A Crystal-Theatre: Automation and Crystalline Description in the Theatre of Samuel Beckett

Daniel Koczy
Abstract

Northumbria University

Throughout his cinema studies, Deleuze tends to dene and to praise the cinematic in opposition to the theatrical. Cinema, for Deleuze, retains the potential to automate our perception of its images. Further, this capacity allows the cinema to profoundly disrupt the habitual patterns of its audiences thought. This article asks, however, whether Becketts theatrical practice can be productively analysed through concepts derived from Deleuzes work on the cinema. In Becketts Play and Not I, we see theatrical productions that strive for and attain an automation of their audiences perception. While this theatrical experience is not identical to the camera-consciousness that Deleuze observes in lm, it can be understood through Deleuzes (Bergsonian) processes of habitual and attentive recognition, their failure and their subsequent transformation into passages of crystalline description. Finally, we can begin to elaborate the novel idea of a crystal-theatre; a theatre where the audience are entrapped within its construction, caught in a loop or circuit that runs between and complicates the realms of reality and illusion, immediately lived experience and artistic representation, the actual and the virtual. Keywords: Beckett, cinema, automation, image, failure, crystal-image
Given that it is a consciousness which carries out these divisions and reunions, we can say of the shot that it acts like a consciousness. But the sole

Deleuze Studies 6.4 (2012): 614627 DOI: 10.3366/dls.2012.0087 Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/dls

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cinematographic consciousness is not us, the spectator, nor the hero; it is the camera . . . (Deleuze 2009: 21)

Discussing the role of art in Deleuzes philosophy, Simon OSullivan has written of an aesthetic function of transformation that extends the boundaries of what can be experienced (OSullivan 2006: 52). For Deleuze, the artist promotes encounters that disrupt the given structures of consciousness. Artworks oppose habitual patterns of thought by confronting us with a world that obeys only its own peculiar logic. When Deleuze and Guattari claim that the sole law of creation is that the composition must stand up on its own, they are working to dene the artwork as a self-positing creation that does not depend upon the spectator (Deleuze and Guattari 2009: 164). Their ideal artwork would not appeal to existing concepts, ideas and habits of perception but would impose its own modes of thought upon us. Cinema, for Deleuze, is exemplary in this regard. Deleuze argues that Dziga Vertovs Man with a Movie-Camera, for example, offers us the perception of a non-human eye that has passed into matter itself, creating a vision of the world in the absence of subjectivity (Deleuze 2009: 838).1 Further, the cinematic form is uniquely well equipped to force such encounters upon us. Cinema, for Deleuze, automates our perception and achieves a direct correspondence between image and thought. We perceive and think through a cinematographic consciousness that belongs to the images alone. It is the material automatism of images which produces from the outside a thought which it imposes, as the unthinkable in our intellectual automatism (Deleuze 2010: 173). For Deleuze, the cinema appears as an immensely powerful tool for provoking unthinkable encounters. In Vertov, our intellectual automatism is rerouted through a sequence of images that follows its own logic and forces an audience to follow this logic in turn. Theatre, for Deleuze, appears to be far less likely to provide such encounters (Cull 2009: 12).2 In One Less Manifesto, Deleuzes only extended study of theatrical practice, Deleuze praises Carmelo Bene for presenting us with passages of variation that move between the established forms of majority perception. Benes theatre performs, for Deleuze, an important political function in cultivating a minority consciousness within his audience (Deleuze 2000a). Deleuzes cinema books, however, may leave us doubting the efcacy of Benes practice. Here, Deleuze maintains that there is no theatrical equivalent of the screens direct correspondence between image and thought.3 We retain a high degree of autonomy in relation to the stage. Benes audience appear,

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from the perspective of cinematic automatism, to remain spectators to and not participants with the movement of his work. This is problematic, in Deleuzes view, because pre-existing structures of thought are liable to obscure Benes revolutionary potential.4 While consciousness remains divided from the images onstage, dramatic works will be less capable of imposing an alterior logic upon us. The theatrical form appears ill equipped to disrupt our intellectual automatism and provoke an encounter with the unthinkable. In Deleuzes account, lm has itself confronted and overcome similar problems. Deleuzes modern cinema develops in response to a growing awareness of our intellectual automatism, expressed as a crisis of clich.5 A clich is a sensory-motor image of the thing . . . but, if our sensory-motor schemata jam or break, then a different type of image can appear: a pure optical-sound image (Deleuze 2010: 1920). Deleuze draws on Henri Bergsons accounts of habitual and attentive recognition in order to theorise both the cinematic clich and the emergence of encounters that disrupt its reign.6 In habitual recognition, we associate an object with a single recollection-image. When this is not possible, attentive recognition allows us to draw upon a range of memories in order to construct a coherent description of the object. Recognition succeeds when we feel ourselves able to understand the object before us. It is a matter of reducing the singular object or encounter to its resemblance to what we have previously perceived; an intellectual automatism that extracts a clich from the image and allows us to remain within habitual modes of thought. For Deleuze, cinematic automation can force this process of recognition to fail. It is not the recollection-image or attentive recognition which gives us the proper equivalent of the optical-sound image, it is rather the disturbances of memory and the failures of recognition (Deleuze 2010: 52). Through montage, lm can carry us through sequences of dislocated or illogically connected images that cannot be integrated into our habitual modes of thought. Cinematic spectators experience the failure of their intellectual automatism as their sensory-motor schema breaks down. Yet the cinematographic consciousness continues to run; perception and thought continue beyond this failure to recognise the images on-screen. In this way, the cinema can impose another mode of thought upon its audience, countering the automatism that orders experience as a series of clichs. What Deleuze calls an intolerable and unbearable pure optical-sound image might stand forth in its singularity, refusing to conform to our expectations and drawing thought beyond its habitual bounds.7 As in Vertov, we

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may come to perceive and think in accordance with another strange and different logic that forces us to discover and confront what would be unthinkable within our habitual structures of consciousness. We may ask whether Deleuzes cinematic concepts can be of use to theatre and performance. Deleuze, in an interview with Cahiers du Cinema that followed the publication of Cinema 2, commented: The encounter between two disciplines doesnt take place when one begins to reect on the other, but when one discipline realizes that it has to resolve, for itself and by its own means, a problem similar to one confronted by the other (Deleuze 2000b: 367).8 Here, Deleuze expresses something that animates this essay. In drawing on Deleuzes cinematic studies in reference to Becketts theatre, I am not attempting to deny the differences between lm and performance. Although Beckett does achieve an automation of his stage that renders Play and Not I peculiarly well suited to this form of analysis, it is not a question of claiming that these pieces are cinematic in any strong sense. Deleuzes thought will, however, help us theorise the emergence of pure optical-sound images and unthinkable encounters within Becketts drama. Perhaps this implies that Deleuzes dismissal of the theatre within his cinema studies is somewhat hasty. Ultimately, however, this essay is merely intended to perform its own encounter between Deleuze and Beckett, in the hope that something as yet unthought the presentation of Play and Not I as examples of an immersive and immanent crystal-theatre shall emerge in the process.

I. Automation: A Pure and Theatrical Optical Sound Situation

Beckett studies has frequently emphasised Becketts desire for complete control of his stage. For instance, Deirdre Bair draws our attention to a discussion between Beckett and the playwright Jean Reavey:
His maxim that every playwright should . . . (be) in control of everything that happens on stage, envisioning it as if he were the audience became difcult to follow, so that his plays became increasingly unconventional . . . It was the only way in which he could gain the stark, controlled effect he sought. (Bair 1990: 584)

This meeting took place while Beckett was writing Play. Completed, Play would achieve Becketts ambition for control in both automating his audiences perception and including his audience within the theatrical construction.

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Play presents us with two women and a man. Each is encased within an identical grey urn with only their heads visible. Beckett indicates that they must face the audience, with neck[s] held fast (Beckett 2006: 307). Their speech is provoked, in Becketts terms, by a single spotlight, cutting from one to another at maximum speed (318). James Knowlson and John Pilling have compared the gures intertwined monologues, constructing a somewhat banal tale of adultery, to the clichs of light comedy and domestic drama (Knowlson and Pilling 1979: 112). They do not address each other but speak their fragments into the light, springing to life when it rests upon them, falling silent as it swings away. With the rest of the stage in darkness, the spotlight draws the diverse perceptions of the audience into a single, automated perception. Like a cinematic director, Beckett gains a high degree of mastery over the divisions and reunions between his theatrical images. Play includes an instruction to repeat the text. The repeat may be an exact replica of the rst statement or it may present an element of variation (Beckett 2006: 320). In the same work, Beckett achieves the automation of his theatrical images and yet, in a somewhat uncharacteristic gesture, allows for a variation that is not governed by precise stage directions. In his own production of Play, Beckett even allowed for an element of improvisation, with the structure of the repeat governed by the caprice of the spotlights operator (Cohn 1980: 54). We can make sense of this apparent contradiction by drawing on Deleuzes notion of the heautonomy of sound and vision within pure optical-sound images. Play holds its audio and visual elements in an heautonomous relationship. Although speech is provoked by the spotlight, the tale of adultery cannot make sense of the visual image it illuminates. As we begin to piece the verbal fragments together into a narrative whole, their domestic clichs do little to explain Becketts highly undomesticated visual imagery. What constitutes the audio-visual image is a disjunction, a dissociation of the visual and the sound, each heautonomous, but at the same time an incommensurable or irrational relation which connects them to each other, without forming a whole . . . (Deleuze 2010: 246). We have already noted how, for Deleuze, the irrational cut or disconnection between images causes the sensory-motor schema to jam or break. Throughout Play, sound and vision stand out as nontotalisable elements of a pure optical-sound image. While they occur within the same instant, neither can fully explain the other. It is as if Beckett has brought two opposed and non-communicating worlds

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together within a single work. As such, Beckett can allow for elements of variation as no variation could bring audio and visual elements together. Anthony Minghella directed a screen version of Play (2001). Throughout, Minghella emphasises the automation of the audiences perception with a mechanical whirr that accompanies movements of the camera. The inquisitorial light becomes a panoptical surveillance system, presenting Becketts gures from a variety of angles and depths and frequently moving while they speak. Rather than adding to the work, as Deleuze might lead us to expect, however, we shall see that Minghellas camera consciousness disrupts the direct relationship between spectator and image that Becketts theatre achieves. Bair suggests that Play includes its audience as a character: The experience is almost as if the audience becomes the fth character (if the light is the fourth), wandering accidentally on stage during a performance . . . (Bair 1990: 582). Alternatively, we might ask whether the spotlight does not so much function as a separate character from the audience but automates the manner in which they are brought onto the stage. Rather than permitting us to retain the position of a detached spectator, Beckett includes his audience within the theatrical situation. Unaware of one another, the gures onstage address the audience directly and under the spotlights commands. Whenever the heads cease to recount their tale, it is to address the audience-light itself.
M: Looking for something. In my face. Some truth. In my eyes. Not even. {Spot from M to w2. Laugh as before from w2 cut short as spot from her to M.} M: Mere eye. No mind. Opening and shutting on me. Am I as much {Spot off M. Blackout. Three seconds. Spot on M. Am I as much as . . . being seen? (Beckett 2006: 317)

Writing to George Devine as he prepared to direct Play, Beckett suggested that: The inquirer (light) begins to emerge as no less a victim of his enquiry than they and (as needing) to be free, within narrow limits, literally to act the part, i.e. to vary if only slightly his speeds and intensities (Beckett 2001: 112). Here, we have the wavering perception of the theatrical spectator, as understood by Deleuze, retaining his or her distance and autonomy in relation to the image. But Beckett refuses us this freedom, automating our actual perception and including us, through the light, within the theatrical situation as its victim. Becketts spotlight automates the audiences perception in the same gesture as it automates the gures onstage. Our perception is automated by the image as our perception automates the image itself. In this way, the

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audiences perception of the image is rendered inseparable from the image perceived. In Deleuzes terms, Becketts audience are victims of the failure of recognition. The spotlight, the audiences perception of the image and ultimately the audience themselves are inseparable from an image which they cannot recognise and integrate into their sensory-motor schema. As Knowlson and Pilling write of Plays spotlight: It does not function, then, only by prompting them into speech, but is itself prompted like them to enact and re-enact a role within this strange, purgatorial world (Knowlson and Pilling 1979: 119). Although Minghellas camera consciousness automates our perception, it weakens this sense of our participation with Plays world. Minghellas camera, moving independently of the characters, lacks this element of victimhood in which the audience, through the spotlight, are forced to enact a helpless and impotent role that shares much with Plays characters. With the spotlight, we too are trapped within this image; perception and consciousness forced to continue through our failure of recognition. In his earliest drama, Beckett included references to his audience and their efforts to make sense of his work. Vladimir and Estragon turn to the auditorium, declaring Inspiring prospects and . . . that bog (Beckett 2006: 1516). Endgames Clov turns his telescope upon us observing: A multitude . . . in transports . . . of joy. {Pause} Thats what I call a magnier (106). These darkly comic inclusions of the audience are mirrored by characters concerned that they are beginning to mean something (108). In Happy Days, Winnies tale of the Shower (or Cooker) couple dramatises, ridicules and nally refuses the audiences demand to be told the meaning of Becketts play.9 From Godot to Happy Days, the audience and their struggle to recognise the images before them appear in Becketts texts. Play radicalises this tendency by drawing the audiences perception into the image itself. Now, the audience are not only unable to construct a coherent description of the images before them but are included within the image as victims of this failure. We have passed from the presentation of a pure optical-sound image, where Minghellas production perhaps remains, and towards the inclusion of the audience within a pure and theatrical optical-sound situation. As argued here, Ruby Cohn identies Play as marking a break in Becketts development. In the post-Play plays ctional and theater situation and place can converge theatereality. In Play the light belongs to theatereality (Cohn 1980: 28). Cohns conception of theatereality parallels, in some respects, our notion of a pure and theatrical opticalsound situation. From Godot to Happy Days, Cohn argues, Becketts

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theatrical spaces are intended to represent ctional worlds the country road where Godots tramps are waiting; Endgames house or shelter. While the light in Happy Days represents an unforgiving sun, Plays spotlight belongs to a necessarily theatrical situation. Where Winnie ctionalises her audience through the Shower (or Cooker) couple, the characters of Play address the spotlight, and the audience, directly and only because the audiences gaze has fallen upon them. This goes far beyond a brief suspension of the fourth wall, experienced as Estragon or Clov insult the auditorium. In theatereality, Beckett no longer produces a ctional representation, even one that draws attention to its status as ction or representation. Rather, the pure optical-sound situation encloses audience and stage within a single world, the fourth wall extending to the boundaries of the auditorium. In Deleuzes account, heroes of the modern cinema nd themselves enclosed within and part of a world in which the sensory-motor schema has broken down. Man is not himself a world other than the one in which he experiences the intolerable and feels himself trapped . . . the psychic situation of the seer, who sees better and further than he can react, that is, think (Deleuze 2010: 164). Rather than offering a theatre of representation, Becketts pure and theatrical optical-sound situation becomes a device for immersing the audience within his own intolerable world. We do not merely observe this theatre but nd ourselves to be an immanent and constituent part of Becketts creation. Automated, our perception is at once an inquisitor and victim of the inquisition; both the vision and the casualty of an eye that sees, in Deleuzes terms, further than we can think. Locked within Becketts unbearable world, we nd ourselves belonging to the unthinkable image. While theatre might traditionally ask to be interpreted, this pure and theatrical optical-sound situation demands that it is lived. It forces itself and an encounter upon us that draws thought and consciousness beyond their habitual bonds. We can now ask, expanding our discussion to include Becketts Not I, what may be at stake in such an encounter.

II. Description: A Crystal-Theatre

Like Play, Becketts Not I demands the construction of a pure and theatrical optical-sound situation. Eight feet above the stage and a little off-centre, we must spotlight a womans mouth while leaving the rest of her body in darkness. A covered gure, identied as Auditor, remains silent and still but for four brief and diminishing gestures of hopeless compassion that punctuate MOUTHs monologue. Beckett indicates a

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pause: There is just enough pause to contain it [Auditors gesture] as MOUTH recovers from vehement refusal to relinquish the third person (Beckett 2006: 374). Spoken in the third person throughout, MOUTHs text is delivered at pace but broken up by bursts of laughter, piercing screams and brief, nervy pauses. From her words, we gather that she kept a near permanent silence until her seventieth year when, while picking cowslips in a eld one April morning, she began to both hear and speak her buzzing of words.10
. . . and all the time this ray or beam . . . like moonbeam . . . but probably not . . . certainly not . . . always the same spot . . . now bright . . . now shrouded . . . but always the same spot . . . as no moon could . . . [. . . ] all part of the same wish to . . . torment . . . (Beckett 2006: 378)

Not I gives us MOUTH who speaks, Auditor who hears and the audience who see. Theatereality is produced, in part, through this scheme that extends the stage into the auditorium. Not Is stationary spotlight, like Plays mobile spotlight, casts the audience into an inquisitorial role from which we too emerge as a victim. As in Play, recognition fails. Not I, however, goes beyond Plays heautonomy of sound and vision and achieves a more radical splintering and autonomy of its parts. Not Is audience will ask themselves who or what is speaking. But MOUTHs monologue resists this question. She is herself not I; split from her thoughts, her voice and her body.11 Five times, she repeats . . . what? . . who? . . no! . . she! . ., refusing to surrender the third person (Beckett 2006: 37782). Further, MOUTH insists that she has not begun to touch upon the most vital element of her tale and renounces what little she has told as being a mere diversion and mistake.12
. . . something she had to tell . . . could that be it? . . something that would tell . . . how it was (. . .) something she didnt know herself (. . .) what? . . not that? . . [. . .] nothing she could tell . . . try something else . . . think of something else . . . oh long after . . . sudden ash . . . not that either (. . .) so on . . . [. . .] keep on . . . trying . . . not knowing what . . . what she was trying . . . (Beckett 2006: 3812; my emphases)

We circle, with Becketts text, around this obscure kernel of something that cannot be spoken. The fragmented and repetitive monologue unfolds like the testimony of one who is missing and whose nal object or meaning cannot be reached. Failing to speak this something, the voice must begin again and MOUTH must return to the moment that her speech began. . . . new every morning . . . back in the eld . . . April

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morning . . . (Beckett 2006: 383). As our own concentration ags, MOUTHs stream of words may periodically rush together into a kind of white noise; the materiality of language overtaking its signifying function and forming a literal buzzing beneath the threshold of meaning.13 The memories that MOUTH relates the eld in April, a single tear falling onto her hand, a day in court arise as sudden ashes that refuse to tell us how it was. Rather than forming a narrative whole, like Plays tale of adultery, the fragments of MOUTHs monologue refuse to communicate amongst each other. MOUTHs discourse is splintered into sudden ashes, separated by illogical cuts and dislocations, and gaining an asignifying affective autonomy. Finally, Auditors gesture diminishes into a barely perceptible quiver, no longer representing compassion but receding into a mere intensive vibration of the gures cloak. In Not I, there are no longer two heautonomous elements of sound and vision but a fragmentation and dispersal of the theatrical situation into a range of autonomous singularities. As she fails to tell us how it was, as irrational cuts and intervals splinter Becketts text and his world, we fail to recognise the pure and theatrical optical-sound situation in which we are immersed. Beyond this failure of our intellectual automatism, however, Becketts theatre forces another mode of thought upon us; the crystalline description of Deleuzes crystal-image. In Bergsons habitual and attentive recognition, we draw upon the virtual images of memory. These are actualised as recollection-images that make sense of the present. We link a perception-image with recollection-images in order to construct the action-images of our sensory-motor schema. Memory makes sense of the world by nding resemblances between present experiences and our past. As noted, however, the pure optical-sound situation causes the sensory-motor schema to break down. Here, memory does not seem equal to the encounter. We cannot make sense of what is happening to us. Within his cinema books, Deleuze claims that his crystal-images are the true genetic element of the pure optical-sound image (Deleuze 2010: 67). It is an actual-virtual circuit on the spot, and not an actualisation of the virtual in accordance with a shifting actual (77). In Play and Not I, Beckett encloses his audience within a crystaltheatre. As no virtual image is equal to the situation, recognition fails. Yet we remain trapped within Becketts drama. As we fail to actualise any virtual image in relation to Becketts world, we enter onto Deleuzes actual-virtual circuit. Deleuze claims that, in the course of this thought that thinks through its failure, the process of attentive recognition may achieve a kind of hyperactivity. Virtual memory, in its entirety and

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in an indenitely prolonged process, is called upon to make sense of the encounter. Crystalline description stands for its object, . . . both creates and erases it . . . It is now the description itself which constitutes the sole decomposed and multiplied object (Deleuze 2010: 122). The immanence of Becketts crystal-theatre is founded upon the prolongation of this process. Trapped within the actual-virtual circuit, any opposition between spectator and spectacle, real and imaginary, subject and object that description establishes is erased as soon as it is posed. What is Plays spotlight? It is a spotlight, a common enough theatrical device. Once we afrm that Play is merely a theatrical construction, however, we discover that this light has drawn us into a role within Becketts ction and that this role does not belong to the imagination alone. Once we say that the spotlight represents an imaginary inquisition, we nd ourselves to be the reality behind the inquisitor and that our pursuit for answers is very real. In Not I we have a mouth speaking, a gure listening and the audience observing. We are invited to understand the piece as an explicitly theatrical construct, simply set in whatever theatre it is performed. However, throughout Not I, the relationship between spectator and spectacle is continually undermined. Auditor is not alone in appearing to be both a spectator and a part of the performance. While the audience nd themselves cast into their inquisitorial role, MOUTH is presented as a spectator to her own speech; unsure, as we are, precisely what is being said of whom or why. All three audience, Auditor and MOUTH are continually passing through the roles of spectator and spectacle, forcing the circuit of our description to begin again and fail again. In Becketts crystaltheatre, we are at once I and not I; both audience and actor, torturer and victim, the automaton and the visionary. In an essay that deals with the ethical experience of Deleuzes philosophy, Aislinn ODonnell describes the cinematic hero in precisely Beckettian terms. The gure of resistance is not the hero. It is the one who fails. Fails again. Fails better. Wandering takes the place of action (ODonnell 2011: 229). If Becketts crystal-theatre is a theatre of resistance then this is because it disrupts the given structures of consciousness. For Deleuze, the perpetual failure of crystalline description transgures the power of memory. Memory ceases to x the world and our place within it in accordance to our habitual patterns of thought. Instead, our encounter with the unthinkable prolongs the interval between perception and understanding, action and reaction. By means of this gap, memory is deployed as a creative becoming; what Bergson would call creative emotion.14 As our description is

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multiplied, displaced and modied, the various clichs that have automated our thinking lose their sensory-motor coordinates. Taken up by this process of creation and erasure, their interconnections enter a potentially limitless series of metamorphoses. Immersed in Becketts world, our consciousness takes on Becketts fragmentation and disorder; a constellation of singularities as we grasp Not Is autonomous intensive ashes, a schizophrenic split as we are caught astride Plays heautonomous worlds of sound and vision. In Becketts crystal-theatre, we nd ourselves living and breathing a logic that is not our own; our failure to think becoming the power of thought to breach its own boundaries and wander, briey, beyond its walls.

Notes
1. Due to the brevity of this essay, it has not been possible to offer a full account of Deleuzes complex notions of the outside and the unthought in thought as they are developed within his cinema books and throughout his wider philosophical project. 2. Discussing Deleuzes antipathy towards the theatre, Cull writes: For instance, we cannot ignore Deleuzes occasional denigration of theatre in relation to his apparently favoured art of the cinema. In LAbcdaire, for instance, as Charles Stivale has reported, Deleuze remarks that theatre tends not to provide opportunities for encounters, though with certain exceptions (like Bob Wilson, Carmelo Bene). (Cull 2009: 12). 3. Ronald Bogue, in his commentary on Deleuzes cinema studies, situates Deleuzes conception of the inferiority of the theatre entirely within his discussions of the relationship between audio and visual elements of lm (Bogue 2003: 194) Theatre cannot, for Deleuze, create the cinematic single sound continuum where the speech-act becomes inseparable from the out-of-eld, non-verbal eruptions and the lms soundtrack or incidental music. Deleuze, however, identies automation and its relationship to the unthinkable in thought as a more fundamental difference between the cinematic and theatrical experience. It is cinemas automatic character which gives it this capacity in contrast to the theatre (Deleuze 2010: 172). 4. One senses that Deleuze is compelled to write One Less Manifesto partly in order to critique the theatres representational and molar functions and clear the way for a genuine encounter with Benes world of universal becoming (Deleuze 2000a: 256). Throughout, Deleuze argues against molar structures of thought that identify only a representational function of the theatre; particularly those that would glorify and limit the theatre to its capacity to represent conicts, contradictions and oppositions (Deleuze 2000a: 252). Deleuzes somewhat offhand dismissal of so-called angry women who accuse Bene of sexism and phallocentrism in his representation of the female body can be explained (if not entirely excused) by Deleuzes determination to present Benes drama as a theatre of minority becoming that would be, for Deleuze, impervious to such critique. 5. For a discussion of the crisis of clich, habitual modes of thought and the corresponding development of time- and crystal-images, see the last chapter of Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (Deleuze 2009: 20119) and the rst chapter of Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Deleuze 2010: 123).

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6. See the third chapter of Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Deleuze 2010: 4252). 7. A purely optical and sound situation does not extend into action, any more than it is induced by an action. It makes us grasp, it is supposed to make us grasp, something intolerable and unbearable (Deleuze 2010: 17). 8. Here, Deleuze is discussing the relationship between cinema and Bergsons philosophy in reference to their shared concerns with movement and time. 9. . . . this man Shower or Cooker no matter and the woman . . . standing there gaping at me . . . Whats she doing? he says stuck up to her diddies in the bleeding ground coarse fellow What does it mean? he says Whats it meant to mean? and so on lot more stuff like that usual drivel . . . (Beckett 2006: 156). 10. . . . what? . . the buzzing? . . yes . . . all the time the buzzing . . . so-called . . . in the ears . . . though of course actually . . . not in the ears at all . . . in the skull . . . (Beckett 2006: 378). MOUTH refers to this buzzing throughout and in such a way as to imply that it is a voice in her skull, transmitted by her mouth. 11. MOUTH is clearly not in control of the buzzing voice which she is transmitting. Further, she insists on the absence of any physical or emotional feeling. During the rst minutes of the play, she asks whether she is being punished and must suffer for her sins before asserting that she is not suffering after all (Beckett 2006: 377). Though she screams, she does so only in order to see whether such a thing is possible and what might come of it (Beckett 2006: 378). She does not know whether she is standing, sitting or lying down and merely presumes that her eyelids have continued to blink (Beckett 2006: 377, 378). 12. This element of Not Is construction should put one in mind of The Unnamable and Becketts question: What am I to do, what shall I do, what should I do, in my situation, how proceed? By aporia pure and simple? Or by afrmations and negations invalidated as soon as uttered, or sooner or later . . . Otherwise it would be quite hopeless. But it is quite hopeless (Beckett 2009: 285). Indeed, Knowlson reports: Asked further about the sources of Not I, Beckett referred questioners back to his own novel The Unnamable (Knowlson 1997: 590). 13. This is an experience recounted in Ruby Cohns description of Not I. As our concentration ags in the theatre, MOUTH and her words become for us an actual buzz and a ray (Cohn 1980: 20). 14. In his study of Bergson, for example, Deleuze notes: By means of this interval, something extraordinary is produced or embodied: creative emotion . . . a cosmic Memory, that actualises all the levels at the same time, that liberates man from the plane or the level that is proper to him (Deleuze 2006: 111). The importance of this interval or gap for Deleuzes conception of art encounters that force thought beyond its habitual bonds has been recently emphasised by both OSullivan (OSullivan 2006: 456) and ODonnell (ODonnell 2011: 223) to name only two writers who have inuenced this study.

References
Bair, Deirdre (1990) Samuel Beckett: A Biography, London: Vintage. Beckett, Samuel (2001) Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn, London: John Calder. Beckett, Samuel (2006) The Complete Dramatic Works, London: Faber and Faber. Beckett, Samuel (2009) Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, New York: Grove Press. Bogue, Ronald (2003) Deleuze on Cinema, New York: Routledge.

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