Sixth International Conference

on

Consciousness, Theatre, Literature and the Arts

June 10-12,  New York, USA

 

Speakers and Performers

 

Thomas Phillips and Ken Kirschner

“Constant Craving Has Always Been:” Liminal Love and Germinal Consciousness in Sarah Kane’s Crave

Plenary talk/performance, 11 June 12 noon

In his Culture and the Death of God, Terry Eagleton speaks of the “order” of what he calls “tragic art” that “must not be too palpable and schematic, which would mean a capitulation to middle-class rationalism; yet neither must is be so elusive as to suggest that the heavens mock all human endeavor. Instead, one must cling to human value while acknowledging its fragility. A path must be found between cynicism and triumphalism” (178). Sarah Kane’s Crave, a highly modernist, single act play for four characters that go by the letters C, M, B, and A, exhibits precisely this line “between cynicism and triumphalism” in its exploration of desiring subjects confronting culturally and individually inscribed dysfunction, never yielding entirely to thanatos or eros but fashioning a space between. This paper will examine the text of the play in which identity is utterly obscured while the phenomenon of desire is revealed as a mode of relationality that is clearly and disturbingly charged with revelation. It will also consider a particular adaptation of Crave, one in which I was involved as both a participant in preparatory acting exercises and as the sound designer who performed live alongside the actors. Both text and performance, in this case, are and were examples of liminality in so far as they generate an immersive space and time in which the reader/spectator is given few conventional anchors. The performance in particular spoke to the potential of theater to enter the spectating or acting body, sonically and visually, in such a way as to provoke transformation – in this instance, of the Cartesian self and its formulas of desire. Such a rupturing of normative selfhood finds a correlate in the Lacanian theory of Kaja Silverman and specifically her notion of love as a bequest. To the degree that one can divest oneself of solipsistic, reactionary tendencies, he or she, like the play’s characters, stands a chance, however compromised by the interiorization of said formulas, of entering liminality on the margins of the text, the immediate time and space in which self and other may facilitate (or renew) conscious relationality. That the common experience of otherness, I will argue, is first and foremost applicable to interiority is reason enough to consider the power of art – of language, acting, sound – as a mechanism to shift the relational coordinates of selfhood.

 

As an extension of the paper presentation, we present a live concert that would approximate the aesthetic sensibility of the aforementioned sound design. The intent of the minimalist music is invariably to create a sonic space in which the audience is invited to listen actively. Like the heightened affect of Kane’s play, at once unsettling and inspiring, active or “deep listening” to such music necessarily entails a confrontation with the self, its tendencies toward restlessness, its multitude of reactive preoccupations. Without the trappings of new age conventions, my musical work is essentially about consciousness.

 

Thomas Phillips is an academic, novelist, and musician. As a composer, he is usually credited as Tomas Phillips. Scholarly monographs include The Subject of Minimalism and Liminal Fictions in Postmodern Culture. Like most of his music, which draws on a range of electronic and modern composition genres, his fiction typically embraces a minimalist aesthetic not unlike certain contemporary French writers associated with Les Éditions de Minuit. He received his multidisciplinary PhD from Concordia University in Montréal and currently teaches comparative literature at North Carolina State University.