How Do You Make Yourself a Theatre without Organs? Deleuze, Artaud and the Concept of Differential Presence

Abstract

This article provides an exposition of four key concepts emerging in the encounter

The Performative Nature of Dramatic Imagination

“…Repetition relates to actualization and is contrary to representation. The here and now claimed by every acting system refers to this need of presence, of differential presence (Cull, 2009): that which cannot be portrayed but enacted, not represented but presented over and over. As life is theatrical per se, representative theatre becomes reiterative and exhausts any possibility of dynamism in the same way that identity does: it has the ability to construct a stable existence which is equal to itself and able to show up in multiple iterations without transforming its own essence.…”

Deleuze, Artaud, and the Bard: Envisioning a Shakespearean Theater Education Yet to Come

“…How can this fundamentally posthuman concept be used to analyze the humanities, such as Shakespearean education and performance? Cull (2009bCull ( , 2012) posits an answer in the TwO.…”

“…This embodied affect takes place prior to/instead of subjective recognition and response. Cull (2009b) says that the TwO fights back against the "dichotomy between language and body" through performative language (p. 248; see also DELEUZE, ARTAUD, AND THE BARD 5 Austin, 1975). To clear away semiotics, structuralism, and psychoanalysis and find instead the "vital, visceral, and electric pulsations" of autonomic response is the goal of the TwO (Kennedy, in Cull, 2009a, p. 184).…”

‘Ga, ga, ooh-la-la’: the childlike use of language in pop-rock music

“…It suggests that maybe what is really important is not the semantic meaning of the lyrics, but their affectivity, their relations of speed and slowness, the way they are moved around the jaw, or warbled in the mouth, or slipped under the tongue, or chuckled or chortled or rambled or whispered. This method of singing has an affinity to the ‘destratified voice’ that Laura Cull (2009, p. 245) locates in Antonin Artaud's 1947 radio play, To Have Done with the Judgment of God , a ‘voice that escapes from signification into incantation’. However, while Cull sees Artaud's speech as a way to ‘enter into proximity with the madwoman who speaks only to her selves, or to the wolf that howls at the moon’ (Cull 2009, p. 249) – in other words, as instances of becoming-mad or becoming-animal – I would suggest that in the case of pop-rock music, this ‘destratified voice’ is usually produced through a becoming-child, though, as I have noted earlier, there are numerous instances of becoming-animal as well.…”