Architecture in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Design, Deep Time, Science and Philosophy

In the Furnace of Disorientation: Tragic Drama and the Liturgical Force of Metal

Fig. 01 A. Ramage and P. Craddock, King Croesus Gold, Archaeological Exploration of Sardis Monograph 11 (Cambridge, Mass.: 2000), Fig. 4.28

Two recent explosions, Fukushima and Facebook, underscore the relevance of metallurgy to our historical moment. While Fukushima is analytical, based on the act of splitting, Facebook is connective, an emergent social media that has arisen from a vast meshwork of electronic interconnectivity laid down over the preceding decades and centuries. Infused with the paradoxes of subjectivity, we can nevertheless interpret Fukushima as metallurgy taking the form of toxic opponent, while Facebook—as an emergent expression of metal-based electronics—is metallurgy taking form as curative saviour (albeit in a mode of ironic trivialization). Together, these two developments support the “assertoric” nature of the modern subject as an entity constituted in language and dependent on provisional acts of repetitive self-declaration, as opposed to a solid and impermeable “apodeictic” entity.[1] In what follows, I examine some links between the assertoric quality of metal-as-subject and the “pharmacological” capacities—i.e. acting as both poison and cure—of the stage; I then consider the roots of furnace metallurgy in ancient Canaan as a way to gauge the potential of a contemporary metallurgical image of thought.

Fig. 02 Archaeoloical Research at Aphrodisias in Caria, 1994. R.R.R. Smith, Chrisopher Ratte, American Journal of Archeology, 100, no. 1 (January 1996), Fig. 23

This inquiry begins with the spatial aspect of the tragic stage, and how its capacity to actualize the virtual inherently undermines the claims of what might be called the “apodeictic,” or logically certain, subject. We can use Giorgio Agamben’s discussion of what the French linguist Émile Benveniste calls “shifters” to see how the on-stage space is the space of “I, here and now,” out of which this assertoric subject is constituted in the moment of discourse or performance. The nature of the “off-stage” is crucial to our analysis because it links the art form to metallurgical effects that, despite ancient roots, are perhaps only now becoming clear. By the off-stage I mean that diegetic world of a play we do not see and, by definition, can never see precisely because it is the world existing in the wings, conjured by the text and the performances, but never represented directly on stage.[2] This off-stage is analogous to the unconscious in that, if you walk up and look into the wings, you still won’t see “it.”[3] Just as we only come to know the unconscious mind by observing the ways it alters the behaviours we can observe, we only know about the off-stage of a play by the shaping force it exerts on events depicted on-stage. It is in the force this off-stage exerts on the space of the stage, and then, secondarily, on the experience of the audience, that we can locate the metallurgical effects of tragic drama.

The best way to grasp the operative role of the off-stage is through a Deleuzian lens by which it may be seen as a virtual zone that is intensively different from the relational space in which the performance unfolds onstage. Immediately, we realize that both off-stage and on-stage spaces are also different intensively from the “actual” space inhabited by the audience. For Deleuze, intensive differences drive processes; similarly, the nested arrangement of these three intensive spaces can be viewed as the driver of the cultural process we call “performance,” “theatre,” or, in this case, “tragic drama.” Classically, the purpose of the tragic spectacle is to amplify intensive suffering toward an affective threshold in which the recursive operations of the self are brought to a temporary halt. Importantly, however, our attention is then drawn to an underlying relational capacity that is being actualized, through the action of the tragedy, toward a radical transformation. This “halting of recursive operations” is arguably a non-Aristotelian way to view catharsis; at least, such an operation suggests a drastic complication of Aristotle’s view of catharsis as a purification or cleansing.

Mapping out a Deleuzian taxonomy of the stage, then, the three differential spaces of theatre can be read as the virtual off-stage, the relational on-stage, and the actual audience.[4] The zone of the relational is connected to the zone of the actual through the audience’s experience of what is performed on stage. Entrances from, exits to, and reports about the off-stage, meanwhile, connect the world of the virtual to the relational and, again, by way of these appearances on-stage, to the actual experience of the audience. The three zones create a circuit that can have tragic or comedic effects, depending on certain particulars, the division of the stage space into three intensive zones echoing the basic arrangement of the metallurgical furnace:

In technical terms, the Dionysian capacity of tragic drama is actualized by this tripartite system of intensive differences, involving the audience in a transformative process. The dynamic plays out in classical tragedies in the dissolution of the protagonist’s reified identity as a social and psychological being or, once again, as an “apodeictic subject.” On-stage, this entity registers as a resistance to disjunction and assertoricity, a tyrannical insistence on the certainty that I-am-this-rather-than-(all)-that. “I am King,” insists Oedipus, or Lear, and then the forces of the differential off-stage begin their inexorable sparagmos via the trajectory of the plot.

Pursuing similar objectives, dramatists from Aeschylus to Beckett and beyond arrange these three zones in different ways. Aeschylus puts the suffering pharmakos in the off-stage, the virtual space beyond the doors of the palace where Agamemnon (and, later, Clytemnestra) is killed.[5] The sovereign murdered off-stage creates a powerful intensive affect, drawing a disjunctive energy toward us from out of that radically differential space. In The Bacchae, Euripides personified this disjunctive energy, representing it directly on-stage by making Dionysus a “relational” character (who is this “Oriental upstart”?), rather than an off-stage virtual force. With Shakespeare’s great cycle of tragedies we see Greenblattian self-fashioning as an assertoric process of self-improvisation fuelled by the “monstrous double” of the newly minted English language as it performs itself in the empty, relational space of the stage.[6] Beckett, in turn, energizes Dionysus in the audience. In Beckett, as nothing at all happens off-stage; the stage of Endgame is suspended in the ironic void described by Clov at his window. In Beckett’s theatre, there is a vacuum in the wings, underscoring the autocatalytic aspect of performative appearance—the absurdity emphasizes the assertoric aspect of the theatrical spectacle—and tragedy becomes a way of investigating and embodying this process in public view. Whereas the aim of Greek tragedy is to intensify the off-stage to draw something molten toward us, Beckett reverses this process—we are intensified to draw something out of us into the off-stage—to re-animate a dead space, a world that has been drained of life. Beckett does this by intensifying heuristic pressure, heating us through ironic aporia. The riddle is posed to us rather than to the characters, who understand what we do not, but whose self-knowledge is so infused with pharmacological irony it cannot help them.

It is important to remember that with tragic drama we are dealing always with the pharmakos, the figure in fifth-century Athens who has been, in René Girard’s words, “maintained by the city at its own expense and slaughtered at the appointed festivals as human sacrifice,”[7] to cleanse the polis of this poison that is also a cure. Girard goes on to address how the pharmakos relates to the term “pharmakon,” which plays such a central role in Derrida’s critique of Plato, writing that “the Platonic pharmakon functions like the human pharmakos and leads to similar results…All difference in doctrines and attitudes is dissolved in violent reciprocity.”[8] According to Stephen Barker, Derrida (and, in a different way, also Deleuze) attempted to “re-think the pharmakon” to emphasize the slippery aspects of phenomenon that resists stable signification and therefore disrupts the operation of transcendent binaries.[9] This slippery quality is embodied in the deity figure associated with tragic drama: Dionysus. From the start, the aim of tragic drama was the release of a new type of consciousness—the tragic recognition of difference’s primacy—both for the protagonist on stage and, via mimetic circuitry, for the audience as well.

A case can be made that both Plato and Aristotle attempted to put this cat back in the bag, so to speak, if the “cat” is here understood to be the pharmacological energy released by the great tragedies of the previous century during the height of Athenian power. It is not representation that Plato feared, but rather what representation brings with it: the empty frame, the stage, the “unnamable” opposite of the binary of representation, its shadow, the mobile element, the pharmakon. Because such stagings returned written texts to presence via performance, theatre can be viewed as Plato’s great rival; in Derridean terms, tragic drama is a pharmakon-machine, an apparatus for the activation of simulacra, mobile elements, agents of groundlessness, curative poisons, jokers-in-the-deck.

The means by which tragic drama releases these pharmacological energies requires further illumination. As a metallurgical practice, the stage operates as a kind of furnace in which the raw ore of the protagonist is heated by the mechanisms of the plot and the breath of the audience over the course of the drama, finally releasing the bright, pure flow of pharmacological recognition—that is, of anamnesis, or unforgetting. Tragedy demands that a threshold be crossed. Intensive gradients in the “ore” give way and the metal flows out in a differential flood of cathartic awareness, the scapegoat’s recognition of his or her assertoric nature. Furnace and stage are thus morphogenetic spaces in which such virtual and relational capacities are actualized through the release of differential gradients. Importantly, the capacity of the tragic hero to suffer relates to the capacity of audiences to be moved by that suffering; our capacities for tragic recognition are interwoven and also extend beyond the boundaries of the theatre.

Fig. 03 A. Ramage and P. Craddock, King Croesus Gold Archaeological, Exploration of Sardis Monograph 11 (Cambridge, Mass.: 2000), Fig. 10. 1

The interpretive framework outlined above helps explain the importance of the recent work of Israeli archaeologist Nissim Amzallag, who links the emergence of copper smelting with the genesis of the deity Dionysus. More intriguing still, Amzallag goes on to position the god of the Canaanite smelters, Yahweh, also known in late antiquity as Io or Iao[10]—“the god of magicians and sorcerers”—as a homologue of Dionysus.[11] Given the trajectory of Judeo-Christian theology, it is surprising to locate evidence, controversial though it may be, of a common root between these two crucial deity figures. We see here the beginning of the contest between tragic drama and philosophy chronicled by Nietzsche, between a Judeo-Christian identification of the deity with “truth” or logos on the one hand and, on the other, an expression of the kind of assertoric, Dionysian desire. That these two deities have a common root, in turn, might help us understand metallurgy’s conspicuous role in the processes of industrial mineralization of the planet: the Anthropocene.

In Amzallag’s account, copper first announced itself via pure deposits that could be chipped off and laboriously shaped through cold- and heat-hammering. Later, around 5000 BCE, somewhere near the city of Seir in Canaan,[12] some individual or group happened upon the first proto-industrial process for heating raw ore to release a bright snake of pure copper. With this process, the enduring human relationship with metal crossed a crucial threshold. In an analysis rich in implications for the tragic stage, Amzallag identifies this as the moment when his two crucial deities are born. It is evidently an auspicious alchemical moment—the release of a pure substance from a baser one; interestingly, the development of alchemy would unfold in the Indian subcontinent under the influence of a third divine homologue: Shiva.[13] The forge reveals ore (matter) to be an arrangement of intensive gradients, an ovum that gives birth to metal; the stage, likewise, reveals a person to be pregnant with recognitions. Dionysus-Yahweh is the deity who makes men god-like via techne, rather than simply deploying divine powers on their behalf; tragic drama is positioned astride the permeable boundary that separates the physical from the metaphysical. The dual nature of the god-human of metallurgy points toward a differential, disjunctive nature in keeping with the tragic off-stage; an especially transformative mode of worshipping this deity is the disjunctive performance of tragic drama.[14]

Fig. 04 Archaeoloical Research at Aphrodisias in Caria, 1994. R. R. R. Smith, Christopher Ratte, America Journal of Archeology, Vol. 100, No. 1 (Jan., 1996), Fig. 23

With the birth of metallurgy, the set of new capacities now adorning human subjectivity included the mirroring properties of burnished copper—the mirror that is also a weapon and a currency of exchange—capacities that have been actualized over the succeeding millennia and continue into the present. But the cultural impact of crossing this threshold cut much deeper, and with greater severity. One is left to imagine those early smelters working to explain to each other what was happening through their experimental metallurgical technologies on both affective and cognitive levels, leading to the invention of incommensurable deities. With metallurgy, the material created by the man-god is associated with a transitive element; it is as if metal were the vowel concealed within the consonant of ore, the vowel that in Hebrew cannot be depicted because it carries the divine spirit, or like the breath that inspirits the body, which in turn conceals it. “Dionysus,” write Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, “is a god whose elusive countenance, though close at hand, leads his devotees along the paths of otherness, opening up the way to a type of religious experience that is virtually unique in paganism, radical self-disorientation.” [15] Vernant and Vidal-Naquet are particularly eloquent when describing the alterity of this deity:

Necessarily, to worship or celebrate the disjunctive “self-disorientation” described above, humans needed an art form commensurate with a different kind of god, a god who would be an Other within the pantheon—Dionysus. The art form of tragic drama arose in response to this cultural necessity.

To worship a deity like Dionysus is to embrace contradiction. To reify Dionysus on the one hand, or to view him as pure becoming on the other, are both distortions in which the deity is seen only partially. This incommensurability is why we encounter, in both Yahweh and Dionysus, radical, oxymoronic demands for an encoded musicality, a carnal dance, the concrete fluidity of the serpent, a semiology of breath entrapped in words, a currency of metal, an itinerant means of entrenchment, a poison that is also a cure, the man-god who is transcendently immanent, and a delirium of clarity,[17] of the kind explored so resonantly centuries later by Antonin Artaud. Yahweh-Dionysus arose to explain the experiential capacity of matter, what Deleuze and Guattari would identify as its morphogenetic properties, and what Whitehead, in Steven Shaviro’s reading, would link to material “occasions” in their continuous self-prehension.[18] To give this figure concrete material form is already a deeply paradoxical and transformative act; worshipping this kind of deity entails entering a double bind, an internal sparagmos.

If sparagmos is the appropriate form of worship for a deity embodying the otherness that is latent in all identity, what form—other than an orgiastic tearing of flesh—might this cataclysmic disjunction take? Given the “monstrosity” and “radical otherness” of language, literary form suggests itself here.[19] But, even more so, this disjunction finds its clearest expression in theatrical form. Agamben’s recent work on the performative force of language, and its liturgical and sacramental aspects, suggests here a contiguity between the literary and the theatrical as well.[20] Surveying both Deleuze and Guattari’s thought and Émile Benveniste’s work in linguistics, Agamben focuses his inquiry on the illocutionary force of a set of “shifters”—specifically the terms “I,” “here,” and “now”—whose meaning depends entirely on where and when they are spoken. These proximally demonstrative terms are particularly striking because they are also the degree zero utterances of the stage. In this regard, it is interesting to consider how Dionysus, as the deity of the I-here-now, constitutes the focal point for a celebration of the assertoric subject, thus diffracting the celebratory worship into multiple foci. Conversely, this I-here-now of assertoric subjectivity can be viewed as an assertion paradoxically available to all agents—in other words, pure difference. The cathartic moment of tragic drama completes the affective circuit so that the illocutionary force of this sparagmatic I-here-now can be relayed to the audience. It is in our relationship to these terms that we suddenly find ourselves identical to each other in an uncanny and unsettling way; this, in fact, is the basis for the mimetic effects Girard views as a perennial source of violence that humans have learned to keep at bay through the sacrificial or pharmacological mechanisms of culture.[21]

Fig. 05 G. M. A. Hanfmann, Sardis from Prehistoric to Roman Times (Cambridge Mass., 1983), fig. 55 (reconstruction)

For Agamben, the “shifters” described above carry the “liturgical force” of commandment by which the subject is constituted, a force that the different apparatuses of culture—law, religion, the various arts—organize and deploy in the service of their particular purposes. These non-lexical shifters are also legible as the subject-constituting signs pure metal seeks to embody when it emerges “assertorically” from ore in fluid form, the evidence of a poetic and a liturgical force within the material itself. The metal “performs” its emergence, the flow suggesting a subjectivity concealed in material. To make this disjunctive emergence intelligible in a form that can be celebrated, it had to be given a name: Dionysus. And with Dionysus, a furnace of disorientation, we locate a mode of subjectivity (e.g. Oedipus) that asserts itself within the intensive circuits of the stage in the moment of tragic disjunction. We see how the tragic spectacle is designed to relocate this assertoric “I,” and all its relational capacity, in the virtual space of the off-stage, flooding the “actual” audience with a Dionysian experience of “here and now.” The pharmakos can be seen as vehicle for this process, his or her disarticulation conveying differential energies from the off-stage across the threshold to reach the actual audience. The tragic spectacle is designed to restore, amplify, and bring into the open the contagious, assertoric fluidity of the non-apophantic “shifters” linked to Dionysus—non-lexical signs whose meaning depends on the proximal demonstration of discourse itself.

What is clear, finally, is that a modern form of subjectivity—fundamentally divided against itself in a dynamic, intensive way—was co-produced with ancient furnace metallurgy; in fact, both Greek tragedy and the Platonic and Aristotelian reactions to its Dionysian qualities mark important stages in the slow but steady rise of this mode of subjectivity toward its cultural hegemony. While expressions of the furnace continue to modulate the ongoing emergence of the human species, and amplify our re-making of the planet and its geology, metallurgy has also thoroughly conditioned our inner lives. Through human agents, metal has long been thinking its own capacities—for tensile strength and electrical conduction, for sharpness in weaponry and tools, for expressive use in crafts and arts, etc.—into actuality. In the present, our world is defined by the continuous flow of information along metallic circuits that supplement and, increasingly, obviate human thought. And while metal continues to actualize its material capacities by driving the human will to artifice, we should also bear in mind the tragic lessons of both furnace and stage: to allow the disorienting reality of the virtual to be made intelligible, we may require new cultural practices, narratives, and rituals—an enormous, planetary theatre—to sustain the intensity of our collective experiences of alterity, violence, and transformation.