Theater of the Non-Body, Anti-Theater of the Body

It is interesting to observe that one of the first proposals for theorizing the digital was already associated with an apprehension of the metaphysical. Indeed, within the famous event Les Immatériaux (1985), the medial proposal — which consisted in saying, to simplify, that the digital medium functions like human language¹ — is associated with a representation of the deep strata of existences, declined in multiple ways within the exhibition and presented, from its very beginning, through the theatrical universe of Samuel Beckett:

the words are there, somewhere, without making the slightest sound, I don’t feel that either, the words falling, you don’t know where, you don’t know whence, drops of silence through the silence, I don’t feel it, I don’t feel a mouth on me, I don’t feel a head on me, do I feel an ear on me, answer frankly, if I feel an ear on me, well no, so much the worse, I don’t feel an ear on me either […] perhaps that’s what I am, the thing that divides the world in two, on the one side the outside, on the other the inside […] I’m neither one side nor the other, I’m in the middle […] perhaps that’s what I feel, myself vibrating, I’m the tympanum […] I feel nothing of all that, try something else […]²

What can be said on the basis of these Beckettian words? Can we say that there is someone speaking here? There is language, to be sure, but is a consciousness expressing itself? In any case, what speaks seems to have no material anchoring; it seems to hear words, but without auditory perception — it believed itself to be an eardrum without an ear, only to retract this afterward. Is there an individual, a subjectivity, in this scene? We are told of an outside/inside taking shape. Are these the limits of being? Probably — but then it would be a being whose speaking consciousness could not fully recognize itself: it inhabits its limits, without for all that being located outside being. The atmosphere is charged with doubt, with hesitation.

One might say of this Beckettian scene that there is nothing but language: absence of the body, absence of feeling, no sound; great expressive force emanates from the situation, but we could not say where it comes from, nor attribute it to a consciousness, so uncertain and ill-defined does the latter appear. There is a limit, however, a beginning of structure: being is not there, but its structure is already there, predefined by language — language that is structure, a first presence that precedes every other element or entity…

It is an image of striking, dizzying poetic power, but one could not think of a state of affairs further removed from the felt sense that drives this research, associated with a family of artistic practices concerned with digital images apprehended through their materiality, in works built around the sensible.

To this Beckettian near-consciousness — without body, without volume, without perception, incapable of feeling but capable of naming —, the linguistic consciousness of a near-self, which could not even be preindividual (for no will or dynamic seems to be associated with this particular mode of existence, pushing it to individuate³) we prefer a vision radically opposed to it. It emerges from the words of the experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage, when he says:

Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of “Green”? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the “beginning was the word⁴.”

At the antipodes of Beckett’s “all language,” the fundamental relation to the world is described by Brakhage on the basis of a hegemony of perception, of the primacy of affect, a dynamic within which the individual is structured through an “adventure of perception,” before encountering the carving-up of the world — discretization — that will later be imposed on it by language.

It is extremely interesting to observe that the dialectic we have staged between Lyotard-Beckett and Brakhage was concretely expressed in a real debate, this time between Malcolm Le Grice — practitioner and theorist of experimental cinema — and the theorist and critic of experimental cinema P. Adams Sitney. The latter expressed himself thus, not without cynicism:

Le Grice has his favorite stories, which he likes to repeat throughout his book. I have noted three of them. The first is a good story — I like it very much: the film tells how it was made. That is one of his favorite stories. There is also another story he likes to tell: what happens when the spectator is emancipated. And the best of all: something happens in the room when the film is projected. For my part, I think I prefer “the Battle of the Titans.” Those who know me well know that I would even prefer to say it in Greek: Titanomachia. The story I prefer, and that I repeat every time I find a film to which to apply it, is that of the mind that comes to designate itself⁵.

Here again is a metaphysics built on the word, to put it quickly: the business of a “mind” — which learns to designate, to name — with which a form of immateriality is traditionally associated. From P. Adams Sitney’s words emerges a conception of reality as a domain structured by “stories,” which constitute its fundamental ontological unit. In this framework, no entity of reality can claim a nature more fundamental than that of being a “story.” The world would thus be composed of stories offered up to the preferences and tastes of each and every one, all legitimate, neither true nor false: just stories⁶.

No great perspicacity, nor any great capacity for anticipation, is needed to know what will happen in such a context: the “stories” favored by the instances of power will impose themselves by force, that is, those that make it possible to perpetuate and deepen their dominant position.

1. Jean-François Lyotard, philosopher and curator of the exhibition, proposes, to describe not only the digital but the whole of reality, a schema originally devised by Jakobson to describe the functioning of language in its communicative role.↩︎

2. Centre de création industrielle and Centre Georges Pompidou (dir.), Les Immatériaux. Paris : Centre Georges Pompidou, 1985, p.7.↩︎

3. The exhibition Les Immatériaux (1985, Centre Pompidou) benefited from a virtual reconstruction within the European project Beyond Matter, which ran from 2019 to 2023. At the beginning of the exhibition, in the “Théâtre du non-corps” (Theater of the Non-Body) zone, from which the five paths structuring the exhibition branch off, one hears a text by Beckett, Foirades, read by Jean-Claude Fall. These words suggest a conception beyond the body–mind duality, as if the mind were able to inhabit the body throughout the latter’s life without ever recognizing itself in it; even after the death of the body, this strange mind would continue to express itself from the ashes of the deceased: “I gave up before birth, it is not possible otherwise, but birth there had to be, it was he, I was inside, that’s how I see it, it was he who wailed, he who saw the light, I didn’t wail, I didn’t see the light, it’s impossible I should have a voice, impossible I should have thoughts, and I speak and think, I do the impossible, it is not possible otherwise, it was he who lived, I didn’t live, he lived badly, because of me, he’ll kill himself, because of me, I’ll tell the story, the story of his death, the end of his life and his death, as it goes along, in the present, his death alone would not be enough, it would not be enough for me, if he rattles it’s he who will rattle, I won’t rattle, it’s he who will die, I won’t die, perhaps they’ll bury him, if they find him, I’ll be inside, he’ll rot, I won’t rot, there will be nothing left of him but the bones, I’ll be inside, he’ll be nothing but dust, I’ll be inside, it is not possible otherwise, that’s how I see it…[…].” Virtual tour of the exhibition available here: https://lesimmateriaux.beyondmatter.eu/, accessed March 14, 2025.↩︎

4. Original English text. In the French version, we preferred a translation by an unknown author — slightly modified by us — to the one in Stan Brakhage, Métaphores et vision, op. cit., p.19.↩︎

5. Yann Beauvais, Malcolm Le Grice, Le temps des images. Dijon : les Presses du réel / Espace multimédia Gantner, 2015, p. 35.↩︎

6. A situation that echoes our contemporary post-truth.↩︎