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Jay Murphy remarkably challenged and exploited remain describe these quandaries of mediation in

simply impregnable. Then there are the Artaud, where representation always seems
Getting Under the Skin: snarky remarks about performance artists to be conceived negatively yet is necessary
Antonin Artaud’s Media of the 1960s and 1970s, who often ascribed for any thought or work or trace to appear—
to Artaud their inspiration for breaking the this is the “scum” or “scraping” Artaud refers
Ros Murray. Antonin Artaud: The Scum
fourth wall. As the theorist Kuniichi Uno— to so often. There are many different ways
of the Soul. Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave
a confidant of the Butoh founder Tatsumi of approaching this issue in sympathy with
Macmillan, 2014. 208 pp., 3 b/w ills. $90
Hijikata—remarks, “One sees that Artaud Artaud’s struggles and combat: one is to
does not circulate freely in the world.”2 discuss the fluctuation of matter as the syn-
The surrealist artist and writer Antonin
Fortunately, Ros Murray’s Antonin Artaud: cope, the syncopation of rhythm, and show
Artaud, who died on March 4, 1948, remains
The Scum of the Earth zeroes in on Artaud’s rela- how Artaud advances his writing by leaping
in a troubling afterlife. He is frequently
tion to the different media that made up his over such gaps or stuttering, the “spasms”
pushed into the prisms he most resisted,
various practices of revolt and bodily recon- he so often equates with death and, at times,
even by those envoking his value, such as
struction. Murray’s book is part of a vibrant with the symbol of the cross as a barrier or
the Catholic priest who defended Artaud’s
countertendency seeking to explore Artaud block to becoming. This complex treatment
incendiary final testament, the banned
as an artist in his own right; that is, beyond of rhythm is a feature of Jacob Rogozinski’s
radio broadcast To Have Done with the Judgment
his seminal notions of activating a Theater 2011 book on Artaud.5 Murray’s strategy,
of God (1947–48). Although he was the most
of Cruelty. In this regard, Murray is in league like many other approaches to Artaud, is
significant thinker of theater in the last
with a number of other recent milestones highly ambivalent—it is a critical defense of
century, along with Bertolt Brecht, even his
in the reinterpretation of Artaud, including Artaud’s exploration that also seeks to reveal
founding influence is sometimes denied. For
an exhibition mounted at the Bibliothèque the contradictions and limits within it. For
example, Jerzy Grotowski, a theater director
nationale de France in Paris in 2006–7. The example, in the interpretation of Artaud’s
and theorist, argued that his prescriptions
exhibition presented Artaud’s enormous glossolalia—the syllable-language that, after
were impossible, the playwright Eugène
output—drawings, writings, films (as an a certain point, punctuates every single text
Ionesco found him too malicious and mor-
actor and scenarist), and sound works—in by Artaud—Murray concludes that Artaud
bid, and, according to the producer and
their “surprising coherence” and “global- succeeded in generating language from cor-
director Roger Blin, neither Jean Genet or
ity.”3 Artaud moved restlessly from medium poreality, directly from the body, at the cost
Samuel Beckett knew his work well. Artaud’s
to medium, often in such a state of agitation of the universal communication he strove
scores of extraordinary, uncategorizable
that the categories are difficult to parse from for. Playing off the huge quantity of literature
drawings, which were completed during his
one another. After a certain date—Artaud surrounding Artaud’s various failures, Murray
final years, exhibited in Paris in 1987 and
claimed October 1939—he no longer wrote pays a backhanded compliment to the artist’s
1994, and shown in New York in 1996–97,
without drawing. glossolalia, writing, “What is perhaps impor-
opened the doors for reconsideration; yet, to
The mediating effects of drawing and tant about this supposedly universal language
date, the most famous commentaries on his
writing combine poetry, theater, the cru- is not that it succeeds, but that through its
drawings continue to be those of the phi-
cially important gesture, and cinema. As very failure, it draws attention to the non-
losopher Jacques Derrida, who maintained
Stephen Barber has pointed out, there is a universal nature of representation” (25).
that Artaud’s graphic “prostheses” kept him
pronounced cinematic quality to many of Artaud probably did not see himself as
trapped in the quandaries of representation
Artaud’s late cahiers.4 This quality is perhaps Murray does, as striving for a “reflection
he so ferociously railed against.
one reason the academy, despite its alleged of universal truth” and “microcosm of the
Artaud was admittedly politically insen-
embrace of transdisciplinarity and interdis- external world” (25). For one who wrote “I
sitive on any number of levels, and a recent
ciplinarity, finds Artaud so incomprehen- was there before God,” it is this postulation
book by one scholar recoups the old charge
sible. Murray’s book is a welcome attempt of inner and outer that is to be constantly
that Artaud’s ideas were simply fascistic.1
to demonstrate the relationships among challenged.6 To Artaud this dichotomy indi-
Despite the many studies on Artaud and
Artaud’s many practices. Artaud asserted that cates the false erotomaniac division of the
the vast quantity of work he left behind—
his underlying project was the drive “to find world; the notions of microcosm and mac-
the twenty-six volumes of Artaud’s Oeuvres
the fundamental matter of the soul” (quoted, rocosm are another folly of representational
complètes, published by Gallimard, remain
8); Murray quite rightly emphasizes that all thinking that the artist must unravel. In
incomplete—he is best known through the
too often commentators become fixed on his journeys to Mexico in 1936 and Ireland
references and representations of others.
the “soul” rather than the “matter,” despite the following year, Artaud hankered after
Julia Kristeva, Derrida, Susan Sontag, and
Artaud’s fierce attack and deconstruction of a primordial language. Yet the Artaud who
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who bril-
it, especially in the latter works. This atten- emerges from the asylums in May 1946 to
liantly appropriated Artaud, are but a few of
tion to the “material aspects of the body, the return to Paris does not think or feel in the
the author’s legatees.
text and the physical object” (8) in Artaud same way; this is a profound transformation,
The mention of Artaud often provokes
is indispensable, Murray argues, since “it the seeds of which were first inaugurated
eye-rolling, given his incarceration for more
is in the very process of mediation that his with his participation in Tarahumara Indian
than nine years in insane asylums, as if the
thought emerges” (11). Murray seeks to peyote rites in September 1936. This late
boundaries of sanity and madness he so

113 artjournal
Artaud, of 1945 to 1948, despises the mysti- Tarahumara thought and its pantheistic deity, one world and its replacement by another.
cism and mystical systems in which he had Ciguri.10 Likewise, and also initially skeptical Murray begins to suggest this idea when she
immersed himself during the 1930s; any of Artaud’s account, Sylvère Lotringer—who writes that Artaud’s war with representation
notion of a universal understanding is con- journeyed to the Sierra Tarahumaras in the is not merely normative but forms “a kind
sumed in his apocalyptic fury within a world 1980s as part of his research on a biography of dangerous, affective ‘mimesis’” (35). This
of sorcery and countersorcery. Artaud’s most of Artaud—found Artaud’s descriptions of insight provides an opening to Artaud’s uni-
illustrious commentators rarely remark on Tarahumara ceremonies remarkably accurate. verse of sorcery: “I am a magician, / nothing
this transformation. In an exception, Jean- In other words, Artaud’s pilgrimage yielded makes itself through nature, entirely through
Joseph Goux has taken note of Artaud’s late something other than a relentless orientalist the will.”12
or final “total reversal,” calling it “a radical fantasy. Artaud called the creation of a new,
rejection of everything related to the initia- Despite these lapses that restore Artaud’s double body the “search for fecality.”13
tory” who replaces his earlier vision with a alienation, so to speak, Murray’s close Murray devotes an entire chapter to this
“harsh and immediate conception of life in focus on Artaud’s notion of representation topic, exploring Artaud’s obsession with caca,
which the body is the foundation.”7 remains fruitful. She accomplishes this, in waste matter, and the process of expulsion.
This change is significant when examin- part, by resorting to the differing versions She points out that for Artaud, the notori-
ing Artaud’s language, which, during 1943 of mimesis found in Plato, a philosopher ous proclamation in Nerve Scales (1925) that
in the asylums, starts to take on different Artaud abhorred. In Plato’s Republic, mime- “all writing is pigshit”14 is somewhat of a
characteristics and style. At this point, it sis is not only the shallow reflection of the compliment: “Words should draw attention
becomes inseparable from his creation of a phenomenal world that exists due to the to their status as something to be discarded.
“new body”—the “body without organs” unseen forms that dictate reality (a mirror We might see excrement as being not an end
proclaimed in To Have Done with the Judgment of to a mirror), it is also the theatrical mimesis result, but a continually transforming process
God.8 Murray points out the incoherence of whereby the poet Plato claimed he “could of production, both decomposing and fertil-
the idea of a glossolalia that anyone can read turn himself into anything by his skill and izing, which is to say becoming a catalyst
regardless of nationality, despite it being imitate anything” (quoted, 29). Murray rather than a barrier for creative activity”
riddled with portmanteau words, shards of argues that for Artaud, le réel “exists in the (38). In fact, Artaud conceives of each word
the polygot languages Artaud grew up with in world, and this is why he places so much as a terminus, a container, and thus an
Marseilles, and transcribed using Latin letter emphasis on the materiality of his work” impediment to the process of direct corpo-
forms. Artaud’s project is far more ambi- (29). This idea is especially true of the final real expression of the nervous system.
tious than cataloguing the failures of any Artaud of 1945 to 1948. For Artaud, it is the When Murray returns to the issue of
possible representation, and these are the social control based on ideological systems mimesis, theater, and magic in her central
more expansive goals that Murray calls into such as language and ideas that occludes this chapter, she connects this notion to the
question. reality from us; in terms of Plato’s Republic, problematic of Artaud’s “present body.”15
After first acknowledging Artaud’s Murray asserts that Artaud partakes of both For Murray, theater is the most successful
“highly imaginative” account of his journey these forms: the world-reflecting and the realm for Artaud, owing to its reliance on
to the Sierra Tarahumaras and many earlier world-creating. Artaud claims these aspects the power of gesture. The different senses
scholars’ doubts that the trip was undertaken of mimesis revolve around the evocation of of the French verbs agir, to act (in Artaud’s
at all, Murray concludes, “What is really at the space of creation and the extraordinarily sense, to become something other than
stake is a complete incapacity [of Artaud] strenuous effort to create a space and time one is and affect one’s surroundings), and
to understand anything beyond his own where this event can happen. This is Artaud’s jouer, to playact, to consciously represent
vision” (24). Entering figurally into what risk and experiment—a situation that something, juxtapose the difference between
was Artaud’s ecstatic suspension or syncope, requires continual, destructive intervention mimesis and representation. Artaud’s actors
Murray oscillates between explaining his into the means of representation. As Murray must be “conjuring rather than representing
extremely challenging methods and sec- writes, “Words must always fail Artaud in something symbolically,” thereby enacting “a
onding the judgments of other writers that order for him to demonstrate that language, type of sign that does not have an arbitrary
Artaud remains trapped in veils of his own and the subject that it claims to represent, is relationship to its referent, but rather . . . a
making. She stops short of an affirmation of a process to be intervened in” (35). For the mimetic one in that it both acts like it and
Artaud’s accomplishments; in Deleuze and late Artaud, this laborious working, the spin- invokes a physical presence that is always
Guattari’s phrase, “Through him something dling or shattering of any representation—so mediated by the body . . . the sign becomes
succeeded for us all.”9 In marked contrast its failure is a kind of success in which any its referent” (70, emphasis in original). For
to this analysis, one finds the Paris-based finite thought is a failing thought (14)—is a this notion, Murray is partially indebted to
filmmaker Raymonde Carasco following means to construct the new, ecstatic body. In the psychoanalytic revisionism of Mikkel
Artaud’s footsteps to the Sierra Tarahumaras a note from December 1947, Artaud writes, Borch-Jacobsen, for whom mimesis implies
and, like him, being initiated into the “I have made / a body.”11 Artaud’s rending a more direct communication in which the
Tarahumara indigenous worldview. For of representation, which echoes the rites subject moves beyond itself; here mimesis is
Carasco, Artaud’s notion of a “body with- of the Tarahumaras, is both intimate and “ungraspable, inconceivable, unmasterable,
out organs” was a faithful transcription of cosmological, calling for the destruction of because unspecularizable” (quoted, 71). Such

114 spring 2016


arguments prove the coherence of Artaud’s was one of the most promising mediums; at Murray’s recurring attention to the func-
project, providing a much-needed corrective one point he heralded its “virtual power of tion of “skin” in Artaud, “continually dis-
to those who argue that Artaud’s theatrical the images [that] probes at the foundation of rupting the boundaries between surface and
theories were contradictory pipe dreams and spirit for possibilities unutilized today. The depth and between metaphor and material”
his later invectives simply mad. Seconding cinema essentially reveals an entire occult (113), finds fertile territory again when she
this argument, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe life with which it puts us directly in rela- turns to Artaud’s drawings. As in the pas encore,
contends that “only a demiurgic interpretation of tion.”18 This promise for Artaud was based or not yet, effect of Artaud’s spells, the appar-
mimesis allows us to liberate its essence, which ently infinite process of the construction of
is installation, or more precisely ‘disinstal- the “body without organs” or the perpetu-
lation’” (quoted, 72, emphasis in original). ally deferred apocalypse much of his later
Hence Artaud’s double imperils the normal work called into being, Artaud’s drawings
unitary sense of self and threatens to act on also exist in a kind of “suspension” (118).
its behalf, stealing its thoughts and capacity, Though in a form disparate from much of
leading Lacoue-Labarthe to conclude that Artaud’s other oeuvre, they may be his most
“madness is a matter of mimesis” (quoted, powerful expression. His drawings also act as
72). Murray closes this line of thought by a “virtual form of glossolalia” (124) and an
suggesting that Artaud’s “refusal” to prof- attempt at “communicating through vibra-
fer “any kind of vision for what follows the tion” (161). Artaud described them to Jean
momentous destruction of the subject” is Dubuffet as “the action of forces which have
actually a positive stance, since this is how presided over the calculation of the forms”
his project “remains resistant to any forms (quoted, 119). “The stage itself is put on
of ideology, including fascism” (72). Though stage,” Murray writes, in that “all elements
Murray admits that the psychoanalytic mod- of their composition, whether material,
els of Borch-Jacobsen and Lacoue-Labarthe linguistic, corporeal, or all of these at the
begin precisely where Artaud explicitly same time, must be rendered visible” (119).
rejects such a mode of explanation, the con- Artaud termed the drawings “anatomies in
tinued use of psychoanalytic counters may action” (quoted, 120), and they constitute,
account for Murray’s reluctance to assert according to Murray, “a force-field that
Artaud’s value in a more forthright manner. would never become a complete form, but
While Murray claims that Artaud’s decima- on film’s capacity for direct contact with the an entity existing between the form and the
tion of the subject merely refuses recu- nervous system. Just as Artaud often referred force that puts its own process of destruction
peration, Guattari maintains that due to this to the “skin” of the surface of the page on in motion” (72). Once again, Artaud presents
“figureless and foundationless Body without which he “scraped,” he wrote “the human the “‘work’ at once as the practice of scrap-
Organs of self-reference we see spreading skin of things, the epidermis of reality: this ing and as the scum that is left over” (122).
before us an entirely different horizon, that is the primary raw material of cinema” Artaud’s ferocious, catastrophic drawings,
of a new machinic processuality considered (quoted, 99). Typical of Artaud is this merg- which frustrate the symbolic formation of
as the continual point of emergence of all ing of the material and the affective, in the normative language as much as the organic
forms of creativity.”16 In contrast, for Murray, different senses of the verb “to touch.” Yet body at every turn, are verbal as well as
Artaud’s attempt at spells “inevitably, also by 1933 Artaud was already denouncing cin- visual entities, as Derrida recognized. Murray
ends in failure and alienation” (72).17 ema’s “idiotic world of images” and “closed compares them to the spells, in that they are
In her chapter on Artaud’s remark- world of vibrations.”19 Despite Artaud’s disap- perpetually “unborn,” “incubators for threat-
able prescience in his cinema writings and pointment and his return in the early 1930s ening, embryonic forms that never quite
scripts, Murray notes Artaud’s contribution to theater (Eisenstein, as Murray notes, went materialize.” Any “subject” represented here
to the contemporary posthuman in terms of in the opposite direction), it is still true that is “the botched result of God’s malfunction-
a philosophy of film in which the capacity Artaud’s emphatic advocacy of corporeal ing sexual organs” (132).
to exceed human processes of thinking and gesture “potentially finds its most advanced These drawings, in which the scarred
imagination is explored (94). In the book permutations in the cinema” (100). What surface of the page testifies to a continual
Filmosophy (2006), Daniel Frampton cites Laura Marks has called the dissolution of abutting of limits, “of existing at the limit,
Artaud, along with Sergei Eisenstein, Jean- the dichotomy between the subject and the under constant threat of annihilation” (137)
Louis Schefer, Jean Epstein, and Deleuze, as object in cinema,20 in which the body is the with their invasion of different types of
a pioneer of “cinematic thought” (quoted, mediator, can lead to the contagious affect signs, thwart and disrupt the Saussurian and
94). The notion of cinema produces its central to Artaud, and shows how cinema Lacanian primacy of the signifier. This would
own processes of thinking and, in the case can create what Murray terms “collective, still be a negative accomplishment, but
of Artaud, is potentially beyond individual affective consciousness (not just between Murray’s consideration of the drawings’ dia-
human experience. For Artaud—an actor, humans but amongst objects, animals, and grammatic qualities leads to the discussion
scriptwriter, and early film theorist—cinema other life-forms)” (109). of the “machinic body” in the last chapter—

115 artjournal
“how can one act in a way that is not already by Gallimard in 2011—that Artaud can be 15. Artaud, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 13, 118.
anticipated by structures of representation properly evaluated in his entirety.23 Murray 16. Félix Guattari, “Regimes, Pathways, Subjects,”
in The Guattari Reader, ed. Gary Genosko, 98.
which dictate the creation of a ‘subject,’ in has contributed a vital level of complexity in
17. One can look at most or all of Artaud’s late
opposition to the non-figurative body without understanding Artaud’s multifarious relations work as operative spells; see Barber, cited above.
organs?” (139, emphasis in original). Here, with his means, from which his message of 18. Artaud, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3, 80.
we contend with Artaud’s odd, fragmenting, corporeal transformation was inseparable. 19. Ibid., 99.
hybrid, mechanized, and electrical bodies 20. See Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film:
1. Kimberley Jannorane, Artaud and His Doubles Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses,
on their own terms—how they act, move, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010).
and possibly communicate—as well as the 2. Kuniichi Uno, e-mail communication to 21. Artaud, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 13, 127.
long-overdue encounter between them and reviewer, May 7, 2012. 22. See, for instance, Allen S. Weiss on this
the philosophy of media. For Murray, this is 3. Jean-Noël Jeanneney, preface to Antonin Artaud, issue, “From Schizophrenia to Schizophonica,”
ed. Guillaume Fau, exh. cat. (Paris: Bibliothèque in Phantasmic Radio (Durham: Duke University
due in part to Marshall McLuhan, who, when
nationale de France and Gallimard, 2006). The Press, 1995).
writing of the power of the sense of touch exhibition was held November 7, 2006–February 23. Antonin Artaud, Cahiers d’Ivry: Février 1947–
to unify the nervous system, asked, “Perhaps 4, 2007. Mars 1948, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 2011). Other
touch is not just skin contact with things, but 4. See Stephen Barber, Artaud: Terminal Curses; editions from the notebooks include Cahier Ivry,
the very life of things in the mind?” (quoted, The Notebooks 1945–1948 (London: Solar Books, Janvier 1948 (Paris: Gallimard, 2006), and 50
2008), 56. Drawings to Murder Magic, ed. Évelyne Grossman,
147, emphasis in original). McLuhan, like trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London and New
5. Jacob Rogozinski, Guérir la vie: La Passion
Artaud, is not interested in representative art d’Antonin Artaud (Paris: Cerf, 2011). This and York: Seagull Books, 2008).
but rather in how media acts and transforms further translations are by the reviewer, unless
consciousness in its very physicality. noted otherwise. Jay Murphy is a writer and independent cura-
6. Antonin Artaud, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 19 tor currently in New Orleans. His treatment of
Murray is particularly good on Artaud’s
(Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 189. Artaud’s “reversal,” Artaud’s Metamorphosis, is
notebooks, in which the very surface of 7. Jean-Joseph Goux, “Antonin Artaud and the forthcoming from Pavement Books in 2016. He
the page becomes the organless body, an Promise of a Great Therapeutic,” Angelaki 13, no. has contributed to Parallax, Culture Machine,
extension of Artaud’s skin. As the reposi- 3 (December 2008): 17–24, 21. Frieze, MAP, Afterimage, Parkett, Art in America,
tory or well of Artaud’s complex practices, 8. I have argued elsewhere that it is the trans- Metropolis, and Third Text, among other
formation of this final Artaud who contributes publications.
the notebooks allow words to evade their
invaluable, uncanny insights into the dilemmas of
fate as published, final forms, instead act- our media society; see Jay Murphy, “The Artaud
ing as extremely powerful, affective, roving Effect,” CTheory (September 15, 2015), at www.
signs. This concept is perhaps even more ctheoryarchive.net/the-artaud-effect/, as of
true of Artaud’s radio broadcast To Have Done September 16, 2015.
9. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand
with the Judgment of God, with its words turned Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian
into incantatory chants and dissolved into Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
screams, as Artaud judged it a successful Press, 1987), 164.
“mini-model” for a Theater of Cruelty.21 As 10. See Raymonde Carasco, “Approche de la pen-
sée Tarahumara,” in Antonin Artaud, 134–41. For
Murray writes, “The voice of this record-
information on the eleven documentaries Carasco
ing becomes an attempt at creating this made with the Tarahumaras from 1979 to 2003,
body without organs” (147). McLuhan, who see www.raymonde.carasco.fr, as of December
could have been paraphrasing Artaud’s own 22, 2015.
thoughts, wrote that radio was a “subliminal 11. Cahier no. 389 (December 1947), Artaud
Archives, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
echo chamber of magical power to touch Thanks to the permission of Guillaume Fau, the
remote and forgotten chords” (quoted, 159). director of the Bibliothèque nationale de France,
Although Artaud’s last radio broadcast is also and Serge Malusséna, Artaud’s nephew and liter-
sometimes judged a failure, even on its own ary executor, I was able to visit Artaud’s archives
in June 2010. The notebooks have since been
terms,22 Murray refers to Friedrich Kittler’s
published by Gallimard in two volumes in 2011;
theory of how the lack of visible embodi- see note 23.
ment in radio can paradoxically highlight 12. Artaud, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 24, 213.
the body’s presence as stochastic sound 13. “The Pursuit of Fecality” is the title of one
and white noise, exceeding and disrupting of the key sections of To Have Done with the
Judgment of God. Fecality is a strong theme in
the illusion of wholeness that an image of Artaud’s work that takes prevalence from 1943
a body would instantiate. One can listen to onward at Rodez. It has a sense of doubling the
Artaud’s broadcast, Murray notes, “entirely as functions of the physical body, in that any expres-
noise,” as another example of “communicat- sion has to contain the same inexorable force
of expulsion. In To Have Done with the Judgment
ing through vibration” (161). As an unstable,
of God, we see, as much as we can, Artaud’s
extremely challenging projection of “the very bizarrely definitive statement concerning it. See
genesis of creativity” (166), it is perhaps only Artaud Oeuvres complètes, vol. 13, 81–87.
now—with the publication of his notebooks 14. Artaud, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1, 100.

116 spring 2016


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