Artaud and His Doubles

Chapter 5 : Crowds and Cruelty

chapter 5 : Crowds and Cruelty Stephen Koch argued persuasively in 1966 that Artaud’s theater is non-dialogic , that it proposes a one-way communication between the controller of the event and its participants. As opposed to Jarry’s theater, which launched its assault with the goal of engaging the audience member’s own capacity for action, Artaud’s theater represents a “graver development of the modernist relation between spectacle and spectator”: The audience is obliged to be far more passive than it is with Jarry. It is acted upon. Artaud does not regard his spectator as a thinking man, to be instructed, cajoled, seduced. Rather, the spectator is an organism , an exalted nervous system to be set free of itself through shock. In the Theater of Cruelty, the spectator is a hieratic victim. (“On Artaud,” 30) Not a thinking human, but an organism: Koch is right to point out that Artaud ’s theater seeks to “free” the perhaps unwilling audience member, who is conceived as an unthinking “victim.” Koch calls this audience member “passive,” and The Theater and Its Double’s construction of a theater space that envelops the audience and its staging techniques, which “seize” and “assault,” does support a general notion of passivity. But this is not the same kind of passivity found in a Naturalist or Symbolist audience, so we must be more precise with this term. Passivity in The Theater and Its Double represents the complex kind found in crowds—specifically, the kind of crowd being cultivated at the same time elsewhere in Europe: the spectator remains agitated and even ecstatic, while her/his individual intellect or will is immobilized under the overwhelming coercion of other forces. The crowd is one way of conceptualizing both artistically and politically the pairing of alienation and desire for the loss of self in the interwar period. This theoretical model sheds light on Artaud’s ideal spectator and its social implications. Crowd theory helps us see that the Theater of Cruelty envisions the audience in many of the same ways people’s theaters in 116 Italy and Germany did, and as demagogic political leaders elsewhere in Europe were also doing: as a group of people they would make feel liberated and exalted while keeping it under tight control. The means of affecting the audience that Artaud shares with fascist theaters become clear in the vocabulary of crowd theory and its place in the interwar era. This chapter examines the effects of these methods from the point of view of the audience member and, crucially, his/her receptivity to such techniques. We close with a reading of Artaud’s conception of his spectators , centering on the dissolution of the individual as seen through the powerful image he articulates of “The Nerve Meter.” The basic premise of crowd theory—that individuals behave differently in a group than they do when alone—has been noted (disparagingly ) since ancient times.1 But the crowd only took its place as a subject of serious critical inquiry in the late nineteenth century, with the belief that, as Gustave Le Bon wrote in his influential La psychologie des foules (1895), the modern era is “the Era of Crowds.”2 It reached a peak in the interwar era, with Mussolini, Sorel, and Hitler reading Le Bon, and books on the social, political, and psychological aspects of crowds appearing in the 1920s and ’30s by Sigmund Freud, William McDougall, Karl Jaspers, and José Ortega y Gasset, among others. After World War II, crowd theory took on a new urgency, after the horrific possible outcomes of mass politics became known. Le Bon’s analysis had served (literally) as a handbook for fascist leaders to control crowds. Studies by Theodor Adorno, George L. Mosse, and Serge Moscovici examined the functions of crowds in modern political movements .3 In 1960, Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power investigated the composition and function of crowds, creating a cultural, anthropological, and even aesthetic history of crowds and the structures and figures of power that control and define them. The picture that emerges from a cumulative look at this body of thought presents the following basic characteristics of crowds. They are violent, contagious, and extraordinarily powerful; they operate by emotion rather than reason; they respond to images and archetypes rather than arguments; they will gladly surrender themselves to higher powers and forceful figures. In a crowd, suggestion replaces discussion; crowds are “given to excesses of both violence and idealism”;4 things become possible in crowds...