Free Your Mouth

FREE YOUR MOUTH Artaud, Deleuze and Bodily Ethics

… experience shows that there is nothing which men have less power over than the tongue. Spinoza EIII P2 Schol.

http://www.epc.buffalo.edu/sound/mp3/sp/artaud_antonin/artaud_jugement.mp3

Have Done With The Judgment Of God (1947) • Delivering man from his “automatic reaction” and “restoring his freedom” is the task of man who has lost its faith in God, yet has not fully realized the consequences of this new type of ‘life’ this has started. • The human being needs to “remake his anatomy” in order to remove the sickness that has been haunting him. Only then, by scraping out its body, by becoming a ‘body without organs’, man can open itself up to the desires and appetites that are truly essential to him. • See Nietzsche: “We are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar" (Reason, 5).

The Illness of Theatre/the Illness of the West • The Judgment of God in fact equals the over determination of language at the expense of the body • The Christian, literate God has robbed us from our bodies (by stressing their uselessness) in order to organize them according to His Judgments, His Language, His Organs. • Semiotic structures have cut us loose from the world (Artaud: the soil).

Have Done With The Judgment Of God (1947) • The BwO is a materialist ethics, that searches for connections between the unknown of the body and the unconscious of thought • Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty emphasizes on the dominance of language over the body in theatre. The Judgment of God is a bigger argument. It allows us to : “Rethink body, subjectivity and social change in terms of movement, affect, force and violence – before code, text, and signification.” (Massumi: 66)

Artaud: Find your Organic Culture! • We need to rethink our senses in order to escape these regimes. Not the movements of the body as in theatre. • Massumi: Proprioception and Viscerality • Here: the speech act colonizes the mouth, and it is there that the relations between the body and the world are scattered. • In theatre it was the body, in everyday life it is the mouth, taste and smell, that needs to be freed.

In Everyday Life: Find your Organic Culture= Find Taste and Smell “I should say that human affairs would be much more happily conducted if it were equally in the power of men to be silent and to speak; but experience shows that there is nothing which men have less power over than the tongue, and that there is nothing which they are less able to govern than their appetites.” (Spinoza: EIII P2 Schol.)

Free your Mouth! Free Taste and Smell • Taste and smell have never stopped to be of the greatest importance to us, but they have been overcoded. • “…when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and most impalpable drop of

Overcoding Taste and Smell in our Everyday Lives 1.

2.

3. •

When infants start developing their vision and begin to talk especially their sense of smell seems to become less important, All mass media extend the body according to language and vision, neglecting and even overcoding taste and smell. It alienates us (Marx). Advertisements obscure our desires/appetites by combining Vision and Language. Micropolitical revolution is resistance that starts with taste and smell, with a reconnecting to the world, the soil.

* Nietzsche’s Grammar (GOD) at work

Find your Organic Culture

* Nietzsche’s Grammar (GOD) at work