Course Blog #10: Sara on Cody; or Let there Be Lips

I found Cody’s collection of blog posts to be particularly fascinating in their cohesion as an archive--in spite of a sense of wild eclecticism in terms of genre (theatre, documentary, performance art, sit com, satire, play texts,  and the mothers, fathers, sisters, and cousins of continental philosophy), he seems to return again and again to the insufficiency of language to describe reality or, at the very least, subjectivity.

Beginning with Cody’s multi-film study of Beckett’s Not I, and continuing through the same author’s evocatively titled Texts for Nothing, I was instantly drawn to the performance of proximity engaging the large pull quote in which Beckett describes the “not silence” of an utterance, noting that:

“Somewhere, someone is uttering. Inanities, agreed, but is that enough, is that enough to make sense? … the head and its anus the mouth slobbering its shit and lapping back off the lips like in the days when it fancied itself.” (Beckett, Texts for Nothing)

There is the immediate and visceral interaction between these two posts, the attractive, if somewhat overly-animated mouth of a woman is suddenly recast as an oozing asshole, spewing forth the logorrhea that is now diarrhea, illustrating Cody’s unqualified assertions about his interest in the Kristevan abject that this mouth embodies.

(Can a mouth embody? Can it do anything but(t)?)

With this new view, Julianne Moore’s lips are certainly “Not I,” but also suddenly “of me” in a way that is deeply disturbing. Although Beckett assures his reader that these “utterances” are inane, Cody’s curation of a conversation between these object suggests a Bakhtinian notion of utterance, “an expression in a living context of exchange” that is “formed through a speaker’s relation to Otherness.”Although, in many ways, Beckett’s interventions try again and again to divorce meaning from word/utterance, the scriptive relationships between these “thingly objects”--the videos which invite an interaction with themselves and the sort of “floating” citations--seemed to choreograph my continued reading.

Cody’s staged “obsession” with glossolalia transformed all other posts chain of ongoing cultural and political moments placed in conference to destroy all notions of linguistic discourse.This framework gives a new understanding of the impossibiliy of the “talking head” to communicate the subjectivity of race in Cornered, gender in Salt Mines, or hate/defiance in the “Anti-Muslim Subway Posters” clip.With this over-arching movement, my only moment of confusion is in Cody’s discomfort with Artaud’s No More Masterpieces, for I feel that much of Artaud’s project centered on disrupting the logocentricism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, proffering his Theatre of Cruelty not as a way to take the meaning of words out of context in a way that might compromise the ethic of an author’s intent, but rather to deliver theater to a moment of pre-linguistic subjectivity that doesn’t seem terribly far off from what I sense to be Cody’s whispered yearnings. The theatre historian in me would urge him to read Theatre and its Double, focusing on Artaud’s notion of the plague and considering a new metaphor for the transmission or rather “communicabilty” of meaning that is prior to words and prior to masterpieces.

WORKS CITED

Artaud, Antonin. The Theatre and Its Double. Translated by Victor Corti. Richmond: Oneworld Classics, 2010.

Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited and translated by Michael Holquist. University of Texas Press. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.

Beckett, Samuel. "Not I" in The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett. New York: Grove Press, 2010.

Beckett, Samuel. Stories & Texts for Nothing. New York: Grove Press, 1967.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. European Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.