The Death of the Concept the Rebirth of the Metaphor

The Death of the Concept, the Rebirth of the Metaphor

We have all experienced a moment, a thought, a feeling that could not be accurately defended through the use of a single word, much less a phrase; we believed the effect would be diminished, muddled down, possibly even misconstrued completely if we were to manifest any kind of translation of what Nietzsche referred to as a "copy of a nervous stimulation in sounds." He continues to explain that "to infer from the fact of the nervous stimulation that there exists a cause outside us is already the result of applying the principle of sufficient reason wrongly."

As members of the Western schools of thought our culture is one that greatly finds consolation in the decisive genesis of language, in the certainty of creating designations for all peripheral, and even most non-peripheral, matter and concepts. We leave nothing to subjective reasoning. Nietzsche, however, stresses to us, as a society, that these are simply the deceptions of our trained cohesive morals - in other words, these are the lies that we have convinced ourselves over centuries and generations to be reality, truth.

"... Where words are concerned, what matters is never truth, never the full adequate expression... The 'thing-in-itself' (which would be, precisely, pure truth, truth without consequences) in impossible for even the creator of language to grasp, and indeed, this is not at all desirable. He designates only the relations of things to human beings, and in order to express them he avails himself of the boldest metaphors." (On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense)

And indeed, thusly, we have no truly objective designation for the property of this or that thing, we cannot. We operate solely on subjective stimuli, and therefore the crisis of encapsulating the true essence of a thing into a unified, expressive idiom comes into play. Strip a thought - a concept which human beings inherently cannot suppress - of language and terms to rationalize it, and what is left? For Nietzsche, this practice is subliminal, a subconscious trick of the mind.

For Artaud, however, this pretext of language was not only a matter of moral difficulty, but a physically illusive medium of expression, as he believed, and as was accounted for by his several documented physical and psychological ailments. He expresses this maddening frustration, however, quite eloquently, and depicts it as a suffrage, an oppressive force bearing down upon his mind, body, and soul, which all have an intermingling consequence to one another.

"This husk of words that falls away, it must not be imagined that the soul is not involved in it... That the soul deserts language or language deserts the mind, and that this rupture plows in the fields of the senses... this is the great pain which undermines not the outer skin... but the STUFF of the body." (Fragments of a Diary from Hell)

However, in light of this struggle, Artaud developed a new mode of viewing the process of theatre, revolutionizing the post-modernist perception of the art form. He demands that "... we shall not restore to the theatre its specific powers of action until we have restored its language... Instead of relying on texts that are regarded as definitive and as sacred, we must first put an end to the subjugation of theatre to