Introduction: to have done with the ‘impossible’

In choosing to address Antonin Artaud now, and specifically in choosing to address him in relation to the concept of ‘presence’ in performance now, we are confronted with two aspects of the dominant understanding of his work: first, his posthumous construction as ‘the apostle of pure, unmediated presence’ by avant-garde theatre-makers of the 1960s like the Living Theatre;Footnote ¹ and second, his subsequent deconstruction by Jacques Derrida. Both determinations cast Artaud's position as one in which presence and representation are opposed, and consequently current secondary literature still tends to frame Artaud's project as entirely incompatible with that of post-structuralism. In ‘The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation’ (1978), Derrida's performance of deconstruction on Artaud's concept of the theatre of cruelty invites us to conclude that fidelity to Artaud is impossible, because he aspires to create contradictions in the form of self-identical and immediate theatrical representations.Footnote ² The theatre of cruelty, Derrida argues, constitutes the

In this way, Derrida equates the ‘intestine difference’ of the present with representation. ‘Pure presence as pure difference’, Derrida implies, is not presence at all. Presence requires representation in order to appear, or, as Derrida puts it: ‘Presence, in order to be presence and self-presence, has already begun to represent itself, has always already been penetrated’.Footnote ⁴

In contrast, this essay will argue in favour of differential presence as a concept that emerges in the conjunction between the philosophical man of the theatre, Artaud, and the theatrical philosopher, Gilles Deleuze. Drawing from Deleuze, this essay departs from the premise that the desire to break free from ‘conflictual, official and institutionalized representation’Footnote ⁵ need not immediately be equated with a transcendentalist agenda. There are different ways of thinking difference: not as the ‘death’ that full presence must necessarily harbour within itself, but as ‘a free and present variation’ that registers itself with audiences as affect, operating beneath the threshold of representation.Footnote ⁶ In this sense, this essay will suggest that Artaud's nonrepresentational theatre seeks to affirm a new kind of presence as difference, rather than aiming to transcend difference in order to reach the self-identical presence of Western metaphysics. The reality that performance makes available to the spectator in this event of ‘differential presence’ is not an other-worldly, transcendental realm that is self-identical insofar as it occupies a space and time outside representation. Rather, the differential presence constructed by what I want to call the ‘theatre without organs’ gives us access to the real as difference in itself, as an immanent ‘perpetual variation’ from which mere representational differences are derived. Difference can make its presence felt without representation, I will suggest, in what Deleuze calls a ‘fundamental encounter’ that forces new, embodied thoughts upon us. Differential presence names an encounter with difference, or perpetual variation, as that which exceeds the representational consciousness of a subject, forcing thought through rupture rather than communicating meanings through sameness.

There is nothing new, at least within Artaud studies, if not within performance studies at large, in setting up a connection between Artaud and Deleuze. Catherine Dale, Ed Scheer and Jeffrey Bell, amongst others, have already explored the Deleuzian elements of Artaud's oeuvre.Footnote ⁷ Indeed, Artaud studies has – if you like – been through the tunnel of this connection and come out the other side, with theorists like Jane Goodall and Umberto Artioli both arguing that Deleuze's project is distinct from Artaud's in a number of crucial ways. Goodall, for example, accepts that Deleuze and Guattari are close to Artaud ‘in their quest for a return to some kind of chora of subjectivity, “the Body without Organs”, and in their fascination with becoming, metamorphosis and contagion as processes which rupture paradigmatic understanding’. However, she ultimately insists that

Likewise, whilst Artioli describes Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus (1972) as ‘unthinkable without Artaud's oeuvre’, he also frames the book as dissolving the ‘persistent dualism’ of Artaud's thinking with its positive notion of desire.Footnote ⁹ Further, Artioli questions Deleuze's description of Artaud as having achieved a ‘wonderful breakthrough’ which ‘knocked down the wall’ of the signifier.Footnote ¹⁰ Instead, Artioli suggests, ‘If you put the two projects together, Artaud's revolt, far from attaining the miracle of the breakthrough, resonates with the devastating cry of setback’.Footnote ¹¹

But my own concern is less with the extent to which Deleuze and Artaud's projects can be understood to be entirely compatible. This essay does not come from a historical perspective that claims to produce the most faithful representation of what Artaud ‘truly’ believed – however complex and knowing our approach to the self-difference of that thought. Rather, I want to propose that something new emerges in the encounter between Deleuze and Artaud that is particularly productive for rethinking the notion of presence in performance – not as the transcendence of difference, nor as an effect of representation, but as ‘nonrepresentative force’, or what I am calling ‘differential presence’.

There are a number of different facets to the concept of differential presence, and therefore to the notion of a theatre without organs that creates such presence. Here, however, we will focus on its relation to language and voice with specific reference to Artaud's radio play To Have Done with the Judgment of God (1947). To aid us in this exploration we have not only Deleuze's numerous writings on Artaud, but also his little-known essay on the theatre, ‘One Less Manifesto’ (1979), which puts a firm emphasis on the question of how performance might release the presence of difference or ‘perpetual variation’ through a particular usage of language.Footnote ¹² In the process I will provide an exposition of four key concepts; not only those of differential presence and the theatre without organs, but also the ‘body without organs’ and the ‘destratified voice’. I will suggest that Artaud's censored radio broadcast, from which Deleuze borrowed the concept of the body without organs, uses a destratified voice, a voice that escapes from signification into incantation, from the illusion of communication to the affirmation of affective breath-words (mots-souffles) and howl-words (mots-cris). To Have Done with the Judgment of God constitutes an instance of a theatre without organs that uses the destratified voice in a pursuit of differential presence – as a nonrepresentative encounter with difference that forces new thoughts upon us. In this sense, I will conclude, to make yourself a theatre without organs is to occupy an interzone between theatre and philosophy.

What is the body without organs?

The concept of the body without organs first appears in The Logic of Sense (1969), in which Deleuze proposes that it corresponds to Artaud's triumphant composition of a novel usage of language. As a ‘new dimension of the schizophrenic body’, Deleuze argues that the body without organs does not achieve self-identical expression with its cries, but rather feels the ‘problem’ of language through its suffering.Footnote ¹³ In this sense, Deleuze suggests that the specifically schizophrenic experience of an absence of distinction between ‘things’ and ‘propositions’ draws attention to an ontological capacity of language to act on bodies rather than merely represent them.Footnote ¹⁴ In his discovery of the body without organs as, in part, a relation to language, Artaud breaks free from passively suffering the wounds that ‘words without sense’ inflict upon the schizophrenic body. The body without organs is not sheltered from language but actively uses it as ‘words without articulation’, as words that become ‘illegible and even unpronounceable, as it transforms them into so many active howls in one continuous breath’.Footnote ¹⁵

By the time we reach A Thousand Plateaus (1980), however, the body without organs – now called the BwO for short – has become a central concept for Deleuze and Guattari's ontology. Here they distinguish between different types of BwO, which we can find once we have ‘sufficiently dismantled our self’, and what they call ‘the totality of all BwOs’.Footnote ¹⁶ Like the distinction between specific becomings and the fundamental becoming they affirm, the totality of BwOs has less to do with ‘the body’ as such, and more to do with ontology. According to Deleuze and Guattari, once the self is taken apart, what we reach is ‘nonstratified, unformed, intense matter’ or ‘energy’. The BwO is this primary ‘glacial reality’ on which organisms and subjects form – nothing but these flows of energy, of difference in itself.Footnote ¹⁷ It is what Deleuze and Guattari refer to elsewhere as a plane of consistency.

To make yourself a BwO (that is, in turn to position oneself on the totality of all BwOs) involves a process of disorganization or destratification. The strata block our way to the BwO and, as such, must be removed or undone in order for the BwO to be made. In Plateau Six, Deleuze and Guattari focus on what they call ‘the three great strata . . . that most directly bind us’: the organism, signifiance and subjectification; although the indication is that there are many, many more besides.Footnote ¹⁸ Each stratum attaches to a different aspect of life: the organism to the body, signifiance to the ‘soul’ (or unconscious) and subjectification to the conscious.Footnote ¹⁹ Deleuze and Guattari suggest that as much as we need to liberate the creativity of the body from the limits of the organism as form, we also need to ‘tear the conscious away from the subject in order to make it a means of exploration’ and to tear the unconscious ‘away from signifiance and interpretation to make it a veritable production’.Footnote ²⁰

Pre-empting the logic of his deconstruction of the theatre of cruelty, in ‘La Parole soufflée’ (1965) Derrida argues that Artaud's concept of the body without organs constitutes an appeal to simple, or metaphysical, presence without difference. For Artaud, Derrida says, it is the division of the body into organs which introduces difference into the body and ‘opens the lack through which the body becomes absent from itself’.Footnote ²¹ In turn, given their appropriation of the concept of the body without organs, Bell has recently questioned whether Deleuze and Guattari, along with Artaud,

If this is how Deleuze is to be read, then he too would fall foul of deconstructive critique.

But as Bell goes on to emphasize, the enemy of the BwO is not the organs for Deleuze and Guattari (as what divides and differentiates an otherwise unified body), but the organism as the ‘organic organization of the organs’.Footnote ²³ The organism inserts itself into the BwO in order to prescribe to bodies a distinct and restricted function, molar identity, or specific, fixed strata. For Deleuze and Guattari,

– or for presence as opposed to difference, monism as opposed to dualism. In this sense, the concept of the BwO plays a central role in Deleuze's effort to rethink the process of creation (whether as thought, art or nature) without the need to posit a transcendent, organizing Law, or what Artaud called ‘the judgment of God,’ which controls the creative process from a position outside it. Conjoining Artaud with Spinoza, the BwO constitutes a refusal of any distinction between worldly products and a transcendent producer, between organizing mind and organized matter, in favour of a univocal notion of being as a processuality ‘immanent in whatever manifests it’.Footnote ²⁵ To make yourself a body without organs is both to find and to construct that immanent processuality as it is manifested in the processes of writing, performing, thinking, living.

The theatre without organs and Artaud's To Have Done with the Judgment of God

Given this conception of the BwO, what is a theatre without organs and how does it operate in the world? It is at this point, I want to suggest, that Deleuze's essay ‘One Less Manifesto’ is of vital importance – helping us to bridge the gap between philosophy and performance, ontology and practice. In this essay, Deleuze develops the concept of a theatre of ‘perpetual variation’, a theatre that subtracts the organizing elements of theatrical representation – such as plot, character and dialogue – in order to ‘release a new potentiality of theatre, an always unbalanced, nonrepresentative force’.Footnote ²⁶ Immediately, this proposed theatre presents itself as in alliance with the body without organs, which is involved in a similarly subtractive process when it dismantles the strata as the ‘phenomenon of sedimentation’ that imposes organization and stasis on an otherwise mobile, material energy.Footnote ²⁷ In both cases it is a question of taking away that which attempts to fix the moving and homogenize the differing, a matter of undoing that which forms speed and subjectifies affect.

‘Only affects and no subject, only speeds and not form’ – this describes the theatre without organs, or TwO, as much as the BwO.Footnote ²⁸ If the BwO is a plane or surface which, once we have leapt onto it, allows us to perceive ourselves and the world not as discrete subjects and objects, but as relations of speed and slowness and powers to affect and be affected, then the TwO is equally an already-existing – and yet also waiting-to-be-constructed – plane, produced by performance-makers and their audiences. In the TwO, all elements of theatricality become the ‘material for variation’:Footnote ²⁹ the variation of costume ‘that falls off and is put back on’,Footnote ³⁰ the variation of gesture in which no gesture is repeated ‘without obtaining different characteristics of time’,Footnote ³¹ or the variation of language in which the ‘phonological, syntactical, semantical and even stylistical’Footnote ³² elements of language are all intensified through ‘methods of stammering, whispering’ and mumbling.Footnote ³³

And it is this last aspect of the TwO that I want to focus on here, in relation to Artaud's radio play. In contrast to the elaborate scenic and theatrical effects required by his first dramatic text, The Spurt of Blood (1925), To Have Done with the Judgment of God eliminates every aspect of theatre except the voice.Footnote ³⁴ Likewise, we might note that it is the variation of language that receives the greatest amount of attention in ‘One Less Manifesto’. In both cases, it is important to emphasize the attention paid to language as a means to counterbalance the tendency to conceive the pursuit of nonrepresentational theatre (whether as the theatre without organs, a subtractive theatre of perpetual variation, or the theatre of cruelty) as one that reinstates a dichotomy between language and body, and falls down heavily in favour of the presence of the latter over the alienating power of the former. All three theatres may well be antitextual, as Martin Puchner implies,Footnote ³⁵ but only if by ‘text’ we mean a self-identical script the truth of which must be faithfully reproduced in performance, or a homogenizing force that serves to fix the creativity and variability that Deleuze argues is immanent to language. But they are by no means antiliterary or uninterested in speech as a theatrical element; on the contrary, ‘One Less Manifesto’ argues that a ‘public reading of poems by Gherasim Luca is a complete and marvellous theatrical event’.Footnote ³⁶ Correlatively, Artaud describes the purely vocal theatre of To Have Done with the Judgment of God as ‘providing a small-scale model for what I want to do in the Theatre of cruelty’.Footnote ³⁷ In this way, although Artaud's polemics sometimes suggest otherwise, it is important to acknowledge that the theatre of cruelty is not conceived in terms of the exclusion of words. ‘There is no question of abolishing speech in theatre’, Artaud states; rather, Deleuze and Artaud share the notion that language ought to be handled as the ‘concrete’ entity that it is.Footnote ³⁸ It is not language itself that is the problem, so much as the codified ways in which it is used.

Since the story of Artaud's censored broadcast To Have Done with the Judgment of God is well known I will not rehearse it here; suffice it to say that the occasion of the ban acts as a good example of Deleuze's argument that the strata are perpetually recasting themselves in the BwO.Footnote ³⁹ The starting point for the radio play was a series of short texts, written by Artaud, and then performed by Roger Blin, Maria Casarès, Paule Thévenin and Artaud, interrupted by rhythmic passages played on xylophones and drums, ‘beating and exchanges’ between Blin and Artaud, and the latter's ‘cry in the stairwell’. It is with this performance of language, I will now go on to suggest, that we see a genuine instance of Artaud's TwO performing its philosophy of destratification.

The theatre without organs cries out in a destratified voice

As a theatre without organs, To Have Done with the Judgment of God performs its philosophical work in its construction of a destratified voice. In the case of the voice, destratification involves putting elements like intonation, diction, pitch and meaning into variation. For example, in Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari argue that the BwO resists the ‘torture’ of organization partly by way of a particular relation to the phonological aspect of language: ‘In order to resist using words composed of articulated phonetic units, it utters only gasps and cries that are sheer unarticulated blocks of sound’.Footnote ⁴⁰ In this sense, the phoneme is like an ‘organ’ of language that the destratified voice would rather be without.

In To Have Done with the Judgment of God, this phonological variation can be most obviously heard in the passages of glossolalia that erupt from the text, and in Artaud's distant, resonating cries from the stairwell. Whereas the stratified voice speaks ‘perfectly and soberly’,Footnote ⁴¹ Artaud's destratified voice speaks too high and too fast to act as the servant of communication; Artaud uses his voice to enter into proximity with the madwoman who speaks only to her selves, or to the wolf that howls at the moon. Alternatively, we might look to the example of Artaud's little-known ‘translation’ of Lewis Caroll's Jabberwocky which Deleuze discusses in The Logic of Sense. Here, Deleuze suggests, Artaud breaks with the conventional schizophrenic experience of passively suffering the woundings of words, in favour of actively transforming words into actions by subtracting the difference between the phonetic elements; turning discrete phonetic units into ‘a fusion of consonants’.Footnote ⁴² ‘It is a question’, Deleuze says,

The concept of the destratified voice can be contextualized with reference to the theory of language that Deleuze and Guattari articulate in A Thousand Plateaus, in which they argue – contra lingustics – that language's variability comes from within itself rather than from external circumstances. Language is not a homogeneous system that acts as theme to the variations performed in instances in speech; rather, they argue, ‘it is the variation itself that is systematic’ in language.Footnote ⁴⁴ And it is this immanent difference of language that Artaud's destratified voice allows us to apprehend – for instance, in the fluctuations of pitch in his particular brand of Sprechgesang, as one procedure ‘in which several voices seem to issue from the same mouth’.Footnote ⁴⁵ In this way, the voice is neither the phenomenological medium that allows the presence of self-consciousness to itself, nor is it the mere ‘simulation’ of presence as Derrida contends in Speech and Phenomena – the response to the threat of the difference that language is said to introduce into self-presence.Footnote ⁴⁶ Rather, the destratified voice embraces the potential ‘to be a foreigner, but in one's own tongue’, or to perform the difference in one's own voice, in a gesture that learns from, and expresses a solidarity with, those minorities who ‘work over’ a foreign language from within.Footnote ⁴⁷ Indeed, for Deleuze and Guattari, placing the voice in variation is revolutionary, insofar as it both goes against the political enterprise to impose a homogeneous system of language on speakers that they claim is coupled with the study of linguistics,Footnote ⁴⁸ and has the capacity to bring forth perpetual variation as the ‘the essential element of the real beneath the everyday’.Footnote ⁴⁹

As Adrian Morfee has proposed, the final phase of Artaud's working life might be characterized as a search for a nonrepresentational and ‘non-alienating form of writing’ in which a perpetually differing self might be created. Morfee argues that, in his late texts, ‘what Artaud desires is not observational consciousness that treats his life as something distinct from what he is, but to feel life itself, to be aware of himself existing’.Footnote ⁵⁰ But from Morfee's perspective, this will always be a fated ambition insofar as awareness, or any kind of presence with life, is understood to necessarily involve mediation, distanciation or the introduction of difference as representation. Artaud is setting himself an impossible task, Morfee argues, when he aspires to engage in writing as a ceaseless process of undetermined self-creation, rather than as an act that binds the self to a fixed representation that betrays or alienates that creativity. In contrast, a Deleuzian perspective allows us to suggest that ‘life itself’ is already self-differing rather than self-identical, and that this difference is not somehow beyond our experience altogether – only beyond the limits of representational consciousness. For Deleuze, difference is that which presents itself to affect and sensation alone. In the final section of this paper, I want to explore how the theatre without organs might be understood to put us in the presence of difference in a manner that brings together the projects of theatre and philosophy.

The theatre without organs creates differential presence

To construct oneself a theatre without organs, I also want to suggest, is to learn to think, as well as to speak, differently. In To Have Done with the Judgment of God, Artaud suggests that man thinks as he is made. As Catherine Dale argues, Artaud ‘throws both mind and body into consternation accusing man of thinking along the organized lines of the organism, that is, of thinking in the same way as he is constructed and vice versa’.Footnote ⁵¹ Likewise, in Difference and Repetition (1968), Deleuze argues that he and Artaud agree on the idea that to think – genuinely – is to create, to make something new in contact with the world rather than to approach it with preconceived ideas. And it is this creative nature of thought that makes it difficult, for all of us, to really think. However, this difficult, incapacitated thought – which Deleuze calls ‘thought without image’ – is given a positive spin as the only thought that can approach difference in itself.

For Deleuze, thought is not the product of language but of what he calls a ‘fundamental encounter’.Footnote ⁵² Here, Deleuze makes a clear distinction between what he calls ‘objects of recognition’ and those of encounter. Objects of recognition, Deleuze argues, ‘do not disturb thought’ insofar as they provide thought with ‘an image of itself’; they reaffirm for thought, in other words, what it already thinks it knows. For Deleuze, instances of recognition do not involve genuine thought. We only ‘truly think’ when we have difficulty in recognizing something.Footnote ⁵³ Such things produce encounters as the forcing of thought, or, as Deleuze puts it,

The object of encounter, then, presents itself to affect or sensation alone, rather than to conscious thought or recognition. Indeed, the encounter ‘defies consciousness, recognition and representation’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Conceived in terms of its power to be affected, Deleuze also argues that the body can think in ways from which consciousness would do well to learn. Deleuze is not arguing that sensation is able to recognize nuance, as constituted by small degrees of difference between meanings. Rather, he argues that difference in itself is that which ‘can only be sensed’, since consciousness works with identities.

In this way, Deleuze allows us to perceive Artaud as aspiring to create a TwO as an object of encounter rather than recognition, as forcing thought through rupture rather than communicating meanings through sameness, or as differential rather than self-identical presence. This is a function Artaud associates with poetry – theatre becomes poetic, Artaud argues, when it seizes its capacity to shake our existing understandings of the relations between things. In ‘The Theatre of Cruelty – First Manifesto’ (1932) Artaud argues, ‘Through poetry, theatre contrasts pictures of the unformulated with the crude visualization of what exists’ – a process he associates with cinema.Footnote ⁵⁶ Contemporary society, he complains, ‘has made us forget the slightest idea of serious theatre which upsets all our preconceptions’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Once distilled to its essence, we must not ask whether theatricality can define thought, Artaud argues, ‘but whether it makes us think’.Footnote ⁵⁸

Deleuze's concept of the encounter with that which can only be sensed also allows us to return with fresh eyes to Artaud's references to ‘bodily transmission’ and his concept of the ‘flesh’. In ‘Theatre and Cruelty’ (1933), for example, Artaud argues, ‘One cannot separate body and mind, nor the senses from the intellect, particularly in a field where the unending repeated jading of our organs calls for sudden shocks to revive our understanding’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Here, the body, or what Artaud sometimes names ‘flesh’, is located at the very source of genuine thought, as distinct from the kind of habitual thinking involved in the interpretation of the psychological theatre that Artaud rejects.Footnote ⁶⁰ Likewise, in ‘Situation of the Flesh’ (1925), Artaud assigns a particular definition to the notion of flesh beyond a common-sense understanding:

For Deleuze, too, the presence of difference or perpetual variation has an electric quality: ‘It is like lightning coming from somewhere else and announcing something else – a sudden emergence of creative, unexpected and subrepresentative variation’.Footnote ⁶² Using the destratified voice, differential presence is characterized by the ‘sudden shock when thought realises itself in the body’;Footnote ⁶³ it is a moment of performance that addresses an acephalic ‘mind in the flesh’.