… we are watching a rehearsal . Well dressed, imperious and impatient, a director questions his assistant. ‘Why the plinth?’ ‘Why the hat?’ ‘Why the gown?’ ‘To let the stalls see the feet.’ ‘To help hide the face.’ ‘To have him all black.’ Their exchange concerns the body of a man standing midstage on a raised plinth. The man is silent. We are told there is no chance he will speak. But we hear the director give precise instructions to his assistant regarding how this body must appear. She is told to remove his gown, to whiten hands and cranium. The man shivers. The director leaves to check the view from the stalls. ‘Could do with more nudity … Bare the neck … The legs. The shins … Higher. The knees.’ The assistant reveals more of the man’s flesh to our gaze. Though the hat is removed, the head remains bowed. No face to be seen. The director orders the lights to fade. A spotlight falls on the skull.
Timidly, the assistant asks whether the man might raise his head. ‘For God’s sake!’, the director replies. ‘Raise his head? Where do you think we are? In Patagonia? Raise his head? For God’s sake!’ There is a pause and time enough for us to contemplate the figure. The director breaks the silence. ‘Good. There’s our catastrophe. In the bag. Once more and I’m off.’ The spotlight brightens to show the man’s body , before fading and leaving only the skull once more. The director is pleased. We hear a distant roar of pre-recorded applause.
But then, with this applause faltering and dying away, the man raises his head and fixes us with his gaze. For the first time, we see the face. For the first time, we see the eyes. And they stare back at us, captured in the spotlight’s glare, resisting, twitching, pained and defiant, anonymous, hopeful and hopeless, speaking their solitude, with us, against us and gone, after a good pause, as darkness falls to be followed by our actual applause…
I want to begin with this theatrical encounter and with this image from Samuel Beckett’s Catastrophe (1982). I want to begin here because I cannot, precisely, say what this image means. Nor can I express, with any great clarity, what this image has meant to me. But the memory of this image remains far from meaningless. Having read Catastrophe’s script a good many times before seeing the work performed, I thought I knew what I had coming. Certainly, I knew that Beckett’s Protagonist, as he is named in Beckett’s text despite remaining nameless upon the stage, would raise his head. But the very fulfilment of this expectation defied my expectations. And it did so in ways I would have great difficulty expressing to myself or my companions once the performance was done, in ways that continue to resist their expression many years after the event. I was moved by this encounter. And I continue to be moved by the memory of an image that provoked an unnerving combination of sensations I can only inadequately describe by gesturing towards a language of breathlessness and joy, disquietude and elevation, anxiety, confusion and an overwhelming urge to both prolong and communicate this profoundly perplexing theatrical encounter.
Performance and theatre-going thrive on such encounters, even if they do not happen quite so often as we might wish.1 Though impossible to describe precisely, I am confident that the reader will have some sense of what this account of Catastrophe is trying—and failing—to express. As Xerxes Mehta writes with Beckett’s theatre in mind, we might consider those times we left a performance ‘profoundly disturbed, yet in the grip of a paradoxical exultation’ (Mehta 2001: 129). Alternatively, Jill Dolan describes such theatrical experiences as evoking a ‘hopeful feeling of what the world would be like if every moment was as emotionally voluminous, generous, aesthetically striking’ (Dolan 2005: 5). As Dolan suggests, these moments make their audiences ‘ache with a desire to capture, somehow, the stunning, nearly prearticulate insights they convey’ (8). And yet each will insist upon the ‘impossibility of doing it justice in any subsequent moment’ (14).
Here, Dolan vividly evokes a line of questioning that has inspired this study.2 How can we begin to understand or articulate such theatrical moments? How can we do justice to the fascinating obscurity of the sensations, afterimages and impressions they leave behind? And by what means does performance generate such encounters to begin with?
The first contention of this book is that Beckett’s theatre offers particularly fertile terrain for pursuing these questions. In diverse ways, Beckett constructs theatrical situations, bodies and images which stir our passions and our sympathies and yet stubbornly resist interpretative security. As Anthony Uhlmann suggests, ‘failing to comprehend, and how this might affect an audience, is perhaps as important to our descriptions of Beckett’s works as our attempts to comprehend’ (Uhlmann 2009: 47). What’s more, as the following chapter of this study hopes to demonstrate, such failures of comprehension may well be considered integral not only to an audience’s encounters with Beckett’s stage but to Beckett’s own conception of his artistic practice.
Beckett found himself compelled to give voice and form to what he saw as the chaos of being. But Beckett was also acutely sensitive to the ways in which artistic means cannot simply express this chaos without transforming it into something it is not. Chaos , for Beckett, is an unspeakable and senseless ‘movement of the unmeaningful’ (qtd. in Knowlson and Knowlson 2007: 112). Art, on the other hand, is woefully overburdened with meaning, at constant risk of symbolism and allegory, constitutively concerned with the fabrication of forms which merely ‘shit on being in the most unbearable manner’ (136).
Artistic expression and the chaos of being appear irreconcilable, for Beckett. And so, across different media and a lifetime of artistic activity, Beckett understood himself to be struggling with the seemingly impossible task of fabricating forms adequate to this chaos , pursuing an art of ‘la malfaçon créatrice voulue’ (DJ: 122) or ‘willed creative mismaking’.3 Failing, inevitably, to express this chaos directly, we will see how Beckett nevertheless encourages his audiences to sense something of it through their own failures to comprehend his mismade work. Indeed, we will suggest that Beckett’s theatre is, at least in part, designed to both provoke and frustrate his audience’s desires to make sense of what happens on his stage. ‘Dear incomprehension’, as Beckett writes in The Unnamable, ‘it’s thanks to you that I’ll be myself, in the end’ (T: 327).
The second contention of this book is that the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze provides resources for approaching these theatrical encounters. During his career, Deleuze published numerous essays and twenty-five books, both alone and in collaboration with Felix Guattari. His writings include idiosyncratic analysis of philosophical figures, developments in his own metaphysics, interventions in psychoanalysis, a monumental two-volume study of the cinema, and wide-ranging discussions of the arts and sciences, literature and society. Deleuze’s work is remarkable for its constant invention of new concepts and vocabularies. Over the last twenty years, Deleuze’s thought and the conceptual innovations that animate his thinking have been taken up by scholars working across a range of disciplines, including performance theory and recent research in Beckett studies, which we will consider below. For now, it is enough to emphasise Deleuze’s own disciplinary promiscuity, his conceptual creativity and his abiding insistence that, despite these constant forays into the non-philosophical, he was always doing philosophy and ‘nothing but philosophy’ (TP: ix).
In What is Philosophy ?, Deleuze and Guattari define their discipline as ‘the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts’ (WIP: 2). Philosophy is, for Deleuze, a fundamentally creative practice. It has but one ambition and this is the creation of concepts (5). Importantly for this book’s concerns, however, Deleuze argues that philosophical invention depends on encounters with that which cannot be readily conceptualised, recognised or understood. Indeed, a theatrical encounter like Catastrophe’s final image could be seen as an example of what Deleuze calls a ‘fundamental encounter’ (DR: 176). Here, we begin to sense the emergence of an incomprehensible something that cannot be thought and which therefore calls for the creation of new concepts and ways of thinking. For Deleuze, such an encounter poses itself as a ‘problem’ to thought (176). And it is precisely under the duress of such problems that the philosopher finds themselves compelled to invent new concepts (WIP: 16). Failing to think, failing to grasp, struggling and failing to even speak an encounter, theatrical or otherwise, is, for Deleuze, the precondition of philosophy itself.
Both Beckett and Deleuze, then, place failure at the heart of their respective projects. Beckett, struggling and failing to express the inexpressible, wants to make theatre in which his audiences similarly struggle and fail to comprehend their encounters with his stage. For Deleuze, meanwhile, it is only by being confronted with that which cannot be thought, through failing to think, that philosophical creation begins. But this still begs the question of quite how such thinking gets going at all. How can philosophical thought approach a performance of Beckett’s work if its vigour depends, in great measure perhaps, on its very refusal to be thought? And what becomes of the performance once the philosopher’s work is done? Can philosophical enquiry articulate, analyse of otherwise investigate the theatrical encounter without doing violence to the very alterity which inspires the struggle?
These are questions about how we might come to imagine the relationship between philosophy and performance. And the third contention of this book is that, by approaching the theatrical encounter with Beckett and Deleuze’s assistance, it will be possible to propose a new method for research undertaken at the borders of these disciplines and in the emerging field of Performance Philosophy.
Performance and Philosophy: Neither with you nor without you
As we begin to outline this method, we can consider the role Beckett has played in a question which has energised debate in Performance Philosophy since its inception. In 2013, during the field’s inaugural conference, Martin Puchner issued a warning that scholars should remain mindful of a gap that divides philosophy and performance. Noting the historical and institutional differences that separate theatre and philosophy, Puchner argues that it is precisely this difference that makes their side-by-side study such intellectually fertile ground (Puchner 2013: 543). By way of example, Puchner considers how theatrical concepts may be used to reinvigorate our understanding of intellectual traditions (543) and how philosophers have drawn on the theatre in order to solve what are, after all, strictly philosophical problems arising within their own discipline (545).
Puchner’s point is that it is the very distance that separates the theatrical and the philosophical that allows the one to renew our understanding of the other. Further, for Puchner , Beckett’s own trenchant refusal to philosophise within or about his own theatrical output ‘has turned Beckett and his philosophical admirers into the most successful case study in theatre and philosophy’ (551). If Beckett has attracted admiring attention and galvanised activity from a remarkably diverse range of philosophical quarters, in Puchner’s view, then this is precisely because there is nothing, or very little, that smacks of philosophical thinking on his stage.
The following chapter of this book will argue that Beckett’s artistic practice is defined by relations of non-relation. If Beckett is going to provoke some intuition of the chaos that inspires his theatrical activity, then he needs his audiences to try to make some kind of sense of his stage. Othe...