Thinking around THE ECSTASY OF COMMUNICATION
Baudrillard’s obscene is not the ob-scene of the obstructed landscape, or hidden promise, but almost its direct opposite, the simultaneous access of a subject to the entire surface of a scene. While the mirror scene sets up a series of objects in relation to the body of the spectator, expressing the limits and architecture of one’s place in the world, the “telematic” subject is given complete access to the network of a screen. He or she exists in the stasis of extension where the internal and external, the private and the public, blend into a single “position of perfect and remote sovereignty.” Without a symbolic relation to the exterior, without representation, one is what one sees-what one touches, one becomes. This is a profoundly anti-psychoanalytic postion, as the subject can no longer desire an object that it has become. The “vertigo” of the obscene is the ecstasy of pure transcendence, a climax without culmination, but also a “vertigo” of the free fall, the subject without anchors or ends. There is no before or after, but immediate transference, expansive subjecthood. Baudrillard’s obscene expands the display of pornography to make the landscape information, communication.
Significant questions arise: Is there a discourse for such a position whose subjectivity oversteps any and all linguistic difference, such that “I” encompasses all? Is this the realization of the “ecstasy of communication”? I am particularly intrigued and troubled by the implications of Baudrillard’s notion of this figure’s position of sovereignty. In light of Agamben’s writings on the state of exception, this position that is not one permits an endless transgression of all ethics and also begs the question of what system these new boundless subjectivities outline in turn…[Something I would like to address in later writings for this seminar, perhaps]
All the same, I am reluctant to cede such an absolutist claim its full authority, with the assumptions of first-world perspective and excess to which it seems incumbent. The theatre of Wilson, Foreman, and the Wooster Group certainly evokes this post-spectacular experience, or often tries to evoke its sense of absolute immersion. Most often these attempts buy into the myth of realizing a non-narrative “continuous present” via Gertrude Stein. But it feels like there is also a contrary movement towards the psychological embodiment of stage as character and site for character. Wilson’s famous objects-turned-actors seem to reinstate the subject-object relation of the mirror stage. Yes, one is in contact with the surface of these Steinian landscapes, but each articulation, each feature seems to hold a secret. Wilson is not abstract, rather absolutely material, even positing a texture and weight to the light he uses, characterizing each chair and opening with its own aura. Perhaps these express a certain nostalgia for the closed or secreted object, the ob-scene rather than the pure circulation of universal exchange value (I think here of the insistently materialist emballages of Tadeusz Kantor). Wilson, too, seems fascinated with the covered and obstructed view. In The Black Rider, the circus/madhouse figures of Pegleg’s menagerie all emerge from the masking of a mysteriously mobile black column. In Alceste, a weightless, but insistently physical floating cube reveals numerous characters and scenes as if it contained unfathomable depths. And yet, this does approach a state of vertigo, but not exactly for the reasons that Baudrillard proposes. The vehicle is not in the spectator’s control, but is being lead through a series of mirrors. The spectator relates to these revelations as a screen, perhaps, but external world still inflects an independent life.
And so Wilson’s aesthetic emerges as a profoundly spiritual vision falling
in and out of private and public divides. It may no longer possess a symbolic
coherence, it may no longer express the boundaries of a subject, but one
has the distinct impression that there is a presence besides oneself out
there in the black shadows of the stage….
