Samuel Beckett's sixty-year career of producing letters, poetry, prose, criticism, drama, radio, film and television spans the twentieth century, bearing witness to a remarkable period of change in history and thought. As such, his work is a key reference point within and beyond theatre studies, even as it indexes a critical turning point in aesthetic modernism. Since his death in 1989, Beckett has remained durable as an object of research in academia, as a source of revenue in theatres, as a fixture in the cultural marketing of Ireland, and often as a caricature in the public consciousness. The field of Beckett criticism is exceptionally large; as a rough measure, there were fifty-five English-language monographs on Beckett published in the 2000–10 decade, and the rate of five to six new books per year shows no sign of slowing.Footnote ² Due as much to Beckett's own prolific career and heterogeneous techniques as to the sheer scale of the critical literature about him, there is little agreement on methodologies, vocabularies or systems in which Beckett can comfortably be categorized. To some, his work is best understood by returning to the figures that Beckett studied while at Trinity College, such as the Pre-Socratics, or to giants of the Enlightenment like Arnold Geulincx, George Berkeley, Samuel Johnson and Emmanuel Kant. Many monographs are devoted to readings of Beckett based on twentieth-century Continental philosophers, including some that Beckett probably never read, in particular the French post-structuralists. In recent years, an empirical wave has swept Beckett studies, with focus on the archival material and unpublished ‘grey’ canon. This process of excavation clearly enriches scholarly accuracy and has enhanced the field immeasurably, but it also risks falling somewhat more on the side of tradition than of innovation, since it assesses all validity based on the past. An archival approach is not wholly equipped to deal with the present or future Beckett. Thus it cannot answer (or ask) certain challenging questions: why is Beckett a figure to whom we keep returning? What are the durable ideas within his aesthetic contribution, and what can they tell us about the century of their birth?

This article will refer to a performative Beckett who is not a deceased artist, but a living idea that goes on, incessantly, to be accessed and apprehended by audiences, students, scholars and the general public. It will not burrow deeply into a single area of Beckett to find out more about his production of literary objects. Instead, it will address broader issues connected to the contemporary understanding of identity, treating Beckett's innovations as emblematic of a radical shift within modernism. Across all of his genres, periods and languages there stalks a figure, the ‘Beckettian subject’ of my title, who is called into being by language, who is irrevocably multiple in identity, and who is undercut by the presence of the void. My core presumption, following a pathway opened by Theodor Adorno and Alain Badiou, is that due to the specificity of historical context in which this literary subject was imagined – namely the political violence that Beckett witnessed first-hand – there is singular ethical weight in Beckett's aesthetic response.

There is a danger, in such a totalizing project, that it may impose a false unity on Beckett's oeuvre or attempt to synthesize the proliferation of critiques and methods that clearly defy organization. It is thus vital to state at the outset that the lack of unity, even at the level of category, is itself an essential part of Beckett's modernism. It is symptomatic that Beckett's works might appear as easily on a syllabus for a class in modernism as for postmodernism; Anthony Cronin tried to have it both ways when he named his 1999 biography of Beckett The Last Modernist. The most tempting category of all is perhaps that of artists who resist category. Beckett himself, referring to James Joyce's Work in Progress in 1929, writes,

The paradox of reflecting on Beckett's innovations with the modernist subject could not be starker: the identification must not be too neat, nor must the pigeon-hole be of the incorrect size. Rather than address the ‘modernist subject’ as a whole, the present discussion will argue that Beckett's treatment of three philosophical categories – language, multiplicity and void – has major implications for how we think through subjectivity, both in aesthetic modernism in the historical sense and in the present. This discussion will thus raise issues of historical, theoretical and methodological interest to theatre and performance studies, in an effort to contribute to contemporary debates on how identity and modernism are to be understood.

The modernist subject

Aesthetic modernism arose at a time when philosophy and science combined to disrupt unities that previously gave identity a constant and solid basis, most axiomatically expressed in the Cartesian cogito. While the innovations of modernism were not wholly new in undermining the constancy of identity, it is nonetheless clear that the dominant model of subjectivity had undergone a seismic shift by 1945 (at the latest).Footnote ⁴ The two world wars can be read as historical resonators for the violence of this shift, manifesting an external destruction that mirrored the decline of positivist models of identity and history in Europe. It is also essential to this revision of subjectivity that scientific advancements in physics, genetics, psychology, linguistics and cognitive theory confirmed what philosophy articulated as a decline of determinism, or, more precisely, the failure to demonstrate unities that had been regarded previously as truths.

Against a modernism conceived in this sense as revolution against a prior model, postmodernism in the second half of the twentieth century can be regarded as a logical extension of that same rebellious spirit, but geared mainly toward redress – often only philosophical, but sometimes nakedly political – of the excesses of past unities. Perfectly understandably, this led to a kind of subjective apotheosis, and a profound rejection or wilful impasse before the old universals. The thematics of difference, particularly subjective difference, shifted the attention of philosophy and art to securing rights and recognition for many for whom these had been denied. No doubt much of this shift was justified, necessary and indeed logical – at the beginning. The naming of races and genders and sexual preferences, their elevation into categories of academic study and sections of the bookstore, flowed historically from modernism's insight into subjectivity's fragmentation and constructedness. But it is equally clear that the pathway of difference can lead to essentialist claims no less violent than those opposed by both philosophies. Recognition is a poisoned chalice, since it always involves non-recognition of what lies outside the frame. Often more subtly, recognition distorts or destroys the wider field that gives the recognized its meaning. Each name, each category of human, leaves behind some remainder, some fragment of experience – not beyond language, but embedded within its field – that transcends the boundary of the named.

The Beckettian subject, if properly confronted as a living event, suggests that far from having escaped the consequences of modernist subjectivity, we have not yet fully realized its radicality. Rather than a period that is comfortably relegated to the past, modernism is instead regarded here as a set of thoughts that humanity has gone on thinking across the past and will think into the future. These potent ideas are real; they have produced events, history and art. Some of these ideas were also, in their Western context at least, absolutely innovative at the time that they emerged. In attempting to construct a new model after what is referred to as postmodernism, or simply to understand the postmodern thought, this article will advocate a kind of really-existing modernism. It will suggest, in line with a riddle first posed by Jean-François Lyotard, that modernism follows postmodernism. Asked in an interview what would constitute a postmodern theatre, Heiner Müller famously responded, ‘The only postmodernist I know of was August Stramm, a modernist who worked in a post office’.Footnote ⁵ Müller's jocular provocation seems to imply that postmodernism is a distinction without a difference. Beckett's subjects offer, if anything, a sterner challenge: if we follow them to their limit, they show that modernism is necessary as a direct refutation of certain streams of theory, or perhaps results from theories, that appear within postmodernism.

The grounds on which postmodern identity politics are usually contested in the public sphere tend to be associated with political conservatism, most visibly in the context of the United States, where objections to affirmative action, rhetoric of ‘reverse racism’ and mockery of ‘political correctness’ are associated with the Republican Party.Footnote ⁶ This critique will explicitly disavow this association, proceeding instead from a structural and philosophical analysis of the modernist crisis in subjectivity, as manifested in the art of the twentieth century. Writing in his survey of modernism, Ashes Taken for Fire, a work that uses many of Beckett's literary contemporaries to reveal the still-unresolved relation of identity and power, Kevin Bell articulates the core lesson of modernist subjectivity:

Already the terms in which this article will address the politics of Beckett's modernist aesthetics are visible. Language is revealed in modernism as the way to create and control a subject, and is thus simultaneously exposed as an instrument of violence and ideology. The arbitrariness of the signifier, together with modernity's advances in the scientific realm, confirm multiplicity, rather than unity, as the dominant model of thinking the self. Finally, prefiguring terminology that Beckett himself will use in his aesthetic criticism, language is seen as a kind of veil covering an unnamable, irreducible aporia. The role of modern art is to puncture this veil, to expose a void, to depart from the surface, or at least to illuminate the superficiality of the surface. Thus a profound absence underlying language and the construction of self, properly understood, devastates the present rubric of identity politics.

Language

A fair argument could be made that language is the central philosophical subject, not to mention the key modernist material, of the last century. It is interesting that current cognitive approaches that study language scientifically have confirmed what early semioticians attempted to establish through theory: our perception of the world hinges at a basic level on linguistic operations. While this field of signifiers is mutually reinforcing, it relies at every level on an operation of distinction and difference. Thus, as a consequence of the insight from structural linguistics that language is essential to all perception, it follows that language also constructs identity, and that our subjectivity relies on a network of others, in parallel to the field of meaning constituted by words. This dependency on social construction, together with the operation of difference on which language relies, forces language into an ideological function. Louis Althusser's description of interpellation, for example, is simply a social rendering of a linguistic idea: I am made when I am named. Who controls the name controls the body. This thought is expressed repeatedly in postwar/postmodern/post-structuralist philosophy, namely by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, though it continues to underpin the contemporary critique of bio-politics in the work of Giorgio Agamben and the critique of capitalism in the writings of Slavoj Žižek.

The central insight to be addressed from within this massive field is the assertion that language involves violence. Language is both a terrain on which today's wars are fought, and a weapon in those wars. As Žižek points out, this is not only the case with specific incitement or ideology communicated by words. Rather, ‘language itself, the very medium of non-violence, of mutual recognition, involves unconditional violence’.Footnote ⁸ This is an old insight, not strictly modern or postmodern in character. The logical consequence is that language is always a mask, a veil, and a herald of the symbolic order. ‘What this means’, according to Žižek, ‘is that verbal violence is not a secondary distortion, but the ultimate resort of every specifically human violence’.Footnote ⁹

To move beyond the subjective violence of language – the idea that language is a place and a means for waging war – it is necessary to examine the systematic and symbolic violence of this capacity for articulation.Footnote ¹⁰ It is conceivable that language is the reason war exists in its human form. Much documentary theatre, at least, begins from the same position as the world's diplomats: the idea that talking is somehow better than fighting. We hear that man's status as a ‘talking animal’ confers moral responsibility; language is elevated as the means of therapeutic repetition, of diplomatic negotiation and of peace itself. Clearly, this misses the point of most theories of language, even the cognitive models that show just how deeply the division of elements is embedded in the human mental structure, and the history that shows the consequences of these divisions. While it is obvious that the capacity for division of our world allows tremendous communicative, logical and scientific achievement, it is equally apparent that this power has as a necessary supplement the most extraordinary forms of violence. Has not the worst violence we can imagine always been committed in service to an idea, rather than to a biological imperative? Is it not probable that genocide and torture among humans – two forms of violence that other animals do not display – exist only because we are the animals who can speak? Murder for ideas is thus the inverted mirror image of all great poetry. Žižek points toward the protest march as a case study:

If language is to be the villain of this story, let us reflect on how the story's hero – Samuel Beckett – plans his attack. Obviously, the hero has lost from the beginning, since he is a writer. His weapons in this battle are his enemy. His entry into the French language can be read on the one hand as a kind of diversionary tactic, a defeat of the mother language at least. But in any language, this modernist writer remains condemned to struggle against his own material in order to remain faithful to his own insight into its inadequacy. Alberto Toscano, writing in the introduction to Alain Badiou's collected lectures on the twentieth century, names precisely the element of Beckett's art that is read here as political: ‘the unique and exacting way in which his work combines, on the one hand, a formidable experimentation with syntactical and elocutionary devices and, on the other, a deep-seated, programmatic mistrust of the written word’.Footnote ¹² I will return to this again in Beckett's own terms, but suffice to say for now that Beckett's writing, emblematic of numerous other modernist practices, involves a critique of language so absolute, so specific, and so relentless that it becomes a critique of identity itself, a critique of representation, a critique of history and a critique of the terms in which even its own existence continues. This paradoxical condition is fundamental to Beckett and to understanding the implications of aesthetic modernism.

Besides switching to French, breaking up syntax, disrupting punctuation, and creating fractures in the conventions of the novel, the essay and the poem, Beckett's late entry into theatre can be read as a further stratagem in a long-running war against the word, as a kind of flight into image and movement instead of text.Footnote ¹³ This author wrote not one but two plays called Act Without Words. Furthermore, Beckett frequently depicts the struggle with language and the writing act as a central conflict in his dramas. This is visible in traditional examples like Endgame, in which Hamm's ‘story’ is an ongoing purgatory in which all the characters are forced to dwell. It is even more explicit in the more obscure Rough for Radio II, in which Fox, a writer whose voice uncannily resembles Beckett's own prose, is restrained and tormented into composition for some kind of broadcast. The Beckettian position, however, is always that failure of expression is a precondition, and the escape from language via the dramatic image is no different. Indeed, the image – worth a thousand words, as the cliché so aptly has it – is in fact no less embedded in a system of language than is prose. Part of the success of Beckett's drama, however, is that the ontology of the theatre can be manipulated in such a way that identity becomes at least more fluid. This is achieved through the body of the actor, which will introduce the second key term: multiplicity.

Multiplicity

Multiplicity in language arises from the insight, credited to Ferdinand de Saussure, that the relationship between signifier and signified is an arbitrary one. Mathematically, this is not the same as random; it merely means that proliferation of multiple meanings from one signifier simply cannot be contained. The profound result of this arbitrariness is a kind of infinity that comes from language. I have already established that language constructs identity, so we can derive that identity too is subjected to a kind of slippage, an arbitrariness, a constructedness. This was, of course, the starting point for so many of the postmodern scholars of identity politics that are under critique here. But identity itself is far more multiple – indeed, infinity is far bigger – than many have realized.

Beckett's work in every genre plays games with this multiplicity, fragmenting the writer into different characters, allowing the characters to consume each other in chains of narrators, playing a shell game with identity that mimics the ideological critique of language. These are abysmal games, occurring especially in the prose, that visibly seek to renegotiate the terms of representation itself. Beckett does this more with image, sound and stagecraft in the plays, allowing fragments of bodies, split voices and repetitions to drive home the fracture of identity.

In creating performance texts that highlight the unfixed nature of the self, Beckett exploits the job description of an actor, which is to ‘be many’, to inhabit the Other. The actor's craft, in fact, is revealing of the mechanism by which the subject is made, since the flexibility of body and voice involved in playing both arises and alters through language (even if expressive language, as in mime, can be eliminated in the end). The actor is like a cell within the larger human body, a single unit that contains the code for infinitely more copies and mutations. Many of Beckett's characters, like Hamm, dread this fecundity; he and Clov kill a flea because ‘humanity might start from there all over again’.Footnote ¹⁴ But there is an irony in using actors to tell this story at all, since they are caught in repetition and procreation of a new self every night.

Beckett also deploys technology and some textual strategies to highlight the lack of unity that a single body can contain.Footnote ¹⁵ The contemporary practices that cross over Beckett's genres – the film adaptations of plays, the staging of prose texts and poems, and the new drive to interpret the late televisual works in digital culture – have further deepened his attempts to maintain rigorous multiplicity and multivalence.Footnote ¹⁶ Indeed, as stated in the introduction, Beckett himself must not be locked down into a simple, stable, identified category, like the literary criticism as bookkeeping that he so abhorred.Footnote ¹⁷ The marketing of Beckett as a cultural commodity, a process well under way in contemporary Ireland, is thus potentially as dangerous to the core of the work as the attempts by his estate to limit performative innovations, which clearly run the risk of imposing singularity.

Void

Beckett's own view of language as a ‘veil’ is the key to understanding his use of ‘void’, as void is what the veil conceals. Concealment is the mission of language, and the reason why Beckett must reject language. Beckett wrote in correspondence as early as 1937 that he could think of ‘no higher goal for a writer today’ than to ‘bore one hole after another in [language], until what lurks behind it – be it something or nothing – begins to seep through’.Footnote ¹⁸ The resolution is proposed by means of a paradox: the impossibility of expression, together with the obligation to express. The thing worth expressing, for Beckett himself and the painters he admired, is not the feasible, the representable, or the whole, but rather the underlying aporia, the void, the abyss. He goes still further ten years later, in the Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit. In this piece, published in the literary magazine transition in 1949, Beckett resists not only a positive meaning for art – he says there is ‘nothing to paint and nothing to paint with’Footnote ¹⁹ – but also any elevation of his lengthy and exquisite statements about art to the status of a new theory. Properly contextualized within the historical situation of Europe during and after the Second World War, his elevation of the void is blatantly political. The only conceivable response for Beckett, and what distinguishes him from postmodern identity discourse, was a wholesale resistance not of representation, but rather of the categories on which representation was negotiated, language foremost. His response was a human theatre of foregrounded language, of laughter, image and silence, a theatre that demonstrated its own failure and, as Theodor Adorno argued, actually offered a ‘fitting reaction’ to the horrors of its time. Unsurprisingly, given that this line appears in Negative Dialectics, Adorno highlights the persistently negative aspects of Beckett's art, writing that the ‘image world of nothingness as something emerges to stabilize his poetry’.Footnote ²⁰ Beckett avoids the stasis that nihilism could offer by filling his world with ‘inaudible cries that things should be different’.Footnote ²¹ In this paradoxical formulation, the potency of his cries derives from their inaudibility. Adorno brutally rejects the positive alternative offered by louder cries:

Beckett's work enacts the attempt to say nothing, but fails, and in this via negativa there is a terribly difficult path leading away from the postmodern impasse of language and violence. In Beckett's theatre, Adorno observes a formal activity of negation, a cultivation of profound absence, which is really a profound authenticity. Instead of a theatre of the absurd, Beckett writes what is finally a theatre of the real, to the extent that its silences and aporias alert the auditor to a void at the heart of presence, being and thought. Alain Badiou, who writes in Being and Event that ‘void is the proper name of being’, finds much the same activity in Beckett's prose.Footnote ²³

The direction that the disciplinary discussion might turn to, then, as we reflect on the potency of the void and its consequences for the subject, is essentially methodological. It appears that the modernist conception of the subject inaugurated a crisis for how we think about identity and the politics of the aesthetic, and that the subject today remains in crisis, not because of new insights or new technologies, but because of the old ones. With localized exceptions, it appears that huge swathes of theory and performance have chosen simply not to address the aftershocks of the original earthquake, or else gradually, imperceptibly and perfectly logically to paper back over the void. The radicality of Beckett's modernist subject, a being constituted by language, irrevocably multiple, and riddled with many tears in its many veils, has either not been fully apprehended or has been specifically written out of postmodern discourses that privilege a more unified construction of identity. Beckett's suspension of the artist-subject, between inexpressibility and the obligation to express, links into the ‘passion for the Real’ that Badiou sees at the centre of twentieth-century aesthetic practice.Footnote ²⁴ The pushback against Beckett's impossible but undeniably revolutionary definition of this Real is linked to the cultural logic of late capitalism, in its drive for ever-narrower categories of targeted consumption, the elevation of reproducible objects over evanescent events, and finally the hegemony of the culture industries, in which academia itself must be included.

Basic material analysis of how artwork like Beckett's is packaged and sold can reveal the challenges inherent in asking a consumer to confront the void. Academic publishing is no less guilty of resorting to the tactics of the ‘analogymongers’, even in the face of blatant contradictions. The publisher's summary on the back of Ashes Taken for Fire, for example, states quite correctly that Kevin Bell argues that ‘modernism exposes cultural identities such as blackness as mere strategies of conforming the self into belonging’. It further advertises that the philosophical archive that is modernist literature pursues ‘the question of nonidentity through sound, silence, and gesture, treating these as technologies of reading the contradictions, breakdowns, and erasures that constitute subjectivity’.Footnote ²⁵ Then, as though not a single structural critic ever became a book editor, the same page is stamped with the words ‘African American Studies’ next to the words ‘Literary Theory’. This action is an academic equivalent of the total neutralization of non-conformist music, a clear pattern from jazz to punk to grunge to hip hop, all of which can now be heard while one buys clothes and coffee. Why is it inconceivable that such a book could be sold without belonging to a predetermined racial category?

In performance studies, as a secondary example, the Beckettian subject threatens the increasingly popular anthropological project that elevates ethnographic and autobiographical performance to an automatically privileged status, a good-in-itself that revises (i.e. fills) a historical void. It is worth noting that the concept underpinning such performances is a precise reversal of the modernist reading of language, multiplicity and void, reclaiming positivist value from the ability of the self to speak about the self, rushing to self-interpellate, relishing the chance to squirm on a pin of one's own making. This project is then shrouded in a language of social redress inherited from none other than its own Victorian anthropological forebears, a lesson well learned from the white paternalism that it abjures. This process of mimicry, so familiar to postcolonial theorists in analysis of the Other, seems to escape the self-analysis of all but the most aware performers of this type.

A practical question for future research, deriving from Beckett and Adorno, is simply this: how is it possible today to deploy the modernist identity in theory and performance in such a way that it illuminates language, multiplicity and void? While this argument has shown that a performative path is available in Beckett, and that a theoretical path is available in practices that resist an economy of commodified identities, in no way is this article an attempt to proselytize that all makers must take the same hard path. The choice to proceed within language, to reveal multiplicity as a strategy to neutralize violence, and finally to use the word surface and the configuration of the body in space to expose, wherever possible, the strategic concealment of the void by language, shows a broad ethics that is founded on impossibility but also rejects the apotheosis of the negative. Rather than an infernal position, this is purgatorial; rather than atheistic, it is both agnostic and, in the strict sense, utopian. Beckett's final line of the Three Novels, ‘you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on’,Footnote ²⁶ seems to typify the fundamental resilience, tenacity and paradox at the heart of the modernist subject. But the manuscript text that is the epigraph for this article seems more precisely on-topic regarding the rigorous absence at the heart of modernist subjectivity: ‘Myself? What are you insinuating?’ Aesthetic modernism so conceived thus presents a non-escapist and anti-nihilist aesthetic, predicated on a relentless witnessing of a senselessly violent and cruel world. It justifies a long afterlife for the Beckettian subject in the contemporary consciousness and exposes a continuing absence at the heart of the subject, forbidding the certainty either of death or of salvation. In this, it can only be said to be profoundly human.