Forgetting Lot's Wife: On Destructive Spectatorship

Chapter 1: Artaud, Spectatorship, and Catastrophe

1 Artaud, Spectatorship, and Catastrophe About suffering they were always wrong, the Old Masters. —Alan Bennett, A Question of Attribution Figures of Spectatorship The spectators imprisoned in Plato’s cave and Lucretius’s witness of shipwreck are perhaps the most canonical figures for spectatorship in aesthetics and philosophy.1 While these figures, and especially the spectral watchers in Plato’s cave, continue their vigorous afterlives, the changed conditions of modern spectatorship also have demanded new critical models. Film’s challenge to familiar regimes of spectatorship and the increasing centrality of spectacular mass political forms make the 1930s a period of particular pressure in the history of spectatorship. That spectacle might radically change people was at once a conviction, and a fear. Antonin Artaud embodies these antinomies with force and fascination. As a form to express these antinomies, he found Lot’s wife. The partly occulted figure of Lot’s wife and the Genesis story’s concern with looking as destructive participation haunt Artaud’s The Theater and Its Double, a collection of essays he wrote during the 1930s. The goal of that collection is to establish a theater that would radically disrupt the spectator, compelling the spectator to occupy a place beyond psychology, on the one hand, and beyond politics, on the other. Precisely this sweeping goal locates the historical place of Artaud’s project. That is to say, rather than being an ‘‘outsider’’ artist whose production bears an only accidental relationship to the main trends of his time, Artaud’s theatrical formulations have distinct filiations to problems many identified as central in the 1930s. Many longed 23 24 Forgetting Lot’s Wife for a theater that would attain the condition of ritual and wanted to reclaim theater’s central role in society as a privileged site of the sacred. Theater artists were at once threatened and flattered by massive state ceremonies that also aspired to a grasp on the sacred. The state claimed ritualized, sacralized theatrical powers. The central exhibits in this theater at once political and theological are the massive spectacles of totalitarian states, which in many cases were explicitly based on ritual models. Theater artists saw the state seizing a theatrical power, and longed for an efficacy to equal that of the state. These political spectacles seemed to possess the power to produce subjects, and some artists desired this power. Central to this political theater is the abolition and transformation of the observer; at least in principle, or in the fantasies of ideology, the spectator becomes participant.2 Walter Benjamin’s analysis of this ideology of spectatorship as it played itself out in the mass rallies of the Nazis is especially germane here for its emphasis on the ritual elements in these spectacles. Fascism, writes Benjamin, sees its salvation in granting expression to the masses—but on no account granting them rights. The masses have a right to changed property relations; fascism seeks to give them expression in keeping these relations unchanged. The logical outcome of fascism is an aestheticizing of political life. The violation of the masses, whom fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to its knees, has its counterpart in the violation of the apparatus which is pressed into serving the production of ritual values.3 One response to violation of the theatrical apparatus in the enforced expression of ritual values was Bertolt Brecht’s. Theater could refuse that mode of expression and abandon the ritual interpellation of the subject. The phantasm of theatrical participation, seen from a Brechtian standpoint, always remains potentially a kind of ritual, and it is precisely such ersatz and politically deleterious magic that theater must reject. Like Brecht, Artaud rejected the false magic of theater; unlike Brecht, Artaud hoped to counter this false magic with true magic, not the disenchanted stage. Artaud’s failures—his failure to raise money for various attempts to realize the Theater of Cruelty, his failure ever to stage a production that approached his ideal—were in many senses inevitable . Artaud’s ‘‘failures,’’ then, are similar to the ‘‘failure’’ of Eliot’s The Waste Land, which, Franco Moretti has provocatively claimed, is a consequence of its desire to achieve what only mass culture could achieve—the creation of modern myth.4 Artaud’s failure has similar causes: Artaud desired a thorough, ritual demolition of the subject. Such demolition work was, perhaps, possible, but only in the mass cultural or political arena Artaud scorned. Lot’s wife is one of Artaud’s ambivalent figures...