2 Body of Thought

Satyr

Schneemann began her career as a painter but quickly moved into performance as a way of asserting the female body over and against its use by male artists.2 Ever since cinema theorist Laura Muvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” art theory has made much of the male gaze that objectifies women and their bodies. As Muvey explains: “In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.”3 Schneemann is keenly aware of this gaze, and as we shall see, she subverts it in two ways: by using the haptic or tactile quality of her visual work to collapse the distance of sight into visceral touch, and by creating works that are fundamentally, physically (not just visually) tactile and call forth the risk and messiness of touch, the infection of touching, over and against the safe distance of looking. Drawing on her background as a painter, Schneemann’s painterly performances work as large temporal canvases textured with straining bodies, paints, objects, and surfaces for painting.

Meat Joy is a fairly early work. The piece was first performed as part of the First Festival of Free Expression at the American Center in Paris, then later in London and New York. Such work was “[a]mong the first visual images that constitute the lexicon of an explicitly feminist avant-garde vocabulary” and is historically situated within the era of Happenings and assemblage.4 The piece became a touchstone for understanding Schneemann’s project of exploring desire through body performances and tactile surfaces.

Meat Joy begins with the performers in casual clothes, applying the last bits of makeup, sewing on feathers, smoking, and drinking as if backstage. After a blackout, the men and women approach and retreat from one another in loosely choreographed fashion while removing their apparel until only scant, tattered clothes remain. The men heap paper onto the women. They bind the women in paper and rope as “body packages”; then bonds loosen as couples roll together and the women are lifted into the air—all in roughly sketched gestures and movements to create particular vectors, lines, and trajectories repeated throughout the work. Pyres of paper and bodies intertwine; men and women paint one another. Then a serving maid drops animal flesh onto the bodies, which respond with spasms, twists, groans, and laughter; bodies and meat mingle (Figures 6 and 7). Then more dancing and painting ensues until the central woman cries, “Enough, enough!” and the stage goes black.5

Senses are opened, and bodies are opened also as hierarchical valuation collapses. In Meat Joy, bodies become the site and surface of sexual desire, painting, and meat, seemingly without distinction among these valances. Several months after the performance, the avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas noted how the work “brings us back to the touch, smell, to the surfaces of things and bodies; it accepts, with love, everything that our insistence on ideas (certain ideas) kept us away from; even what was ‘repellant,’ like ‘raw’ meat, or chicken guts, what we usually dread & fear to touch.”6 That which is repellant and abject is discarded as “not mine” yet still “of me, from me, like me.” The discarded and abject matter floats with a life of its own and couples in new and unexpected ways—body parts up against body parts—that rebound on the viewer, only to disorient the possessive nature of subjectivity. The “mine” and “not mine,” the parts like me, and those that (however like me) I reject are mixed together to disturb the sense of who I am and what is “proper” to my being.

In an iconographic moment, a man uses a mackerel to stroke the body of a woman. The fish stands in for both paintbrush and phallus yet remains a fish—a flesh pressed against flesh, a consumable form against desires for consumption. The work becomes a celebration of surfaces with their frictions, stacking, unraveling, pushing, and pulling. The prelude to Meat Joy captures this dynamic by announcing: “Action with materials: gesture from activity of tearing / pushing gluing rumbling ripping rubbing scratching spilling.”7 Humans are not simply that which consumes the world in a Hegelian aufhebung; rather, we too are surfaces opened up as meat–canvas–sensual flesh and are jostled alongside other paper and flesh and human and animal surfaces. As Rebecca Schneider describes this collapse of hierarchical valuation: “Schneemann experimented with ‘flesh as material’ and imagined a nervous system of bodies in interaction with interchangeable bodily parts, all in the service of sexual freedom and sexual pleasure.”8

Early on, critics noted the collapse of human bodies with other objects as sets of surfaces played out in the work. Mekas continues his comments by saying that

we realize that we can’t look disdainfully at the meat world without somehow somewhere deeper in ourselves condemning our own meat, our own body, our own soul. So that Meat Joy becomes an act of liberation and an act of contact with the essence; a philosophical (or religious?) essay on Essence, Matter & Being.9

He realizes that we “find our depths via the object, via the surface world.”10 The ritual frenzy of Meat Joy is an investigation of humanness and being through surfaces. In chapter 1, knowing was figured as nature hiding and humans seeking by opening up and unveiling what wants to remain hidden. In Meat Joy knowing gets constructed by veils alone, and the veils themselves that constitute “our depths,” our being.

One of the distinct turns in modern philosophy is reading the human as not apart from but immersed in a world of surfaces, a shift most notably developed by Nietzsche. Where Meat Joy develops liberation through contact with surfaces, in his early work The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche uses Dionysus to much the same ends. Schneemann’s flesh as material for art and Nietzsche’s reading of the Dionysus myth both trouble a sense of humans as unique and apart from the world of things.

Nietzsche opens The Birth of Tragedy by examining the origin of tragic drama for the Greeks. He situates tragic drama’s birth in the chorus, which he aligns with the figure of the satyr, friend of Dionysus. Contemporary scholars of Greek drama believe Nietzsche was essentially correct in this point: the tragic chorus derived from the nonindividuated mass of revelers, the satyr-chorus of Dionysian worshippers who exhibited passion and sexual energy in ritual celebrations.11 Dionysian revelers undergo abulic transports to become like the half-man, half-animal satyr.12 Such transformation annihilates the individuals and opens them to an abyss between ecstatic truth experienced in the rituals and their mundane realities. For Nietzsche, the satyr, as a divided creature between human and beast and standing between nature and culture, is an important figure for expounding on the relation between art and truth in The Birth of Tragedy. As Lawrence Hatab summarizes:

The phenomenon of “drama” (literally, an action) and dramatic impersonation are born in the mimetic enchantment of Dionysian enthusiasts who identify with the satyr celebrants of the god who have identified with Dionysus through ecstatic transformation. So for Nietzsche, tragedy begins with the satyr, representing a Dionysian experience of exuberant life force beneath the Apollonian illusions of civilization.13

As the tragic chorus borrows from the ritual dithyramb, it takes with it the sense of vision, revelry, energy, and transformation. Consequently, Dionysus and the satyr serve as the figure for how art functions through illusion, force, and transports. It is exactly such illusion, force, and transport effected in Schneemann’s work of ritual frenzy where contact among surfaces becomes the mode of transforming the mundane into events and encounters that extend or distend what it means to be human.

Nietzsche asserts the vitality of the satyr at the expense of what he considers the modern representative of art, the shepherd as tricked-up dandy:

The satyr and the idyllic shepherd of later times have both been products of a desire for naturalness and simplicity. But how firmly the Greek shaped his wood sprite, and how self-consciously and mawkishly the modern dallies with his tender, fluting shepherd! . . . [T]he satyr was man’s true prototype, an expression of his highest and strongest aspirations. He was an enthusiastic reveler, filled with transport by the approach of the god. . . . The satyr was sublime and divine—so he must have looked to the traumatically wounded vision of Dionysiac man. Our tricked-out, contrived shepherd would have offended him, but his eyes rested with sublime satisfaction on the open, undistorted limnings of nature. Here the archetypal man was cleansed of the illusion of culture. . . . Even as tragedy, with its metaphysical solace, points to the eternity of true being surviving every phenomenal change, so does the symbolism of the satyr chorus express analogically the primordial relation between the thing in itself and appearance. The idyllic shepherd of modern man is but a replica of the sum of cultural illusions which he mistakes for nature. The Dionysiac Greek, desiring truth and nature at their highest power, sees himself metamorphosed into the satyr.14

Unlike the shepherd, the satyr instantiates the relationship between “the thing in itself and appearance,” because of his own divided nature that is not drawn over by a false sense of unity. In like manner, the satyr chorus functions not as individuals, but as an ecstatic multitude that learns, from the divided nature of the satyr, to express its own relationship between the appearance of individuation in the quotidian world and the thing-in-itself. For Nietzsche, questions of management, feasting, and knowledge center around this abyss or caesura within the satyr and within the human.

It is not a particularly difficult stretch to see Nietzschean sensibilities in Meat Joy. After an onstage blackout, the performers leave the quotidian world behind as they spiral into an ecstatic multitude whose gestures open up the human–animal being. They enter into this exploration by proximities and frictions of the bodies in orgasmic gestures, wound in ropes and paper, and flopping among fish and chickens and sausages. The performers act out the tension between an appearance of individuation in everyday life and the unfathomable and intoxicating depths of the thing-in-itself. The issues of “Essence, Matter & Being” are manifest in the “traumatically wounded vision of Dionysiac [hu]man.”

Shepherd

The dark yet libratory gestures found in the Dionysian rituals have their counterpoint in critics who find our divided human–animal nature an unnatural model for defining humanness and the privileged interiority of the human subject. Schneemann imagines and addresses the critics of her approach in Up to and Including Her Limits (1973–76); in an attempt to counter Nietzsche, Heidegger takes to task the satyr by employing his own figure, the “shepherd of Being.” In both cases, at issue is the distance of the critic from the material under examination, and the critic’s desire to unify the multitude and herd or manage its disorienting force.

In Up to and Including Her Limits, Schneemann is suspended naked on a harness and rope. She extends her body and uses a crayon to draw on the walls surrounding her until she creates a web of marks and remarks (Figure 8). Schneemann describes the performance: “My entire body becomes the agency of visual traces, vestige of the body’s energy in motion.”15 Because of the relationship between rope, harness, body, and crayon, slight movements or shifts in the body’s tension change Schneemann’s position and her reach. The vertiginous hanging creates a strange effect: “Being taken over—possessed—not a process of will . . . force of the concentration is overwhelming . . . I move to ‘meet’ it, to be submerged.”16 This feeling of possession echoes the Dionysian loss of the mundane self by immersion into the frenzy of the satyr chorus.17

The voice of the critic emerges in the tape and film element of Up to and Including Her Limits. Adjacent to the performance area, Schneemann places a double-screen projection of her Super 8 film Kitch’s Last Meal (1973–76), accompanied by the sound tapes for the film. The film is a sequence of images of Schneemann’s cat, Kitch, eating. Schneemann shot footage of the cat eating one of its meals each week for as long as the cat lived, from the animal’s seventeenth year until her death at twenty. She included in the film the everyday life surrounding the animal (Figure 9).

In Up to and Including Her Limits, the voices of the tape (as audio component to the film) strike against Schneemann’s naked-body drawing. The voices layer the work with another sense of being possessed, but this time with her “inner voices” projected from the outside. Tape 2 includes the following imagined conversation as narrated by Schneemann:

I met a happy man

a structuralist filmmaker

—but don’t call me that

it’s something else I do—

he said we are fond of you

you are charming

but don’t ask us

to look at your films

we cannot

there are certain films

we cannot look at:

the personal clutter

the persistence of feelings

the hand-touch sensibility

the diaristic indulgence

the painterly mess

the dense gestalt

the primitive techniques

(I don’t take the advice of men

they only talk to themselves)

[ . . . ]

he said you can do as I do

take one clear process

follow its strict test implications

intellectually establish a system of permutations

establish their visual set

I said my film is concerned with

DIET AND DIGESTION18

Schneemann insists that the “structuralist filmmaker” is not a particular person; instead, this figure functions as a voice in her head and a force within culture. In an interview with Daryl Chin, she explained that “[t]he soundtrack tape: does NOT DEFINE MY aesthetic! it is the interpretation of my imaginary enemy—I have put the words into ‘his’ mouth to stand for resistant/blocked apperceptions.”19 The critic is a general enemy against which she is working. He rails against the “clutter” and “hand-touch sensibility” and wishes the artist would “intellectually establish a system of permutations.” Here, intellect is shorthand for disembodied reason. It is clear that what the critic opposes is the messiness of immanent engagement between the artist and her work, including the artist as part of the work. The critic is happy to create films that maintain a distance between the artist and the artwork. This would maintain the structural(ist) integrity of the artist as one who manipulates materials, but stands apart from such materials. He objects to a blurring of boundaries and the vertiginous loss of identity between subject and object, artist and work. Yet as the “I” in the dialogue points out, every artwork is a matter of consumption, a work projected out by the artist and consumed or taken in by the audience. The filmmaker refuses the body that consumes—a body Schneemann asserts in capital letters: “I said my film is concerned with / DIET AND DIGESTION.”

While Schneemann imagines her critic, Nietzsche’s counterpoint can be found in Heidegger, who took up challenges in Nietzsche’s philosophy but selectively omitted questions of the body and concerns for immanence. In 1936, Heidegger began what would become a decade-long series of seminars and lectures on Nietzsche. David Ferrell Krell goes so far as to say that “Nietzsche’s impact on Heidegger’s thought is second to none.”20 In the preface to his four edited volumes of seminars titled Nietzsche, Heidegger explains that the lectures in these volumes “provide a view of the path of thought I followed from 1930 to the ‘Letter on Humanism’ (1947).”21 The influence of the Nietzsche lectures reaches even further because the “Letter on Humanism” initiates a series of questions on technology, dwelling, and the call to thinking in the wake of metaphysics. While the lectures reveal Heidegger’s path, they also give the contemporary reader a reflection on roads not chosen. Heidegger’s selection from Nietzsche, as well as his method of reading, tells us more about Heidegger than Nietzsche. For example, while Nietzsche is often concerned with the human body—its physiological functions and its animal nature—Heidegger curiously omits Nietzsche’s thought concerning the issue of man’s kinship with other animals.22 The lacuna suggests Heidegger’s own intentions, as well as crucial moments in which he remains uncomfortable with Nietzsche’s philosophy as it vitally engages with issues of the human animal. At the intersection between the human’s animal body and thinking, Heidegger and Nietzsche decidedly differ.

For both Nietzsche and Heidegger, the relationship between animals and thought starts with the issue of “DIET AND DIGESTION”: eating as knowing, and eating as incorporation. The connections between eating and knowing are extensive, and both philosophers make use of them in different ways. Eating means taking the other from outside and possessing it, and taking it in until there is no difference or distinction between self and other as the food is digested. Epistemologically, eating becomes a way of thinking about the outside or unknown in thought: How can the unknown ever be known except by making it like the self, the known? In other words, to know is to digest and incorporate the other. Yet as is quite obvious in this extended metaphor, knowledge and eating entail violence to the other. This is why Scheenmann is so assertive in claiming “I said my film is concerned with / DIET AND DIGESTION” and why too she incorporates this narration in a performance work in which her body strains in a harness as she marks on canvas. Violence is encoded in the knowing and the making of her art in which the body—her body—figures as a site of production amid corporeal containment, restraint, and an open access to observation.

Derrida addresses these same issues of knowing the other and the violence of knowing when posed with the question: Who comes after the subject? He works through the problem of the “who” by considering its relations to the outside and the fundamental question of eating and the feast:

The question is no longer one of knowing if it is “good” to eat the other or if the other is “good” to eat, nor of knowing which other. One eats him regardless and lets oneself be eaten by him. . . . The moral question is thus not, nor has it ever been: should one eat or not, eat this and not that . . . but since one must eat in any case and since it is and tastes good to eat, and since there’s no other definition of the good (du bien), how for goodness sake should one eat well (bien manger)?23

The questions become then: how are we to manage eating well (bien manger), and who is this “I” who manages or regulates eating? For Heidegger, the shepherd manages that which he eats (mangez), while for Nietzsche, the satyr’s self-management coincides with his eating (manger). With this cross-linguistic pun, I am drawing from a tradition of such conceptually appropriate and linguistically questionable wordplays such as found in Derrida’s Glas. Here and elsewhere, Derrida (and many Derridians) have used pseudo-etymologies and puns as a way of striking at Heidegger’s quasi-etymologies employed to construct arguments throughout his oeuvre. My slippage across languages and the linguistic questionability is intended to fold into the concept of “pidgin language” developed in chapters 4 and 5 and to denote instability in meaning and shifts between the physicality of speech (words sounding alike) and their meanings.

In anticipation of the contrast between Heidegger and Nietzsche, several options become evident. One may keep food—intellectual or material—at a distance, deferred and with elaborate preparation. It may be something we point at and name, such as “the animal,” something (in Heideggerian fashion) that remains “poor in world [weltarm],” whose animal world is cut out and overcooked to be eaten. Or it may be that food functions as that which draws us near to things—as Heidegger longs for in the opening of his 1949 essay, “The Thing,” in which “despite all conquest of distance [through technology] the nearness of things remains absent.”24 Such a drawing near would perhaps look less Heideggerian (with his meditation on techne) and more like something out of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy turned cookbook. That is, as already intimated in Schneemann’s work, we may learn to draw near via Dionysus and his grapes rather than via the shepherd and his crook. The very identity of Dionysus centers around consumption: he is the god of wine, and in areas of Greece where he is said to have been the first to tame bulls, he is a god of agriculture. According to Greek rites centering around Dionysus (which Nietzsche uses to his own ends), his revelers crush and imbibe grapes in an intoxicating feast. They rend the flesh of animals—usually a goat or bull, but in some rare instances humans as well—and eat their flesh and drink their blood, believing it to be the body and blood of Dionysus himself, who at times takes on animal form. By drinking the wine and blood and eating the flesh, the revelers exceed the mundane world and learn from their god, who emulates the intoxicating fruits in his own immolation.25

At the very beginning of his lectures on Nietzsche, Heidegger offers his students a provocative fragment from Nietzsche:

For many, abstract thinking is a toil; for me, on good days it is feast and frenzy . . . the feast implies: pride, exuberance, frivolity; mockery of all earnestness and respectability; a divine affirmation of oneself, out of animal plenitude and perfection—all obvious states to which the Christian may not honestly say Yes.26

One can imagine the thrill of a student attending such lectures and the possibilities opened by such a rich and dense passage. But in typical fashion, Heidegger withdraws the pleasure of the feast and the thrills and expectations for the students by proceeding to explain,

Feasts require long and painstaking preparation. This semester we want to prepare ourselves for the feast, even if we do not make it as far as the celebration, even if we only catch a glimpse of the preliminary festivities at the feast of thinking—experiencing what meditative thought is and what it means to be at home in genuine questioning.27

Heidegger withdraws the feast, its food, and the “animal plenitude and perfection” that is part of the joy of eating. He substitutes “painstaking preparation” toward catching a glimpse of “the feast of thinking—experiencing what meditative thought is.” The feast with its animal plenitude becomes the feast of thinking that is meditative rather than frenzied and removed and abstracted from, rather than replete with, corporality. Heidegger offers a future feast though one that never arrives; his feast is always promised, but upon approach, the eating is deferred indefinitely across a decade of seminars and their published form in the four volumes titled Nietzsche. He never gets to the body of thought and thought on the body. Nietzsche is unable to provide a retort to this later philosopher; nevertheless, we shall trace such a reply in both Nietzsche’s and Schneemann’s work.

As quoted by Heidegger, Nietzsche’s passage on thinking as feast and frenzy brings together bodily incorporation and knowledge. The quotation displays eating and knowing as an ecstasy and violence reminiscent of the Dionysian festivals in Nietzsche’s early work, The Birth of Tragedy. What is at issue in knowledge and incorporation—and knowledge as incorporation—is the problem of how the outside finds its way into the privileged interiority of the human subject. Furthermore, and as Nietzsche will ask: How is this knowledge not only a mental acquisition, but also a bodily functioning dependent on physiology? For Schneemann, it is exactly this issue of thinking with one’s body and making the body immanent to the work of art that is at issue in her corpus. Up to and Including Her Limits uses limit as a double valence: the artist is at her limits in an ecstatic effort to extend her physical and symbolic reach in her work while the viewer is confronted with the limit of being able to take in and understand the intensity and physicality from Schneemann’s point of view. Within her artwork or from outside it, artist and critic alike are at their limits. For Nietzsche and Schneemann, knowing and corporeal comportment are intertwined.

Turning to Heidegger provides an instructive difference similar to the one we have seen between Schneemann and the critical voice of the structuralist filmmaker in tape 2 of Kitch’s Last Meal. Like the structuralist who erects barriers to the artist’s corporeal work, Heidegger erects his own limits by which to push against the reach of Nietzche’s Dionysus. Heidegger and the structuralist critic prefer a distance and objectification by which to take on their objects of study. It is curious that just after his lectures on Nietzsche, in the “Letter on Humanism,” Heidegger situates man as the idyllic “shepherd of Being”:

Man does not decide whether and how beings appear, whether and how God and the gods or history and nature come forward into the clearing of Being, come to presence and depart. . . . But for man it is ever a question of finding what is fitting in his essence that corresponds to such destiny; for in accord with this destiny man as ek-sisting has to guard the truth of Being. Man is the shepherd of Being.28

If the Nietzsche lectures “provide a glimpse of the path of thought which I followed between 1930 and the ‘Letter on Humanism,’” then it is worth examining why Heidegger chose the figure of the shepherd in the shadow of Nietzsche’s Dionysus and, by extension, the god’s friend: the satyr.

The contrast between Heidegger and Nietzsche is evident in how the shepherd and satyr manage their flocks: both rend the flesh of animals, but for the shepherd, shearing and slaughter happen offstage and out of sight. Such omission serves as a tellingly discarded part of Heidegger’s metaphor and path of thinking. The offstage killing contrasts with Dionysus and the satyr, both of whom embody a reflexive act of self-division even as they divide up the other, the grape, the animal, the eatable (Ask the Goddess [1993–97], Figure 10). In Heidegger’s shepherd, there is a distance between the human and the animal and the human’s own animality. For Heidegger, man cuts himself off from his animal nature, but he does so only to tend to the open and let beings be as such. This is the primary function of the “shepherd of Being” as one who cares: he cares, but does so by removing himself from the immanence of Being amid the multitude of the flock.

In this passage from the “Letter on Humanism,” Heidegger refers his readers to Dasein and care in Being and Time to support his notion of shepherding. In section 44 of Being and Time, Heidegger explains that Dasein is “always already ahead of itself,” because it is able to think its own future and being toward death.29 Dasein, then, in its very structure is concerned about the potentiality-for-being of its own being. Such concern for what is not, but could be, is the care that allows Dasein to shepherd beings. The shepherd gathers and discloses beings: “as long as there is an understanding of being [the shepherd’s role] and thus an understanding of objective presence, we can say that then beings will still continue to be.”30 This role of shepherding becomes formative for Heidegger’s later writing—in “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” for example—in which mortals bring together the fourfold: namely, they shepherd the earth, sky, divinity, and mortals.

Perhaps Heidegger is much more adept than the voice of Schneemann’s critic. He is aware that his shepherd and his stance on shepherding beings reinstate a humanist hierarchy. Concerned about the anthropocentrism in his thinking, Heidegger thus attempts to alleviate the centrality of the human through the call that comes from outside: “For man becomes truly free only insofar as he belongs to the realm of destining and so becomes one who listens, though not one who simply obeys.”31 In the “Letter on Humanism,” this call is characterized as: “Man does not decide whether and how beings appear.” Yet within the same passage, man is situated as the shepherd. It seems that man is destined to be the “shepherd of Being,” and as such, he is elevated above animals and his own animality. Just before the shepherd passage, Heidegger goes out of his way to make the division between the shepherd and other animals quite clear—and so to separate himself from a figure such as the satyr, which is immersed in animality as a being among other beings:

Of all the beings that are, presumably the most difficult to think about are living creatures, because on the one hand they are in a certain way most closely akin to us, and on the other are at the same time separated from our ek-sistent essence by an abyss. However, it might also seem as though the essence of divinity is closer to us than what is so alien in other living creatures, closer, namely, in an essential distance which, however distant, is nonetheless more familiar to our ek-sistent essence than is our scarcely conceivable, abysmal bodily kinship with the beast.32

That which is outside—the animal—is produced by the exclusion of the inside of man, our animal nature and “abysmal bodily kinship with the beast.” Heidegger grudgingly acknowledges our connection to animals, but only to place an abyss between us and them and to further this divide by claiming without foundation that, indeed, we are closer in nature to divinities than we are to other animals. The nature of animals remains “what is so alien in other living creatures.” What is alien “in” animals is the very thing which is “in” us; however, Heidegger removes this “in” and places it on the other side of the abyss—as far from human as possible. It is in this caesura, in this abysmal divide, that the satyr is most at “home.” And it is this that creates a fundamental difference between Nietzsche and Heidegger.

Certainly Heidegger has contemplated and figured many an abyss: the divide between beings and being, the rift between being concealing itself and human sheltering of beings, the difference between the sudden and radiant appearance of being and its unfolding.33 In all these cases he marks a cleft and attempts a leap; yet in the divide at hand (between bodily kinship and our eksistence as beings aware of foundational being) Heidegger fails to attempt a crossing.34 Where the abyss is for Heidegger a no-man’s land, for Nietzsche this abysmal nature of the human is figured as a central concern and the home of the satyr. For Nietzsche the unfathomable is the very site of productive force, where the hybrid figure of the human–animal satyr fashions Dionysian rites as the prototype and foundation of art. Nietzsche is not asking that the site of the abyss become intelligible; he does not wish to save the abyss from being just that. Rather, its very obscurity is its mode of managing or manger being.

Schneemann leverages an abyss in her works. She is continually casting ropes across the abyss between the bodily animal nature of humans and the cultural distancing from our animality. To recall the words of Jonas Mekas:

[Meat Joy] brings us back to the touch, smell, to the surfaces of things and bodies; it accepts, with love, everything that our insistence on ideas (certain ideas) kept us away from; even what was “repellant,” like “raw” meat, or chicken guts, what we usually dread & fear to touch—glittery, vomity substances (under the excuse of our own “delicateness,” the delicateness of our natures . . . ).35

The “mess” derided by Schneemann’s critic is this problem of organizing the organs—ours and the animals’—so as to hold together the human organism rather than allowing bodies and body parts to mix across individuals and species. The work functions as a “nervous system of bodies in interaction with interchangeable bodily parts.”36 While thought has always been about managing distance between subject and objects, Schneemann collapses distances and finds productive thought in the surfaces, contact, and exchange amid entities.

For Schneemann and for Nietzsche, the abyss is a mode of connecting rather than dividing humans from animality. For Nietzsche, the primary concern is how the abyss becomes the site for the production of Dionysian rituals and foundations for art. The human–animal satyr works as a figure for transmuting the material world into artistic ritual. Unlike Nietzsche, Schneemann works with both metaphysical and physical abysmal depths. The raw physicality of her body negotiates physical space in a way that Nietzsche can glance over with myth and metaphor of Dionysus and the satyr (and later figures such as Zarathustra and the Overman). It is the raw and seemingly alinguistic collapse of physicality in Schneemann’s work that pushes her beyond Nietzschean meditations on the body.

As if to rein in Nietzsche, Heidegger calls him the last metaphysician because Nietzsche remains concerned with the “problem of beings” rather than the “question of being.” Such a distinction between beings and being becomes manifest in the contrast between satyr and shepherd, each of whom manages the “abysmal bodily kinship to the beast” very differently.37 For Heidegger, maintaining kinship with brutes misses the unique essence of man:

Are we really on the right track toward the essence of man as long as we set him off as one living creature among others in contrast to plants, beasts, and God? . . . We will thereby always be able to state something correct about man. But we must be clear on this point, that when we do this we abandon man to the essential realm of animalitas even if we do not equate him with beasts but attribute a specific difference to him.38

To think of man as animal, even animal rationale, is to miss the unique essence, the particular calling, of man. Our role, according to Heidegger, is one of “uprightness,” which no other creature possesses: “living creatures [other than man] are as they are without standing outside their Being as such and within the truth of Being.”39 Humans are then out-standing, and in their verticality they are able to get outside of their own being (or stand out) to contemplate the question of being as well as shepherding other beings. In contrast, caught within the series of relations that is their world, animals simply cannot hoist the ladder of thought above their surroundings to have a look around.40

Nietzsche and his satyr explore the problem of beings and being differently. Far from the animal rationale, the satyr’s divided nature echoes man’s own division between a kinship with the beast and human uprightness. Yet unlike Heidegger’s shepherd, for whom the division remains outside of man and initiated by a call or destiny, for Nietzsche, the satyr carries the split within himself, and it is this intimate caesura that creates the satyr’s unique state. This split functions as the very center from which Dionysian revelers admire and emulate the satyr. Furthermore, it anticipates the splitting open that remains the fate of their god. Rather than an outside calling—a call that shepherds the shepherd and allows the shepherd to manage a distance from his flock—for Nietzsche, the very relations within ourselves—our animality—introduce a novel ontology and epistemology.

Giorgio Agamben’s The Open serves as an extended meditation on this “intimate caesura”:

The division of life into vegetal and relational, organic and animal, animal and human, therefore passes first of all as a mobile border within living man, and without this intimate caesura the very decision of what is human and what is not would probably not be possible. It is possible to oppose man to other living things, and at the same time to organize the complex—and not always edifying—economy of relations between men and animals, only because something like an animal life has been separated within man, only because his distance and proximity to the animal have been measured and recognized first of all in the closest and most intimate place.41

The split within humans, “the mobile border [living] within living man,” opens up both human and beast, as well as human as beast, to a unique mode of thinking and knowing. Knowledge, including self-knowledge, occurs as the “inside” or privileged interiority of the human becomes divided and opened. Such an opening moves the interior and its depths to a surface for examination and consumption. The split exposes the inside as another outside, a surface for study. The split operates as a different sort of opening than Heidegger’s notion of the open as a sphere outside which is managed by the shepherd. The constitution of the “who” (which comes “after” the subject) ruptures in this epistemology of epistemology.

Veils

For Nietzsche, the rending of flesh in Dionysian transports simply doubles the space of the caesura and “the abysmal bodily kinship with the beast.” Cutting the flesh of animals, turning their insides out, repeats a division felt by the Dionysian revelers metamorphosed into satyrs. Making the animal into only a surface, flesh exposed and feasted upon—visible and knowable—happens not because the animal is “poor in world” (as Heidegger claims in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics). Rather, the feasting happens because it allows those eating to recognize their own bestial nature and the nature of Dionysus, their friend who will be rent asunder.42 The surfaces in the “feast and frenzy” reveal nothing behind them, no privileged interiority of the human; instead, there are only more and other surfaces—a play of “material” appearances that concurs with Dionysus as the master illusionist and artist in The Birth of Tragedy.

Surface and appearance perform an important role in The Birth of Tragedy. It is the veil of appearance that allows the Greeks their “pessimism of strength”; it permits them the strength to look into the abyss and forge tragic drama despite the darkness of a life without a transcendental truth or meaning.43 For Nietzsche, the strength of the Greeks comes from the power of surfaces, with their sensuousness and illusions, by which they are able to face the abyss and produce meaning in confrontation with the abysmal. Appearance rather than transcendent truth becomes the means of knowing the state of affairs in the world: “For both art and life depend wholly on the laws of optics, on perspective and illusion; both, to be blunt, depend on the necessity of error.”44 The god Dionysus offers the play of surfaces as veils for further production of appearances. In The Birth of Tragedy, Dionysus’ art is opposed by its opposite, Apollo’s realm of truth, light, and reason. There remains, however, an asymmetry to the dialectic because illusion authorizes and legitimizes its opposite—Apollonian light and truth. Further, Nietzsche suggests that Apollo’s light is merely illusion in disguise.

Appearances allow Nietzsche a means of overturning Platonism. Indeed, even as early as The Birth of Tragedy, it is Socrates who stands out as the real counter to Dionysus. Nietzsche inverts Platonism by positing appearance as more true and more real than the eternal essences and forms. As Will McNeill explains in his important analysis of Heidegger’s Nietzsche, “the sensuous becomes the true and the suprasensuous idea is merely the apparent.”45 In his late work Twilight of the Idols (1895), Nietzsche returns to the problem of appearances authorizing the known world, but he finds that even the stability of the sensuous must give way. It is important that Nietzsche not simply inverts Platonism, because to stand Platonism on its head would simply maintain a metaphysical order, the only difference being that the inversion would place material objects in the world as “true” and ideal forms as illusions. Nietzsche finds a means of twisting free from this polarity. As Heidegger explains in his lectures, Nietzsche accomplishes this exit from the polarity in “How the ‘true world’ finally became a fable.”46 The twisting free comes when Nietzsche asserts that “[t]he real world—we have done away with it: what world was left? the apparent one, perhaps? . . . But no! with the real world we have also done away with the apparent one!”47 The world is a continual series of appearances that flash before us in an ongoing becoming; yet in order to capture this becoming, we give it a sense of being. Nevertheless, the being of that which appears to be is itself mere appearance and illusion. The true is no longer what is, but rather unfettered becoming.48 If, as we saw in chapter 1, nature loves to veil itself, then here Nietzsche claims that there are only veils hiding behind the veils. He pushes his overcoming of Platonism further by proposing that even the veils are an illusion, which stand in for the slipperiness of becoming.

Veil upon veil, reality becomes the dark and disorienting world of the Dionysian abyss: the abyss between the revelers’ intoxicating revelations and their mundane world; the abyss between the inaccessible animality and the humanness of the human. In both cases, the satyr straddles the abyss. Yes, he is a fictional creature and as such another veil, but it is exactly this status as veil and fiction that makes him so very meaningful. The satyr functions as the site where human interiority bumps against the forces that would unravel it.

Schneemann leverages the Dionysian in her art by embracing the satyr. She uses surfaces to create veils that are not Apollonian illusions—art as mimesis or expression of inner creativity. Rather, her work of surfaces levels the mundane world and drags it into the abyss. To repeat an earlier comment: the surfaces in the “feast and frenzy” reveal nothing behind them, no privileged interiority of the human. There are instead only more and other surfaces—a play of “material” appearances. Schneemann repeats time and again the manipulation of material surfaces, including the human body as material and surface. For her, desire is not something interior to the human subject; rather, it is what manifests on haptic, sensual surfaces and becomes pronounced through contact and frictions.

Schneemann plies the use of veils in several ways. Not only is this a matter of surfaces and illusions, but also for her it is a feminist form of art. Even as far back as Heraclitus’ claim that nature veils itself, nature is figured as a woman whom the male investigators unveil or open up to expose her hidden value. Rather than allow the male gaze to denude her and her work, Schneemann’s veils provide glittering and disorienting surfaces from which there is no depth for the observer to gain an orienting grounding. As the eighteenth-century essayist Mary Wollstonecraft observed in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, culture has attributed to women only a surface and superficial knowledge, while men have depth of thought. In the veils and surfaces of her work, Schneemann turns this negative stereotype against itself. Veiled and superficial, these works shimmer with the productivity of surfaces without depth.

It is possible to think of Schneemann’s work as other than surface—to think of it as depth of human desire and more particularly female desire. Indeed, critics comfortably place Schneemann within the lineage of early female performance artists who use their bodies as sites for inquiry into the role of gender and sex within the prevailing social community. This approach to Schneemann’s work by way of depth and identity relegates the animal flesh in Meat Joy and the animality or satyr nature of the human body into props for a particular human discourse of human interiority. Schneemann herself occasionally talks about her work in this way. It is sometimes difficult to tell whether Schneemann sees her work as expressing an “inner” self with depth of being or if this too is another veil plied by the artist. Thinking of the work as surfaces opens up a larger field on which animality might roam.

Schneemann plies the body as surface by making it function as canvas and brush. In these instances, the canvas as medium does not mime the real or become the site for expressing the artist’s creativity; rather, it is the artist, and the artist becomes the canvas that has no further end than its play of material appearances. While in her early work Eye Body (1963) she is both artist and sculptural and painted art object, later works further develop the body as a site of flashing appearances and surfaces without recourse to interiorities. There is no shepherd herding the work, but rather the satyr-artist as both agent and object, artist and medium. Meat Joy uses the body in relation to paper and paint as the collapse of artist and medium into mutual surfaces, which is further realized in works such as Body Collage (1967) and Illinois Central (1968).

Body Collage began as a rehearsal of body movements for Illinois Central, which used similar gestures but incorporated local sounds and images. The rehearsal became a productive sketch piece documented in photography and 16mm film. In this work, Schneemann shreds white printer’s paper, covers herself with wallpaper paste and molasses, and then runs “back and forth around the pile of papers until the momentum of the runs provoked a fall into it.” Now amid the paper, she rolls in the heap until paper affixes to her in “random shape and proportion.”49 The result is an active, temporal collage (Figure 11). Amid all of the running and rolling, Schneemann calls forth an image later used in Illinois Central:

Standing up [after rolling in the paper] led to an impulse to fly. I stood on three iron steps leading from the loft to the fire-escape, my arms moving up and down like wings until I “took off” in a flying-run down the steps. The figure poised on the steps, the sense of elevation and lightly attached papers produced a propulsion, an alighting.50

Several years later, Schneemann finds confirmation of her flying impulse in a reproduction of the Cretan Toreador fresco in which athletes vault over the back of a bull, who itself is stretched out as if leaping or straining in space. Schneemann’s “alighting” corresponds to the ethereal summersault of the Minoan athlete as well as the lightness of the paper that covers her body. Yet importantly, the sensation of being airborne is intoxicating not because the artist is leaving her body behind, but because she is taking it with her. Her corporality is the site of this leaping. The flight has all the weight and power of the ancient bull coupled and coupling with the leaping human. The coupling produces a hybrid form—like the minotaur—or, to recall the central figure of this chapter, like the satyr.

In Illinois Central, there is a transmutation of the body that becomes ripped, torn, and changed into the “painterly mess” collage such that “there was as well a tactile and sensory extension of flesh into paper—malleable, expressive, sculptural.” The energy of bodies, flight, surfaces contacting, combining, and recombining in the dynamic collage creates an event and spectacle for the viewer. As the body changes, the artwork beckons to the body of social thought where the audience “grasp[s] a conscious and realizable wish to replace the performers with themselves.”51 The individual bodies and the social body are joined in a dithyrambic reorientation of what it means to be linked to one another and to material nature.

In his 1980 essay on Schneemann for Art in America, Lawrence Alloway characterizes her work as a “dionysiac cul-de-sac.”52 In other words, there is nowhere to go once the artist and audience reach their orgasmic leveling of human interiority into an exterior materiality. Yet what Schneemann’s work provides is a way of producing art that is not a shepherding but a corporeal incorporation of the artist in the process of the art. As we shall see in the following chapters, this gesture of the satyr allows for a way of being with and alongside animals that evades human hierarchical relationships to the animal. The satyr as a figure gives artists and philosophers a place to stand while initiating an inquiry into animals. This place or ground is without ground; rather, it is an alighting over an abyss by the use of veils and veils upon veils. It is precisely the fragility and tentative nature of alighting that legitimizes the inquiry into the animal as something other than an imposition. As we will see in subsequent chapters, more than a “dionysiac cul-de-sac” is tread by animal artists who go off-road to meet up with the animal world on unpaved terrain.

In other words, rather than having nowhere to go, the art take us off-road or off what Heidegger calls the pathway, der Weg. For Heidegger this Weg is a path of thinking in the wake of metaphysics. Yet as Agamben claims, and as I’ve traced in this chapter, Heidegger’s path leads to an “anthropological machine” whose goal is the “total management of its own animality.”53 As we will see, these artists leave the path both literally and figuratively, and in doing so, they abandon total management and consumption of the animal. Literally, they are off-road using unusual settings for their studio spaces, ranging from housing complexes for the elderly to the oceans of the Antarctic. They deploy unique materials including bear skins and fishing chum. Figuratively, they take us far from the cultural economies of the shepherd and into zones of contact with the nonhuman. Some of the artworks produced in these contact zones press the limits of culture and intelligibility in order to move thought to the unthought of thought. In doing so, they develop other (non)human languages—what I will call pidgin languages—and creative modes of comportment. In uncharted terrains with other languages and other modes of being, these artists and their works challenge what it means to be human and draw us closer to the satyr in the abyss.