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Spring 2010 49 Haptic Spectatorship and the Political Life of Cruelty, or, Antonin Artaud “Signaling Through the Flames” R. D. Crano The separation of culture and life in interbellum France The first words ofAntoninArtaud’s The Theater and its Double, first published in France in 1938, read as follows: Never before, when it is life itself that is in question, has there been so much talk of civilization and culture. And there is a curious parallel between this generalized collapse of life at the root of our present demoralization and our concern for a culture which has never been coincident with life, which in fact has been devised to tyrannize over life.1 It seems peculiar that Artaud, the twentieth century’s quintessential thinker of cruelty, would open his one book on theatre theory with a fundamentally “moral” concern. Culture, as it stands, and its concomitant construct of “civilization” “tyrannize” by operating externally to the lives that they affect. “Life itself,” in all its profundity, remains both unknown and unsought as those who happen to be living it are allowed only approximate cultural representations (and misrepresentations) of what it could be. In response, Artaud desires a restoration of life by way of a physiologically affective theatre, a Theatre of Cruelty, as he names it, wherein spectatorial experience would become an essential exercise in liberation from the “tyrannical” culture of the interbellum French bourgeoisie—its art, politics, social codes, modes of production, and so on, all of which remain formally, spatially, and temporally cordoned off from any firsthand experience of the fullness of life. Taking as its primary task the subversion of bourgeois culture’s removal from life,Artaud’s theatre refuses its artistic inheritance while striving for the unthinkable: a perfect “coincidence” with—and ontological indistinguishability from—something called “life.” The one doubles the other, but as neither representation nor simulacrum, neither mirror nor shroud; rather, this staged doubling must make it seem as though it is in fact life that doubles the theatre (as the book’s title overtly suggests) and, as such, becomes empowered and allowed to emerge amongst the stale confabulations of “civilized” culture’s more intellective or psychological pursuits. What the theatre R.D. Crano lives, teaches, makes art, bakes bread, rides a bicycle, and reads books (mostly) in Columbus, Ohio. A Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Comparative Studies in the Humanities at The Ohio State University, he is writing a dissertation on poststructuralist ontologies of vision and visuality, the biopolitics of memory, and the evolution of cinematic and videographic technique and form. His work has appeared previously in Film-Philosophy and Senses of Cinema. 50 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism can and should do is expose our domesticated faculties of perception to strange and provocative sensations. Such exposure is a fundamentally political activity, insofar as true politics always entails forcing something previously unperceived into a given perceptual field.2 Along these lines, Artaud’s invocation of “tyranny” needs to be carefully weighed. Against the political operation that inscribes a necessary distance between ruler and ruled, we might extract from Artaud’s critique a more immediate, undisciplined autonomy, a politics “coincident” with everyday life.3 In terms of stagecraft, this means challenging, on a number of fronts, the dominant text-bound mode of theatrical production by suffusing the spectatorial body in an undifferentiated multisensory milieu of non-representative, counter-mimetic impressions. I argue for the primacy in Artaud’s thought of this problem of reconciling culture and life. There seems to be a general tendency in Artaud scholarship to overlook the “moral” concerns that frame his text. Many regularly discussed threads in his oeuvre might be productively resituated in light of his historically specific anxieties over the increasing distance between “life” and its various public avatars—between what is supposedly interior and what is shared.An indispensable moral problem, I believe, conditions Artaud’s many theatrical and theoretical creations. Cruelty, plague, alchemy, madness, and the like are but partial solutions, or rather different takes on the same foundational concern to reverse the trend of “present demoralization.”4 Though perhaps too often concealed by his contemptuous rhetoric, on the one hand, and poetic abstractions...

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