those of their playmates, demonstrate a profound insensitivity to such a system of care.54 In the smooth expanse of the infant’s features it is normally the smile that we seek out, even in the first few minutes following birth. Placing our own face in front of the newborn, we too exaggerate and contort our features in order to elicit a response, raising our eyebrows and leaving our mouths agape. Our grimace may indeed be rewarded with what looks like a smile, but it may also be met with complete indifference or the disquiet of

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Figure 15 L’Enfance [Childhood], from the collection of lithographs by Louis-Léopold Boilly, ‘Les Grimaces. Recueil factice de 93 lithographies coloriées’, Paris, 1824 Source: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.

the baby’s face in the twisting convolutions of its entire facial musculature as the cry silently announces itself. The French paediatrician Bernard This makes a passionate plea for adult acknowledgement of the authentic reality of the smile of the neonate, in the wake of centuries of what he sees as the literal defacement by medical and psychological orthodoxy of the infant’s innate expressive responsiveness and fine-tuned mimetic capacity.55 Yet if we are to acknowledge the smile as the inborn capacity to engage and to make a relation to others (and also as the crucible of the ex-static relation to self), then we must also acknowledge the grimace as an equally expressive involution, a coiling up of the organism on itself, and not simply as the sign of that nebulous infant disorder so often diagnosed by all and sundry: wind. The emergence from the state of infancy involves the progressive dereliction of the face, a loss of elastic capability of the skin, a deepening of increasingly permanent furrows and the thinning and sagging of the flesh. In the inevitability of this process, grimace encroaches on every face as a reality of cellular degeneration. In doing so, it heralds mortality, symbolized by, for example, the death masks once fashionable in European society,

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by the faces of the ashen dead at Pompeii, by the de-boned and shrunken human heads cherished by certain tribes in Papua New Guinea, by the masklike appearance of those who have undergone poor quality plastic surgery. But prior to that fate and cathected from the involuntary expression of disgust, the protean grimace takes many other forms. Rather than further considering the grimace in, as it were, the abstract – as the abstraction of expression as meaning – let us consider the pout as one of its more phenomenal manifestations.

The pretence of the pout What is a pout? Does it not express an emotion? Darwin writes: ‘[w]ith young children sulkiness is shown by pouting, or, as it is sometimes called, “making a snout.” When the corners of the mouth are much depressed, the lower lip is a little everted and protruded; and this is likewise called a pout.’56 For Darwin, the pout has a strictly limited domain: the sulk. But at the beginning of this analysis of the face, the pout was prematurely proposed as a particularly modern version of the grimace, in connection with the phenomenon of celebrity, of those who labour explicitly in the shadow of their own image. Rembrandt, who perhaps laboured in a similar fashion, shows that the pout has a much longer history, probably as long as that of the face itself (see Figure 16).57 Though Darwin does not make the connection, the pout surely has an alternative history that is as equally coterminous with the evolution of the human species as the baring of the teeth in forms of upset or anger. Morphologically at least, it finds its first entirely involuntary expression in the facial configuration required by mammalian suckling: the mouth fitted to breast. Here, the pout appears as produced out of the innate tactility of the primordial relationship, as the pneumatic interface that permits the flow of life-sustaining fluid from one body into another. (Is it not in fact this relationship that Duchenne simulates, replacing milk with electricity as the vital substance, his paternal half-smile in the Frontispiece of his album infused with a maternal reciprocity?) But in fact, the suckling baby’s pout is not a facial expression – or at least, not yet, from the baby’s not yet formed ‘point-of-view’. Unlike some adults, babies do not pout when they are hungry: they cry. The suckling pout has a pneumatic purpose, possessed neither of a communicative intention nor an expressive self-exhibiting. For confirmation, check the face of a baby just as the nipple pops out of its mouth, prematurely and unexpectedly. What expression is given to be read there? Not a pout; perhaps a variation of the startle reflex, perhaps minor confusion? (Look quickly, because fairly soon, the mouth shapes to produce the cry or scream.) In the infant, the pout is a product of the topology of the suckling relation, the mouth conforming to the contours of the breast that comes to meet it; or vice versa, the evolved human breast conforming to the

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Figure 16 Self-Portrait with a Cap, openmouthed, Rembrandt van Rijn, 1630 Source: Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

topology and pneumatic possibilities of the mouth. The pout of the suckling infant has no existence beyond its physical decoupling.58 But before the pout evolves into an expression, the face has already intervened. Only a few combinations of facial movements are purely involuntary expressions of emotions; the rest are, according to Paul Ekman, either some kind of communication, acting, pretending or lying, more or less conscious, more or less habitual.59 Unlike quadruped mammals, the breast-feeding human infant is placed in close symbiotic contact with the maternal body; supported by enfolding arms and held close to breasts on the ‘front’ of an upright, bipedal body, very close to the maternal face. Studies of neonates show that the babies look not at the breast, the literal source of what provides the nourishment to sate its hunger, but at the mother’s face. Or is it that they do look at the breast and not the face? Or perhaps they flit between the two?60 Whatever, the mother’s face has already arrived on the scene of the infant-breast dyad, a kind of vanguard of what Levinas calls the arrival of the third (between I and the Other), who as another Other inaugurates the requirement for justice: I have to decide between the demands of the faces of others.61 In other words, the mother’s face ‘says’ to the baby, ventriloquizing Levinas, ‘me voici’: I am here, yes, this breast has a face, there is someone

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else. In the psychoanalytic schema, the child has to spend several years reckoning with both the comforts and discomforts of this ‘arrival’, of what was already present; the adult then has to deal with the relative success or failure of such a reckoning. During this reckoning, the pout is re-purposed. Perhaps it has even evolved: Darwin’s pout – the corners of the mouth depressed and the lower lip everted – is not the pout of today. No longer content with the expression of mere sulkiness, the pout has gone on to become a far more elaborate affair. After its formation in the suckling relationship, the modern pout presents itself in the shape of the kiss, once again immanent in a pneumatics of a relation, but this time between two sets of lips. Whatever the relation of the kiss to other forms and functions of infantile orality, the pout enters the logics and economics of expression as its sublime perversion. As such, it has indeed evolved into an extremely sophisticated and varied form of expression, perhaps the most superficially theatrical of all expressions. Understandable, then, why air-kissing, the peculiar habit of poutish kissing without contact, stands as the unofficial symbol of a certain theatrical personality: the luvvie, someone in whom the life of the theatre has taken on a little too much life of its own. The pout as the voluntary pressing out and puckering of the mouth is an osculatory invitation that is also a literal and rejecting kiss-off: a (pretended) expression of attraction that is equally a (pretended) repulsion: very disquieting. Steven Whitakker has written an acerbic and highly entertaining phenomenology of the contemporary celebrity pout, centred around an image of David Duchovny, who gave up doctoral studies in philosophy to become an actor in the 1990s. The time now elapsed since Duchovny’s maximum public exposure offers an interesting perspective on the problematic endurance of a persona. His entire career to date has unfolded in the aftermath of a single role, that of Mulder in the US television series The X Files. Whittaker interprets a photograph of Duchovny from the cover of a weekly TV guide from the 1990s, seeing a face utterly indifferent, even expressionless, except for a quintessentially ironic pout. He does not reproduce the image, but evokes it very effectively: For Duchovny, irony is the pout’s collagen. He says ‘ahh Channelhopper, if you can wipe this pout off my face with your remote before my prophylactic dispassion unrolls around it you are free to become a producer’ in an acting technique one might franchise as the face made safe from the pursings of its mouth. To learn the Duchovny technique study the Marilyn Monroe pout, how her whole face affected to be the deer in our headlights. Now abstract the rest of your face from the pout until only your mouth is the deer in the headlights. The rest of the face is proactively deadpan. That’s the Duchovny pout.62

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Given Duchovny’s publicly expressed frustrations over his contractual arrangements that required him to continue in the role of Mulder for several years (thus damaging his career prospects as a bona fide actor, i.e., one who could perform more than a single role and more than a couple of expressions), it might also be possible to read this pout as the signature of the celebrity resigned to his self-imprisonment in the character he had created: the celebrity as a self-made monster, his face a horror even to himself. For Whittaker, Duchovny’s pout (or is it Mulder’s?) is its evolutionary endpoint, its terminal expression. This is largely due to the size of the task of defacement it is being required to perform. Put extravagantly, Duchovny’s pout expresses both the triumph of the abstract machine of faciality and its rejection in a deliberately disassociated facial performance: There are of course degrees of concession in the currency of the pout. Not all pouts self-efface. The pout may pretend ill humour. Or the pout says ‘Look, I’m pretending ill humour and on your behalf.’ It wants its pretence known. Or, getting really gluey here, the pout pretends to undo pretending (i.e. appeasement, pretending for) […] Self-refuting or not, the pout is the mouth’s come hither. Duchovny’s Mulder pouts with only his lower face, the rest exiting stage right into deadpan. This understatement is over the top. Irony and availing, the Janus profiles of celebrity today, vie in every frame of the Duchovny close-up. ‘Come hither’ and ‘whatever’ in one face.63 As such, the Duchovny pout functions in the same fashion as the infamous ‘double crossing’ of post-structuralist theory, a word overlaid with an ‘X’ and so expressing its own erasure. Such a crossed out word stands proud of the words that surround it and disturbs the organizing force of the sentence, just as the lips jut forward in the thrust of the pout and undo the unity of facial meaning that might be correlated to a basic emotion. In the twilight realm of the Duchovny pout (the contemporary antithesis of the Duchenne smile), it becomes possible to see that textual defacement as bearing a family resemblance to other regimes of extra-textual signification. Like the pout, crossing-out has its own genealogy, uncovered in a retrospective look towards a history of writing before the letterpress or in a sideways glance towards the hand-written manuscript. It is there that we may remind ourselves of the evidence of a writing that, in moments of hesitation, takes back what it sets forth and so evidences itself as expression. However, it appears that in pursuing the logics of expression, the chase has become ensnared in precisely the dialectics of faciality that both Levinas and Deleuze insist we discard, literalized in the pout-as-grimace which rejects the scrutiny of subjectivity. The leering mask-faces of the personae still remain to mock the effort which would attempt their unmasking. But if they express the sense of the inescapable force of dialectics, then perhaps they do

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so only by succumbing to a somewhat comic rendering: a phenomenology of the pout as an exemplar of a philosophy of sense and non-sense, as proposed by Deleuze in The Logic of Sense.64 If something of interest has flared up in this investigation, at least as an exercise in facial defamiliarization, then it is the face as a theatre of immanence, a place wherein ‘the subject’ arrives in the event of its own unmaking. But this face is a sur-face, a plane where events are entirely superficial, forming and deforming in a disavowal of depth. This is how Deleuze prefers to think of events, as a teeming surface of lateral displacements, where all events are just instances of the same Event, where what matters takes place at the edge or border, not down below. Is there, then, nothing ‘behind’ the theatre of the face, except another Stoic joke, the postmodern, blank refusal of depth? ‘If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface: of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.’65 Yet beyond the sur-face, there resounds the question of voice and voicing, which was earlier understood as fundamentally related to any ethical contemplation of the face. As Freud intimated in his rejection of the realm of the visual as the primary realm of psychological enquiry (favoured by his teacher Charcot), it is also the labyrinthine world of the voice, and what it says and does not say, that holds an equal fascination when it comes to the archaeology of the modern psyche. What has been presented as an occasion for thought so far has been, like Bill Viola’s actors, entirely mute, pinched between an imagistic and a textual discipline. If the place of the spectator in the theatre is an auditorium, a place of hearing, then the vocal expressions of the personae, depicting tears and laughter, remain as yet unheard in the theatre-philosophy attempted here.

8 The Tonic of the Sonic

Voice and phenomena In the opening slow-motion sequence of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, the hyperreal, innocence of suburban America is drenched in an intense white light, only to be superseded by the darkness, mystery and evil of an entirely different world beneath. The film manages the transition between these two realms via the ear: the protagonist discovers a severed ear in a grassy patch of derelict land; the camera descends upon the ear and then into it, twisting down the coils and convolutions of that most complex of organs, whose anatomy is so difficult to visualize and, relative to the eye, so poorly understood. A similar transition from eye to ear is made here. This shift from the register of sight to that of sound is managed not by an effort to dismantle the dialectics of faciality from within, nor to abruptly change terrain in attempting an absolute break, but rather by plunging into the ‘black holes’ of the openings immanent to the sur-face. These openings are made available by, as it were, a momentary distraction – the head turning to one side to reveal the ear – permitting an exit akin to that of the runaway who darts behind the closing doors of the underground train and so disappears into the dark interior of the city. Such an exit strategy has the additional option of another passageway – the mouth – since the sonic dimension of sensory experience is not restricted to the ear alone: the voice is the aural counterpart to the face, with the ear completing, but also complicating, the circuit. As will become quickly evident, even this approach does not exhaust the modalities of sound that permeate and penetrate the human organism. At the end of its short but queasy journey, Lynch’s camera finally sinks into a dark interior, crackling with an inhuman sound, that is revealed as a seething mass of insects. Taking in Lynch’s image with an ear and an eye for philosophy, one might overcome a frisson of disgust with an exclamation of recognition: for down with the cockroaches, beetles and worms is none other than (once again) the figure of Jacques Derrida, gnawing away in this 142

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subterranean cavity. In ‘Tympan’, the essay which serves as an introduction to Margins of Philosophy, Derrida figures himself as an earwig, a perce-oreille, working away inside the ear of philosophy, making incisions in its tympanic membrane (the ear drum), which serves as a metaphor for philosophy’s masterful ability to recuperate what lies outside itself.1 If Derrida inscribed his own work as a thorough textualization of philosophy figured as a self-hearing, he nevertheless continued to invoke invocation – or at least a certain principle of sonic vibration – even if it is ultimately reappropriated to the agency of the letter rather than of the voice. But if with the notion of a hearing-oneself-speak which is without voice, philosophy as phenomenology is often construed as a kind of wilful autism, this notion is itself also heard otherwise, as the opening up of a silent interiority – and of a theatre: As a relation between an inside and an outside in general, an existent and a nonexistent in general, a constituting and a constituted in general, temporalization is at once the very power and limit of phenomenological reduction. Hearing oneself speak is not the inwardness of an inside that is closed in upon itself; it is the irreducible openness in the inside; it is the eye and the world within speech. Phenomenological reduction is a scene, a theater stage.2 But why, with regard to a deconstructed acoustics, is what opens within the self-enclosed auditory sphere figured as an eye? Is it not rather the ear or, better, viva voce, the sounded voice, as distinct from speech or language? Derrida invokes that same faculty in the title of the essay from which this quotation is drawn (‘The Voice That Keeps Silence’) and in the book which contains that essay, La Voix et Le Phénomène. Yet this title finds itself rendered counter-intuitively as Speech and Phenomena in its English version. While there are no doubt precise etymological explanations for the refusal of the obvious translation here, it would seem that la voix is destined to be lost in translation. Its ultimate destiny in the rhetoric of deconstruction is to be elided with the scriptural in considerations of signification, manifest indirectly, for example, in Derrida’s analysis of timbre as the ‘same obliterating division of the proper’ as style and signature.3 Or is it that in seeking to deflect the intentional arc of Husserl’s thought, Derrida appears to ventriloquize the synaesthetic Merleau-Ponty of The Visible and The Invisible, evidencing a resistance to a thought divided by an analysis that treats the senses as separate. Either way, what Roland Barthes calls ‘the grain of the voice’ has been occluded and perhaps deliberately so since he also writes: ‘Wherever there is a concurrence of the spoken and written words, to write means in a certain manner: I think better; more firmly. I think less for you, I think more for the “truth”.’4 Such a sentiment, which expressly deals in the ethics of the voice and the duplicity of writing, is the prime sustenance of the Derridean earwig.

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As Steven Connor has suggested, the voice is the very question of ethics, since the possession and bestowal of voice is integral to the constitution of identity and of relations of obligation. As such, to have a voice is to have a say and also to be heard, to exercise a vote and thus to be counted, as well as to be taken into account. To hear a voice as voice is to posit it as the product of an intentionality, the passage of meaning from interior to exterior, the outward and visible sign of an interior consciousness, perhaps of thought itself. In this sense, the voice functions as the sonorous equivalent to the face, as a pre-eminent site of expression. Hence ‘to count as an ethical partner, one must be a potential interlocutor’.5 For Emmanuel Levinas, the philosopher of ethics as first philosophy, the face is the source from which all meaning appears. The force of ethical encounter emanates from the face. To summarize again; for Levinas, the ethical is not a matter of the correct inference and application of moral principles achieved by the faculty of reason and implemented by an equally rational and competent agent. Instead, it is a singular and singularizing encounter with another who ‘others’ me, a gratuitous, unsolicited performance of exposure without time for pretence. The face is what implicates me in, with and for the other, the index of my responsibility. Not face purely as look or glance, but also as what commands and disarms me, as the source of a call which demands a response even before it has been enunciated. For Levinas, the instant of coming face-to-face is the central encounter of the drama of ethics. But what’s in a face? This would be partly an enquiry as to where the face stops and where the body begins. Such an enquiry would have to answer the somewhat peculiar question as to whether the ears are part of the face, the head or the body. Because, as Levinas suggests, the face that faces me is not merely an optical surface that reflects my culpability. It is not a flat plane with holes that open into a dark and impenetrable interiority, alien and unknowable. One’s face is never for oneself: it is for the other, an expressive organ, a labile density and intensity of several sensory ‘inter-faces’ which constitute the relation between what is outside and what is inside. But in Levinas’s analysis, voice is necessarily equated with speech as the donation of sense and is literally significant only as what sounds at a specifically human frequency. Of all the senses, it is hearing that is most attuned to the moral dimension, a notion that resounds repeatedly in the history of philosophy. Thus the ethics of the voice circulates around the gravitational pull of language-as-word, normatively embodied in sound and voice, and exchanged in a system of call and response, speaking and listening which necessarily determines what can count as a having a voice within its aural/ oral economy. Seeking an ethical purchase, philosophies of voice have variously proposed a sounding beyond what is characterized as either the disembodied

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abstraction of philosophical reasoning or a tight, dry-lipped understanding of language as communication. Levinas has deliberately left unsaid the precise characteristics of what he terms ‘saying’ in the event of the address that is summoned by the face. However, phenomenologists such as Don Ihde have sought to elaborate upon it, in the manner of Merleau-Ponty’s assertion that ‘to understand a phrase is nothing else than to fully welcome it in its sonorous being, or, as we put it so well, to hear what it says (l’entendre).’6 In an ontology of the auditory which will lead to a different understanding of experience, the human is located not as the locus of a gaze in a world of objects but as the constituted centre of a world-making sound field. There it must await what comes into awareness in an ecology of listening, where voice heard as language-as-word is the leading phenomenon. Nevertheless, this approach is sensitive to the danger of emaciation which threatens the sonorous plenitude of the word and ‘thus to more locate the fullness of voiced word there is a need to take note of the near and far realms of sounded significance which remain “outside” language-as-word’.7 In contrast to his later work, Ihde is here writing ‘before’ the full impact of the deconstructive assault on phonocentrism had been felt within the sonorized body of philosophy. However, his analysis is instructive in that the ‘near and far realms’ he marks out as the horizon of sounded significance – music and silence – remain as key themes for thinking about the relations between sound and the human. Merleau-Ponty, the major philosopher of embodiment, describes speech and language as a gestural ‘singing of the world’, a sympathetic resonance that is a tuneful harmony, with Heideggerian overtones of becoming and belonging.8 In a different appreciation, music within Deleuze’s work functions as a potentially destratifying force charged with ethical and political, rather than merely aesthetic, significance. Music’s universality, its complex, popular and, no doubt, rhizomatic historical structure, as well as its respectable academic pedigree, make it an attractive host for a new political aesthetics. Similarly, silence looms large in a Heideggerian philosophy of hearkening, as the background from which emerges the poetic call of Being. It also assumes a central importance in the ‘indeterminacy’ of a modern musical aesthetic. Cage’s infamous 4 ' 33'' – the so-called silent piano piece – completes the annexation of sound by music, perhaps exactly the opposite of what Cage himself intended. But after 4' 33'', anything can be music, since sound is everywhere. In the current era in which music is undergoing a massive dispersal throughout all aspects of culture and everyday life, everything sonorous is music, requiring only the capacity to listen in the correct manner. It would seem that the poles of music and silence – in which silence itself is music – hold within them the entire spectrum of soundings which can impinge upon the human, with the spoken word suspended somewhere between them. Yet it remains to ask whether this interpretation is not limited in a fashion similar to the way in which human hearing and vocalization

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occupies only a small portion of the audio spectrum. In listening to music, in listening in a musical way, I direct my sensibility and my attention, regardless of how spiritually beautiful or ear-shatteringly painful the sound may be. What of sound that impinges directly upon my substance, unwilled and unchosen, as an anomalous source of that which perturbs me in my being, engaging my capacity to be affected? Cage asserts it is precisely this capacity that is neutralized by a specifically musical attention: he recounts how the street noise outside his apartment disturbed and distracted him until he could hear it as music, that is, as sound raised out of its condition as noise by an intentional act of listening, thus initiating his entire trajectory as a composer. Noise takes on the characteristics of the weed or fungus, as a denigrated form of life which simply requires a different imaginative perspective in order to recuperate it into an culinary ecology, with the proviso that ‘if you use indeterminacy in connection with the gathering and eating of mushrooms, you might kill yourself.’9 Such a proviso might equally apply to the rigors of cooking up rhizomatic musical material, as well as its mycological counterpart, since a philosophy of ‘anything goes’ will very likely turn out equally disastrous: Sometimes one overdoes it, puts too much in, works with a jumble of lines and sounds; then, instead of producing a cosmic machine capable of ‘rendering sonorous’, one lapses back to a machine of reproduction that ends up reproducing nothing but a scribble effacing all lines, a scramble effacing all sounds. The claim is that one is opening music to all events, all irruptions, but one ends up reproducing a scrambling that prevents any event from happening. All one has left is a resonance chamber well on the way to forming a black hole.10 Even without such an aesthetic sensibility, there still exists a remarkable adaptive human capacity to absorb the anomalies of the acoustic environment: the city-dweller no longer ‘hears’ the traffic, the train or the plane overhead, even as music. But, for some, such adaptation speaks of a greater deafness and desensitization. In a popular acoustic sensibility, other people’s noise is pollution or waste: cacophony, literally sound gone bad. Acoustic ecologists demand we speak up for the silence, or at least for quiet.11 Others suggest that a more ecologically attuned capacity for listening is necessary for the preservation of our sense of humanity and community.12 Yet, bizarrely, one such researcher complained to his companions that on their recordings ‘we are hearing the sounds of each other far too often’.13 Here, in the passionate desire to listen, the chatter of the colleague or friend is an unwelcome intrusion. It would seem that something important is lost when a musical aesthetic absorbs the sonorous completely, prompting the question as to the possibility of a hearing or a voicing that escapes the condition of music. Is there

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a voice of the voice decoupled from language-as-word, music and silence which would speak of what literally vibrates and animates a body? Or is this desire to move beyond a thinking of the senses as discrete modes of aesthetic perception, in favour of their opening on to the world as sensory affection, as exposure and susceptibility, itself a delusory desire for an untrammelled and originary sounding?

(H)earsay: the ethico-acoustics of vibration If an ethics of the voice was earlier established with regard to its status as a pre-eminent site of expression, thought of as the product of an intentionality, then it may be that a Deleuzian concept of expression explored in connection with the face could prove useful in seeking an ethical orientation more resonant with the one being advanced here. But as the quotation above demonstrates, resonance is a concept that does not suit the deterritorializing purposes of Deleuze and Guattari in the aesthetico-political machinations of A Thousand Plateaus, since ‘resonance, or the communication occurring between the two independent orders, is what institutes the stratified system.’14 For Deleuze and Guattari, resonance as a concept is plagued by its own metaphorical depths, a black hole of an idea in which the plurality of ‘rendering sonorous’ is homogenized into a reverberant but meaningless bathos. Black holes represent unpleasant, infinitely deep places for their philosophy. As the physics of the black hole requires, everything goes in, but nothing comes out: one cannot peer beyond the edge of its event horizon, from which not even light can escape. But if it were possible to overcome the terror of the deep that appears to afflict the authors of A Thousand Plateaus, then one would be in a position, according to another of the imaginative constructions of astrophysics, to consider the black hole as but the portal of the wormhole. Black holes suck in objects but, according to Einstein’s general theory of relativity which admits that time reversal is possible, objects that travel through black holes can theoretically be spewed out of other holes, known as white holes. The tunnels that connect black and white holes are known as wormholes, cosmic shortcuts between two distant regions of space-time. Rather than risk pushing this analogy too far in pursuit of parallel universes or the delirium of time travel, it suffices to suggest that resonance is not the conceptual dead-end of a thinking of the sonorous. Indeed, no less a sceptic of the project of ‘rendering sonorous’ than Derrida has recourse to resonance in the aftermath of the deconstructive adventure. In Ideas I, Husserl attempts to delimit the name as a particular, secondary instance of referentiality and invokes the metaphor of the art gallery. The gallery contains a painting which ‘represents a gallery of paintings […] The paintings of this gallery would represent in their turn paintings, which on their part exhibited readable inscriptions and so forth.’15 But Derrida

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declares that naming and representation cannot be corralled inside this metaphorical gallery: The gallery is the labyrinth which includes in itself its own exits: we have never come upon it as a particular case of experience – that which Husserl believes he is describing. It remains, then, for us to speak, to make our voices resonate throughout the corridors in order to make up for (suppléer) the breakup of presence. The phoneme, the akoumenon, is the phenomenon of the labyrinth.16 Here, resonance as the only remaining mode of expression for the voice of philosophy after ‘the break-up of presence’, reverberates not in the agora or other place of civic address, but in the labyrinthine corridors of representation, starkly illuminated by signs reading ‘no exit’. Here, the earlier suggestion of the theatre as the figure of ‘irreducible openness of the inside’ is declined, or rather, in the manner of Thomas Bernhard’s director in his play The Theatremaker, who makes a determined effort to do away with the conspicuous fluorescent exit signs scattered throughout the auditorium in order to achieve the dramatic impact of a true black-out.17 Like Bernhard’s theatre-maker, generations of directorial avant-gardists have sought to assert the rights of the aesthetic over and against those of ‘health and safety’ officials who insist with stoic resilience that the exit signs shall never be extinguished.18 To the artist, the exit sign in the theatre appears as not only an unnecessary significatory surplus but also as the annoying sign of the outside on the inside of the enclosed auditorium. Its presence spoils the desired effect, which aims to generate a hallucination of the disappearance of spatial orientation, leaving the spectatorial mind literally in the dark and thus prepared to receive the imprint of what emanates from the stage alone. Glowing all too visibly in the darkness, the exit sign thus serves to frustrate the theatrical totality, indicating not just the route of escape in case of an impending calamity, but an elsewhere that is not merely ‘offstage’, implicitly raising the possibility for the spectator to take his or her leave at any time. But it seems that a deconstructive orientation finds the labyrinth a potential place of accommodation. Derrida’s somewhat sorrowful invocation of the resonant voice recalls the fate of Echo, the feminine figure of vocality who is transfixed by the face of Narcissus. In the more well-known Roman version of the myth, Echo, her advances unheeded due to the facial obsession of her beloved Narcissus, dies of ignorance, dwindling into nothing, to be heard evermore only as the resounding of what has already sounded. This is Echo as a ghost, a haunting, a trope which has become something of a theme tune for thinking about presence. Yet in another Greek version, the solitary and passionate Echo refuses the advances of Pan, who then has her torn to pieces by satyrs. Even scattered across the land, the parts of her body continue to speak out, uttering a derision from which Pan cannot hide. Thus the Greek version

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gives us a militant Echo, but one who must suffer a total dismemberment in order for her dissenting voice to be heard; a figure encountered in the performative anatomies of melancholy examined earlier. In both versions, Echo’s fate is a sad affair. If one can put faith in resonance as the capacity to speak otherwise, it is as the sounding of a mournful echo trapped within the ruins of representation, much like that reflected from the remnants of an ancient abbey which both haunts and taunts Antonio, husband to the murdered heroine, in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi: ANTONIO. ECHO. DELIO.

ECHO. ANTONIO. ECHO.

It groan’d methought, and gave / A very deadly accent. Deadly accent. I told you ‘twas a pretty one. You may make it A huntsman, or a falconer, a musician, Or a thing of sorrow. A thing of sorrow. Ay, sure, that suits it best. That suits it best.19

But neither the sorrows of echo nor the power of reverberation exhaust the concept of resonance, which is not, as Deleuze and Guattari conceive, simply an act of communicative concordance. As a physical phenomenon, it is the capture within a structure of energy propagated as waves. It is responsible for the quasi-mythical shattering of the wine glass by the soprano’s pure tone, but it also caused the alarming wobble that affected London’s Millennium Bridge, despite having been factored into the engineering calculations. Thus the independent orders subject to a resonant communication are not necessarily bound up in a stratifying procedure. Indeed, almost the opposite can obtain, with the parties involved undergoing a profound mutual destabilization. The synchronized footfalls of the hundreds of pedestrians crossing the Millennium bridge imparted an undue momentum to the suspended structure, which in turn caused them to stumble and loose their footing.20 Resonance is always a potential force of unaccommodation, requiring strict control of its parameters in order to be harnessed to a stable process, as, for example, in the case of the laser or magnetic resonance imaging machine, or in the drama of control and its loss that is the art of certain forms of singing. Another machine that has been shaped with regard to its resonant capacities is the theatre itself. Resonance, both literal and metaphoric, has a special significance for the theatre, where it is often upheld as the primary means by which stage and auditorium, actor and spectator are drawn together at an affective, psychosomatic level. The function of the resonant voice in a theatrical acoustic is not simply to ensure an adequate channel of communication between actor and audience but also to manifest the actual substance of such a communication, according to a principle whereby the requisite feelings, first produced within the performer’s own body, are then directly induced within

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that of the spectator. Joseph Roach has provided an analysis of the former, ‘the player’s passion’, showing how historical conceptions of the rhetoric of acting were determined in part by prevailing scientific understandings in the natural sciences, linking, for example, the development of the Stanislavski method with Pavlovian behaviouralism, or the eighteenth-century notion of ‘sensibility’ with the discovery of the electro-chemical basis of the autonomic nervous system.21 The art of acting is shown to be a significant means for literally embodying differing relations between psyche and soma, and thus for articulating changing notions of ‘the human’. Yet it would seem that whatever the paradigm that informs the production of the player’s passion, resonance endures as the primary mode of its transmission to an audience. Or rather, theatre has sought to measure its own efficacy through a specific imagination of its own resonant capacities. Indeed, resonance is sometimes understood as the phenomenon which secures cultural value for the theatre as social practice. The ‘golden eras’ of dramatic form are generally regarded as coterminous with styles of performing and theatre architectures which organically produce maximum resonance in the relation between actor and voice, stage and auditorium, theatre and society. In the ideal of the Greek amphitheatre or the Shakespearian playhouse, theatre and the State are bound together in a relation not of antagonism or conciliation but of resonance, whose focal point falls precisely at the place occupied by the speaking actor. Whilst tourists are still able to test the Greco-Roman acoustics for themselves, theatre historians explore the resonant capacities of the urns placed under the Greek stage or of the masks worn by the performers. In what is perhaps the high point in the traditions of verse drama and a certain conception of ‘the body politic’, the Shakespearian theatre is often imagined as a place where this type of affective resonance is brought to its most intense focus. The architecture of an auditorium such as the Globe in seventeenth-century London is demonstrated as placing the orating actor at the epicentre of a finely tuned resonant architecture and the spectator in the midst of a reverberating sound bath created by the vox populi, the polyphonic chorus of a fully variegated audience. Writing of ‘the wooden O’ of the Globe, historian Bruce Smith claims that: […] theater inserted listeners into a scene of speaking that was unlike any other in early modern culture. It subjected them, not to the voice of authority, but to the voices of diverse persons, every one of them competing for airspace. And it permitted them to carry on conversations with persons above and below them in social station, something not allowed in conduct books.22 Here, theatre reinvents its own myth as the realization of a dynamic, profoundly democratic, quasi-utopian space possessed of ‘a degree of resonance unmatched elsewhere among body, society, psyche and voice’, the scene of a

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society debating itself that looks askance at the other debating houses of civic importance – the Commons and Lords – across the river.23 What is of interest here is not so much the validity of such a historical claim – Shakespearian England is regularly construed as the historical period of maximum vivacity and cultural dynamism in the formation of the modern state under capitalism – but more its need to imagine theatre as microcosmic resonating chamber functioning as a machine for capturing and condensing all the various forces acting in society, conceived as various forms of sonic expression finding a common focus. In one version of this narrative of aural history, after the sonic glory of the wooden O, the resonance of theatrical (read public) space is increasingly marred, resulting in a contemporary situation where performers are forced to battle against the muffled acoustics of twentieth-century modernist auditoria, requiring the use of microphones and complex arrangements of baffles and speaker stacks. Compared to the reverberant stone of the Greeks and the hardwood of the Elizabethans, the upholstered seats, carpeted floors, vast fly spaces and heavy draping of the modern proscenium theatre literally suck up the sound emitted from the stage, thwarting even the most stentorian of voices: theatre as an acoustically ‘dead’ space, a black hole. Here, the decline of theatre and its cultural or political efficacy is narrated as a loss of sonic power in a progressive ‘de-tuning’ not only of its architectural resonant capacity, but also of the bodies of its performers. At the turn of the millennium, a gathering of British voice-training professionals evidenced an overwhelming sense of crisis: traditions of voice training as becoming diluted; young actors, whose income will largely come from the close-up worlds of television, film and video, proving increasingly unwilling to undergo the necessary vocal discipline in order to become adept, projective speakers of dramatic verse.24 In a parallel process, an earlier tradition of voice training focused on the text as literally dictating the appropriate style of vocal delivery has given way to an approach that seeks to deliver the voice from the psychosomatic stranglehold imposed by the repressive cultural habitus of Western (post)modernity.25 In this orientation (in the work of voice specialists such as Patsy Rodenburg and Kristin Linklater), the voice as a vibratory principle of inner self-possession is in need of unblocking in order that it may assume its full potency, not only as an expressive instrument but also as a manifestation of physical and psychic health. Rodenburg’s declaration that ‘the actor’s voice is her living, her pay cheque’ is extended universally in other, New Age soundings.26 From ancient manuals of the orator’s art to contemporary management texts, the liberation of the voice’s power is announced as the herald of social status and prestige, successful business or personal relationships and of the direct acquisition of material wealth. In seeking to free the voice in the service of clarity of enunciation and force of projection, voice training relies on the conception of the human body as an interconnected set of resonators, made up, for example of the head, face,

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throat, nose and chest, a theory familiar from the work of Eastern-inspired practitioners from the 1960s, such as Jerzy Grotowski and Roy Hart, but already well-established in earlier Western theories of vocal production.27 Don Ihde makes a different type of generalization in his description of the ‘dramaturgical voice’ as a reassertion of the essential intersubjectivity of humankind as being-in-language.28 Ihde’s ideal actor is especially sensitive to the grain of the voice, its textures and tonalities, accents and stresses and to its possibilities for self-transformation, a literal mouthpiece for the amplification of sounded significance. He concludes: The person with a strong voice is impressive in a way that the person with a weak voice is not. Contrast the stage presence of the accomplished actor with dramaturgical vocal power against that of the small child in a school pageant. The faltering lines, the uncertain quaver, the lack of resonance and projection bespeak the dependency and childlikeness of the actor.29 Earlier, the phenomenon of the infant actor in the school pageant was endowed with a performative value very different to this somewhat heavyhanded dismissal. Whilst it might be relatively unproblematic to consent to the notion that ‘the sounding voice is both a penetration into my self-presence and the presence of otherness’, does such a sounding effect a ‘penetration’ merely according to its power rating?30 Rather, is not that which is infans – without speech – the ever-present possibility for the philosophically mature voice, the possibility of its own destitution or disaster? The voice professionals, as opposed to its philosophers, are all too well aware of the inherent weakness that threatens the consolidation of vocal strength. While the actor’s voice is seen as the robust but under-utilized reserve of performative power, it is simultaneously imagined as fragile and vulnerable, at the mercy of a lifestyle comprised of too many rehearsals, late nights, cigarettes, cups of coffee and fizzy drinks.31 Thus, in addition to a Reichean discipline of release and retraining to counter the habits of everyday life, this approach to the voice also demands a meticulous regime of vocal hygiene, designed to protect it from external pollutants and an internalized potential for misuse. The voice is subject to an underlying and persistent threat, that of its own imagined dissolution: ‘the thought that the voice might not work or be heard in front of an audience is, understandably, terrifying.’32 The crucial aspect here is that it is the thought of malfunction that is terrifying, as opposed to any actual occurrence: voice terrorized by imagining its own failure. This suggestion of an ideal vocal plenitude which contains the (imaginary) seed of its own undoing would serve as an obvious point of purchase for a deconstructive reading of the sounded voice, in much the same way that Derrida seeks to unhinge the paradoxically silent s’entendre of Husserlian phenomenology or the pure, non-referential resonance of Artaud’s imaginary theatre of seraphic screaming.

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Of course, the scream is extreme: the voice in the midst of its own annihilation. Even so, its force reverberates in the more everyday phenomena of talk and conversation, the realm of what is usually called speech. The passionless category of speech strips out the scream from the voice, the spittle from enunciation, the chatter from conversation. Equating voice with speech and language renders inaudible the yell, the stutter, the stammer, the groan, the cough, the laugh, the hemming and hawing, the umming and erring in favour of the dictionary as the sum total of what can be given voice. These non-verbal vocal phenomena are not the authentic indicators of the self or of presence over and against the artifice of language. But as bodily spasms which contaminate the link between thought and speech, they are precisely what interrupts the effort to be present, to hold oneself together, to make sense. As an ongoing and incessant series of vibrations in my substance, they are amplified in the resonant cavities of the organs that open my surface to the other person. They enact my discomposure, my inability to cohere, an infancy that is also senility. This is what the other reveals to me in the face-to-face encounter; his or her capacity to be affected, to be dis-organized in a manner that resonates with my own, yet which remains entirely other. This capacity is displayed in the tremor of what is strong and forceful as much as in the quavering of what is quiet and hesitant. What follows here attempts to amplify another resonance, not as a joyful shout of a new ‘gay science’ of acoustics, but as a manifestation of what I can only call the uncanny or unheimlich, that which sidesteps the logic of causality and the maintenance of the proper. The uncanny is always a question of a relation between objects, processes or events that otherwise have no relation, for example, a confusion between what belongs to the outside, what to the inside. What is uncanny arrives uninvited and all of a sudden, a passing state of awareness that is neither dream nor hallucination, but an event. It is thus possessed of a power neither tragic nor comic, but rather what effects a disruption or a momentary state of suspension. An encounter with resonance is always uncanny, whether in the strange mutations wrought on sound by certain architectural or natural stone formations or in the buzzing felt in the filled cavities of one’s teeth caused by a certain pitch and volume of voice. As evidenced in some of the examples above, resonance is not simply a property of sound waves. In fact any energy transfer process that functions according to the principles of wave-like propagation can manifest resonance, from light through ultrasound, audible frequencies of animal species and humans, down to the very long frequency vibrations that occur during earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Resonance thus serves to put the sounding of the human on a spectrum which also encompasses not just the angelic tones of what is sacred and the raucous cacophony of what is profane, but also of the infra-human, the sub-human and the inhuman, soundings which might be gathered together under a term coined temporarily for different purposes by Amanda MacDonald – the humanesque.33 If, as has been claimed, the face

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and voice stand as natural signs of a certain humanism that is still culturally operational, then the humanesque functions as a concept to elaborate them as precarious, fleeting achievements, as much as persistent natural or ideological ‘givens’. In the theatrical understanding proposed here, the humanesque does not seek to reduce the phenomenon of voicing to the manipulation of surface effects by either a transcendent subject or ideology, nor to a generalized ‘tuning of the world’, but to appreciate it as a scene of becoming, characterized as an approximation – in short, as a particular form of impersonation, in which the voice is but one of the more developed achievements of human sonority. Here, the emphasis is on the impersonal in impersonation, on the question of becoming unaccommodated from the properly human, rather than on that of the verisimilitude of the imitative skills of the impressionist or ventriloquist. The sonorous is conceived here as an event in which the being of human being is sounded in – and out – of itself.

The vocalic imagination: circuits, spaces, bodies, events Earlier, it was suggested that a leading aesthetics and politics of performance seeks to figure both the actor and the theatre as resonating chambers of vocal plenitude. In seeking to avoid the rhetoric of humanism and the philosophy of presence heard in this understanding, other thinkers have sought a more machinic, distributed or technologized understanding of the aural/oral. In these approaches, voice is reducible neither to language-as word, nor to inchoate bodily utterings, for its sonorous texture is mediated by the triad of voice, ear and breath and thus is always engaged in the formation of cultural beliefs connected to a symbolic system. For example, Frances Dyson has proposed the circuit as a metaphor for ‘the meaning of the voice’: [T]he ‘originary voice’, no matter how pure, is bound to a certain hermeneutics; prior to any utterance, it is already a metaphor, and already caught within particular circuits, switchboards or ‘machines’ which both literally and figuratively encode, transmit and give meaning to vocal acts […]. From this perspective, the meaning of the voice lies in its movement; its ability to occupy different symbolic niches within different cultural/historical epochs. Perhaps the best description of this kind of flow is that which the metaphor of the circuit evokes […]. The circuitry is as much metaphorical as material or technological, and represents the flows and logics of cultural proclivities as much as the movements of material phenomena […] For it should always be remembered that circuits generate powerful metaphors, they name deities and demons, they perpetuate myths, and their particular construction will determine the nature of social relations.34 Here, the circuit as metaphor permits the elaboration of complex economies of sound in which the same logic pertains to the sonic universe of postmodernity

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as it does, in Dyson’s examples, to the culture of the Dogon people of Niger or in the Christian tradition of the convergence of word, breath and spirit. Each circuit produces voice differently, thus ‘airing’ or opening up the space in what is regarded as the ‘death circuit’ of modernity, polarized between ‘the disembodied voice of mass communications, and the non-vocal, nonsounding, anaerobic voice of the mind’.35 Dyson’s approach suggests that modernity represents a cultural desiccation of the moist and fecund sonic economies to be found elsewhere, whose tones return surreptitiously in phenomena such as the heavy breathing of the obscene phone call. In his cultural history of ventriloquism, Steven Connor proposes a parallel process of desiccation in which the disembodied voice undergoes a series of cultural transformations, from the smoky secrecy of the ancient oracles to the rhetorical struggles of possession in early modern England, to its confinement in the ventriloquist’s dummy, already a historical relic, prior to its dissemination in the technologies of the phonograph, telephone and digital encoding of sound as just another form of data.36 In fact, Connor suggests that the ventriloqual voice is always already outdated wherever and whenever it appears, functioning as a cultural archaism around which cluster ideas and beliefs about the relation between the spiritual and the material. Space, in addition to the circuit or switchboard, is a leading concept here, with the assertion that not only does the voice inhabit and occupy space, it is space, both the ‘implicated space’ of a pre-modern bodily sensibility, with its fluid relations between inside and outside, and the ‘explicated space’ of the modern era, in which the body is posited as an object in a fixed field.37 The Kleinian psychoanalytic theory which forms the background of Connor’s phenomenology of the voice enables him to construe the voice both as an object that is both ‘good’ and ‘bad’, healing and annihilating, with capabilities both creative and destructive of a sense of self. In this double articulation, voice as a Kleinian part-object becomes a symbolic medium of exchange between self, other and world. This voice-object, projected and interjected, opens up ‘vocalic space’, a contested place for the sounding out of a diverse range of cultural questions of power and ownership, possession and spirituality and a concept that permits a two-way traffic between the psychological and the social. The conceptual counterpart to vocalic space is the vocalic body: ‘the idea – which can take the form of dream, fantasy, ideal, theological doctrine, or hallucination – of a surrogate or secondary body, a projection of a new way of having or being a body, formed and sustained out of the autonomous operations of the voice’.38 The logic of a hermeneutics of sound requires that the sourceless voice be attributed to some body – hence, the immediate unavailability of such a body to the confirmation of visual perception necessitates the invention of an imaginary surrogate. The vocalic body is a mutable, phantasmic thing, forever made anew – Connor gives us Edith Lecourt’s ‘sonorous envelope’, the pneumatic cushion of protecting sound

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which surrounds the baby in the family environment, the annihilating voice of rage in which the voice attacks itself, the crooning voice of seduction laden with organic vocal excrescences, the toneless, excremental voice in the throes of decay, the transcendent sung voice of the soprano in which the force of the human cry is sublimated and transformed into a sublimely inhuman object of desire. The circuits of the voice, vocalic bodies and vocalic space are just three of the many conceptions of the voice explored as a cultural phenomenon, part of a more widespread attention to the sonorous. However, while they have raised the voice into the domain of knowledge and meaning with substantial effect, this has been achieved via a certain principle of generalization, a kind of permanent installation of vocality as an autonomous, endlessly proliferating field, whether spatial or circuitous, embodied or disembodied. By resonant association if not direct correlation, the voice becomes attached to the paradigm of a universal vibrationary principle for the entire cosmos, as entertained in many ancient and self-styled New Age philosophies. Whilst several studies of the voice or sound resist the far-flung excesses of such a generalization, they are nevertheless fuelled by a kind of autonomous, reverberative force drawn from their sonic theme, impelling them to an incessant process of expansion. For example, as Connor fears, even after over 400 pages, his lengthy effort to excavate the ventriloqual voice is far from concluded.39 Whilst Jonathan Reé’s I See a Voice, in the main an astute history of the development of sign language, adopts a more sober tone and avoids fetishization of any one sense or modality of experience over any other, it nevertheless also announces itself as a ‘philosophical history of language, deafness and the senses’, by no means a modest or unchallenging ambition in a contemporary philosophical climate.40 However, whilst acknowledging the transformations, spacings, embodiments and inscriptions that the embodied and disembodying aspects of voice perform, as will be clear from earlier remarks, it is the voice as event that is of chief concern here. If, in common with some of the explorations of sound and voice mentioned above, the ear and voice are understood as the organs of obligation, then the relevant modality is not so much that of space, but that of time. Obligation as the response to a demand is a matter of this very moment, the ‘now’ point at which a voice is heard. To be obliged requires one to forfeit the principle of deferred action, whereby one assumes the right to act later, and instead to respond at once, or not at all. To the extent that the matter of theatre is of what perpetually comes to presence, it is a matter of spacing, not simply with regard to its internal architecture, scenography or choreography, but also in relation to the priority it grants to the ‘now’, to the present moment, and to the possibility that any one of such moments might be converted to an event. Given the understanding of events afforded by the philosophy of Alain Badiou, the priority accorded to them is always a retrospective, retroactive attribution which does not take

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place at the same time as an event itself. One is never fully in the presence of an event, since it does not take place as distinct from its retrospective singularization. Furthermore, events are never isolated, solitary phenomena; an event as such can only be comprehended in relation to another event, the interval between marking out durations as different in scale as that of the historical epoch or of the momentary eclipse of syncope. The intervallic and interruptive function of ‘speaking out’, of the necessity that something happen, is foregrounded by what I have called the experimental conditions of theatre, perhaps no more so than in the uncertain silence that falls as the house lights dim. It is the ability to act out of obligation that the theatre foregrounds by bracketing it out, since it is the place where separation is axiomatic. In this understanding, theatre assembles its audience neither as Dionysian participants nor clear-sighted dialecticians, but as uneasy witnesses. Mike Pearson, a well-seasoned performer and theoretician, notes the basic nervous disposition of the actor: Of this I am certain: when I’m performing I am nervous. I am aware of being in front of others, of having one chance to get it right. This state of acute self-awareness is characterised by a release of adrenalin which may lead to feelings of ‘fight’ or ‘flight’, to shaking, sweating, irrationality, forgetfulness, ‘stage-fright’ […] And you may be aware of the fact that I am expressing this nervousness symptomatically.41 He goes on to elaborate performance as the means by which one might enter an ‘ecstatic release in a state of increased physical and perceptual sensitivity without fear of repercussions’ but also ‘be other than my socialization and conditioning might predetermine […] muster my physical and vocal resources at will; confront those muscular tensions, recurrent postures and obsessive behaviours through which one’s fears and repressions – one’s attitude – are reflected in the everyday body’.42 In this book, I have been attempting to dwell in this ‘nervous’ zone between the voluntary and the involuntary, between the exertion and relaxation of the will in a project of deliberate self-differentiation. Pearson concludes: ‘[m]aybe that’s what it is, performance: two groups of people, one of which is nervous, the other expectant!’43 Here it is worth asking whether it is possible to conceive the sensibility of the spectator characterized not as much by expectancy as by a nervous disposition equivalent to but different from that of the performer – an equivalent to the stage fright that afflicts even the most experienced professional, whose ‘profession’ is a more or less acute mastery of the particularities of his or her psychophysiological constitution, in which a Spinozan ‘capacity to be affected’ is manifested in the varieties of expression. If so, then the theatre itself could be said to function as a very nervous system, ‘an other place’ construed not as a the site of higher authority or wisdom but as a heterotopia of exposure and susceptibility, where ‘what is going on?’ is the question that returns incessantly.

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In keeping with the perpetual departure from theatre I am seeking to conduct, the sonorous event, as distinguished from the commencement of dialogue or conversation, takes place in a scene which begins where the art of the professional performer gives out. In Thomas Bernhard’s eponymous and very brief short story, the voice imitator pleases his discerning and appreciative audiences with the accuracy of his diverse impressions, until when, ‘at the very end, we suggested that he imitate his own voice, he said he could not do that’.44 Whilst this remark might be taken as the artist’s rebuff to the facetious and vacuous attitudes which beset his enterprise, which Bernhard never tires of satirizing, it could also be read as an admission of the limits of what is achievable in an aesthetics of mimicry, within which the notion of imitating oneself is a nonsense. It is the auditing of just such a nonsense that is attempted in the final chapter, set out as a series of exclamations, brief, sonorous events that speak out amidst the multiplicities of voicing, events that belong properly neither to language nor to music.

Resonant cavities Coming back on the train from a rehearsal on a dark and depressing winter’s evening, my eye was caught by the back page of a discarded Christian evangelical newspaper, advertising the reality of hell. The article, complete with cutaway views of the earth’s molten interior, described how, some time in the late 1960s, a Soviet deep drilling rig is supposed to have hit upon an unexpected cavity, 9 miles into the earth’s crust, a place of astonishing temperature and even more exceptional resonance. The article gave a web address for those who dared to experience the sounds of hell.45 The sound available there is excerpted from a late-night American chat show, in which a caller provides a mysterious tape, ‘authenticated’ via its provenance from no less an authority than the BBC. The tape offers the sounds of the sinners screaming in hell as a raucous, squealing melange of cries, screams and, groans akin to multiple layers of short-wave radio noise rendered with the human vocal apparatus. As the talk show host says, it’s disturbing, very disturbing indeed. And whether it came out of hell or a bedroom audio studio somehow doesn’t seem to matter. It sounds… well, it sounds weird, disturbing in a jokey kind of way. Back on the surface, I have another resonance problem. It’s the disturbing noise other people make when they eat – the chomping and chewing, the slicing and crunching, the slurping and sucking and, worst of all, the swallowing and gulping. The noise agitates my nervous system in a way that I find both repellent and fascinating. Why, I silently ask myself, why this excessive public display of a private act? Why this all too audible mixing up of what is inside and what is outside? As a child, I think I asked my father that question once, though not in exactly those words. He said it was because of his ‘resonant cavities’ – perhaps he meant the badly filled holes in his teeth or perhaps the structural peculiarities of his jaw and

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cranium. My capacity to be affected by it did not diminish. And I worried about my own involuntary noises and how they must impinge on others. To be heard at all, sound requires a complex receiver: an organ, a body and an entire sensibility capable of being affected by vibrations of the air. The sheer physical force of sound is well established and widely experienced since the advent of electrical amplification. The bass of a sound system is felt as a disturbance in our internal organs as well as in our ears and heads. The approaching train is first sensed through the feet. The higher frequencies of the siren or electronic fire alarm pierce and penetrate us in a fashion that is far from metaphorical. There are many stories and myths – ancient and contemporary, low and high tech – about the power of sound. Such stories testify to our need to believe in a power that can make itself heard but not seen – which is why God always speaks in such thunderous tones: sound as the awesome presence of what is otherwise beyond representation, God and things that go bump in the night. Sound impresses the body with a literal force. But to do so, it requires an interior, a cavity within which to reverberate. After all, in empty, outer space, no one can hear you scream. A resonant cavity is by definition an inner space, an interior which tends to reinforce or prolong sounds, especially as a result of synchronous or sympathetic vibration. It will be resonant according to its capacity to be affected by the sounds which resound within it, which in turn depends on its material substance, the morphology of its interiority and the way it opens out on to its exterior. There is well-known anecdote about John Cage visiting an anechoic chamber, a sealed cavity devoid of resonance because it eliminates all reverberation – an acoustically dead space. ‘But I heard two sounds’, Cage asserted to the technician, who replied that the low-pitched rushing was the sound of his blood circulating and the high-pitched whine that of his nervous system. Repeating Cage’s experiment today, an interested composer might be informed of a third sound – that of the ear itself. A common-sense understanding and experience of the ear considers it as but a hole in the head, a simple conduit for transferring sensation from the outside to the inside. Yet upon inspection, the inner ear is as fantastic and improbable an organ as the eye, though rather less well understood. Contemporary biology has revived Helmholtz’s previously discredited theory of tone sensation as a function of resonance, last heard of at the end of the nineteenth century. Helmholtz believed that there were tiny string-like structures in the inner ear, like miniature vocal cords, that ‘sounded’ when they were vibrated by acoustic pressure waves. But when dissection revealed no such structures, biology preferred other approaches. The resonance theory resurfaced when it was discovered during the 1940s that the ear emits a tiny but continuous complex tone which is also altered by incoming sounds – spontaneous and evoked oto-acoustic emissions, as they are termed. New research theorizes

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that Helmholtz’s strings do exist in the form of a microscopic lattice of motile cilia in the cochlea, which, so to speak, amplify and orchestrate sound as resonance within a fluid-filled cavity, a kind of underwater piano, as one researcher has characterized it.46 This theory considers the ear as a self-resonating cavity, a complex echoic interior made up of a series of invaginations in which acoustic energy is transformed into its electro-chemical counterpart, in a manner that is as yet barely understood. The ear, at least in its musical sensitivity, has been well serviced by both poetry and philosophy, if not by biology. But is not the mouth the truly primal opening, the portal for what sustains us and our relations with others? In suggesting the mouth as a localized site for thought, the notion of the resonant cavity is brought forward here to deflect attention away from the anonymous, machinic aspect of the oral/aural circuit in favour of what I have called the humanesque. This is to suggest that the circuit that links voice and the ear, speaking and listening is in fact a short-circuit, bypassing elements that might produce a different understanding. Instead of aligning what approximates the human in the domain of sound with the physics of electrical flows and intensities, in which the ear and the vocal cords function as transformers, I will consider what Michel Leiris calls ‘the deep country of hearing’.47 This is also the territory of a sounding which never quite amounts to a speaking.

9 Deleted Expletives

Sneeze And he went up, and lay upon the child, and put his mouth upon his mouth, and his eyes upon his eyes, and his hands upon his hands: and stretched himself upon the child; and the flesh of the child waxed warm. Then he returned, and walked in the house to and fro; and went up, and stretched himself upon him: and the child sneezed seven times, and the child opened his eyes. 2 Kings 4, 34:35

Figure 17 Stop-motion image of a sneeze Source: Wikimedia Commons, available at: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sneeze.JPG.

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A Saudi man has come back to life after being in a coma, as he sneezed after he was already put in the grave. Okaz, Saudi Arabian daily newspaper, 9 June 1999 On the verse ‘Behold your father is sick’ […] the Pirkei D’Rabbi Eliezer comments, that from the time the world was created until Yaakov, no one ever got sick and died. A person would be fit as a fiddle until one day, all of a sudden, he would sneeze and his soul would depart through his nostrils. Torah commentary1 Ring-a-ring o’ roses, A pocket full of posies, A-tishoo! A-tishoo, We all fall down. Traditional English nursery rhyme A tantalizing tingling rises up unbidden, vaguely located in that mysterious place where the pathways of the ears, nose and throat appear to converge. Practical activity enters a state of temporary suspension in an attempt to solicit the passage of this sensation. The attention is suspended, the eyes and hands flutter. Too much or too little preparation and it dissipates, refusing anticipation and, unexpressed, sinks back to a nascent, lingering state, awaiting its time. Then, putting an end to this state of suspended animation, it seizes the moment and the body, concentrating an eruptive energy in an impulsive inspiration, followed by an equally forceful expiration. The eyes clench in a self-protective reflex, the body is rocked in place by the spasms of the thoraco-abdominal musculature, and then, either it repeats, two, three or even more times, or, it is over. Equilibrium is restored. A light, even pleasurable, relief obtains. Literal or figurative, the sneeze is a symbolic intimation of the mortality of the human being. Scholarship insists that the association of sneezing and death in ‘Ring-a-ring o’ roses’ is a late nineteenth-century invention and not, as popular folklore has it, a grim mime of the pathology of bubonic plague.2 But the notion of a sneeze as an ominous herald of illness remains hard to resist and so the myth of the rhyme persists, without regard for genealogy. The mortal sneeze is thus the quintessential syncope of the everyday, a little rehearsal of the absence of self. Yet, as the quotations above suggest, the sneeze also on occasion interrupts the supposedly foregone conclusion of death, indicative of a soul speaking out of its premature silencing. As such, it is a vital sign of the will to survive, an explosive ‘No!’ to the cessation of breath, made up of multiple sonorous overtones as compared to the flat, monotone lines of the ECG

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monitor that confirm the morbid reality of what may otherwise be only apparent as death. While the sneeze interrupts the consistency of the communicative or practical situation, it also produces its own small ethical drama in the ritual exchange of responses that are elicited between the sneezer and his or her audience: the minimal ‘excuse me/bless you’ dialogue takes elaborate forms in other cultures, such as in Arab societies where the exchange of several formalized phrases is usual, with the audience forced to initiate the proceedings if the sneezer fails to properly invoke the name of God, concluding with the phrase ‘God shows us and you the right way’. In parts of India, where sneezing is regarded as essential to health, passers-by simply shout ‘Live!’ and the sneezer must reply ‘Live with you!’3 The sneeze as affirmative signal and as a positive indicator of health no doubt connects with its well-known physiological proximity to the orgasm. Sneeze fetishism – specifically the spectatorial (or is that expectatorial?) pleasure thus derived – is well established as a far from uncommon sexual preference. There is something rather poignant and strangely uplifting about the notion of the sexual imperative subjected to the auditing of the sneeze: a passion for the momentary destitution of self-possession, a hope placed in a hopeless object of performance. And, regardless of matters of sexual taste, who would deny that the spectacle of a sneeze is in some way fascinating? The New York artist Heide Fasnacht has exhibited a series of ‘tabletop’ disasters, miniature sculptures made from expanded plastics, depicting geysers, volcanic eruptions and bomb explosions.4 In a change of scale, two of these works depict a life-size human sneeze: not the mouth of the sneezer but the miasmic cloud of sputum that erupts from it at great speed, represented by hundreds of tiny balls of black or white polymer clay strung meticulously on steel wires radiating vortex-like from a centralized point – the notional but unrepresented mouth – on the plane of the gallery wall. What is fundamentally formless is given form as a three-dimensional rendering of a backlit, stop-motion image, familiar from 1970s coffee-table books on the wonders of high-speed photography. As with Duchenne’s photographs, the aesthetic effect is worked through the transformation of what is temporary and ephemeral into what is permanent, not in an act of imagination but in a careful empirical rendering of the natural functions and experiences of the human body as made available by current technologies of the age. Earlier, the grimace was articulated via the image of celebrity deconstructing its own iconicity, running the risk that such a signification might all too easily be recuperated into the repertoire of poses. As was noted, photography evidently accelerated and universalized this process, subsequently engendering the cinema, with which it entered into a proliferating exchange of personae and performance. This is the well-established economy of celebrity. If the grimace is mute, an acknowledgement that

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words will achieve nothing, then the sneeze is an outburst which equally destroys the proprieties of speech and conversation. The sneeze is a sonic event – a-tishoo! – which renders its purveyor both helpless and speechless. Emanating from the mouth, deploying all the resources of the lungs and chest, it commands the ear as much as the eye. However, if there is an ethics of the sneeze, it is not so much concerned with its sound, as with the eruptive projection of wet vapour from out of the body’s interior, carrier of unknown bacteria, viruses, germs and other potential pollutants. Sneeze etiquette suggests that one shield the mouth with one’s elbow in order to avoid communicating these forms of life to others. What more perfect vehicle for a new technology of the instant than an everyday phenomenon that is over in the blink of an eye? Not surprising then that Thomas Edison and his colleagues should choose the sneeze as the subject of one of the first motion pictures, complete with phonographic sound track. This film, Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze, January 7, 1894, also called Fred Ott’s Sneeze, was the first motion picture to be registered with the Library of Congress for copyright purposes.5 Shot by Edison’s technical guru, W. K. L. Dickson, it also contained the first cinematic close up, featuring the Edison Manufacturing Company scientist Frederick Ott, who was apparently well-known for his mimetic abilities and sense of humour.6 While the film is only five seconds long, it is more than long enough to capture the full onset, event and aftermath of Ott’s single sneeze, thus entering him into the annals of cinematic history as perhaps the first celebrity performer (Figure 18). Ott’s sneeze inaugurates the enmeshment of the theatrical in the cinematic from the outset, since the ontological status of his sneeze is undecidable – is it a bona fide, if self-induced, event, or a simulation? That he holds a handkerchief aloft in overly symbolic fashion and appears to be taking a pinch of snuff in the first few frames indicates that there is a fair degree of stagecraft at work. In addition, his sneeze is something of a tamed beast, even coquettish, in its dénouement. In fact, it would be hard to imagine a more alienated or ‘estranged’ spectatorial experience than peering down an Edison Kinetograph at the flickering image of the improbably moustached Ott and his halfhearted sneeze, whilst attempting to synchronize it with the phonographic recording apparently made contemporaneously. A sneeze can be brought on by many things: pollen, dust, grass, strong odours and noxious fumes, sudden chills, and even psychological or emotional irritants and excitements. Whatever the cause, the purpose of the sneeze is to expel whatever it is that has trespassed inside the organism. In a curious genetic-phylogenetic aberration, sneezing is also associated with exposure to bright light in a considerable proportion of the general population, due to a little understood process whereby the sensory pathways of the optic nerve, overloaded by excess ‘data’, somehow offload it on to the naso-pharyngeal pathways.7 Here, the connection between the

Figure 18 Stills from Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze, January 7, 1894 165

Source: Wikimedia Commons, available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fred_Ott%27s_Sneeze.jpg.

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sneeze, the darkened auditoria and continually variable illumination of stage and screen is made even at the level of physiology. Whilst it may be a matter of life and death as well as spectatorial genetics, is there a danger of making too much of the sneeze? Even Catherine Clément, in her phenomenology of syncope, gives it only a passing thought, between the cough and the hiccup. On the other hand, in Anton Chekhov’s short story, The Death of a Government Official (dramatized by Michael Frayn as The Sneeze), a minor bureaucrat is utterly undone by an excessive concern over his inopportune sneeze upon the neck of a senior civil servant at the theatre.8 Whether an event of major or minor significance, the sneeze is ideally placed to unblock the impasse arrived at in the earlier analysis of the grimace. If the grimace is the deliberate refusal of interest staged as a rigid, ossified subjectivity, then the sneeze enacts the break-up of the fixed and exaggerated expression, suspending conscious intention and consciousness itself in a momentary loss of control.

Cough (mouth) If there is an element of ventriloquism occurring in this exclamatory series, then its primary source is David Appelbaum’s soundings in Voice, a polemical text which seeks to free ‘voice’s voice and voice’s body from the place of concealment and to place it soundly before our ears’.9 Appelbaum concludes his analysis, which has resolutely opposed cognitive articulation to liberated sound production, speech to organic resonance, with the admission that such an opposition is metaphorically efficacious, if not rationally justifiable.10 The aim from the outset has been to set forth a covert ethics of the voice, which arises from the point at which ‘signification abruptly collapses’, liberating ‘the kinaesthetic impulse to participate in and be interrogated by an unsignified and unsignifiable reality’ – an evocation of the ethics of the beyond mentioned earlier.11 The purpose will have been to regain ‘the incomparable moment of recovering oneself in the midst of voice’ and to reveal an incarnate awareness at the heart of being.12 But whilst affirming the deranging force of the ‘vibratory address’ which demands a response (even just a ‘bless you’), as should be clear, the present study neither seeks a return to a self-consistency nor finds an increased self-awareness in the prickling, eventful experience of sneeze or syncope. Rather, the purpose here has been to discern an obscure but resonant region at the heart of being in a theatrical phenomenology of unaccommodation. As Levinas has indicated, the incomparable moment is not that of ‘self-recovery’ but of evasion, the need to be quit of oneself, which is in no way the desire for the obliteration of existence. Whilst I have chosen the sneeze as an initiating vital sign, Appelbaum starts his series of invocations with the cough. The cough is ‘the creature voiced’, but also what molests the vocal organs, barely fit for thought, let

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alone philosophy. For Appelbaum, the cough works a basic identification wrought out of interruption: Only the human cough, artful or otherwise, gives voice to an identity which is accompanied by the shadow or presence of a self-awareness […] I have little difficulty recognizing my friend in a crowded theatre hall by his cough. To the oscilloscope, the cough is as reliable a mark of individuality as any voiceprint.13 But philosophy has sought to erase the cough, to eradicate its interruptive force emanating from ‘the cave, the black cavity of the thorax and throat’.14 Aristotle’s rejection of the cough as merely the impact of the breath, devoid of any significance, heralds philosophy’s repulsion for the organic processes of vocalization, culminating in Husserl’s consignment of all paralinguistics or kinesic expression to the category of the meaningless. The re-sounding of the cough, then, inaugurates a hitherto suppressed history of interruption, history as interruption, and rebels against the subjugation of voice by thought. To hearken to the cough will be to mount a subversive attack on the hygienic mentalization and muting of voice that philosophy has installed as the norm, reversing the flow from voice to speech, language, discourse and writing with a movement ‘up and out from the pit of the throat, involving lungs, the organ of speech, and the mouth’.15 Appelbaum traces an ascent of voice from a dark and cavernous interior, via the laugh, babble, breath and chant, up towards the domain of sense and meaning. But, understanding that there is no thoughtful future for any notion of unmediated, ‘raw’ acoustical effect, he installs metaphor and, finally, the poem as the necessarily compromised repository of the liberated voice. Once again, philosophy is sutured to the poem, ‘the acoustic dimension of proprioception’, its rhythmic pulse ostensibly carrying a kinaesthetics to the attendant ear.16 The poem becomes the proper if unstable home for the unaccommodated voice, offering the truth of an uneasy listening to those capable of bearing its affections. The force of the argument is weakened: does the poem really bring ‘the violent blow of liberation, the crack on the skull that suddenly brings one to his or her senses’?17 Or only in a ‘metaphorical’ fashion? Surely the truthful effects of poetry, today more than ever, are extremely hard-won, demanding an introspective reflection and concentration. The well-worn tactic of trumpeting the revolutionary power of the poem via the recollection of Plato’s rejection of the poets is no longer adequate to give substance to such a claim. Furthermore, the disclosure of suffering and the destitution of the embodied soul no longer belongs solely to poetry. The philosophy and the academy which Appelbaum seeks to disturb have long since made their peace with the poem, evidenced in Heidegger’s adulations of Hölderlin, Derrida’s ‘tympanizing’ of Celan, or Badiou’s invocations of Marllarmé.18 In a similar fashion to the ‘musicalization’

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of the sonorous remarked upon earlier, this poetics works a comfortable but disappointing equivocation. However, the provocations made prior to the invocation of the poem in Voice, offer many points of departure from the path the book ultimately maps out. In focusing our attention on the discomposing features of the resounding body, Appelbaum’s rhetoric permits a marginally more prolonged encounter with the resonant cavity of which the mouth is the opening. Like the sneeze, the cough draws attention to the mouth in the very requirement to cover it for reasons of social politeness. The oral cavity, damp and dark, composed of the soft mobility of tongue, frenulae and glottis and the hardness of the teeth, gums and palate, becomes the space for a reacquaintance with the force of libidinal sensation, of disruption, of what is unrefined, recalcitrant and badly behaved – the cough as the infancy and senility of the voice, the delinquent, phlegm-laden anomaly lurking in the shadows of the smooth, dry regime of articulation. Whilst there is a limit to what might be made of this proposal (rapidly approaching here), as Appelbaum suggests, a cough ‘is not nothing’.19 Indeed, the cough plagues the theatre as an obstacle to performance, evident in the clearing of the airway prior to the commencement of song and in its pathological corollary in the extended coughing fits of audiences between acts or movements. This peculiar phenomenon was reclaimed by earlier generations of orators, in the development of the rhetorical techniques of early Christian religious speech-making. Well before ‘hemming’ and ‘hawing’ entered the language as metaphorical indications of delay and prevarication, they were being annotated in the margins of medieval sermons, where they functioned as a vocal form of punctuation for the purposes of emphasis or drawing the attention.20 In his comprehensive survey of paralinguistic utterance, Fernando Poyatos establishes an entire rhetoric of the cough.21 Relieved of its function as a simple symptom of illness, the performative cough can stall, cover up, prompt or fill silence; it can be part of a generalized conversational feedback behaviour or it can be associated with uncertainty, embarrassment, social anxiety; it can indicate boredom, disinterest, rejection, impatience, reproach or even suppressed anger. It can even function as an instinctual response to the presence of alterity, in what Poyatos terms the solitary dyadic cough, which occurs when two people pass in public without the close proximity of others, such as in a darkened street at night.22 He asserts that this cough almost always occurs at the same point in the encounter, some five to ten steps after the actual event of passing, as if it were marking the event and a way of conducting an acknowledgment of the stranger. Such a nascent street theatre might appeal to Alain Badiou, since one event – the passing – is ‘named’ retroactively by another – the cough. In fact, it is possible to imagine the act of solitary throat-clearing in the absence of anything to say as a privately performed instance of the dyadic cough: the ‘library’ cough in which, huddled over my books in the

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enforced silence, I unconsciously remind myself that I exist (and several others respond in similar fashion to my call). Other lines of thought also converge on the mouth. If that opening has a philosopher, then it must Georges Bataille, who is congenitally unable to disconnect it from the corresponding orifice at the other end of the alimentary tract: the anus.23 By replacing the oral-aural circuit with an oral-anal-ocular complex, Bataille creates a perverse but lively erotics of the orifice, which might be put in context by some of the more sober but equally radical proposals of psychoanalytic theory. In the earlier discussion of the pout, the psychological significance of early intra-oral experience was briefly encountered. One of the first researchers to take this realm of experience seriously was the American developmental psychologist René Spitz. In a series of articles published during the 1940s, Spitz conducted work on the earliest stages of perception using direct observation of infants. He concluded that the first visual percept is the human face, or rather ‘a Gestalt configuration within the human face’.24 But observation demonstrated that such a percept is only reliably perceived and reacted to during the third month of life.25 However, Spitz’s interest is drawn to the very earliest phase of infant development, the phase of non-differentiation, a kind of primordial synaesthesia in which sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch and the infant’s own voice mix and meld. In an article entitled ‘The Primal Cavity’, Spitz proposes the mouth as the site for the genesis of perception. His starting point is earlier clinical observations by others regarding the association of oral sensations with dream or pre-dormescent states: […] the somewhat vague sensations are of something wrinkled, or perhaps gritty and dry, soft, filling the mouth, being felt at the same time on the skin surface of the body and being manipulated with the fingers. Visually the sensation is perceived as shadowy, indefinite, mostly round, approaching and growing enormous and then shrinking to practically nothing.26 Whilst claiming that other researchers connect these sensations with the breast, Spitz asserts that their true referent is the face, the face of the mother at which the suckling baby stares in preference to the breast itself. But the question remains of how the newborn, who can only supposedly perceive sensations originating from within his or her own body, turn to ‘outer perception’. Leaving aside the debateable issues of Spitz’s phenomenology of perception, it is worth taking note of his assertion that there is one ‘localized, perceptual zone which includes in itself both the characteristics of interior and exterior perception: the mouth’.27 The suckling reflex is taken as the crucial event, generated most reliably by the insertion of the nipple inside the mouth, a tactile stimulation which involves both the

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outside and the inside. Spitz further asserts that the critical motivator of suckling is not what is usually termed hunger, but thirst: The sufferings of hunger are not comparable to thirst, nor do they occur in response to as brief a deprivation as those of thirst. We are all too prone to forget that at birth the infant shifts from being a water dweller to that of a land animal. During the intrauterine period his mouth cavity, larynx, etc., were constantly bathed in the amniotic liquid. After delivery a continuous stream of air will dry out the mucosa with great rapidity, particularly since the salivary glands begin to function only many weeks later. Thus the moistening jet of milk is the first contact sensation which links the inside and outside of the infant body. This passive relief of unpleasure depends upon the active co-ordination of lips, tongue and cheeks, the first muscles to be brought under control. Thus the mouth becomes the primary means for the infant to explore the world because in this single organ […] are assembled the representatives of several of the senses […] of touch, of taste, of temperature, of smell, of pain but also the deep sensibility involved in the act of deglutition.28 In the synaesthetic infant psyche as imagined by this psychology, these oral sensations are aligned with the visual perception of the maternal face stared at during feeding, welded into a cross-modal percept-affect system in which any one experience comes to stand for the totality. Spitz thus suggests that the subject as ‘body ego’ originates from the earliest sensations experienced in the mouth and that severe forms of psychic disturbance or simply the state of fevered sleep may result in a regression to this primordial sensorium. The perceptual modality of the oral cavity hence forms the basis for later developmental stages, which nevertheless contain the matrix of their precursor and so ‘hark back to the inside-outside mode established by the intra-oral experience, as for instance in the distinction between the “I” and the “non-I”, the “self” and the “non-self”’.29 The use of inverted commas around the terms denoting self is indicative that their meaning is becoming hazy, if not arbitrary, in light of Spitz’s consideration of orality, considered not just a phase but as the condition of all experience: The world of the primal cavity is a strange one: indistinct, vague, pleasurable and unpleasurable at the same time, it bridges the chasm between inside and outside […] it is the cradle of all external perception and its basic model; it is the place of transition for the development of intentional activity, for the emergence of volition from passivity. When, however, the body relaxes diurnally in the passivity of sleep, the activity of the mind will retrace its way toward the primal process, and the primal cavity then becomes the cavernous home of the dreams.30

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If the uncanny tactile space of the oral cavity lies at the origin of the modes of perceptual experience, then its figuration in the minimal theatricality of Samuel Beckett’s later drama returns the discussion to the theme of the resonant cavity, initially sounded with the sneeze and the cough. Beckett’s solitary Mouth in Not I, at a terminal point of theatrical representation, finds itself stuffed with words in a fashion similar to which the infant responds to the dryness of the throat with cries and sobs, which in turn stimulate the pleasurable wetting by milk from the breast, which is then replaced with the arid substitute of language.31 The perpetual untimeliness of human entry into existence is a recurring theme for Beckett, in which language is both an insufficient and excessive solace. The Mouth, in addition to the source of the speech in which the ‘I’ can say ‘I’, is also the site of a Beckettian ‘not-I’, an opening to an ever-present possibility for dis-identification. Yet, the Mouth in Not I is not merely commanded to talk, but also to scream and laugh. But these are no organic remnants of a speechless era of which the aged voice ‘behind’ the Mouth has been dispossessed. In fact, they are far more ‘theatrical’, staged and self-conscious than the fragmented speech that surrounds them: Couldn’t make the sound… no sound of any kind… no screaming for help for example… should she feel so inclined… scream… (Screams.) …then listen… (Silence.) …scream again… (Screams again.) …then listen again… (Silence.) … no… spared that… all silent as the grave.32 It seems that ‘the voice of voice’ for Beckett is often aligned with a certain poetry, however sparse and degraded, and an aspiration for the bitter tonic of language. Indeed, where else to place one’s faith after the 30 seconds of the actorless drama of cry, inspiration, cry and expiration that is Breath? But then again, there is no philosophy or system to be extracted from Beckett’s later drama, since Breath in turn gives way to the mordant comedy of dialogic cliché and theatrical appearing in plays such as Catastrophe and What Where. No doubt, Beckett could have made theatre using only the cough which perennially afflicts many of his fictional creations, but as with the Lacanian view of the introjections and incorporations of infancy, it is ultimately language, as an indigestible substitute for something better, and silence, that shapes the Beckettian landscape. Whilst there is no need here to deny the primacy of language, it is also unnecessary to rehearse yet another assertion of its braiding with all of conscious and unconscious experience. Rather, in preferring with other writers (such as Kristeva, Connor and Appelbaum) to find ‘voice’, rather than language, as what arises in the empty mouth to stand in for the breast, the desire is to entertain a more differentiated encounter with human sonority. Given Beckett’s proclivity for a very short circuit between birth and death, it is once again in infancy that the sonorous finds its fullest expression.

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Cry, scream, shout A particular strain of psychoanalytic thinking links the emanation of sound to the infantile desire for omnipotence and also to the demand for love. Steven Connor’s introductory chapter to Dumbstruck works together several of these approaches, including those of Didier Anzieu, Edith Lecourt and Guy Rosolato. Thought together, these writers create an entire sonic world of infancy, made up of protective cushions modelled on the intrauterine ‘soundbath’ and of attacking, penetrative and excremental expressions which both defend and destroy the ‘vocalic body’ of the undifferentiated infant self. Lecourt makes the greatest distinction between the comfort of the sonorous container and the threat of rupture provided by sounds that impinge on the body, especially when generated from within. Whilst she explores the pathological symptoms of such rupturing, Rosolato assigns the infant’s cry a fundamental importance, as the primordial expression of being, ‘the greatest power of emanation’: ‘Right from the beginning, the cry is the manifestation of the excitation of living matter in pain or pleasure, at once autonomous and reacting to stimulation – an excitation which is life itself.’33

Figure 19 Baby crying during the first day of life Source: Dreamstime, available at http://www.dreamstime.com/-crying-baby-image1397735. © Galina Barskaya | Dreamstime.com.

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Of the infant, Connor writes: ‘Waking, it cries, it demands. Its cries are an attempt to diminish and abolish space that yawns about it and within it. Shouting is the reassertion of the blind imperative demand of the infant, and of the infant’s archaic space, in all its intense intermittence.’34 But the space-making, ‘worlding’ power of this cry, which subsequently leads on to the production of voice as object, subject to the will, also rebounds back upon the infant itself in an act of violent self-estrangement. As the voice of suffering and need forming in the dried up oral cavity, the infant’s cry is a symbol of unsatisfied desire, seeking the thirst-quenching affect of the breast or bottle. But in the absence of this refreshment the cry cannot substitute for milk, but rather takes on an autonomous, self-attacking dimension, both disagreeable and disturbing: the infant is terrified by the sound of its own cry and the accompanying constriction of breath and stress on the vocal cords: ‘the child attempts to feed itself with its voice, but its voice simply crams starvation back down its throat.’35 Beyond the realm of infancy, Connor makes a specific connection between the voice and violence, examining the voice as a technology for the establishment and defence of psychic territory. The voice is the agent of articulation, in its linking of a variety of organs and its connection of utterance and ingestion. ‘It moves from me to you, and from me to myself, in moving from mouth to ear. The shout or scream obviates all these distinctions […] the crying voice tries to get rid of this burden of voice, that, in extending myself into the world, can only ever hold me at a distance from myself, hold me apart from the world.’36 From this psychoanalytic perspective, voice – whether the ‘good’ healing maternal voice or family ‘chorus’ that constitute the ‘sonorous envelope’ or the ‘bad’ mutilating voice of rage or frustration – is thus integral to the agon that is the formation of the self. Yet from this perspective, what comes from outside only appears to do so; alterity is construed according to the economy of projection and introjection, which is literally and necessarily ‘self-centred’, egological. However, the cry, especially of the infant, does not in fact obliterate the distinction between the I and the other, at least not from the point of audition, of an audience. In Munch’s eponymous painting, the cry or scream deforms space itself, so that space no longer spaces, no longer marks out the boundary where the sensibility of the screamer stops. But the boundary of the pictorial frame literally puts a stop to this deformation and also puts me, the viewer, in my place, a place of silence, from which I can contemplate the symbolic spectacle of the scream. But a crying baby is a universal portent that all is not right with the world, an appeal that one can ignore only with difficulty or learned disaffection. When the baby’s mouth remains arid and empty, it opens to form a cavity that resonates a cry drawn from deep within its interior organism, an intense sonority that engages the body as a whole. The crying infant literally shakes, quivers and vibrates. In the infant’s cry, as frightening as it

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is empowering to the baby itself, there is a violent discrepancy between the physical size and presence of the body and the sheer affective intensity of the sound as it resonates in us. Antonin Artaud was ungenerous when he proclaimed that no one in Europe knew how to scream any more.37 The infant has always incorporated such a knowledge – its life depends on it. Its cry is addressed to the resonant cavity of my ear, it interrupts my involvement in my own projects, commanding my attention, regardless of whether I am the bearer of breast or bottle or not. Attempt a cry or scream equal in commitment to that of the hungry infant and in the reverberations afterwards you may well find yourself asking: Who did that? How could that sound emanate from me? The scream is thus the manifestation of the voice of voice par excellence, a resonating force amplified in the chest and mouth which makes my being tremble – as both screamer and the one who hears the scream – before it is registered as a sign. A phenomenology of voice might make a distinction between the shout and the scream, which appear to be elided here. Can one say that a baby really shouts? Screams, cries, sobs, wails, whimpers, gurgles, coos, groans, grunts, sighs, gasps, wheezes, even ‘blowing raspberries’ are all part of the infant’s vocal range, but shouting seems an altogether more grown-up phenomenon. As hinted at earlier, it would be impossible to consider the scream in proximity to the theatre without invoking the name of Antonin Artaud. In a typical work such as ‘Theatre of the Seraphim’, Artaud proposes a theatre in which the scream is the sonic medium which will bypass the regime of signs in favour of a mutual resonating of both audience and performers.38 As with the infant, Artaudian screaming is a bodily and not just a vocal event, its source located deep within the internal organs, containing a power to produce what Artaud (and later Deleuze and Guattari) calls elsewhere ‘a body without organs’. There is a sense here that the scream will contain sufficient power to effectively liquidate the hegemony of a humanistic economy of organ demarcation through the sheer force of resonance – in a sense only marginally less literal than the very real danger posed by ultra low-frequency acoustic waves to the internal organs. As Douglas Kahn has remarked in a brief consideration of the scream in the modernist sonic sensibility, Artaud’s actual screaming, heard on tape recordings of his text ‘To Have Done with Judgement of God’, is altogether different in both force and affect.39 Artaud’s own screams are high-pitched, falsetto even, theatrical to the point of a ‘camp’ femininity. What one hears in Artaud’s screams is more like the suppressed rage and frustration of a voice that, true to its own declaration, has indeed forgotten how to scream. In Artaud’s radio production of the text, Kahn notes the almost complete absence of a scream in the natural register of a male voice: A lower-pitched scream would be closer to despair than to threat: the former retains a degree of volition and through that a male prerogative for

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aspirations of the highest magnitude lost, frustrated, or denied an anguish over squandered greatness, whereas a feminized scream is the sound of subjugation, where life can be ventured outside incitement and motive. When a rare lower-pitched scream does occur in the radio production it quickly threatens to trail off into song, to become discursive.40 The French film theorist Michel Chion has proposed a gendered scream as a terminal point in the libidinal economy of cinema. Explicating ‘mainstream’ films such as Blow Out, Psycho, King Kong, The Towering Inferno and The Man Who Knew Too Much, Chion identifies a common ‘screaming point’ towards which the entire cinematic project is directed.41 This scream is always that of a woman and what is important in cinematic terms is not so much the nature, context or vocal quality of the scream, but the point where it is placed in the unfolding of a narrative ‘where it becomes a sort of ineffable black hole toward which there converges an entire fantastic, preposterous, extravagant mechanism – the celebration, the political crime, the sexual murder, and the whole film – all this made in order to be consumed and dissipated, in the unthinkableness and instantaneity of this scream’.42 Chion elaborates this scream as a defining example of what were earlier described as ‘points of suspension’: ‘a point of the unthinkable inside the thought, of the indeterminate inside the spoken, of unrepresentability inside representation. It occupies a point in time, but has no duration within. It suspends the time of its possible duration; it’s a rip in the fabric of time.’43 The female scream is figured as the coming to presence of oblivion, the quasi-orgasmic expression of terror and pleasure ‘of the human subject of language in the face of death’.44 Chion contrasts this to the scarcity of the male shout in cinema, which is always a question of power, will and the demarcation of territory. On the other hand, ‘the woman’s scream has to do with limitlessness. The scream gobbles up everything into itself – it is centripetal and fascinating – while the man’s cry is centrifugal and structuring. The screaming point is where speech is suddenly extinct, a black hole, the exit of being.’45 In the Robert Graves’ short story The Shout (subsequently made into a film starring Alan Bates), a mysterious male stranger emerges into the rural idyll of a domestic romance, announcing his possession of a shout of unequalled power.46 The potency of the male shout is literalized as a force not only assertive of power and space but also of a libidinal energy, the unvoiced suggestion of which is sufficient to detach feminine affection away from its existing objects. The actual shout in this film is long and drawn out, again on the verge of song or chant, an overblown, aggrandized version of the ‘om’ of the yoga-mantra – Chion adds that it was achieved by the electronic distortion of the director’s own voice. Emitted by a man, a long drawn out scream can only be the sign of the presence of the utterly alien, as in that electronically manipulated, bestial screech dubbed on to Donald Sutherland

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at the end of the re-make of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers – the audience either assuming that his character too has finally succumbed to the said alien invasion or that, less plausibly, he has raised the art of impersonation to a new level.47 This differentiation between feminine scream and male shout can be seen as one aspect of the sexuation of the infant, in which the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ aspects of a singular vocality are split off according to the logic of bifurcation which psychoanalytic theory presents as taking place at the moment when the child must enter into the regime of gender. Under this regime, a female shout and a male scream are strictly anomalous, signs of the immanent breakdown of significatory propriety. The cry of pain and suffering, whether due to physical or emotional cause, enacts just such a breakdown. In Elaine Scarry’s potent description, the scream of the torture victim obliterates questions of meaning, serving to torture other victims placed deliberately within earshot as auditory witnesses.48 As such, Chion’s somewhat hyperbolic suggestion of cinema as an ‘insane mobilization of resources’ in its obsession with the screaming point is allied to the notion of state-sponsored torture as a similar mobilization with regard to the ‘mechanism’ of the state itself. For both, the scream yields a perverse truth: a pure utterance that evidences a truth utterly without content. The actor is often called upon to represent such sounds, which waver between senseless suffering and some other, nameless recovery of sense. Screams, cries and shouts are littered throughout the canon, where they often carry huge dramatic and symbolic weight. A list would range from Oedipus’s cries to the infamous ‘Howl, howl, howl, howl’ of King Lear over Cordelia’s dead body to Allan Kaprow’s direction – ‘OLD MAN SCREAMS furiously, turning wildly in all direction’ – in 18 Happenings in 6 Parts.49 Of all these, perhaps the most demanding (and so rarely sounded) example, for both actor and audience, is that of Philoctetes in Sophocles’s late eponymous drama, marooned on an island with a festering leg injury that will not heal, whose screams are notated in some instances in the original Greek text with over a dozen non-semantic syllables. It seems that even Artaud experienced in his own stage directions something of the challenge that faces the actor in so many performance texts with regard to the vocal representation of suffering. Such exclamations pose the greatest difficulty, since they require the voluntary production of what is most involuntary, not just as a one-off, single outburst, but as a presumably varied and gradated series of repetitions. The threat of an all too wooden ‘O’ is immanent to the vocal challenge of the theatrical cry of suffering. The scream focuses the attention upon the mouth, literally so in the cinematic moment which zooms in on the black hole of the open mouth of which Chion has written. In light of this association with power and suffering, with explosive and implosive forces and with a sexual imperative, the discussion is now in a position to encounter the work of Georges Bataille,

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which, as suggested earlier, endows the mouth with an unmatched degree of philosophical import.50 Alongside the eye and the anus, the mouth is the pre-eminent organ in Bataille’s surrealist, sacrificial thinking of the body and with this trio he effects a version of the Deleuzian dismantling of ‘facialized’ humanism. Aware of the scepticism bound to be raised against the extreme tenor of his ‘project’, Bataille approaches his own work with a degree of caution as to its possible excesses and absurdities. Of his earlier evocations of the ‘pineal eye’ and the ‘solar anus’, he later writes: ‘I was not insane but I made too much of the necessity of leaving, in one way or another, the limits of our human experience, and I adapted myself in a fairly disordered way so that the most improbable thing (the most overwhelming as well, something like foam on the lips) would at the same time appear to me to be necessary.’51 In this self-critique, Bataille situates himself as a philosopher of the humanesque, rather than of the utterly alien. In this vein, he proposes that the dazzling anal efflorescence of apes and baboons (which attracts and repels the schoolchildren – and Bataille himself – at the zoo so potently) has, in humans, been secreted away by the upright and uptight evolutionary imperatives of the species, relegated to the hidden act of excretion. But the expressive capabilities of the anus have instead migrated upwards and into the face, where they still manifest some of their peculiar power: All the potential for blossoming, all the possibilities for the liberation of energy, now under normal conditions found the way open only toward the superior regions of the buccal orifices, toward the throat, the brain, and the eyes. The blossoming of the human face, gifted with the voice, with diverse modes of expression, and with the gaze, is like a conflagration, having the possibility of unleashing immense quantities of energy in the form of bursts of laughter, tears, or sobs; it succeeded the explosiveness that up to that point had made the anal orifice bud and flame.52 The face here massively exceeds its function as the bearer of communicative signs and is instead imagined as a scandalous and disquieting set of orifices, a Hydra spawned of a creative evolution that has overtaken the solitary opening of the anus. Hereafter, the face can no longer be the dignified scene of recognition and good character since it cannot escape its excretory and ejaculatory associations, which offer the sense that it may ‘brusquely cease to set up the least barrier against a sudden, bursting eruption, as provocative and as dissolute as the one that inflates the anal protuberance of the ape […]’.53 This imagination of the face is all mouths, a concentration of openings into a labyrinth of interior cavities, each with its own potential for violent and essentially formless emissions, whether spittle or laughter, phlegm or speech. All of these take on a fluid, excretory quality in which the humid

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wetness of the oral cavity plays a generative part. Vocal emissions of any kind become inseparable from an accompanying fluid substance, the very stuff of life and death, opposed to the disembodied, silent, odourless, ‘dry’ and ethereal voice of immortality. Marcel Griaule, one of Bataille’s co-contributors to the Encyclopaedia Acephalica, takes matters further still in his entries in connection with the mouth. The humble ‘magic spit’ used to cure the childhood playground injury is elevated to the status of ‘the soul in movement’, the substance of the breath of life, emanating from the humid grotto of the mouth.54 Used for protection and healing, spit also functions to insult, to cast out demons, to mark a pact or seal an oath, to confer spirit on a child. Does the one who spits on his or her hands before picking up the tool do so merely to secure a grip upon it, or is there a less functional aspect to such a ritual? Fernando Poyatos suggests that spitting can also function as ‘an unspoken expression of togetherness’, for example, in the behaviour of teenage boys in Western city streets and, conversely, in the ‘play-spitting’ of Ghanaian girls, but not boys.55 To this suggestion of an ethics and gender politics of spit, it could be added that there is perhaps no more mundane but potent catalyst for the tensions of cultural difference in places such as London’s East End as the diverse habits of public spitting. For some, spittle, as Michel Leiris suggests, does indeed represent the ‘height of sacrilege’, sullying the divinity not just of the mouth but also of ‘man’s presumed dignity’; spittle is an entirely personal matter and should remain contained.56 But for others it is a necessary or habitual medium of expression; if retained, internal problems may arise. The exchange of spittle is an ever-present danger in the close contact of face-to-face encounters, the more so when passions are raised. Whilst the salivatory splutterings of friends and family may be a source of comedy, one has to attempt to maintain a straight face in more formal situations. Griaule asserts that ‘one can be hit full in the face by a truncheon or an automatic pistol without incurring any dishonour […] but one can’t accept spittle without shame, whether voluntarily or involuntarily dispatched.’57 However, one person’s source of disgust and insult is entirely innocuous to another. Samuel Pepys apparently did not take the slightest offence when a lady accidentally spat upon him from behind in his theatre box.58 The theatre too sheds a certain light on spittle, since, under the strong illumination of stage lighting, the more powerful orations of the actor take on something of the incongruous nature of Heide Fasnacht’s sneeze sculptures, the words issuing forth with an accompanying spray of saliva arcing across the space. Indeed, particular actors are renowned in the profession for their salivatory habits of performance, which fellow performers must literally face up to. For Bataille, then, nothing so moribund as ‘the narrow constipation of a strictly human attitude, the magisterial look of the face with a closed mouth, as beautiful as a safe’.59 Hence the frustrating offer of the pout: a mouth that

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performs the kind of blossoming that Bataille imagines, but only to form a seal against the outside, proffering everything but emitting nothing.

Laugh The laugh is another invitation into the open mouth. In his evocation of laughter as what loses itself in its own presentation, Nancy fixates on the open mouth of a laughing woman as described in a prose poem by Baudelaire, ‘The Desire to Paint’: ‘That little forehead is inhabited by a tenacious will and a love of prey. Yet, in the lower part of this disturbing countenance, where quivering nostrils breathe the unknown and the impossible, bursts, with inexpressible grace, the laughter of a wide mouth, red and white and alluring, that makes one dream of the miracle of a superb flower blooming on a volcanic soil.’60 With this laugh, Nancy appears to enact, in the sense that Alain Badiou has opposed, the suture of philosophy and the poem. But at the same time, this laugh bursts the bubble of pretension that encloses art, philosophy and beauty. As Nancy writes, laughter ‘does not answer to poetry, or for

Figure 20 Joel laughing Source: author’s personal collection.

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poetry – no more than it answers to representation or for representation.’61 Rather, the laugh marks the vulgar (as belonging to the common people) event of the unmaking of both aesthetic and philosophical inscription. As the motivating force in Baudelaire’s poem, the laugh answers its presenting title – the desire to paint – ‘as a desire to present the disappearance of the thing of art in its very presence’.62 The vulgar laugh of the prostitute, to whose restless countenance the artist has prostituted himself, thus makes a mockery of what would seek to contain it, and so rends the suture between philosophy and the poem. Nancy recommends repeatedly that we should not make too much – or even anything – of laughter as the repetition of bursting and the bursting of repetition. But in doing so, he is able to make much of it as the archetypal phenomenon of what comes to presence: ‘presence laughs: it laughs at coming into presence without intention and consequently without presentation other than its coming, preceding all presence, beyond all presence.’63 In thinking on the laugh, it is difficult to resist what Nancy prohibits: the poetic and philosophical revolution of its breaking out. David Appelbaum’s phenomenology of voice is more circumspect and suspicious with regard to the laugh, which it passes over briefly as ‘rich uncle to the cough’, considerably more manipulable and so more dishonest, ‘dubbed with ego’.64 Yet there is a nascent typology of the cough, as much as there is of the laugh in all expressive manifestations, whether divine or desultory, sarcastic or mocking, innocent or demonic. Whilst its interruptive effect is easily recruited to the cause of argument and dialectic, the laugh need not be assigned to the equivocal and intermediate position between a subaltern vocality and the civilized realm of speech and language. Whatever use is made of it, as Nancy intimates, the laugh retains the power to explode the name as the process of identification and containment, making a mockery of thought’s attempt to seize its own essence. It also, as in the child’s laugh – the laugh as infancy – permits a voicing that is as free of desire and suffering as is momentarily possible. Laughing is a way we make company between ourselves, an essential social lubricant. Not merely a tactic that regulates relations of power, it is a sensation that pursues its own particular form of life. Surprisingly, most of the literature on laughter does not in fact deal with laughter at all, but with theories of comedy and humour. Almost all philosophers, apart from the vivid exception of Bataille, have all treated laughter in this way, in which the actual event is quickly forgotten. Curiously, of all the canonical philosophers, it is the self-lacerating Kierkegaard who has the most phenomenal encounter with the power of laughter, as narrated in Repetition, and at a performance of a theatrical farce, no less.65 But even he is ultimately less taken with laughter itself than with farce, quality acting and the impossibility of repetition. One writer who does actually deal with laughter per se is the almost forgotten seventeenth-century physician to the king of France, Laurent Joubert. Beyond his best-known work, the Traité du Ris (Treatise on Laughter), Joubert’s interests

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included the urinary system, something that inflects his philosophical outlook in general. He dispenses with issues of comedy and humour in a few short introductory chapters before elaborating his true subject – from a modern perspective, an archaic physiology of laughter itself, its passages and conduits, its causes and effects.66 His concern is not with the etiology of jokes but ‘whence it comes that one pisses, shits and sweats by dint of laughing, that one can faint from laughing and whether one could die of it’, not with a Hobbesian theory of laughter as the manifestation of a sense of social superiority, but with ‘six problems of tickling, whether laughter from tickling is true laughter and why it is that great laughers easily become fat’.67 In fact this astonishing text is an extended phenomenology of laughter’s unaccommodation of the human, without any requirement for making laughter signify at all as part of an intentional act. Joubert is well aware of the conscious and unconscious motives in acts of laughter – he is just not interested in them. For Joubert, laughter is a vital force that opens the body on to the world, breaks up the speaking voice, opens the mouth, stretches the lips, brings tears to the eyes, makes the face flush and the neck veins swell, vibrates, shakes and finally threatens the entire bodily organism, resulting, if unchecked, in weeping, fainting and even death. Unlike Robert Provine, an American neuroscientist and laughter expert, Joubert does not want to explain it – dedicated phenomenologist that he is, he simply wants to describe it.68 Provine, who makes the study of laughter into a serious and professionally respectable activity, skips over Joubert, even though the latter’s approach is more in keeping with his own than anyone else who has dealt with the phenomenon of laughter. He also explicitly ignores laughspeak, that everyday blend of talking and laughing, in favour of the laughter which punctuates social intercourse. Students of performance might want to be wary of a theory that posits non-verbal utterances simply as vocalic emblems of textual punctuation. Perhaps laughspeak is excluded because, like other paralinguistic utterances, laughter in its protean manifestations does indeed contaminate speech, more so than it interrupts it. It does so in a way that upsets the efficacy of an adjudication that wishes to allocate each participant his or her own speech acts. In laughspeak, the voice blatantly betrays its role as the apparently neutral medium for the message of an interior speech. In a dry, tight-lipped mode of talking best considered as communication, the transmission of the facts with minimum of noise, even a smile interferes, drawing back the lips to reveal first the teeth, and then the mouth as a cavity, a damp and resonant chamber filled with the lability of the tongue, an opening through which all kinds of matter and sound pass, offering glimpses of the glottis and throat beyond. As laughspeak gives way to laughter, the face which normally individuates, communicates and socializes gives way to the phenomenological face, made up of discrete elements, an assemblage of affects, becoming impersonal, even inhuman. This face, opening up the passage to the chest and lungs and the rest of the

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body, becomes the portal of a resonant cavity. To misappropriate Richard Foreman’s description of his own theatre, it makes the entire human organism into a reverberation machine, propagating its internal acoustics through its orifices, inducing them in other bodies. Provine assents to this notion in suggesting that ‘at this level, the group can be viewed as a superorganism, with each individual being a sensory and motor organ of the whole, contributing to the well-being of the group and sharing vicariously in its collective experience.’69 However, this is a rather cosy notion of the self-communing of community, one which sits uncomfortably with the analysis of community proposed by a philosopher such as Jean-Luc Nancy, for whom laughter is something more abyssal and not to be surrendered to anything so rational as the comprehension of an evolutionary biology. As a resonating force, a Joubertian laughter does indeed provoke more laughter. It is a leavening, something good, an affirmative action. Yet it does not work an identification that equates having a voice with having a say, a vocal presence that would guarantee being heard. Laughter works a kind of dissemination, a contagious mingling between our monadic persistence in individuation, which gives way not simply to collective well-being but to a certain violent degradation: the laugh as a form of frightening selfdefacement, the face distorted in a disturbing rictus which annihilates a Simmelian unity. The association of laughter with the demonic (the inverse of the ‘holy laughter’ found in various religious movements in history, such as Wesleyan Methodism or the cult surrounding Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh in the 1960s) manifests in the cliché of deranged behaviour – as in the cackling witch or the giggling psychopath. Yet the fate of Gywnplaine in Victor Hugo’s melodramatic novel The Man Who Laughed (played in a later 1928 film version by one of the most expressive of all the actors of ‘silent’ era of cinema, Conradt Veidt), or the Baron in William Castle’s 1961 horror movie Mr. Sardonicus, manifests the fearful elision of the laugh and the grimace. As if in a grotesque parody of the already monstrous icon of the masks of tragedy and comedy, both characters have their faces carved into permanent broad, gaping grins, the first for being the son of an insurrectionary rebelling against monarchist despotism, the second for attempting to retrieve a winning lottery ticket from the grave of his dead father.70 For these personae, the punishment for transgressing the boundaries of what is proper is the imposition of an invariant identity – both characters become entirely determined by their defacement – ‘written’ on to the face as the ghastly visual counterpart to a vocal sound of pleasure, denying them the possibility of a pathognomics, of ever differing from themselves. This possibility is incipient in all laughter, which is why a strictly rational sensibility prefers the ‘poker’ face as the inscrutable sign of self-preservation. Throughout his work, Bataille is open to a similar elision of pain and pleasure, the ugly and the beautiful, to the terrorizing force of a thought

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or feeling that becomes carried away with itself – and to all the political problems that such an openness brings with it. As Bataille suggests, in laughter there are two rudimentary structures: spectacle – that of the one who laughs – and compenetration – the laughter that I catch from the other, that cracks me up.71 But if laughter’s ‘unworking’ does not individuate, it nevertheless singularizes. Is it not possible to identify someone purely by their laugh, as their primitive vocal signature, even if, as Provine suggests, the laugh as a sonic phenomenon is largely stereotypical due to the limitations of the human vocal apparatus?72 This does not mean that the laugh cannot be manipulated, false, artificial, cruel, sarcastic or derisory. On the contrary, this possibility is essential if laughter is to happen to us in the ways described above – but it is not prior to the basic exposure and opening that laughter initiates. Levinas has characterized the ethics of exposure with his nonphenomenology of the face. Immanent to this face is an impassive, austere and penetrating glance – exposed and vulnerable but also accusatory and persecuting – counterbalanced only by a romantic erotics of the aimless caress. Levinas’s face is so full of the burning light of infinite obligation, it becomes almost unbearable even to glance at. In dealing with something like laughter, this accusatory face of the other is animated by an erratic ardour that plays in and out of the cavities that invaginate its surface and reverberates in my own. The face becomes not the focus of a (visual) recognition but the threshold for an encounter that gets under the skin and into the flesh, bones and guts: a dramaturgy of decomposition that makes and unmakes our relations, without resorting simply to a semiotic repertoire of variable cultural norms.

10 Peals of Appeal

(WILL presses a button on tangled bundle of batteries, wires and a doorbell. The bell rings.) SUE: Did you hear that bell ringing? WILL: No, no, you misunderstand me, the subject is accompanied by the ringing of the bell. (Rings bell.) The bell marks an entry. There are strings attached. (Rings bell.) The bell makes an entry. Look, here are the strings.1 Laughter peals. In considering what else peals, aside from laughter, it seems that only bells and thunder reverberate in such a fashion: a neat trinity of soundings, the human, the technological and the natural, each more resonant and commanding than the last, variations upon the theme of the humanesque. What the thunder says is open to many interpretations according to folklore and mystical wisdom, but one suggests that a good pealing of bells helps to ward it off.2 The bell has a special resonance for both theatre and philosophy. It rings out the penultimate minutes before the commencement of the spectacle, an interruption which grows increasingly strident and insistent as the appointed hour approaches. Echoing the sound that summons the child to the lesson, its ringing assumes an equally authoritative, if not authoritarian tone, urging the spectator to take his or her allotted place. The ringing of the bell appeals to the spectatorial conscience: witnesses are required. As part of his manifesto for the theatre, Alain Badiou calls, in a not entirely mock-serious fashion, for the restitution of intervals, a tradition now almost entirely absent outside the theatrical mainstream and the opera.3 Part of the reason for such a measure would be to reinforce through repetition the sense of spectatorial obligation in which the repressed must return to the auditorium over and over. These repeated interruptions of the spectacle also permit a re-experiencing of the event of commencement or opening of the performance, points of suspension explored in Chapter 2. The Victorian actor Henry Irving 184

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sealed his celebrity status with his many performances during 1872–73 as Mathias in the melodrama entitled The Bells, an adaptation from a French drama known as The Polish Jew, in which the lead character is haunted by the sound of the bells of the horses belonging to the itinerant Jew whom he has murdered. The pealing of these bells appeals only to Mathias’s guiltstricken conscience, since it occurs only in his mind, leaving the other characters to wonder at his sanity and an audience to marvel at Irving’s evidently striking histrionics. John Caputo consistently discovers the motif of the conscience-calling bell in his encounters with the philosophers of obligation, ranging from the summoning force of the pealing bell evoked by Lyotard to the philosophy of call and response, Klang and Anklang, as well as the ‘cowbells that sound the silent peal of Being’, in Heidegger.4 Derrida too makes much of the bell, notably in Glas, the text’s title being the French noun for ‘knell’ or ‘toll’.5 Elsewhere, writing ‘otobiography’, he also makes much of the ear in relation to Nietzsche’s metaphorical use of that organ.6 Nietzsche himself evokes the pealing of a bell in his genealogy of morals: Whatever else there is in life, so-called ‘experiences’ – which of us has sufficient earnestness for them? Or sufficient time? Present experience has, I am afraid, always found us ‘absent-minded’: we cannot give our hearts to it – not even our ears! Rather, as one divinely preoccupied and immersed in himself into whose ear the bell has just boomed with all its strength the twelve beats of noon suddenly starts up and asks himself: ‘what really was that which just struck?’ so we sometimes rub our ears afterward and ask, utterly surprised and disconcerted, ‘what really was that which we have just experienced?’ and moreover: ‘who are we really?’ and, afterward as aforesaid, count the twelve trembling bell-strokes of our experience, our life, our being – and alas! miscount them. – So we are necessarily strangers to ourselves. We are not ‘men of knowledge’ with respect to ourselves.7 Like self-estranged humans, bells are notoriously prone to being out of tune due to deficiencies in their design and manufacture – in fact, although bells are ostensibly musical instruments, it is often hard to hear the music in them at all. Like humans, bells can create plangent and disharmonious overtones as well as a comforting bath of sonorous nostalgia. Larger bells often contain hidden flaws that can lead to dramatic events, one of which concludes this exclamatory inventory. In the technical terminology, bells have decidedly anthropomorphic attributes, including throats and waists, lips and crowns. The clapper of a bell resembles nothing more than a giant glottis, flapping around in the dark and musty interior of a reverberant chamber. And, like laughter, when bells peal or toll, they appeal, they call out and interrupt, as well as signal.

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Peal bell-ringing – as opposed to the more straightforward tolling – was and remains a peculiarly English phenomenon. Apart from in parts of Northern Italy, elsewhere bells are rung alone or mechanically as part of a carillon in which they are struck by hammers controlled from a sort of keyboard. Paul Hentzner, a German proto-anthropologist remarked in 1612 that: the people of England are vastly fond of great noises that fill the ear, such as the firing of cannon, beating of drums, and ringing of bells, so that it is common for a number of them that have got a glass in their heads to get up into the belfry and ring the bells for hours together for the sake of exercise.8 This taste for reverberation in ‘the ringing isle’ as Hentzner has it, was subject to a prolonged and merciless attack during the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Not only in England, bell-ringing came to be heard by the municipal powers-that-be and persons of influence as a form of disagreeable noise pollution. With Hillel Schwartz, we might surmise that this newfound intolerance could be attributed to the inevitable processes of urbanization and increased density of new housing close to churches.9 One could also speculate that the erection of stone and brick buildings created resonant cavities in the urban environment in which the ringing reverberated even more loudly, intruding upon the soundscape of expanding capital. Both employers and employees needed their sleep at night and all the uninterrupted hours of the day for industry. As the nineteenth century progressed, Schwartz notes the increasing number of published diatribes, both in Europe and the Americas, against the pealing of bells. In addition to proving a simple annoyance, it seems that excessive or random bell-ringing came to upset the requirements for the proper regulation of the daily rhythms of gathering and dispersal between the domains of work and not-work. Alain Corbin, better known as the social philosopher of smell, has also written a minutely detailed exploration of the rows, wrangles and near-insurrections surrounding the sound, meaning and significance of bells in the French countryside during the nineteenth century.10 There, church bells not only performed a huge variety of social functions but were also the subject of often protracted and violent disputes about who had the right to ring the village bell or to control the frequency and occasions of its pealing. The ringing of church bells today draws at least our momentary attention because it seems oddly superfluous. What for? Resounding to a multiplicity of machine-generated buzzes, bleeps, trills, roars and whines, the contemporary urban soundscape seems better symbolized by the ringing of the mobile phone and its bubble universe of portable personal space rather than any notion of convocation and public gathering emanating from the

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church tower. It would seem that the dominant sense of appellation in the contemporary public domain is still that of ideology as articulated by Louis Althusser, with the exception that his own example, the ‘hey, you’ of the policeman encoding us into the workings of power, might now be substituted with the equally demanding necessity (which knows no boundaries between the realms of work and ‘leisure’) to be permanently available for the taking and making of ‘calls’ and communication.11 Against this, philosophy in a Heideggerian mode has evoked a phenomenology of the purely private address, of a soundless voice that is the call of conscience, but also the voice of vocation itself. In different ways, it has elaborated a set of silent hearings and hearkenings that both trouble and command the being of beings, emanating variously from Being itself, nature, the other, language or the mythical destinies of the state, race or nation. What these forms of address seem to share is their paradoxical silent inwardness: coming from an inchoate, ineffable realm (the process without a subject that is both Althusserian ideology and Heideggerian Being), they address me, and me alone. Singled out, I am responsible for hearing and acting accordingly. But as the one who hears, dwells or thinks, I must also bear the burden of collective salvation, even if no-one else is listening. Here, it is silence as an index of the spiritual and existential, synonymous with solitude, which sounds, the silence encountered earlier as the dialectical pole of music. This may be just as well, since what calls publicly in the name of an all-inclusive community is precisely what critical thought has struggled against, the myth of community as a totality that could respond in unison to a univocal summons. The invocation of the pealing bell has returned us to the ethical dimension of interruption that is also convocation and encounter, which provided the initial impetus for what has been called a theatre-philosophy. As promised, it has departed from theatre, but barely returned there, something I attempt to belatedly redress in the closing chapter.

Declarations By way of conclusion to this series of ‘deleted expletives’, I hazard an attempt to vibrate the boundary between what resounds and is silent, between the raucous reverberation of the commons and a private call to conscience. In instancing the notion of fiasco, I mentioned Nicholas Ridout’s meditation on the undecidable pleasures of laughter in performance.12 In characterizing the ontological status of the laugh (is it a description or a production, a performing or a doing?), he invokes a brief talk given by Jacques Derrida during the 1976 bicentennial celebration of the American Declaration of Independence.13 Of course, Ridout is concerned not with the Declaration per se but with Derrida’s unpicking of its authentication. Derrida himself is fascinated with the textual signing off that enacted that process: a kind of

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buckpassing of authorial responsibility, shifted from Thomas Jefferson, who writes but does not sign, to the representatives who do not sign either, to the ‘good people’ whom Derrida decides do not exist except as a useful fiction. But there was another signing of a sort, both in 1776 and 1976, one intended for everyone and anyone in or out of earshot: the symbolic ringing of a bell, the Liberty Bell. The bell that was supposed to ring on 8 July 1776 was cast at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in East London in 1752, at the heart of a soundscape of bells featured in the famous nursery rhyme, ‘Oranges and Lemons’.14 The Whitechapel bell was supposed to ring, because in the event, it did not sound. It cracked the very first time it was struck during a test after being hung, probably due to casting flaws. Two attempts by Philadelphia foundry workers to melt down and recast the bell came to nothing: no one liked the sound. The Assembly requested that Whitechapel cast a new one, which was subsequently rejected as deficient in tone. So the original Liberty Bell remained where it was in the steeple, and the new Whitechapel bell was placed in the cupola on the State House roof and attached to the clock to sound the hours. The Liberty Bell was rung to call the Assembly together and to summon people for special announcements and events, including for voting, victories in battle, deaths of the famous, and discussions of controversial legislation. In 1772 a petition was sent to the Assembly stating that the people in the vicinity of the State House were ‘incommoded and distressed’ by the constant ‘ringing of the great Bell in the steeple’.15 But it continued to toll for any and every event, most resonantly on 8 July 1776, when it summoned the citizenry for the reading of the Declaration of Independence. Some time thereafter the bell cracked again. There is widespread disagreement about when the first crack appeared, but the final expansion of the crack which rendered the Bell unringable seems to have occurred on Washington’s birthday in 1846. Thus the bell that was supposedly rung in 1976 was not actually rung at all: incarcerated in a high-security glass pavilion, it was tapped with a rubber hammer, as it is every year – the actual ringing was to be heard ‘internally’, in the mind’s ear, a call to conscience if not to guilt. In fact the bell had not sounded for over 130 years with the result that during the early 1900s, since it could no longer call out to the people, the dumb bell was taken to them on a marathon railway tour of the United States. Apparently, there are three known recordings of the Bell, two made in the 1940s for radio stations to play; the third is currently owned by Columbia Records, made in 1959 with the use of special hammers and leather mallets.16 But how did the sound of a bell that was supposedly silenced in 1846 find its way on to audiotape in the 1940s? Exactly which bell is it on those recordings? And is it the sound of a cracked or uncracked instrument and what would be the difference between those two alternatives?

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Figure 21 Thomas Alva Edison with the ‘Old’ Liberty Bell in 1915 Source: Independence Hall Association, Washington, D.C. Copyright by and used with permission of the Independence Hall Association.

The photograph reproduced in Figure 21 is a 1915 picture of Thomas Edison, inventor of the phonograph, standing proudly by the cracked Liberty Bell. In a performative pose that I have come to greatly appreciate over the last few years, he has his hand placed over the crack, as if he is trying to either disguise it or to keep the bell in one piece – but, of course, he also succeeds in drawing attention to it. Are he and his phonographic machine somehow involved in the mysterious archiving and subsequent dissemination of the bell’s sound? After all the cracking, recasting, ill-sounding tones and bad vibrations, there are further acts of authentication, appropriation and mimicry to be unravelled here. If the Liberty Bell – the founding tone of democratic freedom – is now mute, except in its various recordings, but hardly silent in what still reverberates after its cracking up, what sounds, resounds, calls or summons now?

After the Event

These images were taken during a school half-term family holiday to the Cornish coast in England in 2006. Without really understanding the set-up, we had booked into a converted farm that turned out to be regularly used as a holiday retreat for a dozen or so extended families with children aged from 2 to around 16. These families return to the place every year, with some parents continuing a tradition they entered themselves as children decades earlier. For this kind of English holiday destination, though fairly homogeneous in comparison to the typical metropolitan mix of ethnicities, this is a very mixed bunch in terms of class, economic and professional backgrounds. In conversation, they appreciate its rough and ready simplicity and the opportunity to temporarily gather as a community of sorts, who, on the face of it, have very little in common. However, this history appeared to be drawing to a close. The owners of the farm, then in their seventies and needing to downscale, were planning to sell it off piecemeal at market rates, with regular visitors getting first call. But, given Cornwall’s rising status as the second-home location of choice for the affluent from elsewhere in the country, very few of the families visiting that week could even contemplate the gigantic sums involved and so faced the loss of this amenity. As we soon discovered, the tradition of a play written, directed and performed entirely by the children during the regular May half-term break has been informally established. The teenagers come up with an idea and write a script via email during the spring and everything else is sorted out onsite during the holiday week itself. For their production in 2006, the players had chosen to adapt the tale of ‘The Three Little Pigs’ into a new version entitled ‘The Three Little Chavs’.1 While on, reflection, it might not be such a stretch from the stereotypical anthropomorphisms of the ‘pig’ to those of the ‘chav’, my expectation was of a not so subtle and not so funny performance of social prejudice, to which our eldest son, aged 8, had been co-opted as backstage hand and general hanger-about. Over the week, in between surfing in the pouring rain, he would disappear for various rehearsals and was typically less than forthcoming about what went on in them. The venue chosen specifically for this production, in this beautiful seaside spot with many picturesque, site-specific possibilities (including a large abandoned 190

Figure 22 Three Little Chavs, Cornwall, 2006 Source: author’s personal collection.

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stone quarry that many a professional would surely have regarded as a gift), is a bleak, empty, concrete-floored garage. The rain has stayed away and the show is scheduled to start around 4pm. The audience assemble in front of the garage on bring-your-own seating, younger kids squatting at the front, so close they are almost in the garage, adults towards the rear, accompanied by large quantities of wine, beer, crisps and fizzy drinks. The set consists of a few pieces of discarded building materials and grubby chairs. Casting, costuming and performance style draw on an era of British Christmas pantomime that the cast could not logically have witnessed themselves, featuring botched cross-dressing, balloon breasts, big sunglasses and barely comprehensible dialogue. Some performers read their lines off bits of papers, others have partially learned them verbatim, exits and entrances are purely tokenistic, almost sarcastic, as if everyone is just a stand-in for a lazy but ‘proper’ someone else who never bothered to show up, the familiar stock-in-trade techniques of the contemporary post-professional actor in Western ‘experimental’ performance traditions. These non-performers ‘corpse’, dry up, trip and knock things over, miss all manner of beats, but without the slightest sense of shame, embarrassment or concern. In fact, their prime affect is a generous, confident indifference. But this is not a studied casualness, rather a type of detachment that might pass as ‘philosophical’. What has to be done, has to be done. We just have to do this, get through it, taking as long as it takes, with as many mistakes as may come along. Who cares? Who’s really watching anyway? We don’t mind and we know you don’t mind either. Spectators of all ages continue their own conversations; some wander off completely into the surrounding gardens or into the cottages for some more glasses. However, the adapted plot is utterly transparent in its ruthless Brechtian simplicity: single Mother Chav cannot cope with her recalcitrant three little chavs in her owner-occupied council flat, so throws them out to make their own way. Alone in her home, she becomes depressed and suicidal. The Wolf, rebranded as a gang leader-cum-property developer with paedophiliac tendencies, is aided by a curiously upper-class council worker now seeking to permanently separate Mother Chav from her children on grounds of neglect. Playing on her financial and emotional weakness, they persuade her to sell the flat – a placard reads ‘Chav-ville’ – under a 1980s-style government incentive scheme, but for a miserable sum, effectively leaving her homeless. However, the separated chav children discover the plot, and with the aid of a neighbour-cum-fairy-godmother, join forces and take violent revenge on the Wolf, reclaim their familial home, and are reunited with their mother. The end. Sweets are thrown to the audience, the younger spectators fight in the mud to collect them. Naturally, other parents wielded digital cameras and video recorders as an integral part of their spectatorship. I don’t like to take photographs in any situation, but attending this performance all I could do was photograph, borrowing my son’s camera and surreptitiously wandering around the perimeter of the audience, as if attempting to record some archaic form of soon-to-be-extinct ritual. The performance was equally compelling and repelling in its systematic invocation and dereliction

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of theatrical conventions, both mainstream and avant-garde, and is equal in my memory now to only two or three other performance events I have encountered. And to cope with that ambivalence, I went to work on documenting it – here was some interesting material that I could hopefully make use of, without really understanding why, just as it felt impossible for me to engage with ‘The Three Little Chavs’ as the kind of spectator I am used to being. Of course, to perform as a pseudo-ethnographic image-maker is a particularly affected performance of spectatorship – perhaps the perfect embodiment of what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has described as the spectator with taste, who is confronted with: something that, as it seems to him, puts him back in contact with his innermost truth, yet he cannot identify with it. The spectator’s is the most radical split: his principle is what is most alien to him; his essence is in that which, by definition, does not belong to him. Taste, in order fully to be, has to become separate from the principle of creation; but without genius, taste becomes a pure reversal, that is, the very principle of perversion.2 If we can substitute an eighteenth-century notion of taste with the twentyfirst-century notion of an educated critical awareness, such as might result from a disciplined study of performance, then spectators who literally trade on the value of their critical awareness would appear to be in a compromising position. This is indeed the case in relation – or rather in non-relation – to the performance just described, which would seem profoundly problematic as an example to offer up for intellectual scrutiny. Accepting Agamben’s thesis, the trouble is all too evident – ‘how to spectate’ (without the genius reserved for the principle of creation) – yet without enacting the very principle of perversion, which aims to assimilate the other to its own form of enjoyment. But isn’t the very principle of performance precisely an invitation to do exactly that, to produce and partake in collective forms of enjoyment, however that ambivalent term might be understood? A performance that is neither solicited nor anticipated recruits such a perverse spectator. This figure is then confronted with its own law of desire: in this instance, an encounter with a boundaried collective of sorts rehearsing its own unbinding, non-relation, non-identity, non-belonging via a collective theatrical ‘ritual’, whose very lack of efficacy and entertainment is so clearly the public secret that is both efficacious and entertaining, shared by everyone in its social setting. That idea might be otherwise articulated, say, by describing how this performance had so efficiently embodied the social and economic contradictions of its own situation and grasped the centrality of class, family and property to those same contradictions. Or how it functioned as an ironic theatrical act of mourning for the anticipated dissolution of a rare

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occurrence of a small, self-organizing, non-kinship based pseudo-community, brutally passed off without a trace of melancholia as a throwaway skit barely worth the attention. Or, eschewing any sort of compromise with the cryptic culture of interpretation, this event might be better complemented by some performative writing that might get amongst its affects and effects more sensitively. Or to contribute to what Alan Read (reading Bruno Latour) has recently articulated as a ‘showciology’, an improvised sociology that trades on appearances (theatrical or otherwise), through a description as a common place of the everyday rather than a privileged, special place of art.3 In this understanding, art is just one practice amongst others that might be partaking in a modest ‘reassembling of the social’, evidencing a cultural know-how well in control of its relation to the mixed cultural blessings of performance, rather than making any kind of direct claim for the political. This last possibility holds out the most hope, but as in Read’s own writing in Theatre, Intimacy and Everyday Life, the marvellously prodigious and promiscuous thinking that departs from theatre finds itself piling anomalous example upon example (from cephalopod biology to Colin Powell at the UN to – and closest to my own example above – the school nativity play) in a series in which various attempts to invoke actual instances of theatre art are but insubstantial sideshows which cannot detain the onrush of enthusiasm to expand the collective. But none of these possibilities appears viable or desirable, either at the time looking down on the event with a camera, or now, looking back at what I can’t recall. What follows is simply a start at attempting to reckon with that moment of minor crisis, so often sutured to the condition of being mid-life, when current experience can neither be assimilated by prior understanding nor projected forward into a determinate future. A similar crisis of dissociation, but more elegantly described, seems to have befallen my colleague Joe Kelleher on a different occasion. Meditating on a work by the Spanish live artist La Ribot, he writes of the performers that ‘their world is not our world […] their words, although they look so similar, are not our words […] their laughter has nothing to do with us’ and concludes that: This is an illusion that might persuade us to add to the question ‘How to act?’ a matching question ‘How to spectate?’, if it really is the case that an effect of acting can be enough to separate us so radically from other people that even their most direct statements, their most explicit gestures, become indeterminate for us.4 But Kelleher has much to say about, and in spite of, this predicament, which in other renderings is profoundly symptomatic of the theatre’s basic problem, set out earlier, that of separation and its overcoming. To return to the argument which set the scene for this book’s explorations, if an ethos signifies a way of life held in common, a set of values and attitudes immanent to any

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particular social configuration, then the separation between spectator and actor, passivity and activity, is simply a bad thing. The theatre is unethical in its very constitution, sundering individuals from their collective being together, substituting hollow representations for living action, alienating so-called ‘subjects’ from the means of emancipation from their ostensible subjection, dividing those who move, speak and act from those who sit and remain silent. The philosophical prejudices and prohibitions mounted against the spectacle from Plato to Debord are all united in their accusations against its unethical and politically debilitating nature. In its turn, the theatre has turned this rejection and repression to its own critical advantage, returning everywhere as the repressed radicality of a performative paradigm or a generalized, but critical theatricality that can help animate the sustained period of waiting that characterizes the thinking of the post-communist left in the current political era. Indeed, so familiar is this refrain that it is tempting to think that contemporary critique would surely have found a way to move beyond this particular impasse. But this is an ethico-political-aesthetic dilemma that refuses to go away. For example, as Baz Kershaw puts it plainly in his recent thinking about a sense of immanent crisis that braids together ecologies of theatre and performance with other ecosystems: I have come to think that the production of spectators is the primary business of theatres, regardless of what is onstage, and that possibly in some respects, at least, such business is profoundly anti-ecological. In other words, spectatorship as such, even though there may be many versions of it, historically is probably a major part of the theatre’s contribution to the environmental crisis.5 If, in the age of ecological catastrophism, producing spectators is still the basic problem of performance, then presumably the remedy to address the multitude of ethical and political ills that come with an addiction to spectating might still be, as it was for Plato and Rousseau, to transform actors and spectators into participants. This is evidenced in the ‘relational turn’ discussed briefly in Chapter 2 that has followed swiftly on from its ‘ethical’ predecessor and its concerns with the singularizing force of alterity in contemporary art practice. This turn is now itself receiving an ecological inflection through consideration of the human as inescapably in relation to the constraints and capacities of the biosphere. As in the work of Bruno Latour, this involves a rediscovered contiguity between humans, animals, objects and the material world, in which the operational concepts of ‘nature’ as something external to ‘human nature’ and the ‘social’ as the omnipresent stuff of human belonging have to give way to much entirely different understandings that equally refuse any easy notion of ‘social construction’.6 However, neither Kershaw nor many others writing on theatre and performance would perhaps be fully prepared to embrace Rousseau’s declaration

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for the theatre’s self-abolition in favour of art itself becoming immanent to the expression of collectivity in which ‘the good life’ that art continually anticipates, but also defers, finally comes to pass. This aestheticization of the body politic, freighted with the purified communitarian legacies of twentiethcentury totalitarianism, has become paradoxically – but also paralysingly – problematic. As Kershaw puts it: Biocentric performance events that use an ethically principled immersive participation, transforming spectators into participants – rituals for the ecological era – are most likely to lead to new performance ecologies. But such events can be voraciously oppressive of participants, forcing on them versions of ‘community’ that are fascistic in their virulence.7 Thus the ethical life to come either requires a new participatory art, art’s perpetual self-cancellation, or both. This contemporary paradox of performance – that its aesthetic, ethical and political ambitions are both produced and deferred in an oscillation between art’s absolute autonomy or its absolute dissolution into life – has been perhaps most effectively articulated by Jacques Rancière.8 In line with his arguments for the incalculable political effects of aesthetic procedures, Rancière also opposes any form of teaching based on the division between those in possession of knowledge and those deemed ignorant. Everyone and anyone can acquire whatever knowledge is useful for them in their own way, just as spectators can and must make their own out of whatever is presented to them, independent of any aesthetic prescription. Furthermore, the notion of a ‘critical’ art, which seeks to directly connect the address of the art work either to a specific socio-political determination or to postmodern discourses of the unrepresentable (and to correspondingly ethical courses of political action), has lost whatever purchase it had on the ideological configuration of modernity. Unlike in the early days of critique, a hard core of ideological reality no longer lurks behind the spectacle of appearances, awaiting its unveiling. Today, Rancière implies, everyone knows precisely in which ways he or she is oppressed or repressed: we are all virtuoso participants in the machinations of capital and spectacle. But unfortunately, this knowledge does not necessarily lead to either understanding or action, despite a century of politicized art practice that attempted to persuade its audiences otherwise. In fact, it is only by securing in advance the guilt, complicity and inaction of its willing audiences that ‘critical’ art has been able to sustain itself in spite of the withering away of the wider social and political movements that gave rise to it in the first place. While hostile to ethics as a zone of indisinction that blurs the spheres of politics and aesthetics, Rancière nevertheless offers an implicitly ethical prescription for aesthetic practice, which can sketch new dissensual

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configurations of what can be seen and who can articulate it only on the paradoxical condition that it does not anticipate its meanings, affects or effects. This is achieved precisely by not attempting to dissolve the boundaries between actor and spectator, art and life. Against Deleuze and with Kant, art must once again proceed to articulate the aesthetic as that ‘which is without any concept’ and which advances only by retracing the shifting line that separates art from non-art, rather than seeking to cancel itself out in a merger with life (as via the succession of avant-gardes from Dada onwards) or by a retreat to the melancholy discourse of the unrepresentable within a generalized regime of ‘the state of exception’ (Agamben), an ethics of alterity (Levinas, Derrida) or an aesthetic of the sublime (Lyotard), all which interminably await a new basis for a community that is ‘to come’. This preference for an art of engaging disengagement finds echoes in much contemporary writing on theatre, whose ethical and political potential is said to properly emerge at the point at which it abandons ethics and politics in the more or less familiar formulations its has accrued to date.9 What Rancière appears to demand of art is that it simply leave the spectator to his or her own dissensual devices, in much the same way that the properly democratic teacher ought neither to anticipate nor determine the necessary knowledges and desires of the student. In this axiomatic assumption of equality, all education is necessarily self-education, all emancipation is self-emancipation, which may or may not converge with the emancipatory projects of other selves. Truly aesthetic and political acts are thus acts of dis-identification which refuse all invitations to participate in pseudo-utopian experiences of participatory togetherness or the synergetic co-presence of embodied minds bound together in an auto-poetic feedback loop. A similar autodidactic imperative would appear to underpin the impersonal formalism of Badiou’s philosophical system, which has proved particularly amenable to a theatrical thinking. As described earlier, perhaps the most important distinction in his thinking is that between an event and a situation – the local structure of a world as it appears, how it is, the way things are, variably organized by power, difference, opinion and knowledge. But, as Sam Gillespie suggests, this distinction might rest entirely on the ability of ‘a select number of human beings to recognize events’, processes that emerge out of a void in the situation to puncture in and initiate the advent of a truth construed as an ethics of fidelity to the event itself.10 Gillespie has an intriguing recourse to Lacan, one of Badiou’s few stated mentors, to explain the inescapably subjective and affect-laden dimension of events and the so-called truth procedures that arise from them. Functioning in a somewhat analogous way to Barthes’s photographic punctum, what seems important here is a particular ability to recognize that is critical (touched on in Chapter 3), which implies a kind of subject-in-waiting who is set just to one side of an emergent event – a particular kind of spectator, possessed of a particular kind of educated sensibility or susceptibility that can detect this emergence. The event is a

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local collapse in the consistency of appearance, an unbinding of the relations between the elements of a situation. But, although axiomatically universal in its address, not everyone is necessarily able to respond. In this collapse, a very particular sort of ‘aristocratic’ subject is born, phoenix-like and given over to the unpleasure of a non-relation in which the inherent inconsistency of the situation is exposed to the possibility of the new. Part of a political rationale underlying a desire to study – and to teach – performance might well be to produce human beings who can recognize in the world the kind of event formally articulated in Badiou’s philosophy and thus entertain the possibility of entering into a process of fidelity to it – or in other words, to get a life. But this type of pedagogical (relational) imperative is refused both by Badiou and Rancière. The ability to engage in a process of fidelity to an event cannot be something that might be taught. As in the example of the slave interrogated by Socrates about geometry, this is knowledge that, for a properly democratic and universalist philosophy, everyone always already has in their possession. However important it might be in an embodying an ethics of truths or a redistribution of the sensible, the paradoxical lesson of art is that it cannot teach anyone any lessons, either through the dialectics of representational mediation or univocal acts of ethical immediacy. As Peter Hallward points out, for Rancière, Badiou and many of their contemporaries, ‘relation itself often figures as essentially binding, irredeemably contaminated by mastery and the social “weight” of domination.’11 From a theatrical perspective, this refusal of an aesthetics or politics based on any kind of primary relationality or dependency is a profoundly difficult challenge, given that the theatre is based on an axiomatic relation that is paradoxically materialized through the separation of actor and spectator, as well as the production, not just of the individual spectator, but of the public as audience. Part of what I have attempted in this book is to evoke a sense that ‘becoming unaccommodated’ is not an individualized act of dis-identification but an event. This is a process, unfurling from an instant of aberration, in which the social is neither entirely pre-given as a set of ideological norms, nor constructed, produced or assembled, but expressed anew, in the Deleuzian sense explored in Chapter 6. There are some questions of serious interest here – given that term’s derivation from the Latin inter esse, from being between or among – about the ‘transmission’ and organization of knowledges, affects, sensibilities, convictions and decisions, about the new forms of being-in-common that even the relation of non-relation gestures towards. What faces the figure of the critical spectator, caught in something of a crisis when faced with the ethico-political art of non-relation, is not simply a paradox, but an enigma. A paradox is something that can be at least partially understood, its poles delineated, its movements mapped, as Rancière does so convincingly with the paradoxes of ‘political’ art. Paradoxes hold out

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the prospect of a synthesis of sorts, often intuited as a truth ‘deeper’ than that which can be logically deduced from a set of initial propositions. But what makes something an enigma is perhaps the extent to which all understanding slides off its impermeable surface, accessible only by an unfamiliar means belonging to a higher power. Enigmatic moments of art that are both literally and metaphorically opaque acquire particular significance for this type of spectator: the passing wave to a parent from his child in the school nativity play that turns out to be a leave-taking, rather than a greeting; the ill-humour of a performed laughter that has neither apparent cause nor object; the darkly illuminated limbs of a dancer arranged to disorganize the coherence of the human body; an artwork in which an illuminated text on the surface of a black box describes the unviewable photograph of atrocity enclosed within it, or the much referenced ‘Auschwitz’ scene in Societas Raffaello Sanzio’s 1999 production, Genesi, in which white-costumed children undertake obscure actions behind several layers of white scrim.12 In all these examples, and others like them, the enigma is also a seduction, (and nowhere more so than in the context of the palpable, physical presences of performance), a thing of fascination, pleasure and promise whose origin and destination remain mysterious not only to the spectator, but also to the actor: an effectively enigmatic performance is one that does not quite know what it is doing and which is ‘eventalized’ by one who does not know quite what to make of it. What is critical here, and perhaps also something of a crisis (a moment of suspension or hesitation before a future that is severed from the past) is the fact that this enigma can no longer be pedagogically decoded – to mean this or that, or both this and that – but simply witnessed, evoked and described. Its workings are to be revealed, but the ultimate destination of its address left open to whatever might be made of it by anyone and everyone. The enigma manifests as a kind of unwilled non-sense that offers itself as both an affective experience of unknowing, but also an opening to an alternative future that seemed to have been ruthlessly foreclosed by the representative powers of mimesis. What is perhaps even more problematic for the critical possibilities of a spectatorial witnessing that can recognize the enigma as event is that a ‘good’ witness, a properly ethical witness, is someone who neither chose to witness what they saw, nor can willingly offer testimony that is able to properly substitute for the witnessed event itself. Like the artwork itself, the spectator as witness who is obliged to speak of an experience in which ‘something happened’ must refuse any easy or direct connection between perception, affection, signification and action. But he or she must somehow attest to the fact of something having happened that ‘confronts its spectators or participants with something radically other, something that could not be assimilated by their existing understanding’.13 At the same time, the task is precisely not to assimilate it through an existing understanding of their own.

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While for Badiou, it is the task of philosophy itself to think together the eventful nature of its four separate conditions (science, love, politics and art), I would suggest that it is this kind of theatrically derived sense of spectatorship, the suffering of a non-relation, that has produced some of the most resonant thinking which sets out to reclaim the ethical or political specificity of the theatrical, even as it refuses previous iterations of the politics or ethics of the aesthetic. Put simply, thinking strictly through theatre, which is by no means limited to thinking about theatre, permits a thinking of the evental truth of non-relation. But could it be that this thinking is, ultimately, restricted to such a truth by the primacy of the observer that conditions the theatrical experience? This appears to be the case with regard to the example of a specific encounter with theatrical performance with which I began this chapter and which has otherwise been, as promised, altogether tangential to this book’s pathognomical wandering. But in a number of local discourses, thinking through theatre has gained a renewed prominence over and against a pervasive globalization of performance.14 From this perspective emerges a particular set of issues: participatory art practice is typically problematic, ineffective and manipulative; audience enjoyment of and engagement with these forms of manipulation is either frustrated, ideologically suspect or simply and unproductively embarrassing; theatre in particular, art in general, has no real leverage on the world and its lack of instrumentality is precisely its political point; ‘political theatre’ as such is a category error, a well-intentioned but misguided renewal of an avant-garde tradition that has simply run aground on the shores of another episteme.15 Obviously, these perspectives are not new and are highly contested, as much I suspect by those, including myself, who hold them as by anyone else. Yet it seems we are a long way from theatre as a place where what is made present is, for example, the public as an association of individuals gathered in their heterogeneous and democratic inconsistency, the insurrectionary power of an event, or a set of embodied minds reassembling the social in a utopian moment of engaged or estranged enthrallment. Or perhaps this is exactly what was happening in and around the performing garage in Cornwall that day, drifting into the undecidability of a middling, English spring afternoon, in some peculiar echo of Virginia Woolf’s final novel Between the Acts? Or was the enigma manifest there, what could not be assimilated by a particular form of professional spectating, in fact the dissolution of enigma? And might it be that what remains after that dissolution is neither some bare and unequivocal substructure of an ideological real, nor the impregnation of an underlying layer of the everyday with the power of the enigmatic, but something more obvious? After spending most of this book celebrating the pains and pleasures of interruption, fiasco, collapse and syncope, what I want to suggest, ‘after the event’ of this engagement with some of their multifarious, minor possibilities, is that what was being entertained

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that afternoon is the prescription that the familiar, the ordinary, the obvious, may be all there is we have to go on. Once upon a time, perhaps from around the 1860s to sometime around the present age, this familiar everyday, the everyday of the avant-garde from Surrealism to psychogeography, was also a mystery, the ‘place’ where the uncanny, the overlooked, the unreliable or the otherwise disavowed were experienced as prospering and proliferating outside ‘official’ channels. But does this sense of the everyday still hold that allure – and its seductive aura of the political – today? The ‘lay theatre’ described above seems to have absorbed, reproduced and systematically repudiated the various types of ethical or political rationale put forward for artistic practice, be that the unveiling power of critique, the festivity of collective self-representation, the undoing of the theatrical machinery, the production of ethical enigma, or ‘simple’ pleasure and entertainment. This is precisely not to make a special claim for the aesthetic intelligence of this particular performance, which, as it ‘says’ itself, is all these things and none of them. Instead, it is to remark the way in which its theatrical self-understanding, constituting what we might call (after Marx and others) a general intellect – a kind of unselfconscious common knowledge and capacity, has reached a particular degree of saturation. This is a type of knowledge that is truly ‘common sense’. Today, the general intellect stages a certain type of openness to the world and to an ethos beyond the constraints of the present (typically figured in critical discourse as the eventful overcoming or implosion of the neo-liberal forms of capitalism and representative democracies), but without any clear sense as to the organizational machinery or, to use an alternative Latourian terminology, adequate procedures for reassembling the social that might produce this transition. As in the The Three Little Chavs, stereotypes are refuted, stories acquire new endings and formal (theatrical) conventions can be ignored and inverted, capital is temporarily defeated, another world is possible, or it is in fact already here in pockets and niches of freed-up social space, but unrecognized, ‘we’ are all having a good time, not burning kerosene on a flight to the sun, living the good life on holidays we are both privileged and grateful to get. But at the same time, it also knowingly enacts a kind of normative preservation order in which that alternative is utterly disdained as a liberal myth of ‘radical’ progress, always in plain sight but perpetually receding towards the horizon. One set of stereotypes are replaced by another, a story is just a story, inverted aesthetic conventions do not usurp political conventionality, let there be no illusions about what it means to have our literal or metaphorical place in the sun and at whose expense. We are not the world, we are not the children and we are not the future are some of the peculiar side-effects that appear to emanate from these ‘child’ performers, who clearly communicate that childhood itself has turned out a bit differently to what we, or they, thought it was. In trying to account for the particular sense of spectatorial disarray occasioned by this performance, it is the shuttling between the poles of

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this contradiction (neither paradox nor enigma) that seems significant, an oscillation ‘between something familiar that becomes agitated and something agitated that becomes familiar’.16 What I am arguing towards here is that this oscillation is itself not something ‘radical’ or exceptional – a kind of energetic supplement to life otherwise ruled by inertia and entropy, but ‘familiar’. What is familiar is already in, with and between ‘us’, where ‘us’ is no longer limited by the conventional constraints as to what counts as human, but extends to phenomena that are re-expressed or reassembled in surprising and unfamiliar ways by procedures that do not conform to those of even ‘radical’ aesthetic design and frames of presentation. To conclude prematurely: this condition mitigates against the ontological identification of an extraordinary, ethically charged ‘superpower’ of dissensus or rupture (be that assigned to performance, art in general or anything else) that has been privileged in cultural theory and critique for a considerable period. Badiou goes to great lengths to demonstrate, using advanced mathematics, that the event is produced precisely out of a void in the situation, not something added to it from the outside. Yet it remains hard to shake off its ‘superpower’ aura, something perhaps exacerbated by the militant heroism that is characteristic of the Badiouian style. As Hallward characterizes it, this power takes the form of ‘either indetermination (the interstitial, the hybrid, the ambivalent, the simulated, the undecidable, the chaotic…) or hyper-determination (“infinite” ethical obligation, divine transcendence, unconscious drive, traumatic repression, machinic automation…)’.17 Such forms find expression in the aesthetic or political event as a process of a paradoxical truth, the public conceived as multitude, the infinite obligation to the Levinasian ‘other’, the insurgency of the Lacanian ‘Real’. These are only a few of the figures of supervenient immanence that have been articulated in the hope of providing an opening to a future from the permanent present of ‘business as usual’. In light of the obvious and now familiar and inextricably related crises (ecological, financial, imperial) of repetition that mark the contemporary, this opening seems to be less a response to the Leninist question of ‘what is to be done?, and more a question of ‘how’?17 In seeking a response to the question of ‘how?’, the temptation is to replace the crisis of spectatorship – the privileged gap between knowledge, potential and act – with a strongly prescriptive (or weakly ‘potential’) politics of participation and action. But if that substitution is not simply to replace one pole of the paradox of the spectator with its ‘ethical’, activist other, then ‘how to spectate?’ still ought to be a contradictory question that usefully unaccommodates us.

Notes Introduction 1. Barbara Stafford provides an excellent introduction to the history of pathognomics in her Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in the Enlightenment, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991. It seems that pathognomy did not have to wait long for few, but ardent followers in the wake of the successes and excesses of physiognomy. The first explicit pathognomists appear to have been the Scottish physician James Parsons (1705–1770) and the German polymath Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799), both critical of Lavaterian physiognomics at conceptual and ethical levels. 2. Stafford, Body Criticism, p. 466. 3. Ibid., p. 121. 4. Ibid., pp. 126–7. 5. Something shared with the phenomenologist, whose (typically self-contradictory) motto might be ‘Prepare to be surprised’. 6. I borrow this phrase most immediately from Steven Connor, which he uses in a plea for critical writing to ‘face out and profit from the enfeebling of metacritical expertise; one ought sometimes to be able not to be able to describe what one is doing, just as we could do with getting better at not being as good at what we do’ (Steven Connor, ‘A Few Don’ts (And Dos) By A Cultural Phenomenologist’, http:// www.bbk.ac.uk/english/skc/cultphen.htm (accessed 27 Sept. 2009). However, the phrase originates in an earlier and iconic theatrical source, appearing as it does in King Lear (Act III, Scene IV), in which Lear remarks of Edgar in the guise of Poor Tom: ‘Thou art the thing itself;/Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor bare, / Forked animal as thou art’. 7. I am borrowing Alain Badiou’s determination of the task of philosophy (discussed later) as the gathering together of what he calls ‘truth processes’ in these four domains (Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy Followed by Two Essays: “The (Re)Turn of Philosophy Itself” and “Definition of Philosophy”, trans. Norman Madarasz, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999). 8. Alain Badiou, Rhapsodie pour le Théâtre, Paris: Imprimeries Nationales, 1990. Translated into English as ‘Rhapsody for the Theatre’, trans. Bruno Bosteels, Theatre Journal 49, 1990, pp. 187–238. 9. See, for example, Alain Badiou, ‘Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque’, in Constantin Boundas and Dorothy Olkowski, eds, Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy, New York: Routledge, 1994; and Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. 10. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham, New York: Continuum, 2006; and Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II, trans. Alberto Toscano, New York: Continuum, 2009. 11. Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy. 12. For example, he is the pivotal philosophical figure in Nicholas Ridout’s Theatre & Ethics, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 203

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13. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or, Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1998. 14. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969. 15. Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis, The Hague: Nijhoff, 1978; and De l’évasion, Paris: Fata Morgana, 1982 (first published in French in 1935), and translated as On Escape, trans. Bettina Burgo, Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 2003. 16. In particular, see Alphonso Lingis, Foreign Bodies, New York: Routledge, 1994; The Imperative, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998; and Dangerous Emotions, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. 17. Michel Tournier, Friday, trans. Norman Denny, New York: Doubleday, 1969. 18. Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin, New York: Zone Books. 1990, p. 303. 19. For differing perspectives on this topic, see, for example, Terry Eagleton, After Theory, London: Penguin, 2004; and Derek Attridge and Jane Elliott (eds), Theory After ‘Theory’, London: Routledge, 2010.

Chapter 1 Strains of Thought 1. Herbert Blau, ‘Rehearsing the impossible: The insane root’, in Patrick Campbell and Adrian Kear, eds, Psychoanalysis and Performance, London and New York: Routledge, 2001, p. 25. 2. Peggy Phelan, Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories, London and New York: Routledge, 1997, p. 12. 3. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, London and New York: Routledge, 1993. 4. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge, 1990; Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, New York: Routledge, 1993; Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, New York and London: Routledge, 1997; The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. 5. See Vikki Bell, ‘Mimesis as Cultural Survival’, Theory, Culture and Society, 16, 1999, pp. 133–61; Jane Campbell and Janet Harbord, ‘Playing it Again: Citation, Reiteration or Circularity?’, Theory, Culture and Society, 16, 1999, pp. 229–39. 6. See the interview between Bell and Butler in ‘On Speech, Race and Melancholia’, Theory, Culture and Society, 16, 1999, pp. 163–74. 7. Ibid., p. 166. 8. Judith Butler, Undoing Gender, London and New York: Routledge, 2004, p. 1. 9. Most insistently by Alan Read in his Theatre, Intimacy and Engagement: The Last Human Venue, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 10. Phelan, Unmarked, p. 180. 11. Butler, Excitable Speech, p. 155. 12. Phelan, Unmarked, p. 177. 13. Ibid., p. 18. 14. Phelan, Mourning Sex, p. 150. 15. Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other and Additional Essays, trans. Richard A. Cohen, Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1987, p. 13. 16. This tendency is apparent in a number of essays in Ludivine Allegue, Simon Jones, Baz Kershaw and Angela Piccini, eds, Practice-as-Research In Performance and

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17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

24.

25.

26. 27.

Screen, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. A robust and sceptical response is offered in John Freeman, Blood, Sweat and Theory: Research through Practice in Performance, Farringdon, Libri Publishing, 2010. Simon Jones, ‘The Courage of Complementarity: Practice-as-Research as a Paradigm Shift in Performance Studies’, in Allegue et al., eds, Practice-as-Research In Performance and Screen, p. 49. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling & Repetition: An Essay in Experimental Psychology, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983, p. 131ff. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Politics and the Arts: Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theatre, trans. Allan Bloom, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1960. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, both trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, London: Athlone Press, 1986. Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin, New York: Zone Books, 1990. Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘The Deleuzian Fold of Thought’ in Paul Patton, ed., Deleuze: a Critical Reader, Oxford, UK, and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996, p. 110, emphasis added. See Laura Cull’s astute introduction to Deleuze and Performance, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009, p. 2. As Cull suggests, ‘One Manifesto Less’ is the central Deleuzian text for theatre and performance studies, although I am less persuaded by its rhetoric of the radical and transformative. The essay appears in English translation in Timothy Murray, ed., Mimesis, Masochism, Mime: Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, New York: Viking Press, 1977, p. 367. Over and against his later assertion in ‘One Less Manifesto’ that the theatre of the future ‘will surge forward as something representing nothing but what presents and creates a minority consciousness as a universal-becoming’ (Gilles Deleuze, ‘One Manifesto Less’, in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, p. 256), we should also note an earlier conclusion: ‘It is strange that aesthetics (as the science of the sensible) could be founded on what can be represented in the sensible. True, the inverse procedure is not much better, consisting of the attempt to withdraw the pure sensible from representation and to determine it as that which remains once representation is removed (a contradictory flux, for example, or a rhapsody of sensations)’ (Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, London: Athlone Press, 1994, p. 56). A specifically representational theatre is perhaps as philosophically inconceivable and practically impossible as the utopian and phantasmic theatres that have informed the theatrical avant-garde’s own ‘impossible’ attempts to escape the gravitational force of representation and mimesis. See Martin Puchner, ‘The Theater in Modernist Thought’, New Literary History, 33 (3), Summer 2002, pp. 521–32. See Brian Holmes, ‘The Flexible Personality: Towards a New Cultural Critique’, 16Beaver Group, http://www.16beavergroup.org/pdf/fp.pdf, 2001. Paulo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito and Andrea Casson, New York: Semiotext(e), 2004.

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28. Ibid., p. 61. 29. The obvious landmarks here are Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, and London, 2000; and their Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, London: Penguin Putnam, 2004. 30. The work of Jacques Rancière is particularly compelling in this respect, along with that of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. 31. Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater, Berkley, CA, and London: University of California Press, 1985, p. 25.

Chapter 2 Points of Suspension 1. See the PICASSO Experiment website at http://www.picassoexperiment.ca (accessed 22 April 2010). 2. Herbert Blau, The Audience, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990, p. 40. 3. See Immanuel Kant, ‘On a Newly Arisen Superior Tone in Philosophy’, in Peter Fenves, ed. and trans., Raising the Tone of Philosophy: Late Essays by Immanuel Kant, Transformative Critique by Jacques Derrida, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993, pp. 51–81; Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. 4. John Caputo, Against Ethics: Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation With Constant Reference to Deconstruction, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993, pp. 27–8. 5. Blanchot, Writing of the Disaster, p. 3. 6. ‘Bologna’, Oxford English Dictionary, J. A. Simpson and E. S. Weiner, eds, 2nd edn, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. 7. Nicholas Ridout, ‘Who does Cathy Naden think she is?’, unpublished research paper, first given at the American Society for Theatre Research Annual Conference, CUNY Graduate Center, New York, November 2000, p. 3. 8. This particular theme and related theatrical phenomena receive excellent treatment in Nicholas Ridout’s Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), perhaps a kind of ‘companion’ text to this one, but whose more timely publication arrived some years after this chapter was completed and which I have – hopefully wisely – not attempted to retrospectively supersede. Ridout’s concerns are very much with the stage and various breakdowns and suspensions of its mimetic machinery, sustained by the kind of focus and commitment to the theatre that I have found entirely impossible. 9. See Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986; and, for a more recent evocation, Esther Leslie, ‘ShudderShutter-Shatter’, Animate Projects, http://www.animateprojects.org/writing/ essays/e_leslie_2, 2009. 10. Freidrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Viking, 1954, pp. 131–2. 11. Ibid., p. 127. 12. Blau, The Audience, p. 334. 13. Man on Wire, dir. James Marsh, Icon Home Entertainment, 2008 [DVD]. 14. Blau, The Audience, p. 334. 15. Ibid. 16. Phelan, Unmarked, p. 172.

Notes 207 17. Ibid. 18. Lingis, Foreign Bodies, p. 32. 19. Such an act of separation also founds the intellectual or academic perspective: those who reflect on the world, studying and observing its forms of life (even their own), necessarily become its spectators. Even the most avowedly phenomenological or performative methodology cannot escape this self-observing constitution. 20. Blau, The Audience, p. 123. 21. Tim Etchells, Certain Fragments: Contemporary Performance and Forced Entertainment, London: Routledge, 1999, pp. 64–5. 22. I have explored the ethics and politics of spectatorship and passivity elsewhere (Simon Bayly, ‘Theatre and Public: Badiou, Ranciere, Virno’, Radical Philosophy, 157, 2009, pp. 20–9). 23. Blau, The Audience, p. 124. 24. Peter Handke, Offending the Audience/Self-Accusation, trans. Michael Roloff, London: Methuen, 1971. 25. Stanley Cavell, ‘King Lear: The Avoidance of Love’, in The Cavell Reader, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996, p. 154. 26. Ibid., p. 150. 27. This phenomena goes back over a decade at least. Some of the performances in question are Richard Maxwell (USA), House; Reckless Sleepers, In the Shadow; Zuidelijk Toneel Hollandia (Netherlands), Voices; and Forced Entertainment, First Night, all seen in London during 2000–01. Forced Entertainment’s Bloody Mess (2006) features an extended scene which attempts to list various types of silence before enacting one. Jerome Bêl’s serendipitously entitled The Show Must Go On, has proved a particular point of reference in this respect. Although there is no silence, the initial six or seven minutes of the performance take place in darkness to the sound of well-known pop tunes (which makes up the soundtrack for the entire piece which featured no spoken text), after which the command of the lyric of a Beatles’ tune, Come Together, was dutifully obeyed by 19 performers, who duly filed on to the bare stage and simply stood facing the audience for the rest of the track (and for a considerable portion of the rest of the performance). 28. Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater. Berkley, CA, and London: University of California Press, 1985, p. 117. 29. Ibid., p. 119. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Etchells, Certain Fragments, p. 69. 33. Ibid., p. 64. 34. Forced Entertainment appear to have managed to almost single-handedly elevate ‘failed’ performance into a sub-genre all of its own within the culture of contemporary British theatre and thus have now to negotiate the problem that arises when failure becomes the victim of its own success. 35. John McKenzie, Perform of Else: From Discipline to Performance, London and New York: Routledge, 2001.

Chapter 3 Instants of Affection 1. Phelan, Unmarked, p. 149. 2. Marvin Carlson, Performance: A Critical Introduction, London and New York: Routledge, 1996, p. 199.

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3. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, Paris: Les Presses du Reel, 1996; Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art, Berkley, CA, and London: University of California Press, 2004; Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, London and Cambridge, MA: ZKM and MIT Press, 2004. 4. Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005; Erika Fisher-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance, trans. Sasyka Jain, London: Routledge, 2008. 5. An English introduction to the project can be found at www.evensfoundation.be/ downloads/campementurbain(anglais).pdf. I use this example because it is one also used by Jacques Rancière, whose ‘theatrocracy’ is discussed later, in a recent consideration of aesthetic separation. See Jacques Rancière, ‘Aesthetic Separation, Aesthetic Community: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art’, Art and Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods, 2(1), http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/ v2n1/rancière.html, 2008. 6. Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1989; Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1989. 7. Nancy, The Inoperative Community, p. 1. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., p. 2. 10. Ibid., p. 23. 11. Ibid., p. 28. 12. Ibid., p. 10. 13. Ibid., p. 11. 14. Blau, The Audience, p. 33. 15. Nancy, The Inoperative Community, p. 31. 16. Ibid., p. 39. 17. Ibid., pp. 40–1. 18. Ibid., pp. 80–1. 19. Auguste Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, ‘The Glory Machine’, in Cruel Tales, trans. Robert Boldick, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963. 20. Ibid., p. 108. 21. These terms derive from Badiou’s complex ontology, set out systematically in Being and Event (published in French in 1988, but not translated into English until 2006). Rather than attempt to summarize the Badiouian system in detail, I have let the terms stand as they are, hoping that something of their meaning and significance is evident within the context of my surrounding discussions. It should be noted that Badiou’s primary application of his theory of eventful truthprocesses is the realm of politics and it is at this level that most commentators approach his philosophy, leaving aside his work on theatre. However, as I have indicated, Badiou’s Rhapsodie pour le Théâtre and comments elsewhere function as a condensed, ‘applied’ version of his entire theory. 22. Alain Badiou, Rhapsodie pour le Théâtre, Paris: Imprimeries Nationales, 1990, p. 11. 23. Ibid., p. 47; my translation, emphasis in original. 24. Jean-François Lyotard also provides a similar understanding of the event in the last chapter of his The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges van den Abbeele, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. It might not be an exaggeration to suggest that ‘the event of the event’ has become the hope for the salvation, or at least renewal, of contemporary French philosophy as a whole.

Notes 209 25. Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy, p. 149. 26. Julia Kristeva’s use of the term in her feminist poetics denotes precisely this variety of meaning, over and against its more normative use with regard to the science of signs. See Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller, New York and Oxford: Columbia University Press, 1984. 27. A notorious, but by no means isolated, instance of such an outbreak occurred during 1962–64 among girls in different Tanzanian and Kenyan convent schools. Over a thousand girls were sent home, only to pass on their condition to their friends and relatives, with males being little affected. See Robert Provine, Laughter: A Scientific Investigation, New York: Viking, 2000, pp. 130–1. 28. Phelan, Mourning Sex, p. 54. 29. Ibid., p. 17. 30. Alphonso Lingis, The Imperative, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. 31. Ibid., p. 181. 32. Ibid. 33. Catherine Clément, Syncope: The Philosophy of Rapture, trans. Sally O’Driscoll with Deirdre M. Mahoney, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994, p. 5. 34. In his ‘stress upon minutiae, sovereignty of the accidental’ as defining of disaster, Blanchot enigmatically suggests that disaster, however ultimately catastrophic, always springs up from what is subtle and indiscernible rather than what is monumental or awesome (Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, p. 3), as it was in the case of the 1986 Challenger space shuttle explosion, whose cause was traced back to a single defective rubber seal, an event which provides Jon Mackenzie with the basis for an entire performance-philosophy (Mckenzie, Perform or Else). 35. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Hill & Wang, 1981. 36. Ibid., p. 28. 37. Ibid., p. 26. 38. Ibid., p. 27. 39. André Bazin, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, in What Is Cinema?, Vol. I, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. 40. Paul Willemen, Looks and Frictions, Bloomington: Indiana University Press; and London: British Film Institute, 1994, p. 126, cited in Christian Keathley, ‘The Cinephiliac Moment’, Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, 42, [exclusive online edition], http://www.frameworkonline.com/Issue42/42ck.htm, 2000, unpaginated. 41. Keathley, ‘The Cinephiliac Moment’, unpaginated. 42. Clément, Syncope, p. 14. 43. In Logics of Worlds, Badiou seeks to modify his earlier conception of the ‘situation’ and also of the ‘naming’ of the event as its sole trace left after its actual occurrence. This move would seem to be designed to avoid the potential incoherence provided by the notion of the subject exclusively as the subject faithful to the event, a view which Badiou finds no longer tenable. It is possible to read Badiou’s work prior to Ethics as implying that an event is purely ‘subjective’ whilst simultaneously having to accept that every event is also universal, since there is actually no subject qua subject (in Badiou’s terms) prior to the event itself and thus a notion such as a ‘private event’ is fundamentally meaningless. Bona fide subjects are produced by the process of fidelity to an event. In addition, it would seem that while there is nothing that compels you to become the subject of the same event to which I am bound in an act of fidelity, nevertheless, according to Badiou, this

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44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52.

53. 54.

Notes same event would have to be understood as a valid event by anyone and so all truths/events would be in some sense ‘equal’ (indifferent to differences, as Badiou asserts), despite the fact that ‘what arises from a truth-process […] cannot be communicated […] it must be directly seized by fidelity […] something that happens to you.’ See Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward, London and New York: Verso, 2001, p. 51. Jason Barker, Alain Badiou: A Critical Introduction, London and Sterling, VI: Pluto Press, 2002, p. 80. Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, p. 37. Again, Badiou also suggests that practices other than philosophy contain the potential to manifest the event and its truth-process otherwise than via a naming procedure that is ‘proper’ to philosophy: ‘Does the identification of the procedures of truth always pass through philosophy […] or is it a question of situation, of culture?’ (Badiou, Ethics, p. 139.). How such a possibility avoids the ‘re-suturing’ of philosophy back to its ‘conditions’ is not yet explicit. Badiou, Rhapsodie, p. 116. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, London: The Athlone Press, 1990, p. 149. Ibid., p. 150. One of Badiou’s (not entirely serious) proposals for the renewal of theatre is to make attending theatrical performance a civic duty, failure to do so being ‘punished’ by forfeiting a tax refund offered to those attending at least four times a month. Read, Theatre, Intimacy and Engagement, p. 189. What Derrida’s later texts imply in their use of the logic of the undecidable, is that the problems of political or ethical action are in fact not – and ought not to be – resolvable within the domain of philosophy. This raises the possibility that, strictly speaking, philosophy cannot take responsibility for their resolution, as it has tried to do since assuming the historical burden of the twentieth century in which the thought of, for example, a Heidegger or a Nietzsche is directly correlated with the historical event of Nazism. Here, the obsession with bridgebuilding, which translates into the desire of a certain strain of thought to take responsibility for everything ad infinitum, is revealed as a kind of heroic obstinacy which ignores the tactical possibilities of giving up a full-frontal assault for a provisional detour. Such a deviation reconfigures what is accessible or inaccessible within a given horizon. Badiou, Rhapsodie, passim. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993, p. 87.

Chapter 4 Anomalous Appearances 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

States, Great Reckonings, p. 133. Ibid. Lingis, Foreign Bodies, p. 33. Ibid., pp. 29–30. Ibid., p. 34. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 35.

Notes 211 9. 10. 11. 12.

Ibid., p. 37. Ibid., pp. 37–8. Ibid., p. 34. Timothy Scheie, ‘Performing Degree Zero: Barthes, Body, Theatre’, Theatre Journal, 52, 2000, pp. 161–81. 13. I owe the notion of the ‘infancy of theatre’ to Alan Read, further explored in his meditations on school nativity performance in Read, Theatre, Intimacy and Engagement. 14. Such an anomaly was redoubled in the original German production of Peter Handke’s The Ride Across Lake Constance in which a cast of celebrity German actors of the late 1960s portrayed the heroes and heroines of the German (and early American) cinema as characters.

Chapter 5 The Borrowed Masks of Being 1. Interestingly, as if keen to reinforce this double sense, some scholars of ancient theatre once insisted that the masks themselves functioned as primitive amplifiers for vocal projection, a notion now largely discredited by more contemporary research. 2. Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray and F. Wieck, New York: Harper & Row, 1968, p. 32. 3. A comprehensive survey of thinking on shame is included in Steven Connor, ‘The Shame of Being a Man’, Textual Practice, 15, 2001, pp. 211–30. 4. But, of course, the Buddha is not so easily corralled within such a physiognomy – hence his common figuration as the ‘laughing Buddha’, the one who mocks his own serious pretensions. See James Siegel, ‘Georg Simmel Reappears: “The Aesthetic Significance of the Face”’, Diacritics, 29, 1999, pp. 100–13. 5. Denis Diderot and William Archer, The Paradox of Acting/Masks or Faces?, New York: Hill & Wang, 1957. 6. Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, London: Picador, 1995. 7. Aldo Mosca, ‘A Review Essay on Antonio Damasio’s The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness’, Psyche [online], 6(10), http:// psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v6/psyche-6-10-mosca.html, 2000. 8. Damasio, Descartes’ Error, p. 89. 9. Aleksandr Luriia, The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book About a Vast Memory, trans. Lynn Solotaroff, New York: Basic Books, 1968, pp. 77–8. 10. See, for example, Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View From Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology, New York: Basic Books, 1985. 11. For a lively, non-scientific account from someone with this condition, see Bill Choisser, Face Blind!, http://www.choisser.com/faceblind, 1997–2002. 12. Levinas, Time and the Other and Additional Essays, p. 109. 13. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 66. 14. Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 397–404. 15. Hence the producing studio’s decision to add Harrison Ford’s voiceover to the commercial release of Blade Runner – a film explicitly questioning notions of what it is to be human and how we recognize such a quality – providing an aural confirmation of an authentically human narrative anchor figure which the original film’s rhetorical structure continually lays open to question.

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16. Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. 17. Lingis, The Imperative, p. 204. 18. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p. 40. 19. Ibid. 20. Jacques Derrida, ‘The Violence of Metaphysics’, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978. 21. For instance, Levinas is the only major twentieth-century philosophical figure treated in Nicolas Ridout’s Theatre & Ethics, a choice all the more striking given the brevity required of texts in Routledge’s Theatre & series. 22. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p. 50. 23. Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, trans. Richard A. Cohen, Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1985, pp. 86–7. 24. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p. 194. 25. Ibid., p. 198. 26. David Levin, The Philosopher’s Gaze: Modernity in the Shadows of Enlightenment, Berkeley, CA, and London: University of California Press, 1999, p. 279. 27. Ibid., pp. 281–2. 28. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p. 51.

Chapter 6 Logics of Expression 1. Deleuze, Expressionism, p. 11. 2. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 168. 3. See Spotlight, available at http://www.spotlight.com, and in several printed volumes released annually. 4. Jonathan Cole, About Face: a Natural History of the Face, and an Un-Natural History of Those Who Live Without It, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. 5. Gita Sukthanker, ‘Face Recognition: A Critical Look at Biologically-Inspired Approaches’, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, 2000. 6. An eigenface is the product of digitally resampling images of a large number of human faces to produce a kind of basic digital ‘gestalt’ of a particular aspect of face shape, such as left/right asymmetry, the presence of a beard, etc. 7. I take this phrase from Rivers’s Face Value: Physiognomical Thought and the Legible Body in Marivaux, Lavater, Balzac, Gautier and Zola, Madison, WI, and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994. 8. Johann Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, Designed to Promote the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind. Written in the German Language by John Caspar Lavater. and Translated into English by Thomas Holcroft ...[etc.], 10th edn, London: Tegg, 1858. 9. Lavater, cited in Rivers, Face Value, p. 43. 10. Alphonso Lingis, Phenomenological Explanations, Dordrecht and Boston, MA: M. Nijhoff, 1986, p. 100. 11. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 167. 12. Ibid., p. 168. 13. Ibid., p. 176. 14. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p. 262; Levinas, Ethics, p. 97. 15. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 170. 16. Ibid., p. 171. 17. Ibid., p. 186. 18. Ibid., p. 188.

Notes 213 19. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Birchill and Hugh Tomlinson, London and New York: Verso, 1994, p. 160. 20. Georg Simmel, ‘The Aesthetic Significance of the Face’, in K. H. Woolf, ed., Essays on Sociology, Philosophy and Aesthetics, New York: Harper & Row, 1965. 21. Ibid., p. 277. 22. Ibid., p. 276. 23. Ibid., p. 277. 24. Ibid., p. 104. 25. Siegel, ‘Georg Simmel Reappears’, p. 110. 26. Levinas, cited in Levin, The Philosopher’s Gaze, p. 290. 27. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 188. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., p. 181. 30. Frank Willett, An Introduction to African Art, London: Thames & Hudson, 1970, p. 213. 31. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 190 32. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p. 106. 33. Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, p. 323, emphasis added. 34. Deleuze, The Fold, p. 132. 35. Alan Tormey, The Concept of Expression: A Study in Philosophical Psychology and Aesthetics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971, p. 39. 36. Ibid. 37. For instance, in the 1920s, Valentin Volshoninov (possibly a pseudonym of Mikhail Bahktin according to some) had already offered a thorough critique of this version of the concept of expression: [t]here is no such thing as experience outside the embodiment of signs. Consequently, the very notion of a fundamental, qualitative difference between the inner and the outer element is invalid to begin with. Furthermore, the location of the organizing and formative center is not within (i.e. not within the material of inner signs) but outside. It is not experience which organizes expression but the other way around – expression organizes experience. Expression is what first gives experience its form and specificity of direction.

38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44.

See Valentin Volshoninov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986, p. 85. This text and its alternative approach to expression would seem to have informed that of Deleuze and Guattari, mentioned in passing in a footnote in A Thousand Plateaus (p. 523, n. 5). Alan Trachtenberg, ‘Lincoln’s Smile: Ambiguities of the Face in Photography’, Social Research, 67(1), 2000, p. 1. Deleuze, The Fold, p. 87. Nancy, ‘The Deleuzian Fold of Thought’, p. 14. The English title does not quite afford the possibilities of the French, in which ‘l’évasion’ has overtones of the sense of a more ambiguous, ennui-driven seeking of release from the monotony of everyday life. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 111. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, trans. Claude Lefort, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973, p. 75. Deleuze, The Fold, p. 85.

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Notes

45. See J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2nd edn, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975, pp. 52, 76, 148. 46. Tormey, The Concept of Expression, p. 52. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid., p. 53. 49. Ibid., p. 55. 50. Ibid., p. 59. 51. Deleuze, Expressionism, p. 327. 52. Ibid., p. 333. 53. Ibid., p. 335. 54. The following explication of this triadic structure is based around that made in Robert Piercy, ‘The Spinoza-Intoxicated Man: Deleuze on Expression’, Man and World, 29, 1996, pp. 269–81. 55. My guide here has been David Griffiths, Introduction to Elementary Particles, 2nd rev. edn), Weinheim: Wiley VCH, 2008. 56. Deleuze, Expressionism, p. 105. 57. Ibid., p. 304. A concise elaboration of the concept of expression in the work of Deleuze and Guattari can be found in Brian Massumi, ‘Introduction: Like A Thought’, in A Shock to Thought: Expression after Deleuze and Guattari, ed. Brian Massumi, London and New York: Routledge, 2002. 58. Ibid., p. 336.

Chapter 7 Wrinkles, Furrows and Folds 1. Taussig, Defacement, p. 252. 2. Ibid., pp. 252–3. 3. This work is referred to hereafter as Mécanisme in the text for the sake of brevity. Quotations and references are from the English translation, Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne et al., The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression, trans. R. Andrew Cuthbertson, Cambridge, New York & Paris: Cambridge University Press and Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1990. A digital facsimile of the images appearing in the Atlas volume of the work is Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne, Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine. Atlas, 2nd edn, Paris: J-B Bailliere et Fils, 1876, available via The Virtual Laboratory, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin at http://www.vlp.mplwg-berlin.mpg.de. 4. Duchenne, Mechanism, p. 39. 5. Ibid. 6. These originals were presented by Duchenne in another album to the Ecole des Beaux Arts in 1875 and reproductions are apparently still used in undergraduate anatomy classes. 7. Duchenne, Mechanism, p. 9. 8. Ibid., p. 43. 9. Ibid., p. 103. 10. In this list, we can already detect the difficulties with defining what is an emotion, as William James suggested as early as 1890, in the development of psychology. See William James, Principles of Psychology, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1981, p. 443 ff. 11. Duchenne, Mechanism, p. 208 12. Ibid., p. 122. 13. Ibid., p. 105.

Notes 215 14. Ibid., p. 111. 15. Ibid., p. 127. 16. Cited in R. Andrew Cuthbertson, ‘The Highly Original Dr. Duchenne’, in The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression, Cambridge, New York & Paris: Cambridge University Press & Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1990, p. 235, n. 49. 17. Duchenne, Mechanism, p. 106. 18. Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images As History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans, New York: Hill & Wang, 1989, p. 24. 19. Ibid. 20. Trachetenberg, ‘Lincoln’s Smile’, p. 4. 21. Hegel cited in Alistair MacIntyre, ed., ‘Hegel on Faces and Skulls’, in Hegel: A Collection of Critical Essays, New York: Doubleday, 1972, p. 228. 22. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p. 21; emphasis added. 23. Of course, other discourses, such as psychoanalysis, have constructed different theories to account for and describe this process. 24. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p. 200. 25. Duchenne, Mechanism, pp. 42–4. 26. Ibid., p. 42. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., p. 105. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., p. 44; emphasis added. 32. Ibid., pp. 43–4. 33. Ibid., p. 44. 34. See Arthur Elsenaar, ‘Artifacial’, http://artifacial.org. 35. Silvan Tomkins, Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, Vols. 1 and 2, New York: Springer Publishing, 1962; Silvan Tomkins, ‘An analysis of the use of electric shock with human subjects’, Journal of Psychology, 15, 1943, pp. 285–97; Henry Gerbrands and Silvan Tomkins, ‘An apparatus for the study of motor learning under threat of electric shock’, Journal of Psychology, 15, 1943, pp. 299–305. 36. Ekman’s work spans the full range of scholarly and popular publishing from Paul Ekman, Darwin and Facial Expression: A Century of Research in Review, New York: Academic Press, 1973, to Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage, New York: W. W. Norton, 1985. 37. Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 3rd edn, with an introduction, afterword and commentaries by Paul Ekman. London: HarperCollins, 1998. 38. Darwin’s own face almost prevented him from embarking on HMS Beagle and on a journey which would yield the evidence for the theory of evolution: in his autobiography, Darwin notes that: ‘Afterwards on becoming very intimate with the Captain, I heard that I had run a very narrow risk of being rejected on account of the shape of my nose! He was an ardent disciple of Lavater and was convinced that he could judge of a man’s character by the outline of his features, and he doubted whether anyone with my nose could possess sufficient energy and determination for the voyage’ (Darwin cited in John Liggett, The Human Face, London: Constable, 1974, p. 215.) 39. Phillip Prodger, ‘Photography and The Expression of the Emotions’, in Charles Darwin et al., The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, ed. Paul Ekman, 3rd edn. London: HarperCollins, 1998, p. 400.

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40. Darwin cited in Prodger, ‘Photography and The Expression of the Emotions’, p. 406. 41. Darwin, Expression, p. 406. 42. Prodger cited by Ekman in Darwin, Expression, p. 148. 43. Prodger, ‘Photography and The Expression of the Emotions’, p. 408. 44. Darwin, Expression, p. 261. 45. Paul Ekman and Erika Rosenberg, What the Face Reveals: Basic and Applied Studies of Spontaneous Expression Using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. 46. Paul Ekman and Dacher Keltner, ‘Universal Facial Expressions Of Emotion’, in Ullica Segerstrale and Peter Molnar, eds, Nonverbal Communication: Where Nature Meets Culture, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997, pp. 27–46. 47. These works were seen at the exhibition Bill Viola: Five Angels for the Millennium and Other New Works, Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London, 2 May – 21 July 2001. Similar works were featured in Viola’s subsequent series of videos featuring acted emotions, The Passions (2003–04). 48. In presenting stilled images of Viola’s work, I am aware that I am sundering it from its vital relationship with the unfolding of time. Yet, it seems to me that in the act of slowing the performed play of expression so dramatically (in all senses of the word), these video works already deal in a thoroughly ‘de-natured’ time. Rather than showing the indivisibility of ‘real’ time, they suggest time as made up of an infinity of successive instants. In other words, what is mildly disturbing in them is their ability to suggest that human expressivity consists in the simple addition of ‘physionomical units’ of expression beneath the overt pathognomic display, a phenomenon which might be thought as ‘without measure’. The combination of context-free acting and slowed motion works to literally deadly effect by rendering visible what is otherwise indiscernible, but very far from insignificant. 49. A newspaper article comments that the director of London’s National Gallery was observed to shed an authentic tear at a talk with Viola preceding the opening of the exhibition. See Simon Grant, ‘This Work Would Make the Angels Weep’, The Independent on Sunday (London), 6 May 2001, pp. 1, 4. 50. Paul Ekman, Davidson, Richard J. and Friesen, Wallace V., ‘The Duchenne smile: Emotional expression and brain physiology II’, J Pers Soc Psychol, 58, 1990, pp. 342–53. 51. Darwin, Expression, p. 256. 52. See Lynda Nead, ‘Response: The art of making faces’, Textual Practice, 22(1), 2008, pp. 133–43 and the unusual early film she discusses, Photographing a Female Crook (1904), a fictional production showing three US policemen attempting to capture a still image of a recalcitrant prisoner, who responds with an alarming display of facial distortions. As Nead discusses, the pathognomic fluctuations of grimacing and gurning were favourite themes for early cinema. 53. I owe this observation and much inspiration to Michel Indergand’s essay on the grimace. He connects grimace and the child to the ‘peek-a-boo’ games of early infancy in which the child hides its face in an introjection of the symbolization of maternal absence, more famously known via Freud’s observations on what he called the fort-da game. See Michel Indergand, ‘Grimace et Grimaciers’, in MarieJose Baudinet and Christian Schlatter, eds, Du Visage, Lille: Press Universitaires de Lille, 1982. 54. Tomkins, Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, Vol. 1, p. 210. 55. Bernard This, Naître et Sourire: Les Cris de la Naissance, Paris: Flammarion, 1983.

Notes 217 56. Darwin, Expression, p. 228. 57. Compare the tiny pencil self-portrait of the young Rembrandt saying ‘boo’ to his own image with a sneering pout (Figure 16) to the famous enigmatic portraits of his later years. 58. Deleuze and Guattari also remark on this dyadic relation between mouth and breast, noting its articulation in earlier French and American texts. See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 172, 533 n. 6. 59. See Paul Ekman and Richard J. Davidson, The Nature of Emotion: Fundamental Questions, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. 60. Details of some of the differing opinions formed about this matter in the evolution of developmental psychology can be found in René Spitz, ‘The Primal Cavity: A Contribution to the Genesis of Perception and its Role for Psychoanalytic Theory’, Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 10, 1955, pp. 215–40. 61. Maternity is another of those fecund themes in Levinas which, like the face, one can never be sure is meant literally or ‘merely’ metaphorically: thus the theme of the mother’s face is doubly troubling in this respect. 62. Steven Whittaker, ‘Face to Efface with the Pout’, Ctheory.net, 2000, unpaginated. 63. Ibid. 64. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 9ff. 65. Andy Warhol quoted in Gretchen Berg, ‘Andy: My True Story’, Los Angeles Free Press, 17 March 1967.

Chapter 8 The Tonic of the Sonic 1. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982, pp. x–xxix. 2. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973, pp. 86–7; emphasis in original. 3. Derrida, Margins, p. xix. 4. Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard, London: Macmillan, 1977, p. 6 5. Steven Connor, ‘The Ethics of the Voice’, in Dominic Rainsford and Tim Woods, eds, Critical Ethics: Text, Theory, and Responsibility, Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999, p. 233. 6. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, Followed by Working Notes, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968, p. 155. 7. Don Ihde, Listening and Voice: A Phenomenology of Sound, Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976, p. 153. 8. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith, London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul and Humanities Press, 1962, p. 187ff. 9. Steven Sweeney-Turner, The Sonorous Body: Music, Enlightenment & Deconstruction, University of Edinburgh, unpublished PhD thesis, 1994, s. 10.4, at http://www. cyberscotia.com (accessed 15 Feb. 2002, no longer available online). 10. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 344. 11. There a number of bodies devoted to the problem of noise pollution, ranging from The World Health Organization to Pipedown, an international association campaigning for freedom from piped music. 12. See, for example, Ursula Franklin’s essay ‘Silence and the Notion of the Commons’, in The Soundscape Newsletter 07, Vancouver: World Forum for Acoustic Ecology,

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13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

Notes http://interact.uoregon.edu/MediaLit/wfae/library/articles/franklin_commons. pdf, 1994. Pierre Mariètan quoted in Darren Copeland, ‘Shared Listening Journey: The Sounds of Displacement (France: 4–6 August 1997)’, The New Soundscape Newsletter, Basel: Forum für Klanglandschaft, http://interact.uoregon.edu/medialit/ wfae/library/articles/copeland_displacement.pdf, 1998. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 57. Husserl quoted in Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, p. 104. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, p. 104. Thomas Bernhard, Histrionics: Three Plays, trans. Peter Jansen and Kenneth Northcott, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Theatrical memories are long and the disaster of fire, as Alan Read has shown, has a totemic significance in the social history of the stage. See Alan Read, Theatre and Everyday Life: An Ethics of Performance, London: Routledge, 1993, pp. 228–36. John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, London: Nick Hern Books, 1996, p. 106. I can confirm this, since, by chance, I passed by the bridge at its moment of inaugural opening on the 10 June 2000, and was able to cross it with my young son who had only recently begun to walk himself. At the time, the ‘wobble’ felt like a brilliantly performative piece of engineering, designed perhaps to evoke the wavering of the rope bridge as a more primitive form of crossing, imparting a sense of vulnerability and fragility to the typically unmoving monumentality of this type of structure. However, the bridge quickly closed for almost two years while it was re-engineered in situ. Sadly, it is now as solid and unyielding as the rest of London’s bridges. Joseph Roach, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting, Newark, NJ, and London: University of Delaware Press/Associated University Presses, 1985. Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999, p. 283. Ibid., p. 284. International Centre for Voice at The Central School of Speech and Drama, Voice in British Actor and Performance Training, Proceedings of a conference organized by the Performance Department and held at The Central School of Speech and Drama in July 1995, London: International Centre for Voice at The Central School of Speech and Drama, 1995. Jacqueline Martin, The Voice in Modern Theatre, London: Routledge, 1990. Patsy Rodenburg, The Actor Speaks: Voice and the Performer, London: Methuen Drama, 1997, p. 383. See Edmund Myer, Vocal Reinforcement: A Practical Study of the Reinforcement of the Motive Power or Breathing Muscles, of the Resisting Force or Resistance in Singing, of Tone Color, of Correct Thought, of the Resonant Cavities, [etc.], New York: American Publishing, 1891. Idhe, Listening and Voice, p. 171. Ibid., p. 176. Ibid., p. 174. Rodenburg, The Actor Speaks, p. 384. Ibid., p. 387. See Amanda Macdonald, ‘In Extremis: Hergé’s Graphic Exteriority of Character’, Other Voices, 1(2), 1998, unpaginated. MacDonald writes: ‘The term “humanesque” appeals, also, in that it effectively asserts that what we are dealing with here are

Notes 219

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

47.

human-like figures, semiotic construals of the human, fabricated in generically specific ways, and not some truth about personhood. Not that this should be understood as any form of epistemological escape to the province of mere matter.’ After the analyses so far, I would want to qualify this useful neologism by adding it is perhaps no longer quite so easy hygienically to secure ‘semiotic construals’ from ‘truths about personhoods’ – and that ‘matter’ is never merely ‘mere’. Frances Dyson, ‘Circuits of the Voice: From Cosmology to Telephony’, Soundculture, http://www.soundculture.org/texts/dyson_circuits.html, 1992. Ibid. Connor, Dumbstruck, passim. Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., p. 35. Ibid., p. 415. Jonathan Reé, I See a Voice: a Philosophical History of Language, Deafness and the Senses, London: HarperCollins, 1999. Mike Pearson, ‘The Principles of Performance 1’, University of Aberystwyth, accessed at http://www.aber.ac.uk/~psswww/pf20110/lecture1.htm on 25 Jan 2002, no longer available and unpaginated. Ibid. Ibid. Thomas Bernhard, The Voice Imitator, trans. Kenneth Northcott, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997, p. 2. At the time of writing, this recording is available from several Internet sources but in this particular instance came from Terry Watkins, The Truth About Hell, http:// www.av1611.org/hell.html, accessed 25 April 2010. A search for ‘Hell Sounds’ or ‘Sounds of Hell’ in an Internet search engine should satisfy the curious, should that particular link become broken. Andrew Bell, ‘Helmholtz’s Piano Strings: Reverberation of Ripples on the Tectorial Membrane’, Cogprints: Cognitive Sciences E-Prints Archive, University of Southampton, 2001. Derrida reproduces a section from Leiris’s text Persephone as a parallel passage to his own meditation on the tympanum. See Derrida, Margins, x–xxxix.

Chapter 9 Deleted Expletives 1. Yissocher Frand, ‘Rabbi Frand on Parshas Vayechi’, torah.org, http://www.torah. org/learning/ravfrand/5757/vayechi.html (accessed 14 Jan. 2010). 2. Gloria T. Delamar, Mother Goose, From Nursery to Literature, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1987, p. 143. 3. Fernando Poyatos, Paralanguage: A Linguistic and Interdisciplinary Approach to Interactive Speech and Sound, Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: J. Benjamins, 1993, p. 375. 4. Heide Fasnacht and Nancy Princenthal [text], Heide Fasnacht: Drawn to Sublime, New York: Kent Gallery, 2003. 5. Interestingly, the film was actually submitted to the Library as a series of still images, rather than on celluloid. 6. American Treasures of the Library of Congress, ‘A Sneeze Caught On Film’, http:// www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/trr018.html (accessed 20 April 2010). 7. Bradley W. Whitman and Roger J. Packer, ‘The photic sneeze reflex: Literature review and discussion’, Neurology, 43, 1993, pp. 868–71.

220

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8. Anton Chekhov, The Sneeze: Plays and Stories, trans. and adapt. Michael Frayn, London: Methuen Drama, 1989. 9. David Appelbaum, Voice, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990, p. xiv. 10. Ibid., p. 139. 11. Ibid., p. xiv. 12. Ibid., p. 138. 13. Ibid., p. 2. 14. Ibid., p. 10. 15. Ibid., pp. 12–13. 16. Ibid., p. 116. 17. Ibid., p. 117. 18. Peggy Phelan remarks on her witnessing of Derrida at work on the poetry of Paul Celan, a painful, painstaking and ultimately unyielding performance in her description. See Phelan, Mourning Sex, pp. 8–10. 19. Appelbaum, Voice, p. 1. 20. Mary Key, Paralanguage and Kinesics, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1975, p. 97. 21. Poyatos, Paralanguage, pp. 346–58. 22. Ibid., pp. 356–7. 23. See various texts in Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, trans. Alan Stoekl et al., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. 24. Spitz, ‘The Primal Cavity’, p. 216. 25. It is interesting to note that subsequent generations of developmental psychologists have been keen to push back the perceptual threshold for the face to the very earliest post-natal periods, prompting the question as to whether, given the degree of imaginative interpretation that goes into any estimation of the processes of infant cognition, this effort is motivated more by the demands of the adult’s imagination of the child’s imagination rather than by any pressing observational data. 26. Spitz, ‘The Primal Cavity’, p. 219. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., p. 221. 29. Ibid., p. 215. 30. Ibid., p. 238. 31. See Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, ‘Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation’, in The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 1, ed. and trans. Nicholas Rand, Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994, pp. 125–38. 32. Samuel Beckett, Collected Shorter Plays, London: Faber & Faber, 1984, p. 218. 33. Rosolato quoted in Connor, Dumbstruck, p. 29. 34. Connor, Dumbstruck, p. 31. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., p. 34. 37. Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings, trans. Helen Weaver, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976, p. 266. 38. Ibid., pp. 271–6. 39. Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: a History of Sound in the Arts, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999, p. 350. 40. Ibid. 41. Chion, Audio-Vision, pp. 75–9.

Notes 221 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

71. 72.

Ibid., p. 76. Ibid. Ibid., p. 78. Ibid., p. 79. Robert Graves, The Shout, and Other Stories, London: Cassell, 1965. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, dir. Philip Kaufman [video: VHS], New York: MGM, 1987. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, New York: Oxford University Press, 1985, p. 51 Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, p. 351. Bataille’s obsession in this respect is secondary – but very much related – to his attraction to the event of syncope and his writing, itself often fitful and spasmodic, features prominently in Clément’s study. George Bataille, ‘The Jesuve’, in Bataille, Selected Writings, p. 74. Ibid., p. 77. Ibid., p. 78. Marcel Griaule, ‘Spittle 1. Spittle Soul’, in Georges Bataille et al., Encyclopaedia Acephalica: Comprising the Critical Dictionary & Related Texts, London: Atlas Press, 1995, p. 79. Poyatos, Paralanguage, p. 366. Michel Leiris, ‘Spittle 2. Mouth Water’, in Bataille, et al., Encyclopaedia Acephalica, p. 80. Griaule, ‘Spittle 1’, p. 79. Poyatos, Paralanguage, p. 362. Georges Bataille, ‘Mouth’, in Bataille, et al., Encyclopaedia Acephalica, p. 60. Charles Baudelaire, quoted in Nancy, The Birth to Presence, p. 370. Nancy, The Birth to Presence, p. 382. Ibid. Ibid., p. 384. Appelbaum, Voice, p. 21. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling/Repetition, pp. 154ff. Laurent Joubert, Treatise on Laughter, trans. Gregory David de Rocher, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1980. Ibid., contents page. Provine, Laughter. Ibid., p. 133. Demonstrating once again that there is indeed more in nature than is dreamt of in philosophy or fiction, the cardinal feature of the rare genetically inherited condition Ochoa syndrome is a facial grimacing of a similar kind, produced when the affected individual smiles or cries. See Sixto Garcia-Minaur et al., ‘Three new European cases of urofacial (Ochoa) syndrome’, Clinical Dysmorphoolgy, 10, 2001, pp. 165–70. Georges Bataille, ‘Laughter’, in The Bataille Reader, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 59–63. Provine, Laughter, p. 63. As Joe Kelleher has reminded me, the sound of the step can also perform a similar signatory function, as it does in Beckett’s Footfalls (personal conversation). But as with the laugh, the confusion that overtakes the characters in Beckett’s drama also suggests that to pay close attention to such phenomena is inevitably to solicit the processes of unaccommodation.

222

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Chapter 10 Peals of Appeal 1. Simon Bayly and Lisa Baraitser, Small Talk About Chromosomes, unpublished playtext, 1992. 2. Llewellyn F. W Jewitt, Church Bells; their history, legends, superstitions, uses, &c., no publisher given, 1870?, p. 23. 3. Badiou, Rhapsodie, p. 62. Whilst writing this section I happened to attend a London performance by some well-known figures in the UK live art scene, at which an announcement was made a few seconds prior to the start, to the effect that the interval promised in the programme had in fact been cancelled. 4. John D. Caputo, Against Ethics: Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation With Constant Reference to Deconstruction, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993, p. 27. 5. Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. and Richard Rand, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. 6. Jacques Derrida, ‘All Ears: Nietzsche’s Otobiography’, trans. Avital Ronell, Yale French Studies, 63, 1982, pp. 245–50. 7. Fredrich W. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, in Basic Writings, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Random House, 1968, p. 451. 8. Paul Hentzner, Travels in England During the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, Cassell’s National Library, 1889, no publisher or place of publication given, p. 40. 9. Hillel Schwartz, ‘Noise and Silence: The Soundscape and Spirituality’, The Noise Pollution Clearing House, 1995. 10. Alain Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 19th-Century French Countryside, trans. Martin Thom, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. 11. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001, p. 118. 12. Ridout, ‘Who Does Cathy Naden Think She Is?’. 13. The talk itself is published as Jacques Derrida, ‘Declarations of Independence’, New Political Science, 15, 1986, pp. 7–15. 14. Established in 1570, the foundry is still operational and, according to its publicity, is Britain’s oldest incorporated manufacturing company, a fact that forges a curious link between the power of convocation of the bell and an inaugural moment in the development of capitalism. 15. Independence Hall Association, ‘The Liberty Bell’, USHistory.org, Independence Hall Association, available at: http://www.ushistory.org/libertybell (accessed 2 March 2008). 16. Ibid.

After the Event 1. For those not familiar with the term, ‘chav’ is derogatory slang for a stereotype of an uneducated, socially disruptive British underclass, identified by a fixation with fashions derived from American hip hop such as imitation gold, poorly made jewellery and fake designer clothing, combined with elements of British street fashion. It appears to have entered common usage in the UK during the late 1990s. 2. Giorgio Agamben, The Man without Content, trans. Georgia Albert, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999, p. 16. 3. Read, Theatre, Intimacy and Engagement, 2008.

Notes 223 4. Joe Kelleher, ‘How to Act, How to Spectate (Laughing Matter)’, Performance Research, 13(4), 2008, pp. 56–63. 5. Baz Kershaw, ‘Pathologies of Hope’, Performance Paradigm, 3, 2007, p. 5. 6. See Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004; Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. 7. Baz Kershaw, Theatre Ecology: Environments and Performance Events, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 316. 8. The article that brought Rancière widely to the attention of the fields of theatre and performance studies is ‘The Emancipated Spectator’, Artforum, March 2007, pp. 271–80, a transcript of an earlier lecture and reprinted in a revised version, along with other essays in Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott, London: Verso, 2009. The ideas on art and spectatorship expressed there are comprehensively filled out in a number of other recent translations of his work. See in particular The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill, London: Continuum, 2006; Dissenus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. Steven Corcoran, Cambridge: Polity, 2009; Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran, London: Continuum, 2010. 9. Rancière’s approach to the politics of spectatorship is broadly consonant with that of several of the texts in a recent series of short books on theatre and its various supplements including Joe Kelleher’s Theatre & Politics, Nick Ridout’s Theatre & Ethics and Helen Freshwater’s Theatre & Audience (all Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), Alan Read’s Theatre, Intimacy and Engagement (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) as well as Hans-Thies Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theatre (trans. Karen JürsMunby, London and New York: Routledge, 1999), which explicitly delimits theatre in particular (and implicitly art in general) to a politics of perception. 10. Sam Gillespie, ‘Giving Form to Its Own Existence: Anxiety and the Subject of Truth’, Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, 2(2), 2006, p. 165. 11. Peter Hallward, ‘Jacques Rancière and the Subversion of Mastery’, Paragraph 28(1), Summer 2005, p. 42. 12. These examples are drawn from, respectively: Read, Theatre, Intimacy and Engagement, p. 128ff; Kelleher, ‘How to Spectate’, Ridout, Stage Fright, pp. 67–9; Rancière, Dissensus, pp. 95–7. 13. Ridout, Stage Fright, p. 67. 14. This ‘return to theatre’ has been a notable aspect of the development of theatre and performance studies in the UK in the last decade. Of course, many enthusiasts of performance will rightly remark that they never left. A strong case for the advantages of refusing neat demarcations between performance and theatre was made early on by Jill Dolan, ‘Geographies of Learning: Theatre Studies, Performance and the “Performative”’, Theatre Journal, 45, 1993, pp. 417–41. 15. Neither is the solution to exchange this primacy of the expert observer with that of, for example, the expert practitioner, which maintains the binary of separation through a simple reversal of perspective – welcome though that might be in terms of redressing the balance. 16. Paulo Virno, Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation, trans. Isabella Bertoletti and James Cascaito, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008, p. 52. 17 Peter Hallward, ‘The will of the people: Notes towards a dialectical voluntarism’, Radical Philosophy, 155, May/June 2009, p. 16. 18. See the anonymous text ‘Comment Faire?’, Tiqqun, 2, 2001, available at: http//bloom 0101.org/tiqqun.html. An English translation is available via the same website.

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Index Note: The author’s name or the medium of production follow the titles of works in the index; life dates have been included for less well known pre-twentieth-century writers and artists. A accident see disaster; fiasco; interruption; syncope actor see performer Adorno, Theodor 24 aesthetics 78–9, 111, 114, 118, 158, 197–8 relational 38 affect 8, 11, 13, 35–6, 44–7, 49–51, 53, 55, 57, 59–61, 74, 76, 99, 105, 122–3, 174 see also emotion Agamben, Giorgio 193, 197 alterity 7, 16–18, 31, 47–8, 52, 59, 68, 80, 90, 99–100, 168, 173, 195, 197 Althusser, Louis 187 Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari) 103 Appelbaum, David 166–8, 171 Archer, William (1856–1924) 72 Artaud, Antonin 14, 152, 174, 176 audience see spectatorship Austin, J. L. 101 B Badiou, Alain 4, 6, 8, 43–4, 52–6, 58–9, 61, 100, 156, 167–8, 179, 184, 197–8, 200, 202–3 Being and Event 6 concept of fidelity in 43, 54, 197–8, 209 Logics of Worlds 6, 209 Manifesto for Philosophy 6 Rhapsodie pour le Théâtre 6, 43–4, 54–5, 58, 61, 184 theory of theatre 6, 43–4, 54–5, 58, 61, 184, 208 see also event Barthes, Roland 50–2, 66, 198 concepts of photographic punctum and studium in 50–3, 59 Bataille, Georges 169, 176–80, 182–3 Beckett, Samuel 55, 171

becoming unaccommodated, phenomenology of 3, 43–4, 154, 166, 198, 203 Being and Event (Badiou) 6 bells 184–6, 188–9, 222 church bells 186 the Liberty Bell 188–9 Bernhard, Thomas 148, 158 black hole, as metaphor 90–1, 94, 142, 146–7, 151, 175–6 see also faciality Blanchot, Maurice 22, 28, 39, 93, 209 Blau, Herbert 10, 20, 25–7, 30–1, 41, 58 Blue Velvet (film) 142 the body, in contemporary cultural theory 11, 13, 46, 48–9, 58, 63, 65–8, 72–4, 91, 94, 99–100, 149–50, 154–5, 159, 162, 181–2 body, vocalic 155, 172 body builder 63–5, 68, 116 Boilly, Louis-Léopold (1761–1845) 135 Bourriaud, Nicolas 38 breast, infant’s relation to 137–8, 169, 171, 173–4, 217 Butler, Judith 10, 12, 58 C Cage, John 145–6, 159 Campement Urbain 38 Captuo, John 22, 185 Cavell, Stanley 30–1 celebrity, as performer 62, 65–6, 68, 86, 116, 137, 140, 163 child, as performer 66–8, 73–4, 101, 116, 124–5, 127, 134–9, 152, 176, 190, 199 Chion, Michel 77, 175–6 cinema 15, 44, 51–2, 62, 76–7, 121, 132–3, 141, 151, 163–4, 175–6, 182 cinephilia 51–2

242

Index 243 Clément, Catherine 49, 53, 166 commons see community community, philosophical concept of 16–17, 29–30, 36–43, 146, 182, 187, 196–7 Connor, Steven 144, 155–6, 171–3, 219 cough 153, 166–8, 171, 180 cry 108, 136–7, 158, 171–4, 176, 221 curtain call 28, 32 D dark matter 19 Darwin, Charles 114–15, 123–7, 129–30, 134, 137, 215 The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals 114, 123–6 deconstruction 4, 8, 75 Deleuze, Gilles 4–8, 14–16, 44, 47, 55–6, 59–60, 82–3, 89, 96, 98, 100, 102–3, 105, 115, 132, 140–1 concept of expression in 15, 76, 83, 96, 102–5, 147 concept of immanence in 105 Difference and Repetition 15 Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza 7, 15, 44, 83, 103, 105 The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque 60, 96, 98, 100 The Logic of Sense 56, 141 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix 90–4, 116, 147, 149, 174, 217 Anti-Oedipus 103 A Thousand Plateaus 83, 90–5, 103, 146–7 What is Philosophy? 91–2 Derrida, Jacques 4–5, 9, 79, 142–3, 147–8, 152, 167, 185, 187–8, 197, 210, 217 see also deconstruction Descartes, René 73, 92 Diderot, Denis 72 Difference and Repetition (Deleuze) 15 disaster 22–3, 25, 27–8, 32, 35–6, 44, 52–4, 56–7, 59, 61, 63, 65, 67, 152, 209, 218 names of 22 see also event; fiasco; interruption; syncope Dolan, Jill 38, 223 Duchenne de Boulogne, Guillaume (1806–1875) 108–24, 127, 129–30, 133, 137 Duchovny, David 139

dysmorphology 84, 88–9, 134 Dyson, Francis 154–5 E ear 142, 159 Echo (mythical figure) 148–9, 200 Edison, Thomas (1847–1931) 164, 189 Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze, (film) 164 eigenface 87 Ekman, Paul 123, 129, 138 Elsenaar, Arthur 122, 215 emotions, expression of 72–3, 85, 95–7, 101, 105, 108–11, 117–18, 122–30, 132–3, 137–8 see also face; voice Etchells, Tim 29, 33 ethics 2, 7–8, 10, 12, 16, 22, 26–7, 32, 36, 55, 60–1, 75, 78–80, 102–4, 143–4, 197–8 of the face and voice 75–8, 143–5, 147, 156 Ethics and Infinity (Levinas) 79 the event, philosophy of 9, 22–3, 39–40, 43–4, 52–61, 94–6, 105, 115–16, 141, 145–6, 153–4, 156–8, 168–9, 188, 193–202, 208–10 see also disaster; fiasco, interruption; syncope expression philosophy of 2, 46–8, 59, 68, 81–3, 85, 87, 89, 91, 93–7, 99–121, 123, 132–3, 140, 147, 213 universals of human and animal 123, 127–9 see also facial expression; emotions Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (Deleuze) 7, 15, 44, 83, 103, 105 eyes 1, 48, 71, 75–6, 80, 90, 94–5, 133–4, 142–3, 164, 177 crossed 95 eyebrow acting 120 see also face F face 2, 5, 8, 67–9, 71–2, 74, 79–80, 83–8, 94, 96–7, 109–10, 115–18, 130–3, 137–8, 176–7, 182–3 as allegory 108 of Buddha 71

244

Index

face – continued Facial Action Coding System (FACS) 129 facial expression 84, 87, 93, 109, 111, 117–18, 123, 137, 214 as icon of identity 85–6 in Levinas’s philosophy 5, 47, 79–82, 90–1, 115–16, 144, 183 Simmel on the aesthetic significance of 92–5, 97, 111, 182 faciality, in Deleuze and Guattari 83, 86, 90–4, 108, 134–5, 140 Fasnacht, Heide 163, 178 fiasco 22–3, 32, 35–6, 44–6, 52, 54, 56–7, 59, 61, 65, 67–8, 187, 201 see also disaster Fisher-Lichte, Erika 38 The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (Deleuze) 60, 96, 98, 100 Forced Entertainment 29 Foreman, Richard 106, 182 Franko B 34 Fred Ott’s Sneeze (film) 164 G the gaze 1, 13 Gillespie, Sam 197 grimace 95, 116, 133–7, 140, 163, 166, 182, 216 see also face H Hallward, Peter 198, 202 Handke, Peter 30 Hardt, Michael 17 hearing, neurobiology of 159–60 Hegel, G. W. F. 4, 115 Heidegger, Martin 4, 18, 27, 70, 145, 167, 185, 187 humanesque, concept of 153–4, 160, 177 Husserl, Edmund (1859–1938) 18, 147–8, 152, 167 hysteria 45–6 I identity 46–7, 72, 80–1, 84, 86–7, 97, 99, 115, 118, 134, 144, 167 Ihde, Don 145, 152 the imperative, in Kant and Lingis 48 The Inoperative Community 39, 41–2

interruption, as event of subjectification 3, 22, 41, 44, 157, 167, 184, 187, 198, 201–2 see also disaster; event; fiasco; syncope J Joubert, Laurent (1529–1582) 180–2 K Kahn, Douglas 174 Kant, Immanuel 4, 8, 22, 48 Keathley, Christian 51 Kelleher, Joe 194–5 Kershaw, Baz 196 Kester, Grant 38 Kierkegaard, Søren 4, 14, 49 L Lacy, Suzanne 38 language see speech Latour, Bruno 38, 194–5 laughter 23, 42, 45–6, 108, 120, 141, 153, 167, 171, 177, 179–85, 187, 194, 221 laughspeak 181 see also voice Lavater, Johann Kaspar (1741–1801) 1, 87–8, 96, 110, 215 Lecourt, Edith 155, 172 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646–1716) 4, 98, 100, 102–3, 115 Levin, Richard 80–1 Levinas, Emmanuel 4–7, 13, 17–18, 26, 47, 75–83, 86, 89–91, 95, 98–100, 115–16, 138, 140, 144–5, 166, 183 on art 78–9 concept of evasion in 7, 95, 98–9, 166 concept of face in 5, 47, 79–82, 90–1, 115–16, 144, 183 Ethics and Infinity 79 On Escape (De L’Évasion) 7, 98 Otherwise Than Being, Or Beyond Essence 7, 78–81, 91, 95, 116 Totality and Infinity 7, 76, 99 Lingis, Alphonso 4, 7–8, 18, 27, 47–8, 63–4, 77, 89–90 The Logic of Sense (Deleuze) 56, 141 Logics of Worlds (Badiou) 6, 209 Luria, Alexander R. (1902–1977) 74 Lynch, David 142 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 185, 197

Index 245 M Mackenzie, Jon 34 Man on Wire (film) 25 Manifesto for Philosophy (Badiou) 6 masks 65, 69–72, 76, 81, 87, 93–5, 100–1, 108, 119, 133, 150, 182, 211 of comedy and tragedy 69–71, 133, 140–1 see also face Massumi, Brian 214 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 67, 74, 100, 143, 145 mimesis 3, 10–12, 16, 158, 189, 199 The Mind of a Mnemonist (Luria) 74 mouth 24, 33, 80, 85, 94, 113, 123, 137–40, 142, 160–1, 163–4, 166–71, 173–4, 176–9, 181, 217 as primal cavity 170 see also face Müller, Heiner 26 multitude, concept of 17, 28, 37–9, 195, 202, 241 see also community music 28, 49, 145–7, 158, 185, 187, 217 see also sound; voice; silence N Nancy, Jean-Luc 4, 15–16, 39–43, 179–80, 221 concept of ‘unworking’ 4, 41–3, 93, 183 The Inoperative Community 39, 41–2 nativity play 66–7 Negri, Antonio 17 neuroscience 73 Nietzsche, Friedrich 4, 15, 25–6, 49, 116, 185 noise 146 see also music; silence O On Escape (Levinas) 7, 98 O’Reilly, Kira 34 Otherwise Than Being, Or Beyond Essence (Levinas) 7, 78–81, 91, 95, 116 P pathognomy 1–2, 20, 59, 96, 132–3, 203 Pearson, Mike 157 Peeping Tom (film) 52 performance, as paradigm 3, 10, 14, 16, 18, 154

performance studies 2, 6, 8, 10–12, 15, 72, 129, 205, 223 performer 22–4, 30–2, 34, 55–7, 62–3, 71–2, 83–4, 101, 116–17, 120–1, 129–30, 132–3, 149–52, 157, 176, 197–9 Petit, Philippe 25, 27 Phelan, Peggy 10–11, 13, 26, 46, 57–8 phenomenology 5, 16, 18, 63, 66, 74–6, 80, 86, 88–90, 109, 122, 141, 143, 166, 203 photography 39, 50–1, 86, 109–10, 114, 123–5, 127, 133–4, 139, 163, 189, 193 portrait 96, 114–15, 117, 121 phrenology 73 physiognomy 1–2, 87–9, 95–6, 115, 132–3, 203 pout 137–41, 169, 178, 217, 241 see also mouth; face Poyatos, Fernando 168, 178 pricklings, as phenomenological term 59–61, 98, 116, 132, 166 see also affect Prodger, Philip 124–5 Provine, Robert 181, 183 psychoanalysis 26, 46–7, 68, 72, 139, 155, 169, 172–3, 176 punctum see Barthes, Roland R Rancière, Jacques 196–9, 206, 208, 223 Read, Alan 13, 57, 194, 204 Reé, Jonathan 156 Rejlander, Oscar (1813–1875) 124–5 Rembrandt van Rijn 138, 217 resonance 79, 147–53, 158–60, 174 see also sound Rhapsodie pour le Théâtre (Badiou) 6, 43–4, 54–5, 58, 61, 184 Ridout, Nicolas 23, 45, 187, 206, 212 Roach, Joseph 150 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 14, 28, 36, 195 S Schwartz, Hillel 186 scream 96, 137, 153, 158–9, 171–6 see also shout; voice semiotics 45, 47, 87–8, 134 Shakespearian playhouse 150–1 shame 61, 70–1, 108, 122, 178, 192, 211, 241

246

Index

shout 43, 163, 172–6 see also cry; scream; voice Siegel, James 93 silence 13, 28, 31, 40, 48, 79, 132, 134, 143, 145–7, 157, 168, 171, 173, 187, 207 in the theatre 31 see also music; sound; voice Simmel, Georg 92–5, 97, 111, 182 smile 113, 119–20, 133–6, 181 Smith, Bruce 150 sneeze 161–6, 168, 171 The Sneeze (play) 166 see also voice sonorous envelope 155 sound 69, 76, 78–9, 142, 144–6, 151, 153–6, 158–60, 164, 171–6, 184–7 of hell 158 see also resonance; voice spectatorship 16–17, 20–1, 23, 25–34, 36, 41–4, 50–1, 55, 57, 61, 65–8, 148–50, 184–5, 192–3, 195–200, 207 speech 77, 101, 134, 143–5, 152–3, 164, 166–7, 171, 175, 177, 180 see also voice Speech and Phenomena (Derrida) 143 Spinoza, Baruch 4–5, 8, 15, 83, 102–4, 157 spit 153, 177–8 see also mouth Spitz, René 169–70, 220 Stafford, Barbara 2, 203 States, Bert 32, 63 Stelarc 122 studium see Barthes, Roland suspension, as conceputal motif 2–3, 22, 24–6, 28, 30, 32, 34, 36, 41, 57, 153, 184 symptom, as expression 46 syncope 49–53, 59, 157, 162, 166, 201, 221 see also disaster; event; fiasco; interruption T Taussig, Michael 108 terror, expression of 108, 111, 117, 123–4, 147, 175 theatre and theatricality 1–3, 5–6, 13–18, 20, 22–34, 41–4, 52–8, 61–8, 70–2, 77–9, 114–17, 148–51, 156–8, 182–4, 193–8, 200

theatre-philosophy 1, 4, 6, 10, 14–16, 58, 72, 77, 141, 187, 209 A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari) 83, 90–5, 103, 146–7 thrill see affect throat 75–6, 152, 162, 167, 171, 173, 177, 181, 185 see also mouth; voice tic 93–5, 100 see also face Tiravanja, Rirkrit 38 Tomkins, Silvan 122, 135 Tormey, Alan 97, 101–2 Totality and Infinity (Levinas) 7, 76, 99 Tournier, Michel 7 Trachtenberg, Alan 97, 114 trauma, as trope 3, 8, 11, 13 U The Unavowable Community (Blanchot) 39 the uncanny 153 V ventriloquism 76 vibration 147, 166 see also resonance Villiers, de L’Isle-Adam (1838–1889) 42 Viola, Bill 130, 216 Virno, Paulo 17 The Visible and The Invisible (MerleauPonty) 143 voice 18, 23, 55, 58–9, 65, 67–70, 72, 74–8, 84, 141–5, 147–56, 158, 166–8, 173–5, 180–2, 217–21 disembodied 76, 155 ‘hemming’ and ‘hawing’ 168 ventriloqual 76, 155–6 vocal training 151–2 vocalic body 155, 172 vocalic space 155 see also cough; cry; laughter; scream; shout; sneeze W Whitakker, Stephen 139 Willemen, Paul 51 World Trade Center 25–6