Jay Murphy - The Artaud Effect

A/V#18.03 2014 Spring
www.actualvirtu...
This paper proposes, following Antonin Artaud (d. 1948), an investigation exploring the virtual body, neurology and the brain as fields of contestation. Using Deleuze and Guattari, Francisco Varela, Gregory Little, Foucault, the ‘final’work of Artaud among other sources, this project seeks a clearer understanding of Artaud’s transformations in their relation to discussions of “biopower” or “neuropolitics,” an investigation that ultimately leads into examining the relevance Artaud may or may not have for an adequate theory of the current media environment.
The notion that the primary arena of struggle between various forms of corporate capitalist domination and autonomous processes of subjectivation is now the brain (as many theorists cite neurology or the mind as the site of contestation rather than the body per se; what other economists or sociologists call ‘cognitive capitalism’) has its starting point for my purposes in Deleuze’s theories of cinema, where the brain is introduced as the screen. Deleuze’s primary inspiration here was the ‘late’ Antonin Artaud who at the dawn of the atomic age in 1948 proclaimed “a newbody/will be assembled.” Artaud prefigured the current concern with virtuality and the virtual body as early as 1925 and he already sites it in his radio broadcast To have done with the judgement of god (1947-8) as a realm of struggle against techno-capitalism, monotheism, and the perpetual war economy of the ‘Cold War’ (tendencies only exacerbated under the current ‘war on terror’).
What I explore is how Artaud cunningly outlines the contemporary media environment, dominated by what David Rodowick has called the “social hieroglyph” and how it is riven with conflict. For Artaud this was a combat of sorcery and counter-sorcery, a desperate cosmological war against demonic, invasive forces. Yet what was most ‘mad’ and delusional in Artaud’s lifetime (where he was stigmatized as ‘schizophrenic’ and subjected to electroshock treatments) is an aspect that survives and even thrives today in analyses of capitalism by Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers, Frédéric Neyrat, and the collective Tiqqun where the movements of political economy are indeed nothing less than “black magic.” The essential question from Artaud is this fiercely debatable role of representation and representational processes and what can possibly constitute a subversion of them in an inexorable digital sensorium. There are several current manifestations of these debates, ranging from the fact that Artaud’s notebooks are themselves undergoing the process of digitalization for public access, to the exploitation of the idea of ‘capitalist sorcery’ in a film like the Otolith Group’s Anathema (2011).