I Have a Very Nervous System

I Have a Very Nervous System Paper+performance Simon Bayly with Igor Zvonic University of Roehampton/Theatre PUR s.bayly@roehampton.ac.uk Presented at International Federation for Theatre Research, XIV World Congress, Amsterdam, 2002. [live performance by Igor Zvonic, followed by….] So: maybe a flip is flick is a trick is twitch is twinge is a tingle is a twangle. I think what we are after is more like frisson, the French word for ‘tingle’ that is common in English, a word that names what has yet to congeal into a recognizable emotion. Presuming that doctors are well versed in the languages of such sensations, I stop at the door of a new colleague in the hospital where I work once a week. Explaining my business, I ask if she speaks any other languages than English. She does: several, including Urdu, but her first language is Pashto, the language of the Pashtun people of Afghanistan. Given the political circumstances, it feels suddenly very stupid to ask what the Pashto word for a kind of mental tingling is akin to pins and needles. So, as if it were any less stupid, I ask her if there is an equivalent word in Urdu. Humouring me, she says no, in Urdu you’d have to describe it more indirectly. But there is, she adds, a Pashto near-equivalent. Khwasidell. She laughs: ‘it sounds funny to say it out loud’, and then writes down a phonetic transliteration. I exit twitching, and apologising for disturbing her. Khwasidell. So much for twinge. Twangle: It’s Shakespeare’s word, put into Caliban’s mouth: Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices That, if I had waked after long sleep, Will make me sleep again: Seeking the missing ninety percent of the mass of the observable universe, astrophysicists alighted over thirty years ago upon the solar neutrino, a particle possessed of a density and a size so different from the structure of matter that makes up our planet that it generally passes straight through it – and also through you and me. But probability indicates that sooner or later, one of these particles will strike the nucleus of an earthly atom and cause an observable event – the production of a muon that emits the blue Cherenkov light that can be detected by photomultipler tubes. To avoid interference from other everyday subatomic impacts, experimental apparatus is secreted at the bottom of disused mine shafts containing thousands of tonnes of inert liquid or into holes bored several hundred metres into the polar icecaps. Hundreds of photomultipher tubes surround these host mediums, awaiting the arrival of the neutrino that will collide with a nucleus and produce a telltale trace of subatomic evidence that will testify to its own existence. In front of their instruments, the audience of neutrino scientists waits expectantly for singular events, ready to receive and register the impacts that will be over in an instant. In fact, the instruments record such events on a regular basis, perhaps one or two a month. But this is hugely below the statistical forecasts based on the known mass of such particles, if they are to constitute the missing ninety percent. So the search continues and, meanwhile, the scientists, wait and try to make better theories that will hopefully permit them to perceive what they know must exist, but as yet eludes capture. As a pseudo-scientist of performance, both theatremaker and spectator, I find myself returning over and over to the theatre in a similar search. I take my place in the semi-darkness, falling silent at the correct point and sit there, awaiting an event, however minor, that will give prove a theory, delight and hurt not – well, not too much – the flip, the tingle, the twitch, the twangle. How did it come to this? In the West at least, it seems we are less and less comfortable with a notion of theatrical pleasure. Given the injustices and suffering that condition our sense of the lifeworld at a global scale, we are suspicious of the smaller pleasures of performance, and for some good reasons: spectacle is often construed as either a politically dangerous form of mass hysteria or as an alienated and alienating exercise of power. So it can often seem that theatre’s ethical and political task today is to defeat its own devices. I, and again perhaps you, have got used to thinking about theatre with concepts which seem critically and politically robust, almost unimpeachable – we talk of contexts, economies, hegemonies, representations, mediatations, sites of meaning and so forth. We know how to read the signs, the ruses of ideology and the significant significations. And as befits a community of those who have nothing in common, theories of performance born out of these concepts are often elaborated as lonely acts of mourning, as re-rememberings that are primarily concerned with what is missing – with absent presences, traces and hauntings. Performance becomes a elegiac space or site for the display of symptoms, one where the shadow of what has been occluded, repressed or sublimated will make itself felt, but not appear. Confronted by this critical edifice of mourning, I momentarily feel reassured – after all, theatre does matter, not just as an institution with a sizeable workforce and a large, if ageing, public. How could I fail to realize that it’s at work everywhere, in the epoch of performance? If theatre is indeed a significant place for the production and experience of what this conference is calling cultural memory, then it seems to offer the possibility for us to get to grips with the abject state we’re in, our delicate and delusionary condition, what we and our varied pathologies are really about, – if there is a ‘we’ that can say ‘we’ anymore, which no less sensitive a figure than Jacques Derrida denies. In fact, it often seems that in order to find a perspective on the so-called post-modern condition, all thought will have to be converted if not to theatre, at least to performance or performativity. But I confess that many of these critical procedures, which I once found lively and provocative now seem opaque and anaesthetizing. In a parallel evolution, over the years my habits and expectations as a spectator have changed substantially. I seem to be increasingly indifferent to plot, character, good acting, and the gross level of content or thematic coherence. Sets, lighting and costumes, even the venue matter little, though proximity to the action is important. It seems that all I require is two things: firstly, that someone appear. Secondly, something has to happen: not a joke, nor a moment of catharsis or of the sublime, not a virtuoso manifestation of beauty nor a coruscating depiction of suffering, a character neither built nor deconstructed, not an accomplishment nor an achievement, nothing great or refined, finally perhaps something that wasn’t even meant to happen: merely an accident. How to describe it then, this experience of what I will have to call theatrical pleasure, but which is not enjoyment, let alone jouissance? Such events are rare, anomalous, unanticipated, ephemeral: like the muon, they never amount to anything that one could take home. Yet when they happen – and they do happen - they still seem to carry a significant emotional and intellectual charge – an existentialontological sensation that feels an infinite distance from an understanding or knowledge. I hope you know what I mean. It must be why I am here, since every year I come up with a clutch of good reasons for giving up on theatre for ever and its creaky representational paraphernalia, however hitech, and to stay at home instead and surrender myself to the sparkling universe of information, whose countless particles, like the neutrino, mostly past right through me without making contact. Perhaps what I am grasping at has something to do with why you are here, over there, too. The eminent theorist of theatre, Herbert Blau, seems to feel the same way. He writes of “inaugural moments and instances when the theatre appears – unless all the world is a stage – from whatever it is that it’s not. More theater, less theater: in the doing of theater - we solicit, rebuff, try to entrap that thing (has it appeared again tonight?), though we’re never quite sure we have it.” That thing? Hardly an illuminating description, but I know what he means, although it’s not really knowledge. Blau imagines a theatre that might be worthy of such a thing. Its task would be the creation of an apparatus able to detect and register spontaneous disclosures of the human (whatever one decides ‘the human’ is), or at least what is thrown up in the aftermath of their momentary occurrence. Seeking the guarantee of a system that might produce such events with a regular and consistent success, like the neutrino scientists, we may have to wait a very long time, only to find that we were mistaken in our expectations and theories. But we go on trying anyway, making theatre and when that isn’t enough (and how could it be?) elaborate theories that will permit us to register the value of what escapes as performance: something we sense must exist but remains indeterminate or even unrepresentable. As you can probably tell from my fevered state, I am in the final stages of completing a PhD. As part of that highly speculative, theoretical work – itself a break from 10 years of attempting to make theatre worthy of the event, - I tried to think about why I find myself in the now strange predicament of experiencing the theatre as both supremely attractive and strangely horrific at the same time. I came up with two of what Blau calls ‘inaugural moments’, two memories: To give their parents some time alone, two brothers, are sent out to play in the humid night air outside a restaurant in a provincial French port. They wander aimlessly up the quiet street, along the quayside and within a few hundred yards they come across a small outdoor circus in mid-performance – or perhaps it’s just a rehearsal, it’s hard to tell. There is music but there are no seats. With a few others, the brothers make up an audience, some distance from the action. After a pronouncement in a foreign language, a man starts his walk across the high wire, about 60 feet up, the balance pole between his hands. There is no safety net. Around the halfway point, the figure hesitates, falls and thuds onto the stone of the quayside. He does not move. Other members of the troupe rush around him, agitated, upset. The music is turned off. The audience, such as it is, remains uneasily, unsure what is happening. Minutes go by. Two or three people are bent over the prone figure. A white ambulance van arrives, its blue emergency light pulsing silently. The paramedics emerge and gently ease the body of the wirewalker onto a stretcher and then into the van, which drives off. The spectators disperse. Amazed and somewhat confused, the brothers return to the restaurant and tell their parents the story of what they have witnessed, about how the high wire walker stepped out onto the wire so high up, fell off onto the ground, did not move and was taken away by an ambulance. Just like that, that, just now, a few minutes ago. No one seems to believe them… 2. Lady Macbeth’s long dress is caught on something, perhaps a protruding nail or a frayed timber edge left by the stage carpenter. The blocking demands she move off, to greet whoever it is and embrace them. But the blocking itself is blocked: the dress holds fast and the dialogue runs out. She tugs, but encounters only resistance. The recalcitrant audience of schoolchildren that has hardly been in attendance finds its interest aroused and focuses its collective disbelief towards the event now taking place on stage. There, in compact choreography of bodies supposed to depict a web of loyalties of kinship and power, everyone suddenly appears a long way from everybody else, but with too much in common. Eyes have nowhere to look, hands have nothing to do, bodies have nothing to represent. Some other kind of time passes, neither real time nor our time – it seems like hours, but it’s probably only a few seconds. Emerging from this frozen time, one of the actors moves awkwardly into the space separating him from the others. As he kneels to detect the hidden source of the problem, these others break ranks to join him. The dress is deftly unhooked, the performer released, and in a reverse movement of the breakdown that has occurred, the professionals take control. Everything on stage morphs seamlessly back into the space-time of the play. In a parallel motion, the young audience withdraws into itself, unhooking an attention that had also been caught on that nail, coagulating again around its own substance and sustenances. The performance must have gone on to conclude as it usually does, Burnam Wood did come to high Dunsinane Hill, everything went off pretty well, despite the embarrassing hiccup. But perhaps another version of the performance was already over after that hiatus; it had its moment, something of interest had flared up briefly and then vanished… A moment of disaster and a moment of fiasco, one major, one very minor. Disaster: a sudden misfortune, due in older traditions unlucky stellar or planetary aspects, a mishap on a grand scale often involving loss of life; or, more obscurely, it’s a personal bodily affliction, an internal upset. Fiasco is a strange term of Italian origin that means literally ‘the bottle’, metaphorically, the interruption of a theatrical spectacle and, more generally, the notion of collapse and disintegration and mixed with a sense of the ludicrous. Disaster and fiasco: two types of unforeseen event that disrupt the planned unfolding of a rehearsed situation. The disaster narrated above is overtly deathbound and portentous, perhaps even demeaned by anecdote; the fiasco verges on the trivial, hardly worth the telling. But both were equally thrilling, pleasurable even, in the witnessing and in the remembering, but strange and horrible too. As accidental events which are nevertheless always a real possibility, they chime with what seems to me a defining quality of so much contemporary experience, of what makes experience into an event, something memorable, something that burns into the psyche and the soma: instantaneous occurrence. Significant things, such as disasters, seem to happen instantly: the archetypal causes of death in our era are the heart attack or the stroke; when death comes we prefer it to come unbidden, out of the blue, which is why diseases such as cancer and AIDS are so hopeless in comparison. Are we not still a little amazed that events such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions can arrive without warning in the era of anticipation? And there is no need dwell on the disastrous instants that have shaped recent world events. I think that my spectatorial desires hanker after events of a similar kind, but with two vital differences: they delight, but hurt not and, like the twitch or twinge, they are small, barely there at all. But can pleasure, even in the theatre, ever be innocent? There is a real ethical problem here. Distasteful unease partly defines the nature of these instants, the unexpected thrills of spectatorship normally precluded by competent performance. They thrive on the uncertainty surrounding what actually takes place and what is ‘merely’ performed. They are at once enthralling and excruciating - one wants to watch and to look away. Is that not precisely the definition of the spectatorial frisson? Both of these thrilling moments lodged into the memory of the child that I once was and became sedimented there, awaiting other encounters that would disturb them. They have come to stand as an inauguration into a possible theatre: theatre as the incessant effort to solicit the collision between the infinitely agile flight of thought and the obdurate materiality of the pseudo-competent body. You will no doubt have inaugural moments of your own. Roland Barthes made a book about photography, Camera Lucida, out of his moments, which he calls puncta, he describes the punctum as that which cuts into the field of the studium, the ideologically and culturally determined meaning of an image that is generally recognized as what a particular photograph ‘wants to say’. For Barthes, to identify the studium is to draw up a contract with the image and to endow it with so many functions and to organize its overt significations. In contrast, the punctum is an entirely ordinary detail in an image, but one that ‘rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me’ (26). For Barthes, the punctum is a wounding, ‘a sting, speck, cut, little hole…that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me). Camera Lucida presents Barthes’ personal photographic puncta: insignificant items of clothing, a bandaged finger, a half-formed expression, an ambiguous gesture at the edge of the frame. For Barthes, although initially presented as a singular sign of life within the deadening generality of an image, the punctum’s ultimate power is to align the photograph with the full stop of death, as the enduring presence of what has passed away or will pass away into absence. Thus one can enjoy the photographic punctum at leisure, painlessly, secure in the knowledge that it will remain permanently available as a memento mori. But this security of possession, denied to the theatre spectator, in turn cannot achieve the status of what we will have to call, after the French philosopher and unlikely aficionado of the theatre Alain Badiou, a truth. Not the Truth (big T), but a truth, small T. Such truths are not events that one can anticipate or preserve in an archive; rather, whatever manifests as a truth will do so as a momentary eruption of the anomalous into the status quo. Truth as an event will be thus what confounds knowledge as an encyclopaedic description of the situation; no Truth, but only plural truths as what make holes in knowledge. But surely, my particular punctum, my inaugural moment, my so-called truth will be different from yours; what lights my fire will be a silly nonsense to you. How dare I presume otherwise? Culture may have engendered these memories, but there is no culture in them, no shared experience, no communal agreement on their enduring value. But what is meaningful - or rather, truthful - is their generic property as members of the set of puncta. What was an event for me may have passed you by completely, but nevertheless, we both know what we are talking about. This generic property exists over and above the existence of an infinite number of specific instances: a kind of Platonic idea that exists not in the abstract, but in our very nervous systems. Adding up to more than the sum of its instances, the event testifies to a wandering excess of sense that forms in the wake of the event: something happened, something recognized only by the fact that it stands out from the situation of which it has also become a part: something sticking out, like a sore thumb, like a twitch. Perhaps the sense of theatre evoked here is no more than a place where one attempts, against the odds, to solicit a density of such minute events which are generically rare – infrequent, unanticipated, anomalous. In the end, such a theatre will simply be a place where life as a generality is subject to an intensified discipline of controlled variables, in the hope of making something happen, constituted out of the following elements: actors, a director, décor, costumes, a text (or whatever stands in for one), spectators. As such, theatre is literally an experiment, though not all (perhaps hardly any) of its expressions will sign up to its conditions. Under such conditions, the possibility is raised that the spectacle will become, momentarily, the event of a truth process. In truth, the instants of disaster and fiasco recounted earlier became events only in reflecting upon them. From another perspective, they are ultimately unremarkable. They do not carry the guarantee of their own success. Not only will such events not be recognized until they have already happened, but it will not be a matter of re-cognition, of assimilating the unfamiliar under a pre-existing category, but rather of the naming of the event itself. Which is what I am trying to do and to share here. One can never be sure that an event has happened and so one can never be recruited to its cause while it is, so to speak, still happening. So there are two possibilities for the event. Either it will dissolve back into the state, situation or performance from which it sprang – which must include its possibility but not have assimilated it – and then it will in effect not have happened at all. There never was a flip. Or it will be seized in an act of naming – it did happen – in an intervention which accepts the consequences of the event, for better or for worse. For a truth, as Badiou has described, is only manifest as a retroactive naming of what-has-been: a coup de théâtre rather than a deus ex machina. Such an act of fidelity converts the event into the process of a truth. To become the subject of such a truth, in or outside the theatre, one declares for the event, goes through the motions, acting ‘as if’ it had really happened, placing a wager on the possibility that in doing so, things will indeed be different ‘after the event’. I’ve already forgotten what I’ve said. What was it that happened? But I seem I have a reason to return to the theatre. How long it will last?