The Art of Cruelty Read online

  The problem is, of course, that art typically requires an audience, which loops us right back to the problem of observing actions and losing ourselves in consideration of their imagined form. (Kaprow, coiner of the term “happenings,” agreed that the most persistent problem he faced in his attempts to blur art and life was the presence of the audience—a problem he spent nearly sixty years trying to solve via a more benign method he called “un-arting.”) In The Emancipated Spectator (2009), French philosopher Jacques Rancière calls this “the paradox of the spectator,” which he succinctly describes as follows: “There is no theater without spectators. But spectatorship is a bad thing. Being a spectator means looking at a spectacle. And looking is a bad thing, for two reasons. First, looking is the opposite of knowing. . . . Second, looking is deemed the opposite of acting.” While Brecht and Artaud share the same set of premises, they offer opposite solutions: Brecht demands that the spectator become more aware, via a forced self-consciousness, of his or her complicity; Artaud strives to collapse the distance between looking and acting entirely, leaving the spectator subsumed, possessed, dissolved.

  One can see a coarse, au courant torsion of the Brechtian approach in Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke’s notorious film Funny Games. Funny Games, which Haneke originally made in 1997, and then remade for an American audience in 2007, is the story of two torturers who terrorize and mutilate a bourgeois family over the course of the film’s 108 minutes. As they go about their bloody business, the torturers periodically turn to the camera to impugn the viewer, saying things like, “You really think it’s enough?” or “You want a proper ending, don’t you?” This is about as crude a means of drawing attention to a viewer’s complicity as you can get, which is likely why A. O. Scott, in his review of the remake, described the technique as one that “might have seemed audacious to an undergraduate literary theory class in 1985,” but that today comes off as a fraud. (I might also add that while directly addressing the audience is indeed a Brechtian technique, directly indicting the nature of its attention was not; Brecht did not presume the worst about what an audience was feeling or desiring, as does Haneke here. The presumption to know collapses an important space—a space of great importance to Brecht, as he thought it allowed for the development of agency.)

  It may simply be that the time for the efficacy of such an enterprise has passed—not because our complicity (in you-name-it) has lessened or grown any less toxic, but because the enormity of certain geopolitical crises has made a viewer’s complicity in the presumed evils of spectatorship seem like small potatoes. (Yes, we like to watch, but so what?) Brecht himself was already onto this: at least in his early years, his curiosity was bent toward investigating the ways in which one might entertain and instruct simultaneously—to allow entertainment and instruction to stand together “in open hostility”—rather than toward advocating the abolishment or villainization of entertainment itself.

  More to the point, it may be that the fast-moving pace of the so-called image regime under which many of us now live offers so little opportunity for slow looking, reflection, and contemplation that the indictment of a viewer’s prolonged attention these days seems like a waste of an increasingly rare resource. Consider, for example, Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar’s installation Untitled (Newsweek) (1994), which consists of seventeen digitally reproduced covers of Newsweek magazine, hung in chronological order, covering the five-month period of April 6 to August 1, 1994. The last of the covers features the Rwandan genocide, which began roughly five months earlier; below each cover is a card with printed text conveying choice details of what was happening in Rwanda on the date of the issue. The juxtaposition is meant to highlight what the United States (or the United States as represented by Newsweek magazine) was focusing on (the legacy of Jackie O, the O. J. Simpson trial, the World Cup, the future of North Korea, and so on) while it could have been—that is, should have been—turning its attention toward the ghastly, large-scale slaughter underway in Africa.

  Jaar has a perfectly valid—if not obvious—point to make about what mainstream American media chooses to make newsworthy and what it opts to ignore. But since the artist has already predetermined what it is, exactly, that we should have been looking at—and, by extension, what is frivolous or wrong to look at in its place—what is the use of our looking at all? The artist, buoyed by good conscience, has simply replaced the hierarchy of Newsweek’s attention with his own.

  In 2007, Jaar gave a lecture at Wesleyan University in concert with this work. The lecture was titled “It is Difficult” in reference to the ways in which Jaar’s works “force us to look at events we would rather not see.” But who is the “we” here? And how does the artist know in advance what we would rather not see, or how difficult the looking may be? And is it really the looking that’s so hard? Or is it all the work that looking at atrocity doesn’t do—namely, as Susan Sontag has it, repairing our ignorance about the history and causes of suffering, and charting a course of action in response, tasks that may fall fairly and squarely outside the realm of art? Even groups such as ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), which fought relentlessly for the radical politicization of art, sometimes found themselves landing on a similar point: think, for example, of the ACT UP flier produced in protest of a 1988 Nicholas Nixon show at the Museum of Modern Art, a show that included several photographs of people devastated by AIDS. “STOP LOOKING AT US; START LISTENING TO US,” the flier read.

  THE OTHER day, a friend hoping to gain some insight into my current project asked me to describe Artaud’s theater of cruelty to him; I opened up to a weathered page of The Theater and Its Double and read aloud to him how it concentrates on “famous personages, atrocious crimes, and superhuman devotions,” with a special appeal to the forces of “cruelty and terror.” “Sounds a lot like Hollywood,” my friend shrugged, before returning to his book, unmoved. And so it does. In the end, the irony of Artaud’s theater of cruelty may not lie in its legendary inapplicability, but rather in the fact that our age may have given the lie to its dream of the destructive, regenerative, revolutionary power of the spectacle.

  This isn’t because, as some have said, there is no longer any “reality” beyond the spectacle. Nor is it because some privileged people have the luxury of “patronizing reality,” while the more unfortunate—who are presumably mired in the so-called real at every moment—do not (see Sontag). Rather, it is because the whole notion that art, or a more fundamental form of representation (such as language, vision, or consciousness itself), obscures or distorts an otherwise coherent, transcendental reality is not, to my mind, a particularly compelling or productive formulation. Much more interesting, I think, are the capacities of particular works to expand, invent, explode, or adumbrate what we mean when we say “reality.” Another way of putting this would be to use Rancière’s term, the “redistribution of the sensible.” To focus on this redistribution is to celebrate the bounty of representational and perceptual possibilities available to us, and to get excited about art as but one site for such possibilities—one means of changing, quite literally, what we are able to sense.

  For this reason, however much Artaud may have desired a theater that would “break through language to touch life,” I find him most moving and inspiring when he is analyzing, excavating, and making strange the very acts of thinking, articulation, and representation themselves. See, for example, 1925’s “The Nerve Meter,” in which Artaud reports from the void: “Words halfway to intelligence. This possibility of thinking in reverse and of suddenly reviling one’s thought. This dialogue in thought. The ingestion, the breaking off of everything. And all at once this trickle of water on a volcano, the thin, slow falling of the mind.”

  It is a testament to Artaud’s intensity—and perhaps to his madness—that the deadening aspects of his theatrical vision never seem to have occurred to him. He dreaded literalization and misunderstanding, yes, but his proposals to “get us out of our ma
rasmus, instead of continuing to complain about it, and about the boredom, inertia, and stupidity of everything,” always called for more intensity, more spectacle, more bloodshed, more shock, more immersion, more obscenity. He was, after all, a man who persisted—if just barely—in a harrowing state of near constant agony, ecstasy, trance, withdrawal, or psychosis that few others would choose or be able to suffer. He did not live to see the piece in Le Monde published shortly after 9/11, in which French philosopher Jean Baudrillard called the terrorist attack that brought down the Twin Towers “our theatre of cruelty, the only one left to us.” Nor did he live in the age of, say, beheadings available for casual viewing on YouTube. Nor, thankfully, did he live to see the results of my Google search this morning under “theater of cruelty”: up first, a piece from the Nation that describes the acts of torture committed by Americans at Abu Ghraib—and the circulation of the photographs of those acts—as a “Theater of Cruelty”; next, a USA Today blog inviting readers everywhere to weigh in on the question, “Are ‘[American] Idol’ auditions a ‘Theater of Cruelty’?”

  Perhaps this is why Artaud’s writing now seems to me best encountered in silence, in solitude, and—despite what he might have wanted—on the page. Its crackle is still audible, it still scorches. But there it does not rely on the decimation of thought that Artaud at times imagined as a purification, but which the anti-intellectualism of contemporary American culture has repurposed into something utterly stultifying.

  For the mainstream thrust of anti-intellectualism, as it stands today, characterizes thinking itself as an elitist activity. And even if one were to get excited about leaving the contortions of mental effort behind, today’s anti-intellectualism makes no corollary call for us to return our fingers to blood and dirt, to discover orgiastic bliss, to become more autonomous in our ability to fulfill our basic, most primal needs, or to become one with the awe-inspiring forces of the cosmos. It does not demand, as did Thoreau, “Give me a Wildness whose glance no civilization can endure,—as if we lived on the marrow of koodoos devoured raw.” It does not invite us to “throw ourselves like pride-ripened fruit into the wide, contorted mouth of the wind,” as did F. T. Marinetti. And needless to say, it most certainly does not imagine, a la Carolee Schneemann, that the liberated power of female erotic pleasure could gain us entrance to an ecstatic experience of our bodies no longer defined in opposition to intellectual inquiry. Instead, it promotes something more like an idiocracy, in which low-grade pleasures (such as the capacity to buy cheap goods, pay low or no taxes, carry guns into Starbucks, and maintain the right not to help one another) displace all other forms of freedom, even those of the most transformative and profound variety.

  “Don’t think, say the stupid, says the vulgar herd, why try to think?” wrote Artaud, who often experienced thinking as a sort of bodily agony. “As if without [thinking] it were possible to live.”

  GREAT TO WATCH

  IN HER moving, influential anti–capital punishment memoir, Dead Man Walking, Sister Helen Prejean asserts, “I know that it is not a question of malice or ill will or meanness of spirit that prompts our citizens to support executions. It is, quite simply, that people don’t know the truth of what is going on.” Prejean is convinced that if executions were made public, “the torture and violence would be unmasked, and we would be shamed into abolishing executions.”

  Alas, if only it were so. For if the bad news from Abu Ghraib made anything clear in recent years, it is that this model of shaming-us-into-action-by-unmasking-the-truth-of-our-actions cannot hold a candle to our capacity to assimilate horrific images, and to justify or shrug off horrific behavior. Not to mention the fact that the United States has a long history—as do many countries and individuals—of reveling in the spectacle of public executions and gruesome torture. (On this account, I unhappily recommend to you the 2000 book of documentary photography Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America.)

  Prejean’s conviction that it is simple, blameless ignorance that prompts so many Americans to support executions (or the torture of detainees in the so-called war on terror, and so on) may be good-hearted. But unfortunately it leaves us but one option: know the truth, and ye shall be redeemed. But “knowing the truth” does not come with redemption as a guarantee, nor does a feeling of redemption guarantee an end to a cycle of wrongdoing. Some would even say it is key to maintaining it, insofar as it can work as a reset button—a purge that cleans the slate, without any guarantee of change at the root. Placing all one’s eggs in “the logic of exposure,” as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has put it (in Touching Feeling), may also simply further the logic of paranoia. “Paranoia places its faith in exposure,” Sedgwick observes—which is to say that the exposure of a disturbing fact or situation does not necessarily alter it, but in fact may further the circular conviction that one can never be paranoid enough.

  Prejean’s logic relies on the hope that shame, guilt, and even simple embarrassment are still operative principles in American cultural and political life—and that such principles can fairly trump the forces of desensitization and self-justification. Such a presumption is sorely challenged by the seeming unembarrassability of the military, the government, corporate CEOs, and others repetitively caught in monstrous acts of irresponsibility and malfeasance. This unembarrassability has proved difficult to contend with, as it has had a literally stunning effect on the citizenry. They ought to be ashamed of themselves! we cry, over and over again, to no avail. But they are not ashamed, and they are not going to become so.

  Also difficult to contend with: the fact that we ourselves have ample and wily reserves of malice, power-mongering, self-centeredness, fear, sadism, or simple meanness of spirit that we ourselves, our loved ones, our enemies, skillful preachers, politicians, and rhetoricians of all stripes can whip into a hysterical, destructive froth at any given moment, if we allow for it.

  To this list, one should surely add television producers. In 1982, Stephen King published a sci-fi novel called The Running Man, set in the not-so-distant future. In the novel, “The Running Man” is the country’s most popular TV game show, and features a contestant who agrees to run for his life while being trailed by a group of “Hunters” charged with killing him. The network engages the populace by paying civilians for confirmed sightings of the runner, which it then passes along to the Hunters. If the runner survives for thirty days, he gets a billion dollars. If he is caught, he is killed by the Hunters on live TV.

  As others have noted, the dystopic plot of The Running Man turned out to be more prophetic than dissuasive. So-called reality television has been foraying into this territory for over a decade now, churning out show after show that draws on some combination of surveillance; self-surveillance; “interactivity” with the home audience; techniques associated with torture, interrogation, or incarceration; and rituals of humiliation, sadism, and masochism (of the I’ll-do-anything-for-fame-or-money variety, not the I-do-this-because-it-gives-me-pleasure variety: outing one’s pleasures, it seems, remains more taboo than outing one’s ambition or avarice).

  The international craze for reality programming has, to date, given us shows such as the United Kingdom’s Shattered (2004), in which contestants are deprived of sleep for many days in a row, and Unbreakable (2008), in which contestants undergo various forms of torture (including being waterboarded, buried alive, or made to cross the Sahara Desert while wearing suffocating gas masks), and whose motto is “Pain Is Glory, Pain Is Pride, Pain Is Great to Watch.” In the United States, reality TV has at times joined forces with soft-core journalism and law enforcement to produce shows like Dateline/NBC’s To Catch a Predator. To Catch a Predator—which operates in questionable legal conjunction with not only the police but also a vigilante “anti-predator” group called “Perverted Justice”—hires decoys who pretend to be underage teens. These decoys attempt to entice adults into online sex chats; if and when one of the adults agrees to meet his online pen pal
at the “decoy house,” he (and it is always a he) is there greeted by the show’s host, Chris Hansen, who first verbally humiliates him by reading him the most tawdry excerpts of his online sex chatter, then turns him over to the police, who are waiting nearby with handcuffs.

  The legal, ethical, and psychological ramifications of such shows have occasioned quite a bit of debate, as these effects have often proved unmanageable. On November 5, 2006, for example, after a SWAT team trailed by TV cameras forced its way into the home of Louis Conradt Jr., a longtime county prosecutor in Murphy, Texas, Conradt said, “I’m not going to hurt anybody,” before firing a single bullet from a semiautomatic handgun into his brain, thereby ending his life. (There had been no pressing reason to break into Conradt’s home—Conradt had, in fact, refused to meet the decoy at the decoy house—but the show’s producers were anxious to capture the arrest of a prominent public figure on tape, as it promised to make compelling TV. In the end, Dateline refrained from airing the death itself, but it did run a segment on the case.) As one newspaper columnist writing about the incident acidly put it, “When a TV show makes you feel sorry for potential child rapists, you know it’s doing something wrong.” (Or right, depending on your point of view; To Catch a Predator was one of NBC’s hit shows for some time.)