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New Media and the Artaud Effect Jay Murphy New Media and the Artaud Effect “Jay Murphy deftly excavates Antonin Artaud’s capacious visionary thought, actions, and experiences in a riveting new study of the artist’s infinite depths and continued contemporary relevance. Murphy uniquely grasps Artaud’s obsession with original sources, inexhaustible search for truth, unconventional optimism, and continual reinvention of himself expressed in a vision of altered bodies that anticipated the cyborgian present. Praise for this new reading of Artaud cannot do sufficient justice to Murphy’s originality, erudition, insight, and masterful work.” —Kristine Stiles, France Family Distinguished Professor of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies, Duke University “The Artaud Effect is a generous book; far more exciting and ambitious than any straightforward reception history of Artaud. Jay Murphy tracks themes and threads from Artaud into modern and contemporary avant- garde art practices, critical and social theory, thereby making the ‘Artaud effect’ resonate in our present. This is a book for readers excited about the blending and blurring of literature, film, visual arts, sorcery, hieroglyphs, and contemporary critiques of capitalism. Artaud wrote that ‘we’re in cre- ation up to our necks, we’re in it with every organ’, Murphy shows that we’re in Artaud up to our necks.” —Nikolaj Lübecker, Professor of French and Film Studies, St. John’s College/Oxford University “This is Jay Murphy's second book on Artaud. Like the first, it is excellent: lucid, rigorous, transformative, accessible. It reinvents Artaud in a way that highlights his pivotal position between twentieth-century and twenty-first-century virtuality, an Artaud for whom, in my language, theatricality (or cruelty) is an instance of a productive im/ materiality that does away with all those boring and dead-end debates in Theatre and Performance Studies about presence/absence, liveness/virtual/, the body/technology, politics/sacred, etc. There’s a kind of virtuality to the writing as well, and the structure, with its shifts and breaks, allow the reader a kind of capaciousness, a space to make their own journey and virtual connections. Jay wears his immense learning lightly. The book is stylish, wide-ranging, a feast of ideas.” —Carl Lavery, Professor of Theatre and Performance, University of Glasgow “Approaching Artaud through the framing of hieroglyphics, Murphy’s book discovers much more than an avant-garde artist and thinker confined to the era of high modernism. Instead, he discerns Artaudian hieroglyphs at work in multiple aesthetic contexts from the poetry of Olson and Pound to the cinema of Eisenstein and Grandrieux, and from Warburg’s visual zig-zag iconology to Stelarc’s cyborg hacking of evolutionary processes, not to mention in Deleuzian and Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophies and their aftermaths. In all of these spheres Artaud is already there in advance gesturing through the multiple and surprising hieroglyphic figures and hieroglyphic practices that this book reveals.” —Michael Goddard, Reader in Film and Screen Media, Goldsmiths/University of London Jay Murphy New Media and the Artaud Effect Jay Murphy School for Professional Advancement Tulane University New Orleans, LA, USA ISBN 978-3-030-83487-6 ISBN 978-3-030-83488-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83488-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Yuichiro Chino / Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland A cknowledgements Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following, where portions of this book have appeared in different forms: Artaud’s Metamorphosis (Pavement Books, 2016). By permission of Pavement Books. “The Artaud Effect,” in CTheory (September 2015), https://journals. uvic.ca/index.php/ctheory/article/view/15122/6110 By permission of CTheory. “Gary Hill and the ‘new aesthetic paradigm’”, Paper presented at the International Association of Philosophy and Literature (IAPL) conference ‘Postmodern Sites,’ Hartford, CT, May 12, 1999. http://www.thing. net/~soulcity/ap/index.html. By permission of author. * I owe gratitude to Lauriane Piette and her staff at Palgrave Macmillan who selected and shepherded this manuscript. I would also like to thank the great generosity of the artists who have provided images for this book, and those who took valuable time to read the manuscript and recommend it. I also thank the following (only a very brief list) for actions great and small, in no hierarchical order: Sharon Mesmer, Virginia Stephan, Miuki, Pamala Bishop, Peter Valente, Joseph Nechvatal, Jonathan Brooks Slaughter, Elizabeth Shannon, David Rivé, Michael Fedor, Seila v vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Susberg, Oloye Bafagunwa Awo Agbaye, Elena Bondal, Oana Aitchison, Yota Theod, Stephen DiCillo, Shawn Williams, Jan Barnes, Sophie Fuggle, John Hutnyk. * As is appropriate for a project in which the dead have never been more alive, I would like to thank for past exchanges, without which many things would be different: Clayton Eshleman (d. 2021), Carolee Schneemann (d. 2019), and Emile de Antonio (d. 1989). c ontents 1 Living Hieroglyphs 1 Hieroglyphic Keys 2 A Universe and a Theater of Signs 4 Shedding Light on Hieroglyphic Language: Fenollosa and Pound’s Revolution of the Word 11 Aby Warburg’s Expressivity without Subject and Eisenstein in Mexico: Hieroglyphs in Motion 23 Hieroglyphs as Fields of Force: Olson’s Origins 31 The Originality of Artaud in Twentieth Century Hieroglyphics 45 2 The Power of Capture 51 Inner/Outer 53 Cybernetic Totality 58 Brain Matter 62 Sorcery Without Sorcerers 65 Body Without Organs as Substrate of Resistance 81 3 Beyond Hieroglyphics: I 87 “The Body Is the Self”, or Godard’s Incommensurable 89 “Impossible” Influence 97 Where Artaud’s Ghost Seems to Move the Most—Grandrieux’s Cinema of Cruelty 99 Grandrieux and Sade 114 Constructing the “New Body” 117 vii viii CONTENTS 4 B eyond Hieroglyphics: II 119 Klossowski’s Body Exchange, or Sharon Tate as Hieroglyph 120 The Body Remixed—Sterlarc 128 Catastrophe Theory in Gary Hill 133 “the infinite, this is me” 141 Schizophrenia as Interactive Cinema 143 Another ‘Outside’ 148 5 Don’t Forget the Virtual 151 Artaud: The Urge for Destruction 154 The ‘Virtual’ as Revolutionary Source 159 Breakdowns 168 Artistic “Virtualism” 170 No Guarantees 175 Whose Groundlessness? 178 For a New ‘Anti-Psychiatry’ 181 Works Cited 185 Index 207 CHAPTER 1 Living Hieroglyphs Up to a certain point, Antonin Artaud’s search for hieroglyphic keys to another, underlying reality links him to many other seminal twentieth century artistic projects, ranging from numerous artists of Cubism and Surrealism, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, to Aby Warburg’s founda- tions for a new art history (one not based on texts), to Sergei Eisenstein’s cinema, Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound’s research into Chinese ideo- grams as a basis for poetry, and later Charles Olson (who advocated learning from Sumerian and Mayan glyphs) extending Pound’s modernist revolution into a what he dubbed a “postmodern” poetics.1 Even in this context Artaud stands out, since with the possible exception of Warburg, these projects are often limited to aesthetics, and to a single art-form, whereas Artaud’s proposals cannot be reduced even to the single cause of a revivified theater. Artaud used an eminently hieroglyphic means, an extreme and severe introjection of the cross (Artaud writes at one point at Rodez “I am the vertebral cross”2), as a key transformative process to sur- vive nine years of horrific psychiatric confinement and emerge onto another plane of ferocity and creativity. Artaud’s transformation, what one 1 Charles Olson. Collected Prose. Eds. by Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander. Berkeley/ Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997. p. 116. 2 Artaud XV, 1981, p. 326. Quotes from Artaud’s oeuvres complètes published by Gallimard are indicated by volume number, year, and page. All translations are mine unless specified otherwise. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1 Switzerland AG 2021 J. Murphy, New Media and the Artaud Effect, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83488-3_1