Traditionally, "drama" means character, dialogue, action - representing "Man" (da Vinci)

Artaud argues that the stage has the means to encompass a wider sweep of reality - sub & supra personal levels, beyond the interpersonal. Artaud as an anti-humanist (Man not at the centre of his representation of reality). Use of "lyric" elements [to replace/to interact with/to contradict] "dramatic" elements.

"departing from the sphere of analyzable passions, we intend to make use of the actor's lyric qualities to manifest external forces, and by this means to cause the whole of nature to re-enter the theater in its restored form."

("The Theater and Cruelty" 86)

"finding an analogy between a gesture made in painting or the theater, and a gesture made by lava in a volcanic explosion"

("No More Masterpieces" 80)

"an intensive mobilisation of objects, gestures, and signs, used in a new spirit."

("The Theater and Cruelty" 87)

"The images in certain paintings by Grunewald or Hieronymus Bosch tell enough about what a spectacle can be in which, as in the brain of some saint, the objects of external nature will appear as temptations.

It is in this spectacle of a temptation from which life has everything to lose and the mind everything to gain that the theater must recover its true signification."

("The Theater and Cruelty" 87)

What he means by temptations? Related to how mimesis works in his theatre. What is it that is being "represented"? Is this a theatre in which "representation" operates? (Does it cease to be theatre without representation?) How does "representation" operate in his theatre?

Artaud has expanded what is to be represented (nature) through an expansion of the means to represent (inclusion of lyric elements). He is also refunctioning those means - that is, he causes them to work in new ways, to achieve new effects.

According to Aristotle, six important categories make up the poetics of tragedy:

The sequence in which they are presented corresponds to their importance.

In Artaud's "Total" theatre, spectacle is primary in sequence of elements. He reverses Aristotle's sequence.

"After sound and light there is action, and the dynamism of action: here the theater, far from copying life, puts itself whenever possible in communication with pure forces . . . [that is,] whatever brings to birth images of energy in the unconscious, and gratuitous crime on the surface."

("No More Masterpieces" 82)

In reversing the sequence, his gives greater priority to those elements concerned more with the means of representation than those concerned with that which is represented.

This also tells us about his construction of the relationship of mimesis to reality - not imitation of surface, but communicating with deeper forces (unconscious images on one level; 'gratuitous' images on another, linking to metaphor of plague - functions to unlink dramatic cause and effect, and with that, familiar relations of signification).

Note that communicating is different from imitating. Still need to discover how representation works in this scheme.

the gratuitous undoes traditional dramatic character's motivation (compare with Ionesco's character's actions, repetitions etc.) - how else are the traditional relationships undone?

This is what distinguishes Artaud from Nietzsche (still working within "Drama" even if Aeschylus over Euripides)

the gratuitous stands outside of narrative - a dramatic redundancy? establishes an autonomous layer of signification?

Artaud's refunctioning of the means of representation involves establishing a different relationship between the stage and auditorium.

"It is in order to attack the spectator's sensibility on all sides that we advocate a revolving spectacle which, instead of making the stage and auditorium two closed worlds, without possible communication, spreads its visual and sonorous outbursts over the entire mass of the spectators."

("The Theater and Cruelty" 86)

In terms of representation, notice two things: the things received by an audience are not images or representations of actions, but "outbursts". Also, aim of activity is to attack the audience, specifically their "sensibility".

So the abolition of the separation between stage and auditorium involved a refunctioning of the means of representation towards attacking the spectator's sensibility.

What does he want to do?

not to entertain, nor to instruct - to affect

Arena for elaboration of bodily-thought - theatre is last place left

"The theater is the only place in the world, the last general means we still possess of directly affecting the organism and, in periods of neurosis and petty sensuality like the one in which we are immersed, of attacking this sensuality by physical means it cannot withstand."

("No More Masterpieces" 81)

Compare to Eisenstein's "attraction" principle. How and where does the Constructivist project of Eisenstein's "montage of attractions" diverge from Artaud's theatre of cruelty? Modernist projects of remoulding subjectivity: Use of spectacle; Versions / visions of reality involved; Means of operation by which effect is achieved; type of subjectivity desired. Meyerhold as another point of comparison. Manipulating the masses.

Real, vibratory affect over representation

"That is why in the 'theatre of cruelty' the spectator is in the center and the spectacle surrounds him.

In this spectacle the sonorisation is constant: sounds, noises, cries are chosen first for their vibratory quality, then for what they represent."

("No More Masterpieces" 81)

relate to unpinning of signification

role of speech

"And we can readily answer that this metaphysical way of considering speech is not that of the Occidental theater, which employs speech not as an active force springing out of the destruction of appearances in order to reach the mind itself, but on the contrary as a completed stage of thought which is lost at the moment of its own exteriorization."

("Oriental and Occidental Theater" 70)

this is reconfiguring mimesis somehow. but let's move on to clearer terrain…

related to vacuums and temptations somehow. holes in reality figuring the unfigurable.

"Speech in the Occidental theater is used only to express psychological conflicts particular to man and the daily reality of his life. His conflicts are clearly accessible to spoken language, and whether they remain in the psychological sphere or leave it to enter the social sphere, the interest of the drama will still remain a moral one according to the way in which its conflicts attack and disintegrate the characters. And it will indeed always be a matter of a domain in which the verbal solutions of speech will retain their advantage."

("Oriental and Occidental Theater" 70)

So Artaud here is disentangling the relations established in traditional dramatic mode between action, character, speech, motivation, conflict, mimesis (the relation between the reality of the representation and the reality represented). We might think of Stanislavski and Brecht as the referents of his types of theatre here, but he is referring to traditional "drama" - so a better comparison would be Hauptmann's The Weavers as an attempt towards the inclusion of a social dimension in the drama. (In establishing the social content of epic drama, Brecht is refunctioning the traditional elements in a way that is analogous to Artaud's project.)

Storytelling psychology since the Renaissance (Shakespeare, Racine)

"If people are out of the habit of going to the theater, if we have all finally come to think of theater as an inferior art, a means of popular distraction, and to use it as an outlet for our worst instincts, it is because we have learned too well what the theater has been, namely, falsehood and illusion. It is because we have been accustomed for four hundred years, that is since the Renaissance, to a purely descriptive and narrative theater - storytelling psychology; it is because every possible ingenuity has been exerted in bringing to life on the stage plausible but detached beings, with the spectacle on one side, the public on the other - and because the public is no longer shown anything but the mirror of itself.

Shakespeare himself is responsible for this aberration and decline, this disinterested idea of the theater which wishes a theatrical performance to leave the public intact, without setting off one image that will shake the organism to its foundations and leave an ineffaceable scar.

If, in Shakespeare, man is sometimes preoccupied with what transcends him, it is always in order to determine the ultimate consequences of this preoccupation within him, i.e., psychology."

("No More Masterpieces" 76-77)

Establishing a bodily-based means of expression is directly related to affecting the audience member's consciousness through physical, sensual means.

• the performer's relation to their own body
• the performer's relation to the spectator's body
• the spectator's relation to their own body
• the spectator's relation to the performer's body

The physicality of the stage (its gestures, its mise-en-scène) is oriented towards effecting a reconnection in the spectator's consciousness with more bodily-based modes of perception (sensuous; spatial):

"To cause spoken language or expression by words to dominate on the stage the objective expression of gestures and of everything which affects the mind by sensuous and spatial means is to turn one's back on the physical necessities of the stage and to rebel against its possibilities."

("Oriental and Occidental Theater" 71)

Physical language(s) of theatre represent "attitudes"

"whether there are not attitudes in the realm of thought and intelligence that words are incapable of grasping and that gestures and everything partaking of spatial language attain with more precision than they."

("Occidental and Oriental Theater" 71)

These attitudes embodied in the gestures of the performer and the mise-en-scène.

Spectators mimetically adopt these attitudes.

Negative, almost dadaist relation to representation. True feeling untranslatable. To express is to betray. Dissimulate - hide what makes manifest. Creates a void in thought. Lucid (rational) language obstructs appearance of this void - poetry in thought. Williams - frankly illusionary nature of theatre figured as truth. Nightmares in Flemish painting - juxtapositions with real world of caricature of that world; the specters we encounter in dreams.

Refunction speech in Artaud's theatre:

"It is not a matter of suppressing speech in the theater but of changing its role, and especially of reducing its position, of considering it as something else than a means of conducting human characters to their external ends, since the theatre is concerned only with the way feelings and passions conflict with one another, and man with man, in life.

To change the role of speech in theater is to make use of it in a concrete and spatial sense, combining it with everything in the theater that is spatial and significant in the concrete domain;--to manipulate it like a solid object, one which overturns and disturbs things"

("Oriental and Occidental Theater" 72)

Speech refunctioned from means by which characters move through action to a co-functioning element in a more generalised disruption of signification.

The refunctioning of the elements occurs in all modernist theatres. Refunctioned towards different ends and by employing particular configurations of means. Comparing and contrasting use of gesture, configuration of stage/auditorium, role of language, the body, the mise-en-scène. Modernist uses of shock - different inflections between Brecht, Meyerhold, Eisenstein, Artaud.

"The separation between the analytic theater and the plastic world seems to us a stupidity. One does not separate the mind from the body nor the senses from the intelligence, especially in a domain where the endlessly renewed fatigue of the organs requires intense and sudden shocks to revive our understanding."

("No More Masterpieces" 86)

Relate to surrealist practice, contrast with Brecht, Eisenstein.

"Psychology, which works relentlessly to reduce the unknown to the known, to the quotidian and the ordinary, is the cause of the theater's abasement and its fearful loss of energy, which seems to me to have reached its lowest point."

("No More Masterpieces" 77)

Separation: art / life - "ritual" model engulfing spectators (86)

Cathartic - can't murder once seen & affected (82)

Mass spectacle (85)

Problem with the world - metaphysical: things/words; ideas/signs - theatre disrupts these

->lived culture

Thinks in forms, signs, representations (8)

The Spectator

• directly affected
• sense over mind
• attitudes imposed
• collective abscess-draining
• restore harmony

Concrete language of the stage

poetry in space (all elements)

sensuous, spatial means

not decorative; not illustrative

Gestures: ideas, attitudes of mind, aspects of nature

Creation on-stage, composed

• anti: character, rationality, social & psychological problems

Language:

• possibilities for physical shock
• spatialized
• incantation

Addressed to the director

A scenario (Müller, Churchill?) treated in three contrasting manners:

• the psychological (Stanislavski)
• the social (Brecht)
• the metaphysical (Artaud)

Split group into three and prepare in isolation

Compare their contrasting use of gesture

"Doubles" of theatre - plague, metaphysical, Oriental, cruelty
-> double of theatre is "reality untouched by the men of today"

Bodily shock - undomesticated, uncanny. Cruelty and Verfremsdung

Rousseau and civic festivals; Nietzsche and Dionysian reality

mass event; spectator loses himself

Locate, in sources of event, those that speak to the body
-> exaggerate them (temptations; vacuums)

Specifically "theatrical" in theatre - that not contained in dialogue
But against "retheatricalising" the theatre

Charmed snakes, mimetically adopt attitudes

Manifesto - rhetorical style mimes action of the plague

Not formalism but function.

• Aristotle's six elements of "drama"
• Peter Szondi's definition of "drama"
• Raymond Williams' split in modernism - historically-determined
  (social and subjective expressionism); Encompass wider reality (anti-"Man") as motivation in social strand (Toller, Piscator, Brecht) as well as subjective strand (Artaud; other surrealists; pastoral in Lorca?); anti-"Man" associated with anti-bourgeois; fascist and socialist versions; philosophically, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud (to an extent), Darwin - Diego Rivera's painting "Man, Controller of the Universe" (1934). Humanist "Man"-centred visions of the world under attack; dissolution of the bourgeois individual. Responses: Anxiety, Celebration, Reconstruction. Artaud shares all this with most other projects of theatrical modernism.

• no presence of dramatist
• no audience address
• no actor-role visibility
• no quotation; no improvisation
• present tense - time as linear, absolute; no epic I
• unity of place - no epic I