Artaud’s Contagious Cries: Virtuality as Aurality

Abstract

Artaud’s Contagious Cries: Virtuality as Aurality Amin Erfani (bio) The plague takes dormant images, latent disorder and suddenly carries them to the point of the most extreme gestures. Theatre also takes gestures and develops them to the limit. Just like the plague, it reforges the links between what does and does not exist, between the virtual nature of the possible and the material nature of existence. —Antonin Artaud, “The Theater and the Plague” The viral and the virtual bear an uncanny affinity in an age marked by a deadly global pandemic and a profusion of new media. Two works by Antonin Artaud are particularly timely to think through contagion and technology together in the current environment, where the shock effect of real life exceeds the foresight of artistic representation. During a global scourge, life itself aligns with what Artaud describes as the Theater of Cruelty: it “disturbs our peace of mind, releases our repressed subconscious, drives us to a kind of potential rebellion.”1 The first work by Artaud that calls our attention is his seminal essay “The Theater and the Plague,” [End Page 117] first published in La Nouvelle Revue Française on October 1, 1934, a few years before his long-term internment in the asylum. The second work is the now notorious and initially censured radio performance “To Have Done with the Judgment of God,” first recorded in 1947 not long after his excruciating nine-year internment came to an end. These works, read together, demonstrate an approach to “theatricality” that exceeds the theater as a mere discipline. They also establish the realm of the virtual as a liminal space between media technology and life, one that is hospitable to the advent of the unpredictable and radical Other. This emergence, within the “non-space” of the virtual, occurs in an aural mode insofar as it fundamentally overwhelms preestablished modes of representation. For Artaud, virtuality and aurality are intimately bound together: neither fully present, nor completely absent, the Other emerges yet lacks recognizable form. Its advent is cataclysmic because it occurs unpredictably, threatens the established order, and reawakens repressed and incomprehensible delirium. Theater, in Artaud’s terms, proves to be neither sheer technical contrivance nor mere natural phenomenon. As such, it unsettles foundational dichotomies at the heart of Aristotelean precepts—techne versus physis, the technological versus the biological, art versus life—and establishes itself as a generative supplement to those binaries. Artaud’s redefinition of theater as being, not opposed to but supplemental to life, draws a parallel between virality and the virtuality. Its mode of communication, distinct from narrative discourse and mimetic representations, is one of virtual contamination, which Artaud describes here as “psychic” and “oneiric.” The aural modality responsible for such virtual contamination—most evident through but not limited to the radiophonic medium, as illustrated by his 1947 recording—subscribes to a paranoid structure, one that anticipates the advent of the unpredictable Other summoned by the recording of his strident cries and ritualized glossolalia.2 Theater and Techne To grasp the complex link between the theater (as artifice) and the plague (as a by-product of nature) in Artaud’s 1934 essay, one must first grasp its historicity as reflected in the tension between art (techne) and nature (physis) already present in Aristotle’s Poetics. Conventionally translated as “craft,” “skill,” or “art,” the term “techne” refers to a category of knowledge, particularly applied knowledge, that Aristotle attributes to humans as opposed to animals. According to him, animals possess a set of instinctual skills [End Page 118] but lack the critical judgment to grasp the rationale behind them. For instance, a beaver knows the techniques required to build a dam, but for Aristotle humans have an understanding not only of how to build it but also why it ought to be built in a certain way. Techne adds to animal instinct “a productive capacity informed by an understanding of its intrinsic rationale,” which would be a properly human attribute.3 Theater as art (techne) and, more specifically, tragedy in Poetics belongs to a category of applied knowledge that relies on mimesis, the imitation of life or nature (physis). In his theoretical articulation of tragedy, Aristotle presents...