On Artaud, drawing in Walter Benjamin, black magic, l'art pour l'art, and more.

... gorge themselves on Cioran, Beckett, Artaud and all today's hallowed forms of cynicism and nihilism, the better to evade any analysis of the current forms of despair. They denounce with the greatest moral and political energy every present instance of nihilism, of the nihility of our values, while 'culturally' savouring the heroic but anachronistic forms of nihilism and the inhuman. They glorify the accursed share, but keep the holy water handy.

Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories 2

      The first sentence above lost its subject because 'the sharpshooting lone ranger of the post-Marxist left' (Copyright Frederic Jameson) was being needlessly reticent, if not mealy-mouthed. Where he wrote, 'our cultivated high-society set', evoking a mannered world last seen disappearing in 70s Bunuel films, there should have been a list, starting with Derrida, running through a dozen hack 'Deleuzians' and ending with Stephen Barber, author of an Artaud biography praised in England as 'readable and pacey'. You'll know the culprits not by their gentility but by their love of 'extremes', 'limit states', blunt desire against social controls and 'new images of the human body'. (Such is Barber's respect for the general reader, in fact, that he talks freely of 'raw power').

      The idea of poor incarcerated Antonin pushing the limits of howling intensity further than any intellectual had dared before can't help but be nostalgic, for wholly unmysterious reasons. Artaud's life's monologue has kept all its qualities these last fifty years, except that what it describes is neither new nor extreme any more. The series of ordeals he reported is more 'current' than ever, but prosaically, commonly so, its supply of culture and heroism having been divided up between hapless millions. This isn't to say that someone else has crafted a paroxysm exquisite enough to to steal the insect-weight world championship of pain. While most of the world's population keeps on struggling for bare survival, Artaud's misfortunes have been democratized to the point that they're no longer recognizable as suffering.

      Walter Benjamin wrote the textbook on twentieth century phenomenon, first detected in the 1840s by Baudelaire. The colossal gestures of Greco-Roman heroes are mass-produced in the 'thousands of irregular existences led in the basements of a big city by criminals and kept women', 'urban apaches' who have 'abjured the contrat social forever'. Artaud as imagined by fin-de-millennium bohemianism is the ideal form of this cliche, having outlawed himself without getting mixed up in the seedy rationality of stealing, selling and fighting for a living. His personality alone, as expressed in screaming, squirming, drug-taking and writing, apparently provoked society to ridicule, ignore and eventually imprison him.

      As is well known, the modern Apache eternally rebelling against a world of squares is a popular persona not only in the entertainment world but also in recent business management theory. A role in this fun for Artaud is easily envisaged: corporate bodies must be sacrificed in flames and constantly willed to new, dynamic life in the theatre of business cruelty; the Tarahumara peyote ritual would make a fine model for a motivation workshop.

      Yet even as this anachronistic fancy for rock'n'roll niggerhood rules so many fiercely individual imaginations, elements of Artaud's myth are lived through every day by people who have never heard of him and would be deeply unmoved if they had. What the drug-crazed Momo called 'an incursion necessitated by God into our very being... this invasion of a nature which, through a play of reflexes and mysterious commitments, penetrates more deeply than we do ourselves into the underlying principle of life', they call 'adapting to 21st century working conditions'. Of course, the word 'God' is a decoy here, its sense is strictly materialist. It refers to the famous 'microbes' of the radio broadcast, to the self-evident secret that science hasn't overthrown belief, but refined it beyond recognition. Divine judgement makes not just the eyes but the whole body a window through which the soul is unstintingly observed. Genetics, electricity, radio and psychology simply tear what's revealed this way out of the confessional to make it everybody's business.

      Artaud complained from the 1930s onwards that he was beset by magic spells which constantly turned him inside out, exposing 'the membrane of my ego' so directly to the miasmas and 'fluid maggots' of the outside world that they never ceased to absorb it. 'From the part of myself that observes myself', he noted, "I feel that each one of these gestures, every one of my thoughts, does not belong to me'. If we do him the courtesy of taking this literally, it neatly describes the distinctive characteristics of so-called 'post-Fordist' working life. These are not only familiar from wretched experience, they're enthusiastically theorized in books and newspaper columns by the likes of British Labour party stooge Geoff Mulgan. The days of rigid hierarchies and workplace discipline, we're told, are over. From now on 'sociability has an economic value'. 'Soft control' 'treats people as people... within the firm, ethos, self esteem and peer pressure are emphasised. Corporate ideology takes on a new significance, demanding loyalty and devotion from the worker so that discipline is internalized in the worker's conscience'. The modern fantasy of a clear dividing line between ruthlessly Taylorized working-time and sluggish private life falls into the document shredder of history, to no-one's noticeable sorrow. IBM's uptight 'organization man' died not from some beatnik William Tell's bullet, but from built-in obsolescence. Now every nerve is exposed all of the time, every action is knitted into intricate patterns of professional responsibility. Nor do the unlucky majority not yet co-opted into creative team-work miss out on this new ideal for living. They may still be bossed around the old-fashioned way, but the increasing numbers forever 'on call', working casually or from home, find their obscure hours of 'privacy' as fearfully exposed, as much subject to 'uncertain clawmarks' as those of the glamorous 'sociable worker'.

      Black magic, by its nature, works from a distance. Some sucker watches his life fall to pieces without catching a glimpse of any malicious causal machinery, even when he suspects it's there. All those by whom Artaud believed himself bewitched convincingly displayed a total lack of interest in him. The softly controlled worker doesn't spit behind the back of a foreman: the urge to toil the hardest in her team comes from nowhere in particular, or because she belongs, from within herself. Had Artaud had only to marshal the departments of his body against a common outside enemy, his life might have been long and tolerable and of no interest to anyone today. But the hordes of miasmas besieging him were equally an effect of bewitchment and creatures of his own flesh and will. No part of his being wasn't actually or potentially part of theirs.

... as for the body, it's me who makes it, by means of obstinate blockage. I see fragments, I pant them, I set them up with my breath and my hand and with my breath and my hand I slash... These are beings, animalcules and not objects, who have invented spirit in order that it resemble them... They come from an already existent body drawn from all the fragments... And that is what is known as absolute materialism... what characterises things is that they follow no law absolutely save for my own arbitration and will which are made of things that are going to annihilate them... From an abortive or hasty gesture of the body one day an army of bodies has emerged...

      In 'a never defined dynamism where perpetual invention is the whole of the law along with my whim', Artaud encountered the subtlest logic of our working lives (though not of his own or those of his contemporaries). In fact his discovery makes sense not only of work but also of leisure, the nihilism of 'relaxation', the difference between two dog and pony shows, bodily experience then and now.

      Production is sociable, coercion spreads itself too broadly and thinly to be located. Desperately I search the eyes of every friend and stranger for clues about an unknown, unlimited demand. As poets opt out of the agony of composition, it becomes everyone else's daily drudgery. Estranged from every set of rules which might have explained my effects to me, shown me how I was seen, I force the larvae of anxiety prematurely into silent syntax, so that as a set of definite hypotheses, a reluctantly willed 'body image', they can at least be delimited and doubted. Of course it's an impossible, exponential task: maggots multiply when torn apart, the grub-matter that escapes formulation matures into a swarm that has to be fought off with blasts of breath, a perpetual invention of spasms. At the Rodez clinic Dr Gaston Ferdiere forbade Artaud's convulsions on pain of electric shock, while cajoling him to write down and identify with their orphaned verbal complement. Giorgio Agamben alludes to the same range of defensive tics when he writes that in the twentieth century Tourette's syndrome has almost disappeared because its symptoms have become the norm.

      Today everyone enjoys the sovereign freedom to will a body through its exposed gestures. We're responsible for this dummy and accessible through it in a way that no-one else has ever been. Yet each individual creates not from innocent molecules but from 'an already existent body drawn from the fragments', from hazardous materials in thrall to other powers. Thus he or she is suffused with the universe and incorporated into it, answerable for its extravagant malice, a pantomime Walt Whitman lashing out at imps of his own indivisible substance.

Moral: by minutely exterminating humanity, I will no longer suffer from nothing.

      The current repertoire of 'Communication Skills', especially those of graphic design, have a secret mission: to infest language with blank spaces, teeming caesurae between words, phrases and passages, atomizing sentences and paragraphs. Meanwhile the pettiest accretion of speech commands a leaden pause for emphasis, and continues to be rephrased and reiterated long after the dregs of meaning have been drained from it. In fact it's misleading even to speak of blankness, as this isn't really a question of absences. Typefaces, icons and colours, loose motes of punctuation, swarms of gesture and streams of repetition, are weighed down with 'information', pack mules on its flight from servitude to grammar. These 'non-verbal' modes of communication are supposed to make life easier to understand and endure, by damming flows of syntax which submerge meaning and carry it away, breaking raging complexities down into discrete, comfortable spaced signals. But because of this autonomy, every such impulse, each new 'obstinate blockage', is also a cryptic alarm. What can an expanse of white paper, an insistence, a flick of the wrist, be trusted not to signify? With no determinate relations with the other scraps of language in the area, they stand for unlimited, conflicting demands and convolutions. If most people mange to keep the void at arm's length in practice, it's not because 'non-linguistic', 'lateral' thinking is tied to scientific progress, but because it plays to a bogus gallery of intuitions, a 'deep, authentic' sensibility which the culture business never tires of discovering in everyone. Mute messages insinuate themselves among our most intimate 'fibres of inanity'; their content expresses our innermost whims. If an understanding of spacing, typography and body language seems to be shared widely, this goes to show that free will takes up the trash available, that 'every one of my thoughts does not belong to me...'

      Ever since humanistic science suckled at Renaissance astrology's teat, Western society has chased rainbows of unalloyed freedom and unlimited liability. Generations planned a world in which 'things follow no law save for my own arbitration and will', without guessing that this majestic will could only be 'made of things that are going to annihilate' it. Of course their dreams were always dashed against objective hazard, in the forms of sickness, war, accident, idleness, ignorance and market forces, among innumerable others. In the nineteenth century, however, commodity production began to provide the conditions under which it seemed that raw, existential freedom could be enjoyed at last. The consumer remains at the mercy of man and machine in every other area of life, but in the mysteries of taste s/he slips away from this fiasco. Bourdieu notwithstanding, social circumstances can no more predict a choice between formally equivalent commodities than can comparison between the trinkets' objective qualities. The exercise of taste is the one sort of action for which individuals can be held wholly to account: how, then,could it have been confined to the point of sale for long? Benjamin described the transformation of poetic language:

      In l'art pour l'art the poet for the first time faces language the way the buyer faces the commodity on the open market. He has lost his familiarity with the process of its production to a particularly high degree... (he) has to choose (his) words... The poet of l'art pour l'art wanted to bring to language above all himself -- with all the idiosyncrasies, nuances and imponderables of his nature. These elements are reflected in taste.

      To the consumer of the early nineteenth century, the need to base purchases solely on taste probably seemed no more significant than many of the age's other economic novelties. When lyric poets began subtly to reproduce its logic, however, this phenomenon was recognized as a source of precious insights into character. What couldn't be acknowledged as true of mere shopping could easily be accepted in the most intimate of art forms: in choosing between indifferent options, we expose the entrails of personality, the imponderable vital statistics of our nature.

      Since this whitewash of its economic origins, queasy human freedom has been relived in every sort of scenery. In the mid twentieth century fine aesthetic judgements were held to be less telling than responses to privation, imprisonment and torture. Artaud shared this prejudice with Jean-Paul Sartre, without ceasing to loathe him energetically. Less timely by at least twenty years, however, was his insistence that, by virtue of its exposure, his own 'arbitration and rule' must incorporate and be incorporated by hostile alien elements, that he could be no more than this continuous contamination.       This former deadly secret is now a matter of mundane politics.
Psychological truth is no longer extorted primarily through aesthetic caprices or extreme ordeals: every motion slavishly gone through counts as a signed confession. One either accepts deep culpability for every move made blindfold, each word used hastily and by default, or disowns one's own creation through self-destructive paroxysms, inertia and duplicity.

      Because this existential gameshow is both a 'labour issue' and society's spiritual motor, materialist dogma spewed in the course of Artaud's theological fits is more than a source of metaphors. The dull compulsion to use one's taste is 'universal' because its the mechanism through which tiny, fragile bodies are incorporated into the universe.

      In The Coming Community Agamben enumerates the virtues of the fully commodified body at which Artaud lashed out unwittingly, anachronistically.       The commodification of the human body, while subjecting it to the iron laws of massification and exchange value, seemed at the same time to redeem the body from the stigma of ineffability that had marked it for millennia, freeing it from 'the double chains of biological destiny and individual biography'. In advertising images and cheap pornography from the nineteenth century onwards, the body is neither generic nor individual, neither an image of destiny or an animal form... something truly whatever'. Cut away from its theological foundation, its 'invisible archetype', the commodified body preserves a resemblance without archetype, a phantom well known to Artaud, 'creator' from the finished object.

      Needless to say, this 'subdued, senseless promise of happiness' has held a few generation in thrall without showing any sign of being kept. Individuality circulates freely among a body's doubles, but this marvellous liberty doesn't 'materially invest' the wreckage bodies get caught up in, it's powerless against the powers that constrain them. The magical continuity of willed, advertised bodies is a screen behind which history remains a slaughtering bench on which slower, cruder methods are always being tried.

      If alternatives to voluntary servitude exist within this debacle, they won't be found in survivalist fantasies of individual self-sufficiency, or in leering empathy with the so-called wretched of the earth. Even in the 'heroic passion' of suicide, the gross desires released by Spectacular pre-history fall short of revenge on the travesty of satisfaction supplied.

      According to experts in pre-emptive policing (the California Task Force for the Promotion of Self-Esteem and Personal Responsibility), 'we need to make self-esteem and responsibility training a part of the State's penal and criminal justice systems. Accepting responsibility for the consequences of one's own decisions and behaviour is an integral part of healthy self-esteem.'

      Esteem for the self, they know very well, means consent to the conditions that compose it. Deleuze and Guattari wrote: 'We do not feel ourselves outside of our time but continue to make shameful compromises with it... And there is no way to escape the ignoble but to play the part of the animal (to growl, burrow, snugger, distort ourselves)'. Resistance to the present is a pure product of shame, a sickly sentiment, precisely 'the bitter and prepressive fury which is ultimately self-mutilating'.