A Plausibly Deniable Conclusion
A theatre that is closed cannot raise money, a theatre that is struggling can. Once dead everyone mourns, people don’t try to revive the dead but they do save the living.
JULIAN BECK
Perhaps it is a testament to the original timeliness of the work itself that roughly forty years after its publication by Surkamp Verlag in 1974, Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde continues to haunt not only studies of avant-garde performance but studies of the avant-gardes across the spectrum of the arts. If there is an irony to this haunting, it lies in the fact that, as critical gestures, the constant refrains of Bürger’s work are so very un-avant-garde. Looking backward rather than forward, they possess little of “the radical quality of the break with what had prevailed heretofore” or “the historically unique break with tradition” that Bürger posited as defining touchstones of “the historical avant-garde” as a mode of cultural expression.1 Obviously, there is no dictate that requires studies of the avant-gardes to be avant-garde themselves. However much scholarship is driven by a seemingly unending quest for the new, legitimacy in cultural criticism is not contingent upon a break with tradition or with what has prevailed heretofore—unless of course that break renders visible that which existing scholarly discourse leaves invisible. In this latter respect, there is significant irony in the haunting presence that Bürger’s work has in current studies of the avant-gardes. That haunting largely precludes critical inquiry into another form of haunting that has everything to do with how we might conceptualize the living legacy of the avant-gardes. Indeed, while Bürger’s theories lend a kind of life support to arguments that grandly pronounce the death of the avant-garde, these same theories discourage serious critical scrutiny of what one might call the ghosts of the avant-gardes.
As a conclusion to this book, I would like to suggest that much of the significance and continued viability of the avant-gardes—whether one speaks of the avant-gardes of the past, the present, or the future—rests with those ghosts, and with what I would call vanguard ghosting. This is, of course, a metaphorical and not a metaphysical paradigm, and I posit it here as a counterweight to the often-overlooked fact that the “death” critics have frequently used to pronounce a finality, end, or termination to avant-garde gestures is itself a metaphor. As grand as those pronouncements of the death of the avant-garde might sound—and the function of metaphors is in part to aggrandize—they traffic in a conceptual impossibility. Every vanguard gesture leaves a trace, and those traces have an uncanny, haunting vitality that critics have been slow to consider—a vitality rich with previously unexplored meanings and new potential meanings as well. Indeed, avant-garde gestures frequently derive their initial vitality from the ghosts haunting the gestures that preceded them. At its most basic level, then, vanguard ghosting is the process whereby avant-garde gestures find and give voice to residual or untapped significance and meaning in previous gestures—significance and meaning that linger either because they were left unexplored or because new historical contexts bring them into play.
In terms of historiography, this notion of vanguard ghosting offers a conceptual flexibility that is vastly superior to the strict linearity and the far more restrictive notion of the avant-gardes and of history itself that Bürger assumes in Theory of the Avant-Garde. Indeed, some initial sense of the conceptual restrictions that Bürger’s theories enforce can be garnered through a simple juxtaposition of his categorical dismissal of “the neo-avant-garde,” on the one hand, and Marvin Carlson’s more recent embrace, on the other, of the characteristic feature of theater, which he calls “ghosting.” Bürger’s arguments discount almost the entire post-war American avant-gardes, and they carry a surprising hostility toward performance—avant-garde or otherwise. In one of his more dismissive references to the work of Andy Warhol, for example, Bürger argues that “the neo-avant-garde, which stages for a second time the avant-gardiste break with tradition, becomes a manifestation that is void of sense and that permits the positing of any meaning whatever.”2
There is no small irony in the fact that that the strict sequential linearity of Bürger’s anti-theatrical rejection of the “neo-avant-garde” is itself haunted by the legacy of avant-gardists like Antonin Artaud. In many respects, in fact, Bürger’s rejection rehearses (i.e., “stages for a second time”) Artaud’s own arguments in The Theatre and Its Double “that an expression does not have the same value twice, does not live two lives; that all words, once spoken, are dead and function only at the moment when they are uttered, [and] that a form, once it has served, cannot be used again and asks only to be replaced by another.”3 Not only does this rehearsal of Artaud situate Bürger conceptually in what one might call a “neo-modernist aesthetic.” It also links his arguments to what Rosalind Krauss has famously identified as the avant-gardes’ discourse of originality.
According to Krauss, that discourse perpetuates an “organicist metaphor” that equates vanguard expressions with “a literal origin, a beginning from ground zero, a birth,” and ultimately a death, and it thus refers “not so much to formal invention as to sources of life.”4 Bürger’s allegiance to this anti-theatrical discourse is evident in the fact that he equates repetition (e.g., staging “for a second time”) not only with an absence of sense, but, inasmuch as repetition supposedly allows for “any meaning whatever,” he also equates it with the loss of a presumed authentic meaning available only in an unprecedented event. Krauss counters such notions with her now famous assertion that “the actual practice of vanguard art tends to reveal that ‘originality’ is a working assumption that itself emerges from a ground of repetition and recurrence.”5 In short, the very concept of “originality” is always already haunted by the ghosts of the avant-gardes.
Although Marvin Carlson speaks little of the avant-gardes in his book The Haunted Stage, his notion of “ghosting” as a characteristic feature of theater highlights the extent to which Krauss’s argument subtly acknowledges avant-garde theatre and performance. For the phenomenon to which Carlson gives “the name ghosting”—the phenomenon that he argues is central to theater itself—involves a process of staging and re-staging, and of appearance and re-appearance. Playing off Marcellus’s question in Hamlet, “What, has this thing appeared again tonight,” Carson argues that “ghosting” occurs in the theater when spectators confront “the identical thing that they have encountered before, although now in a somewhat different context.”6 If, as Krauss suggests, repetition and recurrence are the ground from which the avant-gardes’s notion of “originality” emerges, it is no small matter that this ground is also the very substance of theater and performance. Krauss’s implicit critique of Bürger’s embrace of the discourse of originality thus segues into a performative space where, echoing Carlson, I would like to suggest the ghosts of the avant-gardes begin to take visible form.
To some extent, these ghosts coincide with the broad implications of Carlson’s arguments not only about the haunted stage but in particular about what he calls “the haunted text.” It is not difficult, for example, to see some correspondence between Julian Beck’s account in “Storming the Barricades” of the effect that Artaud’s The Theatre and Its Double had on The Living Theatre, and Carlson’s more general assertion that in the relationship between a “preexisting dramatic text and its enactment onstage” it is possible to speak of a “‘haunting’ that lies close to the structure of the theatrical experience.”7 Indeed, recalling the moment in the summer of 1958 when M. C. Richards’ translation of The Theatre and Its Double arrived in the mail, Beck says that he and the other members of The Living Theatre read the book “again and again” until “the ghost of Artaud became [ . . . their] mentor.”8 That ghost transformed their theater. But what is significant about Beck’s reference to “the ghost of Artaud” is that, as a mentor, this ghost led The Living Theatre not into the haunting baggage of theater history that Carlson explores in his book, but rather, into an altogether different haunting, where the ghosts of history—the vanquished, the repressed, and the victims of injustice—cry out in accusation against those whom Beck describes as:
the heartless monsters that wage wars, that burn and gas six million Jews, that enslave blacks, that plan bacteriological weapons, that annihilate Carthage and Hiroshima, that humiliate and crush, that conduct inquisitions, that hang men in cages to die of starvation and exposure [ . . . ], that wipe out the Indians, the buffalo, that exploit the peon, that lock men in prisons away from natural sex, that invent the gallows, the garrote, the block, the guillotine, the electric chair, the gas chamber, the firing squad, [and] that take young men in their prime and deliberately teach them to kill.9
It may be a politically idiosyncratic reading of Artaud to suggest, as Beck does, that “Artaud believed that if we could only be made to feel, really feel anything, then we might find all this suffering intolerable [ . . . and] put an end to it.”10 But inasmuch as Beck’s reading of Artaud somehow leads to this conclusion, I would like to suggest that it is a near-perfect example of vanguard ghosting. For in this reading, it is not only the ghost of Artaud who haunts Beck and the other members of The Living Theatre.
It is clear from Beck’s comments that he is haunted by the specter of the suffering he detailed in the passage I just cited. This haunting is not unlike that which Alice Rayner describes in her book Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomena of Theatre. In the introduction to that book, Rayner argues that “ghosts hover where secrets are held in time: the secrets of what has been unspoken, unacknowledged; the secrets of the past, the secrets of the dead. Ghosts wait for the secrets to be released into time.”11 Such ghosts haunt Beck’s reading of The Theatre and its Double, and in a very literal sense, they are the ghostwriters of the political activism that Beck derives from Artaud’s visionary prescription for the theater. At one level, then, we might use Beck’s reading of Artaud to supplement Carlson’s concept of ghosting. Vanguard ghosting is not merely an instance of “encountering the identical thing” that one has encountered before in a now “somewhat different context,” and recognizing in turn that this reappearance of the familiar is haunted by the previous contexts where one first encountered it. New and different contexts are populated with ghosts as well—ghosts that press for a revised understanding of the familiar objects one encounters. Ghosts make the familiar “unheimlich,” uncanny . . . strange. As we will see momentarily, those ghosts, while giving form to that which “has been unspoken” or “unacknowledged,” may carry with them not just “the secrets of the past” but also the secrets of the present and the haunting possibilities of the future. In this respect, Beck’s idiosyncratic yet politically creative reading of The Theatre and Its Double offers us insight into how texts are always already haunted by any number of potential readings.
This latter haunting is a call to experimentation and innovation, a call that is forward-looking and that cultivates vanguard expression. Despite Bürger’s anxieties that repetition or staging “for a second time” allows for “any meaning whatever,” I would suggest that Beck’s idiosyncratic reading of Artaud exemplifies the radical vanguard potential of the very tendency Bürger discounts. Far from being a liability that, as Bürger suggests, is devoid of “sense,” the possibilities of “any meaning whatever” are limited only by the level of courage one has to improvise those possibilities into significance. Indeed, the radical exploration of those possibilities can reorient ghosting itself. Whereas Carlson sees the haunted stage as a memory machine, Beck’s mentor apparently opened the eyes of The Living Theatre to the ghosts of the present and the future, as well as the past. In a manner reminiscent of the darkest moments of Charles Dickens’s Christmas narrative, these ghosts haunt the present with the unseen, the unforeseeable, and the overlooked, and the morally disastrous potential consequences that attend them.
The odd temporal conceit of the ghosting implied in Beck’s reading of Artaud provides a vivid metaphor for the conceptual structures of the visible and the invisible that I want to explore first in my discussion of The Living Theatre’s productions of Kenneth Brown’s The Brig, and then in a concluding discussion of vanguard ghosting and Artaud’s The Theatre and Its Double. It is not a matter of coincidence that I have prefaced these discussions with reflections on Beck’s own reading of Artaud, for both The Brig and vanguard ghosting more generally are foreshadowed in Beck’s reading. The Living Theatre’s production of The Brig in the spring and summer of 1963 was conceptualized as a realization of Artaud’s “Theatre of Cruelty.” Moreover, Beck’s essay “Storming the Barricades” has a historical tie to Brown’s play, having first been published as a preface to the 1965 Hill and Wang edition of The Brig,12 which followed The Living Theatre’s original production of the play and which, it is worth noting, appeared in print after the IRS had closed The Living Theatre’s Fourteenth Street theater in October 1963, and Beck and Judith Malina were themselves incarcerated on contempt-of-court charges.13
Whether those charges were politically motived has always been a matter of debate. Beck and Malina certainly believed that mixing Artaud’s “Theatre of Cruelty” with Brown’s radical critique of military culture was capable of producing a politically subversive enough spectacle—a kind of theatrical Molotov cocktail—that a backlash was a genuine possibility. Malina claimed as much in a now legendary interview conducted while the members of The Living Theatre had re-occupied the Fourteenth Street theater temporarily after the IRS had locked them out and shut down their production of The Brig. Yelling answers from the third-floor office window to Richard Schechner, who was posing questions to her via a megaphone from the street, she told him “that the kind of plays” they produced had “a lot to do with” the closing of the theater.14 Yet in the same issue of TDR where that interviewed appeared, Charles Mee argued it was inevitable that the “creditors would eventually close in,” calling it the height of “stupidity” for Beck and Malina to believe that incurring massive debts and running up “a tax bill of thousands of dollars” was not a prescription for closing a theater.15 If the political activism of The Living Theatre’s work was subversive enough to provoke a backlash—and it is debatable whether it was—their seeming disregard of financial responsibilities was nothing short of an invitation to the authorities to take action against the group.
For his part, Beck tended to frame the closing of the Fourteenth Street theater as yet another example of the repressive mechanisms of an increasingly authoritarian society. The Brig had only exposed the crudest militaristic forms of that society. Judith Malina echoed this framing by arguing that The Brig is merely “a structure” and that “the Immovable Structure is the villain” regardless of “whether that structure calls itself a prison or a school or a factory or a family or a government or The World As It Is.”16 Nowhere was this framing more evident than when in an act of resistance to the IRS’s demand that they quit the building, the members of The Living Theatre symbolically turned the significance of the set design for The Brig on its head. With the IRS pressing them to vacate, Beck and the other members of The Living Theatre “all went into the inner compound of the brig and announced [ . . . they] would not go until . . . allowed to perform.”17 That inner compound was a cage, complete with a mesh of barbed wire to separate the performers and the stage from the audience, thereby foregrounding the brutal realities of incarceration within the penal system of the armed services. In performances of The Brig, the inner compound of the set was a site of discipline, constraint, and detention. Above all it represented what it felt like to be brutally cut off from society at large. But at the moment when the IRS began closing in for eviction, Beck, Malina, and the other members of The Living Theatre recognized in the inner compound a radically opposite potential: a site of staged resistance and a last bastion of artistic freedom within a society where, from their perspective, the repressive apparatus of the state had become all-pervasive and was literally closing in. In this respect, the inner compound was not devoid of sense but was open to “any meaning whatever”—for those who had the courage to improvise it into a new significance.
Despite the IRS’s efforts to evict The Living Theatre and to keep the public out of the building, enough people found their way in through windows and openings in the roof that an audience formed, and shortly before 10:00 pm on October 19, 1963, The Living Theatre began their last performance of The Brig at the Fourteenth Street theater. From within the cage—that site of brutal discipline and authority—they mounted what Beck ironically but legitimately called “a performance which was in and of itself an act of civil disobedience” and an “act on the part of individuals who were saying we want the freedom to create, we want a society in which the inhibitions of the state and/or money do not dominate.”18 Kenneth Brown stood with them, as did the roughly forty members of the audience, many of whom along with Brown were later arrested with The Living Theatre on charges of “Impeding a Federal Officer in the Performance of his Duties.”19
Among the ghosts of this moment were Brown’s companions from the Third Marines with whom, roughly five years earlier, as a 19-year-old recruit, he had done thirty days hard labor in Camp Fuji, the marine corps brig close to Mount Fujiyama in central Japan. The brutalization he and the other prisoners endured there largely provided the substance of his deeply disturbing drama. In many respects, the play itself is haunted by those experiences. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how Brown, or anyone else who was arrested on that October night in 1963, could avoid drawing haunting parallels between the potentially violent prospect of prison time and the state-sanctioned brutalities of time in a military brig. The act of civil disobedience—i.e., the performance itself—and the ensuing arrests established an otherwise inaccessible affinity with those marine prisoners. Malina gave voice to that affinity in the parallels she drew between the month she had previously spent “in the Women’s House of Detention” for her acts of civil disobedience and hearing “the familiar metal scraping prison sounds and the stamp of the booted foot on concrete”—a sound that she acknowledges “will haunt [ . . . her] forever as they will haunt all of us who have been prisoners.”20
From the perspective of the state, this is the haunting that is most desirable, a haunting that is most frightening because, like ghosts themselves, it is only vaguely discernable. As Avery Gordon argues in her book Ghostly Matters, the possibility of disappearing into the hands of the state is not a matter that the state wants to keep entirely “hidden away, but rather [it] must be discernible enough to scare ‘a little bit of everyone’ into shadows of themselves, into submission.”21 On the other hand, the haunting parallels between a prison and a military brig established the kind of affinity that is ultimately necessary to bring about social change. Drawing in part upon the work of Michael Taussig, Gordon argues that “haunting is [ . . . ] the mode by which the middle class needs to encounter something you have to try out for yourself, feeling your way deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness until you do feel what is at stake”22—in other words, until you know that the choice is between becoming a submissive shadow of yourself or refusing the shadows.
Ironically enough, the harsh, dismissive criticism of The Living Theatre’s unlicensed performance of The Brig that subsequently came from theater practitioners like Herbert Blau and Jules Irving only further established this haunting affinity between the evicted and soon-to-be arrested performers and the prisoners within The Brig whom they portrayed. Blau and Irving admonished readers of TDR to avoid “spooky speculation” and not to confuse “civil disobedience” with what they considered to be “an inexplicably dumb show” that amounted to little more than “the most adolescent kind of law-breaking.”23 Yet adolescent law-breaking and a disproportionate, heavy-handed response to it by civilian or military authorities is precisely what linked the performers at the Fourteenth Street theater to the actual prisoners who had been subjected to the sadistic physical brutalities and psychological humiliations that constituted punishment at Camp Fuji. As a young marine, after all, Kenneth Brown had received thirty days in the Brig merely for being late for an assignment.24 What was possible within the marine corps—what Brown bitterly described as “being treated inhumanly by people who were supposed to be [ . . . his] fellow countrymen”25 for mere adolescent irresponsibility—was now a specter that potentially loomed over any social non-conformist at any point.
Blau’s and Irving’s dismissals notwithstanding, the final Fourteenth Street performance of The Brig was by almost any measure a germinal moment in the history of American avant-garde performance. Though perhaps naively idealistic, it combined a brinkmanship style of improvisation with political activism, radically redefining the space of theater. It liberated performance from subservience to the authority of the dramatic text, and provoking the civil authorities into action, it blurred the boundaries not only between performers and spectators, but between life and art. Even its more puerile moments of “acting out” were consistent with the frequently juvenile preoccupations of the Dadaists and of Alfred Jarry before them. The ghosts of the avant-gardes were with this performance, but to understand how profoundly haunted this performance really was, it is necessary to backtrack momentarily so as to reconsider Kenneth Brown’s bitterness toward fellow countrymen who treated him inhumanely—and to consider this bitterness in light of Beck’s allusions (in his idiosyncratic reading of Artaud) to the dispossessed and to the victims of injustice, those ghosts of history who cry out in accusation.
Brown’s bitterness is all the more striking because it implicitly equates the expectation of humane treatment with a shared nationalism (e.g., “being treated inhumanly by [ . . . ] fellow countrymen”). This is not to suggest somehow that Brown was a latent nationalist, extending notions of humanity only to those who march under the stars and stripes. In fact, Brown categorized his play in universalized existentialist terms, as an exploration of the “human condition.”26 The issue is rather that beneath his bitterness, there lies a haunting that would point us to something deeper than the fear that what happens in The Brig could happen at home. This haunting points us into the shadowy and more disturbing realms of clandestine operations and ghost wars, where CIA operatives are routinely called “spooks,” and where the ghosts of the voiceless, the repressed, the disappeared, the tortured, and the murdered reside. This is a haunting in the shape of the simple question—a question that Brown himself echoed in a 2007 interview.27 If Americans are willing to treat their fellow countrymen inhumanly within the structures of their own penal system, what are they willing to do to non-citizens who do not enjoy the ostensible protections of the law, and who, like the prisoners at Abu Ghraib, are viewed by their guards “as culturally alien, as enemies, as inferior—as Other”?28 At the time when Brown was locked up in the brig at Camp Fugi in the late 1950s—roughly at the same time Beck and Malina were put in jail for “participating in an anti-nuclear demonstration”29—this was a question that few wanted answered. John Prados has noted, for example, that the then Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Leverett Saltonstall, once commented: “It is not a question of reluctance on the part of CIA officials to speak to us. Instead it is a question of our reluctance, if you will, to seek information and knowledge on subjects which I personally, as a Member of Congress and as a citizen, would rather not have.”30 One does not need to ponder such statements for long to recognize the culpability involved in being aware of something that appears morally suspect and yet consciously deciding not to look into the particulars of it.
Morally repugnant though Saltonstall’s selective ignorance may sound—especially coming from a Chairman of the US Senate Armed Services Committee—it is consistent with the policy of “plausible deniablity” that has governed US covert operations since their inception during Harry Truman’s presidency at the beginning of the Cold War.31 This is a policy that multiplies the mechanisms of power and authority of the state through a calculated ignorance that obfuscates and leaves those mechanisms unchecked by the rule of national and international law. Ironically enough, this notion of plausible deniability might also be used to describe the status in which all ghosts exist, regardless of whether those ghosts are the covert agents of the state, the restless victims of repression and injustice, or simply the stuff of supernatural fancy. Whether paramilitary or paranormal, ghosts are plausibly deniable because they are both visible and invisible. If nothing else, the shadowy spaces of plausible deniability remind us that the haunting world of ghosts is a terrifying realm in which anything can happen. It is the locus of those who have been “ghosted” and/or “disappeared.” It is the dominion of “ghost planes” and extraordinary rendition. It is that “parallel world” of black sites and secret prisons that exist, like Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s descriptions of the Gulags, “within physical reach of everyday life but yet [ . . . ] unseen to ordinary people.”32 At the same time, however, the realms of plausible deniability are not the realms of absolute deniability. Despite the unleashed state-sponsored terror facilitated by such politically sanctioned evasiveness, its restless victims—those ghosts of history past, present, and future—appear again and again to press their case.
At an abstract level, the extent to which the very appearance of such restless victims is enough to press their case is arguably the focal point of plays like Harold Pinter’s Party Time. In the closing scene of that play, which takes place against the backdrop of a brutal police action in the streets, there is a particularly good example of this point, particularly with regard to the character Jimmy, whose noticeable absence from a social gathering of political elites is a politically sensitive and thus consciously avoided topic. Earlier, at this same party, Jimmy’s sister Dusty inquired about her brother’s sudden disappearance and was met with feigned ignorance, chilling indifference, and ominous rebuffs. Her husband Terry warned, “Nobody is discussing this [ . . . ] Do you follow me? Nothing happened to Jimmy.”33 When Jimmy arrives at the door at the end of the play, it is not clear whether he is alive or dead, but either way he is a ghost of his former self. Disoriented and uncertain about where he is or what has happened to him, he speaks cryptically of the violence of which he is a victim. Like Jimmy’s ambiguous status in this final scene, Pinter’s entire play is strategically ambiguous with regard to time and place. Party Time’s dramatization of Jimmy’s return is thus arguably more of a theoretical reflection calling attention to ghosting than it is an actual example of a drama or performance haunted by ghosts. Indeed, the temporal and spatial ambiguity of the play functions like a script for the audience, rhetorically encouraging them to seek a historical point of reference for the simulated repressiveness enacted on the stage.
When the ghosts of the avant-gardes appear, however, their appearance is always unscripted and radically improvisational. Julian Beck was a conduit for their voices when, from within the pages of The Theatre and Its Double, he somehow discovered echoes of the cries of murdered Jews, enslaved Africans, and dead citizens of Hiroshima. These are cries that haunt the text, but, unlike the appearance of Jimmy in Pinter’s Party Time, they are without direct textual warrant. You will not find them in the pages of Artaud’s visionary book. They haunt from the periphery and the margins, where they press their case amid plausible deniability, visible but invisible, in the text but not of the text. Moreover, their presence cannot be discounted as the product of Beck’s profoundly creative abilities as a poet, artist, and reader. The ghosts of history haunt artist and audience alike in the work of the living.
Fifty years after The Living Theatre received M. C. Richards’ translation of The Theatre and Its Double in the mail, their 1963 Artaud-inspired production of The Brig continues to haunt them. That haunting hovered about their 2001 “collaboration with local theater artists in Lebanon” in the creation of a “play about the abuse of political detainees in the notorious former prison at Khiam.”34 It also hovered about the opening of their new theater on Clinton Street in New York’s lower east side in April 2007, which they inaugurated with a re-staging of The Brig. While, to echo Bürger once again, some might consider this re-staging of The Brig for a second time a gesture that is “void of sense,” the members of The Living Theatre argued that “a play about brutality inside a US military prison seems more to the point today than ever.”35 In 2007, they were hardly alone in seeing the play’s new relevance—a relevance that was clearly the result of the radical potential of a play that was far from being “void of sense” precisely because it lent itself to interaction with and was haunted by profoundly disturbing forces of history. The potential of this rich context of relevance echoed through the press. Writing for The Village Voice, for example, Michael Feingold suggested that if the new production of The Brig “makes you think of Abu Ghraib, of Guantánamo, of secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe, or of a US government that claims the right to hold its own citizens incommunicado for months on end without criminal charges,” The Living Theatre is not to blame.36
But neither is the text of Brown’s play to blame. The victims of Abu Ghraib, of Guantánamo, of secret CIA prisons and of the US government’s willingness to incarcerate its citizens (and others) without charging them, are only present in the performance of The Brig as ghosts. They haunt the margins of a text to which they do not belong. In a very literal sense, they are there in spirit rather than in the letter. In this respect, I would suggest, to speak of the ghosts of the avant-gardes is to speak also of a sensibility for the haunted spaces where they plausibly reside. It is to speak of a sensibility capable of improvising those spaces into perceptible and plausible legitimacy—a sensibility that, among other things, improvises invisibility into visibility and works thus against plausible deniability. At one level, such improvisations result from an opportunistic and subversive misreading of the written word. In substance, however, such improvisations are crucial performative gestures of the avant-gardes. Far from being the products of a senseless void, they are the haunting antithesis of the death of the avant-garde. As such, they are a vital dimension of the avant-gardes’ continued relevance today.
Such improvisations may be easy with a piece like The Brig in 2007, but the improvisations go much further than an ability to draw an analogy between the unjustifiable brutality dramatized in The Brig and the unjustifiable brutality played out in an Abu Ghraib, a Guantanamo, or a secret CIA prison. They touch upon a profound understanding of the combative relation that experimental performance has with textual authority—an understanding that not only informed Malina’s decision to do a new production of The Brig, but was central to the decision in the early sixties to do a production of The Brig in the first place. That understanding was on display in an interview Malina did shortly after the opening of the new production. There she explained that the play is “about torture, the torture consists of living [ . . . ] by the book and doing everything in an exact way.”37 Malina’s immediate point of reference was obviously The Guidebook for Marines, which dictates the code of conduct by which Marines must abide. All the prisoners in The Brig are made to read this book incessantly. At the same time, it is the book whose authority and legitimacy are radically subverted by the sheer physical brutality for which it provides cover and which The Living Theatre’s productions of The Brig expose.
Although the members of The Living Theatre have long held profound moral reservations about the military, Malina’s pointed reference to The Guidebook for Marines and the role that it plays in The Living Theatre’s productions of The Brig have less to do with the military per se than with the need to question “living by the book,” whatever that book might be. This admonishment, which pivots in part on a classic avant-garde contrast between text and performance, is arguably grounded in a deep-seated belief that improvisation is a passageway into the haunted spaces where the ghosts of the past, present, and future can be heard beyond the lines of textual and political authority and are no longer invisible. This is an admonishment that would coax us into the margins of textuality and into the radical potential of improvisation. It touches the pulse of a living legacy and the continued viability of the avant-gardes.
Keeping Malina’s admonishment in mind, it is worth recalling that a continent, a quarter of a century, and a brutal world war—not to mention a language—separated the original publication of Artaud’s The Theatre and Its Double and the ghosts that Julian Beck found in his subsequent reading of this visionary book prior to The Living Theatre’s 1963 production of The Brig. Given this distance, Beck’s initial idiosyncratic reading of Artaud is in many respects already a model of the continuing viability of the avant-gardes and of their ability to reconstitute themselves in subsequent improvised readings of literary texts and cultural artifacts. This is, in fact, what Beck’s reading of Artaud exemplifies. A similar sense of that viability is evident in The Living Theatre’s 2007 revival of The Brig, which not only populated the margins of Brown’s drama with a new community of ghosted victims, but, with the CIA’s practice of disappearing juridically inconvenient people, it also added a whole new layer to the very notion of “ghosting” as such. But what connects these two moments in The Living Theatre’s history beyond the initial and subsequent productions of The Brig are the improvised readings that aim at the margins of textual authority, and that move from the conventionally visible toward those who are historically the dispossessed and the invisible. As a praxis, those readings preface what I have called vanguard ghosting.
While it is true, as I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, that no dictate compels studies of the avant-gardes to be avant-garde themselves, I would suggest that the difference between seeing the ghosts of the avant-gardes and seeing the death of the avant-garde may very well pivot on one’s ability, indeed on one’s willingness, to venture into experimental reading as a praxis. It may depend, in other words, on one’s willingness to improvise and to look to the margins—especially when reading the artifacts of the avant-gardes’ own histories. Beck himself gives a cue for such a praxis in the record of his response to Artaud, a response that identifies many ghosts but that in its relation to The Brig ultimately led to a hearing for only a few. One might query those that remain and in doing so extend the processes of vanguard ghosting to a more sustained reading of the visible and invisible in Artaud’s The Theatre and Its Double. To summon one example here, it is worth asking how one might read Artaud in response to the ghosts Beck identifies as “men [locked] in prisons away from natural sex” by “heartless monsters.” In this final section of this chapter, I want to turn to this question.
Anyone familiar with the sexual politics of The Living Theatre and of Julian Beck in particular will recognize that his reference to “natural sex” has little to do with reinforcing heterosexual norms. On the contrary, the reference points toward an unrestricted sphere of sexual experimentation and exploration—a sphere in which, to borrow a phrase from Malina, sexuality is no longer practiced “by the book.” In this respect, even the notion of locking men “in prisons” is as figurative as it is literal. It refers as much to the codified social mores that close the minds of men and women to a more radical understanding of sexuality as it does to the institutions that close them behind locked and guarded doors. Indeed, Beck’s reference to prisons conjures the ghosts of those who have been incarcerated and persecuted behind bars because of their sexual identity and because of the threat that it presumably poses to the dominant social order. I would suggest that for Beck, “natural sex” thus refers to an understanding of sexuality that is so fundamentally diverse and fluid that it is anarchistic and threatening to the heteronormative economy of the body politic. It is radically performative and subversively visceral in ways that not only have profound parallels with Artaud’s vision of the theater but that arguably bring the ghosts haunting that vision out of the closet and into visibility.
Since this notion of “natural sex” may seem far afield from The Living Theatre’s productions of The Brig, and from the ghosts that haunt those productions, it is worth pausing briefly to remember that the most grotesque moments of that haunting—at least with regard to the 2007 production—are manifested not in vague references to Abu Ghraib but in the particulars that the vague references politely avoid and that thus largely remain invisible. Those particulars are documented in the deeply disturbing photographs the public saw for the first time in April of 2004. What the public saw in those photographs not only was foreshadowed by Beck’s reference forty years earlier to the “heartless monsters” who “lock men in prisons away from natural sex.” The photographs, while perhaps reminiscent of the system of humiliation recounted in The Brig, also document a strategy of calculated humiliation that uses physical and psychological torture grounded specifically in a vicious form of homophobia. Among other things, the photos that surfaced in 2004 show Iraqi men stripped of their clothing and forced to assume sexually suggestive positions with one another or with the guards who threatened them with physical violence and attack dogs. Time and again, the decisive subtext of these photos is written in the attempt to humiliate and degrade prisoners specifically by associating them with homoerotic tendencies. This subtext, which is nothing less than a viciously authoritarian reinscription of compulsory heterosexuality, is based as much upon the profound homophobia that permeates US society as it is upon a corresponding homophobia in Iraqi society.
Amid the bewildering effects of the brutality recorded in these photos, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that the victims who haunt them are multiple and hard to identify because they reside in differing degrees of invisibility. First and foremost, the anonymous victims of torture populate the photographs themselves—victims robbed of their identities, who have been “disappeared” and “ghosted” and who only surfaced by chance in photos leaked to the media. There are also the un-photographed prisoners: victims who remain invisible ghosts in almost every sense of the word. But beyond the immediacy of these horrific instances of torture and abuse, other ghosts hover even further in the margins of the photographs: those whose sexual identity presumably is so threatening and is such a source of anxiety within Iraqi society, for example, that the potential release of a coerced photograph suggesting an association with them was enough to blackmail Iraqi prisoners into submission and cooperation. Then there are also people whose sexual identity is presumably so threatening and such a source of anxiety that the US military deemed it “unspeakable” and closeted it into invisibility with policies like “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”
These are the ghosts that the US military has forced into disparaged margins and shadows where they do not belong. This is the same US military that in its tacit approval of the abuses at sites like Abu Ghraib all too willingly links the display of homoerotic desires with the most degrading forms of humiliation. There is nothing natural about such a linkage. People forced into the shadows because of the sexual bigotry of Iraqi society or that of the US military and other US social institutions also haunt Abu Ghraib: they are the victims of policies that cultivate and sustain a deeply homophobic culture, both in and outside of the military. It is these ghosts who unite The Living Theatre’s productions of The Brig with the specter of “natural sex” that haunts The Theatre and Its Double.
Some sense for that haunting can be found in the fact that Artaud’s own resistance to the authority of the written word—his resistance, so to speak, to doing things “by the book”—is premised upon an embrace of a “physical knowledge” of theater38 that is charged with erotic and anarchistic undercurrents. Describing a theater no longer beholden to the “deaden[ing]” effects of what Artaud calls a “superstitious valuation of texts,”39 he celebrates an anti-textual notion of performance conceptualized as “the encounter upon the stage of two passionate manifestations.”40 Indeed, Artaud calculates this celebration according to the degree to which the encounter—and hence performance itself—can be compared with a physical sensuality so intense that it eclipses one’s allegiance to established civil and moral authority. In its opposition to literary works that are “fixed in forms that no longer respond to the needs of the time,”41 performance thus becomes “something as entire, true, even decisive, as, in life, the encounter of one epidermis with another in a timeless debauchery.”42
Artaud’s use of an erotically charged metaphor to characterize the “physical knowledge” of theater and performance that he posits in opposition to literary authority is hardly unique as an image in The Theatre and Its Double. Nor is the image of “debauchery” the most provocative of those linking a “physical knowledge” of the theater with an intense, even desperate, sensuality. More provocative still—and more problematic—is the analogy Artaud draws between this physical knowledge of the theater and the image of someone in the time of the plague casting all rational caution to the wind, experiencing a “surge of erotic fever” and “trying to wrench a criminal pleasure from the dying or even the dead, half crushed under the pile of corpses where chance has lodged them.”43 If debauchery suggests a passionate, wild abandon, the suggestion here is to a force so extreme that it arguably begins to collapse under the weight of its own rhetoric. Indeed, I would suggest that however provocative this image of the dying and the dead piled together and sexually defiled may be as a characterization of an intense theatrical immediacy, the rhetoric of this image pushes far enough toward an extreme that the ghosts of the avant-gardes move once again from invisibility to visibility and press their case.
This erotically charged image segues back into Beck’s original encounter with the ghosts who haunt Artaud’s text. But more to the point, the image of someone wrenching “a criminal pleasure from the dying [ . . . and] the dead” gives the ghosts haunting The Living Theatre’s 2007 production of The Brig passage into The Theatre and Its Double as well. Puzzling though Beck’s earlier idiosyncratic reading of Artaud might be, his reference to Holocaust victims (the “six million Jews” burned and gassed by “heartless monsters”) bears some conceptual semblance to Artaud’s image of the dying and the dead violated while “half crushed under [ . . . a] pile of corpses” during the 1720 plague of Marseille. Indeed, I would suggest that this conceptual semblance establishes a connection where the traffic of ghosts moves not merely between the lines of textual authority but also across generations and historical periods. It is worth remembering in this regard that among the most haunting and disturbing images from the Holocaust are the photographs of naked and emaciated victims left in piles to rot by heartless monsters. It does not take much to imagine how difficult it would have been in the early 1960s for Beck to read Artaud’s graphic allusion to the victims of the plague without being reminded of the recent victims of those fascists who took criminal pleasure in murdering so many. If those horrifying photographs documenting the Holocaust haunt Beck’s reading of Artaud, so too do the victims in those photographs and the victims of Artaud’s graphic descriptions of the plague haunt The Living Theatre’s revival of The Brig.
While this haunting is in part the kind of haunting of one production by another that Carlson discusses in The Haunted Stage, it also extends beyond the margins of the 1963 and 2007 productions of The Brig. Just as Beck could not read Artaud in the early 1960s without being haunted by the ghosts of those incarcerated, tortured, and murdered in Nazi concentration camps, so too do the ghosts of those incarcerated, tortured, and murdered in Abu Ghraib haunt The Brig after 2004. Here is an instance of vanguard ghosting that one might call “ghosts by association.” It involves a haunting facilitated by the kind of associative logic that has been a staple of the avant-garde since the invention of collage: a radical juxtaposition of seemingly disparate elements that bring forth an unexpected meaning and significance out of a new and different context. But here is a place of vanguard ghosting that arises less from the collagist’s constructions than from the uncanny momentary correspondences of history, such as the haunting parallels between Artaud’s account of Marseille in 1720, Beck’s knowledge of Buchenwald in 1945, and the leaked photographs from Bagdad in 2004.
If the chilling similarity to photographs of piled up Holocaust victims in 1945 haunt the photographs of piled up, abused, and potentially dead and dying Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, so too do Artaud’s descriptions of the “surge of erotic fever” and of “criminal pleasure” wrenched from those “half crushed under [ . . . a] pile of corpses” render the brutal sexual undercurrent of the Abu Ghraib photos visible. The ghosts who convene in the space of this haunting to press their case link Artaud’s graphic description of the dying and the dead “half crushed under [ . . . a] pile of corpses” not just with the photographs of piles of dehumanized Holocaust victims but also with the photographs of naked Iraqi prisoners stacked in piles in front of smirking US soldiers like Army Specialists Charles Graner, Lynndie England, and Sabrina Harman—smirking with the erotically charged, sadistic, criminal pleasure that they apparently derived from “readying” the prisoners for interrogation. But how much credibility should scholars give to the associative logic of this case and this kind of historiography? How much validity can be found in the experimental reading that they entail—an experimental reading that as a critical practice has solid precedent in Beck’s own idiosyncratic reading of Artaud? The question that looms over the haunting parallel between Marseille, Buchenwald, and Baghdad is thus a question of whether to acknowledge the parallel’s legitimacy and give it voice and visibility in critical discourse, or whether to embrace its plausible deniability and thereby relegate its ghosts to silence and invisibility. In terms of historiography, the choice is between improvising and doing things “by the book.” In terms of theory, the choice is between recognizing the radical potential lurking within Artaud’s statement that “an expression does not have the same value twice”44 or buying into Bürger’s assertion that staging for a “second time” results in “a manifestation that is void of sense.”45 In terms of the legacy of the avant-gardes, I would suggest that the choice is between the ghosts of the avant-gardes and the death of the avant-garde.
It is, of course, a long journey from Marseille in 1720 through Buchenwald in 1945 and the Marine Brig at Mount Fujiyama in 1957 to Baghdad in 2004, but it is precisely the kind of logic that fuels this journey that is at the core of what I have been calling vanguard ghosting. This logic, I would suggest, is a crucial strategy for seeing beyond the death of the avant-garde to discover the meanings that linger like ghosts in avant-garde gestures because they have been left unexplored or because new historical contexts bring them into play. At one level, that logic and the historical leaps forward and backward that it enables are foreshadowed in Beck’s own reading of Artaud—a reading in which the “heartless monsters [ . . . ] that burn and gas six million Jews” are the same “heartless monsters [ . . . ] that enslave blacks,” “wipe out the Indians,” and “lock men in prisons away from natural sex.” If the ghosts of the avant-gardes haunt Beck’s reading of Artaud, if they haunt The Living Theatre’s 1963 production of The Brig, they also haunt The Living Theatre’s 2007 production of The Brig. Indeed, they and other ghosts—unseen and unforeseen ghosts of the past, present, and future—haunt The Theatre and Its Double as well. In this respect, the broad license that Beck took as a reader of Artaud was not only in the spirit of Artaud’s own anti-textualism. It exemplifies a critical practice that one might extend to the cultural artifacts and the legacy of the avant-gardes more generally.