Infinitely Demanding

'I shall flee every attempt to circumscribe my consciousness with precepts or formulas, with any kind of verbal organisation' - letter to Ren Allendy, 1927

'...I demand phantasmagorical films, films that are poetic in the accurate, philosophical sense of the word, psychic films...[F]ilms in which there is a pulverising, a recombining of the things of the heart and the mind...' - reply to a questionnaire, c. 1924-25

'All problems are incomprehensible.' - private papers, 1931

Talking of Chris Marker led me to focus on an ethical impetus - his films function, partly, as a study in 'how things are going' in particular places, the manner in which people find themselves able (or unable) to live, which is the substance of all ethics (Deleuze distinguishes, on this basis, between ethics and morality; the former focuses on the concrete and immanent practices of life as lived, while the latter suggests eternal archetypes that would be strictly speaking be impossible to attain). On a note of perhaps unjustified optimism, I suggested that his films, and art more generally, might also contribute new possibilities for life - new ways of thinking and living in the world that had previously been inconceivable. An ethics of creation. But cynicism has its response, a response that is difficult to combat in spite of the ease of dismissing it as mere cynicism.

The work of Antonin Artaud has been in my mind for the last few days, and it is he I turn to in order to deal with this doubt, a disquieting sense that I was too quick to be enamoured of the possibilities of art to transform and disrupt. I want to move along three interrelated paths, as indicated by the three quotes above (all from Artaud). Firstly, the struggle against what Klossowski, in his seminal study Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, called the 'gregarious' - that is, the 'levelling' element of thought, what Deleuze refers to as 'common sense' and 'that which everybody knows.' It is thought become unremarkable to itself, residing in fixed terms of identity, the 'precepts' and 'formulas' which make a particular element of life no longer a problem, no longer in question, but nullified as given, axiomatic. Secondly, I want to talk about art as a practice of dismantling these arrangements, a 'pulverising' force which would make new forms of thought possible - and the dangers of conceiving art in such terms, or of negotiating with the outside of thought, its excesses. The third point will be this element of the problematic which inheres in thought, and must reconceived - it is not as such a limitation to thought, but rather its form and its possibility. Thought is the posing of problems that are not resolved in solutions, but create a set of solutions worthy of their posing, and this is an element of a new thought which would dismantle the formulas and precepts that are given to us, in favour of a set of plastic principles; ethics as a problematics. To close, I want to suggest some of the tension between this notion of ethical engagement and transformation through art and more direct political activism, via Nietzsche's proclaimed apoliticism and Chris Marker's comments on his disinterest in politics.

Antonin Artaud in Carl Theodor Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928)

The figure of Antonin Artaud is obscure, terrifying. The parellels with Nietzsche abound, but need not be belaboured. Both men explored with boundless intensity the relationship between lucidity and delirium, thought and the unthinkable. Both demanded the confrontation of consciousness, the excoriation of the subject, and the transformation of humanity. Walter Kaufman (never the most adventurous of Nietzsche commentators) summed up the impetus of Nietzsche as: 'You must change your life.' Artaud puts it much more fittingly: 'I am he who, in order to be, must whip his innateness.' Clearly, this is not a utopianism of art and theory; for Artaud and for Nietzsche, to struggle against the stable, limiting forms of thought that function around identity and negation is not an intellectual excercise, but a risking of ones whole being. To combat gregariousness, which Klossowski read as Nietzsche's principle enemy, is not to simply 'embrace diversity' (the neoliberal conception of difference and equality is something Negri and Hardt raise in Empire, and something I want to think more about - but this particular phrase strikes me as a handy shortcut to avoiding the strenuous work that rethinking difference demands). It is to radically rethink life as a process of continual creation taking place within difference as such - no ideal forms undergoing combination, but pure differences and intensities that transform each other through their interstitial interactions. The true meaning of 'becoming.' But to dissolve the figures of Self and Other in favour of multiplicity risks an annihilation - an annihilation which perhaps only those fortunate enough to be granted the legal and political comfort of assured selfhood and citizenship can be so cavalier as to dismantle. For Kristeva, it was only the male who could act as avant-garde transgressor, playing at the limits of language and comprehension. For women, the struggle was to attain a place within those boundaries in the first place.

Friedrich Nietzsche

So, in the name of this annihilation which he perhaps never chose (let us recall his lifelong struggle with madness and drug addiction, which, as the photos demonstrate, physically ravaged him), Artaud makes the demand of art that it be shattering, transformative. The ability to cut together a series of moving images to compose a whole was utterly unique and suggested entirely new possibilities of experiencing the world, and Artaud wanted nothing less than a new cinematographic sensibility that would invade the very structuration of the body, reconfigure the organs. For Deleuze, cinema wasn't merely another language that could be figured in terms of units (phonemes and morphemes becoming 'cinemes') composed into larger blocks (frame-word, shot-sentence, montage-paragraph) but a whole new configuration of movement and the image which needed entirely new concepts to conceive it. Movement-image, time-image, the set and the Open - Deleuze offers us a new set of terms, a new way to apprehend the event of cinema. But the films themselves do not transform our thought simply by their form. Artaud tells us that he likes films, but that 'all the kinds of films have yet to be created.' Deleuze, writing some fifty years later, was able to study some exemplary moments (one of them starring Artaud himself) that were unavailable to Artaud, but the demand remains, undiluted by the better part of a century. The cinema may offer us a new image of thought, but only if the film-makers demand it, insistently and impertinently demand us to think and see in ways were hitherto impossible, to make demands upon the very composition of our bodies and the functioning of our organs.

An ageing Artaud, in a mental hospital where he spent much of his later life

Films, then, must be in some sense incomprehensible. This returns us to the start, but with an opening. If comprehension is a function of precepts or formulas, of experience captured within a narrow band of pregiven and unproblematic terms, then any transformative impetus must come from without - from the incomprehensible or the unthinkable. This, of course, inheres in all thought (I recall a passage in the second of Deleuze's books on cinema in which he articulates this relation as depicted by films but only in the sense of exposing an always-present structuration of being). There is no thinking without a relationship with the outside, which demands a response by posing a problem. All problems are immanent zones of incomprehension which produce solutions that do not pre-exist them. Art, then, must imitate life only in this sense: it must pose problems that exceed all formulas, all the rules of the game, and in doing so force thought to come into contact with the outside, to enact entirely new becomings. Becoming-animal, becoming-minoritarian, becoming-imperceptible, or something else entirely.

Prehaps we have found here another utopianism. But we must not forget that rationalism has its own utopianism of thought - teleological progress, the accumulation of truth, the theory of everything. So many configurations of the urge for finality, totality, dominance. The question must be, if these urges are totalitarian, what are the political possibilities for a movement which eschews them? Artaud and Nietzsche do not presage a utopia of 'higher men' - they themselves lived in a barely-tolerable suffering, a ceaseless whipping of their innateness in the search for something outside the human. Nietzsche proclaimed himself apolitical, and for Klossowski his praxis took the form of a grand conspiracy against all of mankind. So what would be a fully problematic political activism? A transhuman or posthuman activism? Marker says the politics, the art of compromise ('which is as it should be'), bores him. Instead, he intervenes with history, configuring the past in aid of the future. Many questions of access and elitism are raised by the artistic, avant-garde interventionism that may ultimately offer only madness - problems we have yet to properly pose.