Disorganizing Language, Voicing Minority: From Artaud to Carmelo Bene, Robert Wilson and Georges Lavaudant

Abstract

This chapter will continue to flesh out the concept of immanence that has been outlined so far, shifting our attention from authorship to the roles of language and voice in performance by way of a consideration of Deleuze’s thought alongside that of Antonin Artaud in particular, but also Carmelo Bene, Robert Wilson and Georges Lavaudant — practitioners who have all paid considerable attention to ways of speaking and listening in their work. I want to explore what an immanent approach to language and voice might involve by way of a series of concepts. First, we will consider this approach with reference to the ‘schizophrenic use of language’ that Deleuze controversially attributes to Artaud in The Logic of Sense. Next, we will approach immanence in relation to what I call the ‘destratified (or disordered) voice’, a concept that builds on both the notion of the body without organs and a ‘minor usage of language’ as they are developed by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, as well as in Kafka : Towards a Minor Literature and in Deleuze’s essay on Bene, ‘One Less Manifesto’. We can also hear this destratified voice at work, differently, in Artaud, Bene, Wilson and Lavaudant, I will suggest; again, these vocal performances are not mere illustrations of the concept of destratification so much as thinkings of, philosophies of voice in themselves, that might reciprocally inflect what we hear in Deleuze.