Erotic Nostalgia and the Inscription of Desire

The deus ex machina took the place of metaphysical comfort.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

In 1874, indignant about the failure of his play La révolte, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam wrote one of his Contes cruels, entitled 'La machine à gloire', dedicated to Stéphane Mallarmé. This sardonic diatribe against modernity ironically presents what may be deemed a prototypical manifestation of the theatre of cruelty. Villiers suggests that in the theatre, the claque, the hired clappers, constitutes a deception necessary to the success, indeed to the very existence, of the production. The claque is deemed an artform, manifesting the entire gamut of expressivity. Beyond the varied types of clapping, there is also a myriad of vocal effects: the initial, basic bravo is soon transformed into brao; one then passes on to the paroxysmic Oua-Ouaou, which finally evolves into the definitive scream, Bra-oua-ouaou -- nearly a bark. But, in fact, these are still only the most basic effects; there is an entire range of special effects of which the claque is capable, including such refinements as:  

Screams of frightened women, choked Sobs, truly communicative Tears, little brusque Laughs...Howls, Chokings, Encore!, Recalls, silent Tears, Threats, Recalls with additional Howls, Pounding of approbation, uttered Opinions, Wreaths, Principles, Convictions, moral Tendencies, epileptic Attacks, Childbirth, Insults, Suicides, Noises of discussions (Art-for-art's-sake, Form and Idea), etc.¹

Even so, this is but mere art; Villiers suggests the possibility of eliminating the aleatory effects of the claque by mechanising the process. This is the 'Glory Machine', which will be constituted by the auditorium itself, where the entire audience will surreptitiously be transformed into the claque. In this apparatus, the sound effects are perfected by multiplying the presence of gilded angels and caryatids, whose mouths bear phonographic speakers to emit the appropriate sounds at critical moments; the pipes that supply the lamps with gas are augmented by others to introduce laughing gas and tear gas into the auditorium; the balconies are equipped with mechanisms to hurl bouquets and wreaths onstage; spring-operated canes are hidden in the feet of the chairs, so as to reinforce the ovations with their striking. In fact, the apparatus is so powerful that it can, literally, bring down the house, such that the theatre would be totally destroyed! 

In this masterpiece of ressentiment, Villiers manages to eradicate the need for actor, scenario and scene. All is reduced to audience reaction, in what is not quite a conceptual theatre, but rather a purely sensual stagecraft. This ironic, unwittingly modernist event creates the immediate yet ephemeral inscription of sensation directly on the spectator's body -- an iconoclastic technique of theatreless theatre which effects a counter-memory, counter-spectacle, and counter-symbolic. 

This technique is consistent with physiological experimentation and theorisation of the l9th century, which understood perception to be possible in a non-referential manner, as in demonstrations which reveal how impressions of light may be produced without any visual stimuli whatsoever, by mechanical, electrical, and chemical means.² To seek the aesthetic limits of such techniques would be to theorise not the sublime but the countersublime, where temporality is reflexively closed in upon physiological rhythms and thresholds; where consciousness, subsumed by pure presence, eschews all transcendence; where the imagination exists in direct proportion to somatisation; and where, purged of language,  

the symbolic code is abolished. Narration is obliterated, time nullified, and the psychic mechanism thrust into a solipsism rivalling that of the mystics, inaugurating the oxymoron of an innate apocalyptic sublime. In what would appear to be an ultimate extrapolation of Baudelaire's utopia of an 'artificial paradise', the Romantic sensibility merges with a nascent scientific positivism to indicate a major trajectory of modernist performance. 

The first book of Charles Cros' collection of poetry, Le Collier de griffes [The Necklace of Claws], is entitled Visions, of which the introductory poem, 'Inscription', simultaneously describes Cros' scientific discoveries and his erotic nostalgia: 

I wanted the tones, the grace,  
Everything reflected in a mirror,  
The drunkenness of an opera ball,  
Ruby evenings and green shadow  
To be fixed on the inert plate.  
I wished it, so shall it be. 
Like the features on a cameo  
I wanted the beloved voice  
To remain a keepsake, forever cherished,  
Repeating the musical  
Dream of an hour too brief;  
Time wishes to flee, I master it.

Death hasn't touched beauty. 
        The perverse flesh is killed,  
Yet the form, upon a tomb,  
        Is perpetuated.

Such phantasies had their metaphysical correlates. In 1881, Nietzsche -- seeking that atmospheric electricity which he hoped would cure his varied ills -- travelled to Sils-Maria, where he received the intuition of the Eternal Return. Its motivation is expressed in Thus Spoke Zarathustra:  

That time does not run backwards, that is his wrath. Revenge is the will's ill will against time and its 'it was'. 'It was' -- that is the name of the will's gnashing of teeth and most secret melancholy. The will cannot will backwards; and that he cannot break time and time's covetousness, that is the will's loneliest melancholy. To redeem those who lived in the past and to recreate all 'it was' into a 'thus I willed it' -- that alone should I call redemption. All 'it was' is a fragment, a riddle, a dreadful accident -- until the creative will says to it, 'But thus I willed it'.³ 

While Villiers' glory machine offered the minimal aesthetic model of an imageless realm of pure affect, the l9th century valorised its antithesis: the totalising presumptions and effects of the Gesamtkunstwerk of Wagnerian opera.⁵ The architectural constitution of the 'mystical abyss' separates spectator from proscenium and real from ideal, creating the conditions whereby a distant dream vision arises. Theodor Adorno, in a passage concerning Tannhäuser, illustrates the intimate relations between memory and technology in Wagnerian aesthetics:  

The standing-still of time and the complete occultation of nature by means of phantasmagoria are thus brought together in the memory of a pristine age where time is guaranteed only by the stars. Time is the all-important element of production that phantasmagoria, the mirage of eternity, obscures.⁶

The opposition between the purely imageless, iconophobic, physical intoxication of Villiers' glory machine with the dreamlike, imagistic phantasmagoria of Wagnerian opera is delineated by Nietzsche's aesthetic paradigm of the distinction between the Dionysian and the Apollonian. The Apollonian is the world of pure form and dreams; to the contrary, the Dionysian exists emotively, through intoxication, without images, where  

the entire symbolism of the body is called into play ... the other symbolic powers suddenly press forward, particularly those of music, in rhythmics, dynamics, harmony.⁷

Mallarmé well understood the relation between sound and image in Wagner. In his celebratory text, Richard Wagner -- Rêverie d'un poëte français, Mallarmé writes of the sublime, generative aspect of Wagner's music: 'an audience would have the feeling that, if the orchestra were to cease exercising its control, the mime would immediately become a statue'.⁹ This inversion of the myth of Galatea is telling. Rameau's Pygmalion offers the scenarisation of an ontological category error transformed, through wish-fulfilment, into aesthetic delight. Here, passion is projected as beauty, in the form of a statue animated by the artist's desire. And this desire is choreographed: the statue of Galatea takes her very first steps to the sound of music, as the three Graces teach her to dance. 

Yet Mallarmé, arch Apollonian, had no need of music to animate his verse: the musication of his poetry sufficed. This is a musicality radically divorced from expression. Though he claims that 'every soul is a melody, which must be renewed',¹⁰ and 'every soul is a rhythmic knot',¹¹ considerations of the soul were in fact anathema for Mallarmé. Rather, he sought a poetics where  

the pure work implies the elocutionary disappearance of the poet, who cedes the initiative to words ... replacing the perceptible respiration of the ancient lyrical breath or the personal enthusiastic direction of the sentence.¹² 

Paul Valéry -- who defined the poem as 'that prolonged hesitation between sound and sense'¹⁴  -- finds in Mallarmé a limit of the poetic art. Only for Valéry 'The delicate point of poetry is the procurement of the voice. The voice defines pure poetry'.¹⁵ In an updated 'muse theory' of creativity, Valéry offered an aural version of Galatea: 'The most beautiful poetry bears the voice of an ideal woman, Mademoiselle Soul'.¹⁶ Valéry's narrow and quite traditional symbol of poetic inspiration suggests a melodic 'rhythmic knot' that is now gendered, following the lineaments of Valery's desire. From the Romantic nightmare of Poe's The Oval Portrait to the Symbolist tragedy of Villiers' The Future Eve, the simulacrum of the beloved remains both the allegory of art and the sign of death incarnate. Yet for Valéry, a poem written but unrecited -- instantiating Mallarmé's dismissal of 'the ancient lyrical breath' -- would be but a dead letter. Is it the imagined voice, or rather its recorded reproduction, that shall be the vehicle of erotic nostalgia? 

Though verse is fashioned by voice, there is a distinct futility in Valéry's claim that 'If we better understood this true relation we would know what Racine's voice was like'.¹⁷ Is it any more likely that Valéry could reconstitute Racine's voice through phonological analysis, than that professor in Salomo Freidlaender's tale, Goethe Speaks into the Gramophone, could capture Goethe's voice by digging up the poet's skeleton, reconstructing the larynx, and wiring it to a microphone in order to recapture those vocal vibrations which, though weakened by time, could not have totally disappeared?¹⁸ Valéry confuses desire with its object, as is evident in his hypothesis of a besoin-phénix (phoenix-impulse), where memory would maintain a constant renascence of desire: 'the more I have you, the more I want you'.¹⁹ This need reveals a darker, unregenerative side of Eros, as Pierre Saint-Amand, in another context, so eloquently explains:  

This imaginary incorporation of the other into the self is invasive, even fatal. It can lead to death, which is at once deliverance, exorcism, and out-fascination. Death is the outcome of desire exhausted, and the outermost limit of confrontation with the other obstacle. Such is the madness of seduction.²⁰

The linguistic, poetic and rhetorical effects of sound recording transformed both poetical and metaphysical categories. The effects of amplification, repetition, reversal, projection, broadcast, disassociation, and disembodiment equalled those of the most profound theological phantasies. Sound recording inaugurated a new dimension to necrophilia and necrotopias, resuscitating the rhetorical figure of prosopopoeia, manifesting the hallucinatory, paranoid, supernatural or schizophrenic presence of invisible, deceased, ghoulish, demonic or divine beings. These disembodies demand a new phantasmatic topography, one which will find its theorisation alluded to in Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space, where he celebrates the topophilia of 'felicitous space', all the while recognising the disquieting existence of its antithesis, what he terms 'oneirically incomplete' dwellings.²¹ Here, we enter the realm of topophobia, of the architectural counter-sublime, the corporeal correlate of which would be the oneirically incomplete body: a condition manifested in the diasparagmos of the gods, the dismemberments regulated by schizophrenic deliria, the sado-masochistic extremes of erotic fantasy, and the acousmetric condition of the impossible radiophonic body. 

The antithetical yet complementary limits of such an unrepresentable architectural dystopia mark the limits of modernism: from its anti-Enlightenment inauguration in the secret chambers of Sadean chateaux, to its closure in the vast cosmic expanses of radiophony. Both are realms of forgetting, of counter-memory: Sade's inner chambers are the sites of invisible orgies and unimaginable tortures, beyond the scope of narrative visuality, offering evidence only through the horrifying sounds emitted; parallely, the infinite expanses of radio compose a terrifying necropolis where the voices of people, both living and long dead, continue to circulate, all the while disintegrating and mixing with each other in a promiscuous auditory montage.²² The inner chambers of Sade's chateaux shroud the most scandalous erotic liaisons. These unexpressed activities constitute a textual supplement which would totalise the erotic combinatory, if such totalisation were possible. Both chateau and radio proffer spaces obscene, because haunted by death; sites fascinating, because ruled by pure metamorphosis, juxtaposition and combination; scenes of excess, because they necessarily extend beyond the limits of any single imagination; realms of seduction, because they permit that phantasmatic projection which is the very ground of mimetic spectatorship; theatres of pornography, because of an unspeakable promiscuity; domains of transgression, because symbolic articulation is no longer possible.²³ 

During the 1960s there existed numerous second- and third-run cinemas in Paris, specialising in monster and horror films. In the wings, one could witness, or even participate in, provocative scenes of intense, often anonymous, erotic activity. Here, the spectators became the spectacle, and the eroticised body became the scene. Several of these sites -- such as Le Brady at Chateau d'Eau and Le Mexico near Clichy -- offered a peculiar architectural feature, insofar as the bathrooms (where the private scenarios usually culminated) were located behind the movie screen. Thus, within these scatological maisons ouvertes (to ironically coin a phrase), the caresses and couplings of rapid love were dubbed with the inarticulate, inhuman, and disembodied screams of monsters and mutants, vampires and ghouls. 

Can we not see in such erotic scenarios an example of the rare confluence of antithetical oneiric spaces, where the intimacy of the closed chamber and the presence of the distant, disembodied, recorded voice combine to create an oneirically overdetermined architecture? Such is a site where both detached, Apollonian spectatorship and participatory Dionysian drunkenness coexist and coalesce. At the end of the 18th century, the sublime was corporealised through libertinage, demonised by the Terror, and finally interiorised by Romanticism. Now, during the cataclysm of AIDS, the ideals and pragmatics of Eros differ vastly.²⁴ I offer this text in memorium for friends lost; with nostalgia for an eroticism transformed; and as a lament for a terrible new appearance of Thanatos. Given these epochal shifts, what, today, can be the difference between the sublime and the uncanny?²⁵  

Alan S. Weiss is a writer based in New York. He is most recently author of  Perverse Desire and the Ambiguous Icon (SUNY Press, 1994); Phantasmatic Radio (Duke University Press, 1995). He is currently editing a special issue of The Drama Review on experimental radio (1996). 

2 See Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992, pp. 89 - 92. 

3 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part II, section: 'On Redemption', trans. Walter Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche, New York: Penguin Books, 1980, pp. 249 - 254ff. The present citation is a loose condensation of Nietzsche's text. The notion of the Eternal Return was first expressed in 1882, in The Gay Science. 

4 On the use of this trope in cinema, see Annette Michelson, 'Dr. Crase and Mr. Clair', in October 11, 1979, pp. 31 - 53ff. 

5 In 1869, Cros dedicated the journal publication of his early poem, 'L'orgue', 'A Richard Wagner, musicien allemand.' See Louis Forester, Charles Cros: L'homme et l'oeuvre, Paris: Minard, 1969, p. 350. 

6 Theodor Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingston, London: Verso, 1985, p. 87. 

7 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Vintage, 1967, p. 40. 

8 See Allen S. Weiss, 'Possession Trance and Dramatic Perversity', in The Aesthetics of Excess, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989, pp. 3 - 11ff. 

9 Stéphane Mallarmé, 'Richard Wagner -- Rêverie d'un poëte français' (1885), in Oeuvres complètes, Paris: Gallimard/La Pleiade, 1945, p. 543. 

10 Stéphane Mallarmé, 'Variations sur un sujet', in Oeuvres complètes, Paris: Gallimard/La Pleiade, 1945, p. 363. 

11 Stéphane Mallarmé, 'La musique et les lettres', in Oeuvres complètes, Paris: Gallimard/La Pleiade, 1945, p. 644. 

12 Stéphane Mallarmé, 'Variations sur un sujet', op. cit., p. 366. 

13 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, op. cit., p. 36. 

14 Paul Valéry, 'Poésie', in Ego scriptor et Petits poèmes abstraits, Paris: Gallimard, 1992, p. 73. This citation comes from his diary of 1912. 

15 ibid., p. 85. 

16 ibid., p. 84. 

17 ibid., p. 102. 

18 This 1916 tale is cited in Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks: 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990, pp. 230 - 231. 

19 Paul Valéry, op. cit., p. 144. 

20 Pierre Saint-Amand, The Libertine's Progress: Seduction in the Eighteenth-Century French Novel, trans. Jennifer Curtis Gage, Hanover, New Haven: Brown University Press/New England University Press, 1994, p. 13. 

21 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas, New York: Beacon Press, 1969, p. 26. Such constructions are perhaps best instantiated by Frederick Kiesler's projects, notably the 1959 model for the Endless House. See Lisa Phillips, Frederick Kiesler, New York: The Whitney Museum/W.W. Norton & Co., 1989. 

22 The secret chambers must be distinguished from the salon d'assemblée in the Chateau de Silling of The 120 Days of Sodom, insofar as the latter constitutes a more classic theatric space, though one where the audience of libertines, inflamed by the narratrices' tales, soon become actors as they act out their passions. See Anthony Vidler, 'Asylums of Libertinage', in The Writing of the Walls, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1987, pp. 103 - 109ff. 

23 See Gregory Whitehead, 'Out of the Dark: Notes on the Nobodies of Radio Art', in Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead, eds., Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-Garde, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992, pp. 253 - 263; Marcel Henaff, Sade: L'invention du corps libertin, Paris: P.U.F., 1978, pp. 88 - 93; Allen S. Weiss, 'Structures of Exchange, Acts of Transgression', in David Allison, Mark Roberts, Allen S. Weiss, eds., Sade and the Narrative of Transgression, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 

24 See Douglas Crimp, 'Mourning and Militancy', in October 51, 1989, pp. 3 - 18ff. 

25 It was suggested to me that the relations between technology and poetics sketched out in this paper might appear to be too teleological. I would answer by evoking Maurice Merleau-Ponty's claim that there are inevitably dead-ends in the historical -- and certainly also the art historical -- dialectic. To situate the aesthetic ideal with which this paper concludes in the toilets of a seedy, third-rate Parisian movie theatre would indeed seem to suggest such an impasse, where dialectic dissipates into excess. But hasn't the avant-garde always been precisely what hovers about, or creates, such felicitous spaces?