The intellectual is a beautiful maggot–A Review of Ansgar Allen’s PLAGUE THEATRE

‘He observes every infringement of morality, every psychological disaster; he hears his body fluids murmuring within him; […] his organs grow heavy and gradually turn to carbon. But is it too late to avert the scourge?’ 

—Artaud, ‘The Theatre and Plague’

Once such a scourge as plague sets in, “aversion” cannot hold—the disintegration of social forms, the collapse of order, is potentialized in the very scenario of plague as an eventual locale. Order subsequent to plaguetime is a facsimile. The Damoclean “plague” is realisation of latent swelling, the imposition of black bile on a collective which had hitherto been able to suppress, distract from, or otherwise ignore erosion of homoeopathic structure. Plague neutralises essential acids, interferes with digestion and hydraulics, and pulls the curtain of state risk and outcome communication clean off a rotten rail.

A psychosocial terrorism of the will! Reframing the normal functioning of organic life within accelerated decomposition! Evolution of the organism!

What provides an illusion of growth is the “epidemic.” Plague promulgates decay in an arche-fashion: the character of plague is oriented towards a zenith before collapsing into minor peaks. In other words, plague is always becoming-decayed. Accelerationism is a social model of propulsion to a maximal point. Plague is a model of the decomposition of physical matter. Plague is not entheogenic, not poetic, not anthropocentric, but an impassive and mechanistic materialism, a materialism of indifference.

The invalidation of social forms is an inevitable consequence of plague-emergence—this is, of course, a human phenomenon. Social order is an imposition on plague, though we might mistake the inverse to be true. Pathologising plague involves a routing-into the swell, in order to deduce one of several plague orthographies from a mandala of possible symptoms. These constellations of plague materialism are the writing of plague, and since all writing evades univocation, enactments of virulence in discourse—discourse stratifies “plague,” while, at the same time, eroding the materialism of disease through the misnomer: “plague” is not plague; “plague” is a bacterial cause of symptoms.

This division between ontological plague—the becoming-decay—and epistemic “plague” authorises an analogy. Nothing has occurred, and everything is performed. Plague is theatre. Allen plots three occurrences along a line of historiographic plague literature: 1655—the Great Plague of London, as recorded in Defoe (born 1660), Journal of the Plague Year (1722); 1720—the “plague theatre” of Scarborough, a nonoccurrence of pure intentional plague-writing; and 1737—a landslip, the first actual occurrence. This line is subject to a translucent and Sebaldesque series of retellings and reintegration with indistinguishable narrative consciousnesses. To literalise is to monumentalise—Allen is more concerned with gesturing towards the potential for monument.

Images—documents—of this coagulation surface in certain passages: a gunboat bombards the empty ocean for two days; a whale decomposes; a dream occurs in which there is a coffin. Each image murders the arc—the conceit of “plague narrative” is that aspiration to return to a moment of enshrined civil life. There is no such thing in the wake of plague. A redeeming epidemic is one that enshrines a new radicalism, that infects with prescience, that increases fragmentation to a point where granules are so fine their breakage is imperceptible. Allen writes from that point—the point of plague → theatre.

© Elijah Young, 2023