New shapes, New Cruelties

Artaud summer, Maenad fall.

I had no female identification before Madonna, Maggie Nelson and Margaret Cavendish. My Gods were Artaud, Kanye West and Steve-o. I’d sit in year 10 maths class, watch jackass and south park and long for a time where I too could be disgusting. I guess my gods were the queef sisters, their only crime: doing the exact same things two men did and being met with moral outrage.

It would have been either obscene, morally deplorable or pornographic to watch a woman’s ass get branded. A woman must have been a victim somewhere, we have still yet to find the first real female sadist, not the female sadistic accomplice. Thus, we are yet to have the first true female Pasolini, the first true female Sacher-Masoch, the first true female Artaud, perhaps the first real Nietzsche. What these (besides Pasolini and perhaps Artaud) ugly misogynistic men had to offer is a value-critique, with Artaud we can see individualisation-as-narcissism, individualism as identification-with-representation replaced with a more primal individualisation through shock, a regaining of consciousness through an aesthetic attack. This does not differentiate us from others. If we had a female Artaud (believe me, I tried to write a theatre of cruelty retelling of my assault), she would have to have been making her art responding to the cruelty of being a woman. These men get to critique the totality of the human condition, they get to critique the sovereignty of the LAW in abstract, as it stands as the highest form of a baseless good. Women are shoved to the realm of the reactionary, before a woman acts artistically, she is first making a criticism on the basis of her being a woman. Because every act of cruelty a woman can commit is one which is cathartic or bracketed, she's liberating herself from the trauma of assault or a world which binds her to object in an aesthetic catharsis OR she must be committing the act because she’s a woman. 

The girls yearn to be filth without being dirty. They want to never have to be a victim again, instead the perpetrator of acts against others, against themselves. But this want is a negative want: I want to do something that I am not allowed to, the negation arrives first and the want festers out of it like the birth of a botfly. All our creation, even acts of creation, even acts of creative negation seemed to be birthed from wounds, filled in by mange and pus. It seems we are drawn to explanations of art by women which demonstrates cruelty, as Maggie Nelson puts it, as “victim-art”.

Now, no longer sitting in girlish immaturity, I think of tales of the maenads. Their cruelty never hurt a human soul; they brought ecstasy in commitment to something that dissolved them of their individual identities. Maybe women have access to something identity-denying, something self-effacing, a desire which strips us of identity-based subjectivity. Maybe we are only read as reactive, but our denial of subjectivity as De Beauvoir describes it, allows us to access art in more Dionysian forms. 

In The Second Sex, De Beauvoir describes woman’s access to a limited or historically contingently impinged upon consciousness as a form of alienation. In the introduction, De Beauvoir states that “But what singularly defines the situation of woman is that being, like all humans, an autonomous freedom, she discovers and chooses herself in a world where men force her to assume herself as Other”. Woman’s situation of being as a human is one of autonomous freedom, and this is what defines her “like all humans”. However, she experiences alienation insofar as she is passive to conditions of her body and the world, she cannot affirm her freedom if she is a victim to life. This alienation is achieved through the manner in which “men force her to assume herself as Other”, with the Other being a condition of being an object, rescinding one’s own consciousness in order to allow man “his sovereign consciousness”. Otherness is a state of “fleshy immanence”, that is a state of being-in-itself, where women are passive to the conditions of the world and men, and their consciousness and experience is often de-personalised meaning they cannot engage in forms of action which affirm their humanity. However, this sovereignty of individual, this self-affirming consciousness which De Beauvoir’s existentialism idolises is one which denies the manners in which self-negation can create beautiful things. I think, in contrast, of the Maenad and the Dionysian forms of art which Nietzsche describes, forms of art which he feminises throughout the Birth of Tragedy as an attachment to “mother nature’s breast”. In contingency, in connection to the world and in the denial of one’s own identity we can produce a wonderful negation in art. This reveals the illusory manners in which we build identities, particularly Romantic ones which require a kind of denial of the world, which allows aesthetic creation. By sinking into a feminine nature:

“Now is the slave a free man, now all the stubborn, hostile barriers, which necessity, caprice, or "shameless fashion" has set up between man and man, are broken down”.

If woman does not have access to a sovereign consciousness, why should she aim for this in aesthetic creation if she has another, arguably more exciting power? This is explicitly relevant to De Beauvoir, as like Woolf, female creative acts are a manner in which women can be liberated. But for her, such a liberation can only occur through the liberation of a woman’s consciousness as superior, from her becoming like men. 

I think there is something to be said about the ways in which women have constantly been enslaved to the realm of contingency and reactiveness that allows us to do some kind of dissolving. If our consciousness is infringed upon in a way which impacts us ontologically, that we cannot be in the same ways in the world as men, and this realises itself in a form of self-dissolving, what distinguishes this devotion to the devotion of the Maenads? Can we not be crazed in love or devotion which makes art that dissolves the barriers of ourselves? Can this not come from the very Other we are supposedly forced to assume? I’d like to see it. I don’t know if we can make it. Show me.