The Absurdity of Existence: Transformed Roles of Consciousness and Sexuality in Artaud’s "To Have Done with the Judgment of God" and Oshii’s "Ghost in the Shell"

The absurd in the works of art can be expressed through multiple forms, including text, music, videos, and pictures among others. In order to examine how it is created in different types of media and compare the absurd as presented by two artists, two passages from Artaud’s To Have Done with the Judgment of God (pages 71-72) and Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell (47:49-49:54) were chosen. Artaud and Oshii examine the absurdity of existence, consciousness, and experience by using literary devices, such as repetitions, particular formatting, as well as cinematographic tools, namely montage and discrepancy between a character’s speech and the way it is depicted. Both artists apply sexuality, sex, and gender to create the feeling of absurd: Artaud questions their role, while Oshii deconstructs them. Artaud and Oshii do not provide the readers and viewers with direct explanations of the meaning of human existence, thus allowing to create it themselves (if it is at all possible). The absurd in the works of Artaud and Oshii is the overwhelming sense of uncertainty and anxiety when human consciousness is either reduced to ‘nothingness' or transformed through merging human and artificial bodies as well as minds.

Despite the drastic differences in background, medium, and style, both Artaud’s To Have Done with the Judgment of God and Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell tackle the same problem of human and inhuman experience, gender, sexuality, and mortality and their relation to the human body. In the movie and text, the absurdity of human existence and consciousness is emphasized and demonstrated via literary devices or cinematographic effects. Therefore, it is suggested to define some of these terms prior to the comparative analysis. According to Gavins, “the absurd as a literary phenomenon is an artistic expression of human beings’ inability to find inherent meaning in their existence” (1). American Psychological Association (APA) defines gender as “the attitudes, feelings, and behaviors that a given culture associates with a person’s biological sex”, whereas sex is defined as the "person's biological status" that is usually marked as "male, female, or intersex" (1).

Artaud’s creation of the absurd effect in relation to consciousness is enabled through various literary devices, such as repetition, answers to rhetorical questions, and paradoxes among others. For example, in the chosen passage, Artaud asks: “And what exactly is consciousness?” and answers: “We do not exactly know” (71). The absurd effect here is created with the word ‘exactly’ since it is difficult to know and explain in detail what consciousness is both from an artistic or a purely scientific point of view. Artaud intensifies the level of absurdity by suggesting a new answer that contradicts the previous one: “It is nothingness” (71). Thus, according to Artaud, people do know what consciousness is, even if it is nothing. At this point, Artaud’s consciousness that does not have any definition becomes similar to the way consciousness is presented in Ghost in the Shell.

One of the main protagonists, the sentient AI going by the name Puppet Master, defines consciousness as “life [that] is like a nodal point born in an overwhelming sea of information” (Oshii). When one of the characters argues that Puppet Master cannot be a thinking life form since his speeches cannot prove he is ‘alive’, Puppet Master parries the claim by saying that modern science cannot explain what life really is (Oshii). The sentence is highly similar to Artaud’s statement that people do not know exactly what consciousness is. In order to emphasize the absurdity of the scene, Oshii uses visual aids and montage. First, Puppet Master enters a dismembered body of a young woman that appears dead until he starts speaking. Second, Puppet Master has a male voice, which does not correspond with the sex of the young body Master uses. Oshii deliberately deconstructs Puppet Master’s gender identity by giving him both male and female features since “cyborgs… disrupt the binary separation of masculinity and femininity” (Schaub 91). Third, the body that Puppet Master inhabits practically does not move in any way when the sentient AI is speaking until the very moment Master says: "I am a living, thinking entity" (Oshii). It is difficult for the viewers to perceive Puppet Master as a living entity since he possesses all features of an AI commonly presented in the films: a monotone, ‘robotic' voice, vast baggage of knowledge gathered through ‘the Net', and lack of any expression or emotions. The whole presentation of Puppet Master is contradictive and absurd.

Both Artaud and Oshii use sexuality when constructing the absurd in their works, but whereas Artaud heavily leans on it to emphasize absurdity, Oshii deconstructs it to do the same. For example, Artaud compares the sexual desire and hunger to explain how human consciousness is produced: “It seems that consciousness is in us linked to sexual desire and hunger” (72). The next sentence negates the previous one: “but it could very well not be linked to them”, leaving the readers wondering what was it that Artaud wanted to say. Do sex and sexuality define the humans’ experience to some degree or do they not matter at all? Artaud says: “for that also occurs to be hungry without appetite” (72). The absurdity of human consciousness lies in its paradoxical nature, Artaud argues that it can have two or more contradictory states simultaneously or can shift from one another, for example, from desire to apathy, from sexual drive to pointless copulation that is ‘hunger without the appetite’.

In Ghost in the Shell, cyborg bodies and the ghosts (consciousness) inhabiting them also possess and merge in forms that seem contradictory by their whole nature. The sex and gender of cyborgs play a particular role there. Puppet Master is both sexless and genderless. The AI inhabits various bodies throughout the movie, from male to female, but it is impossible to determine what gender and sex the AI has since it does not operate in such terms. The audience’s understanding of what it is to be male, female, or any other does not apply to Master. As Schaub points out, the world in which Kusanagi and Puppet Master dwell makes no difference between organic life and technological intelligence, and it is a ‘post-gender' world (96). The absurd in Ghost in the Shell is the fact that the technology is becoming alive and sentient that can merge with others and even create an offspring despite not having any organs and even body for sexual reproduction. Without sex, gender, and body, the AI can only reproduce by merging with other bodies that still have features of an organic life (for example, the brain). However, the AI itself perceives humans as “the program designed to preserve itself” (Oshii). Puppet Master does not link sex to reproduction, as in its world, the former does not exist, while the latter can be done through data combination, which further increases the absurdity of the Ghost in the Shell world that is completely different from ours.

Since the absurd is the inability to find meaning in a human existence, it is possible that with the self-contradictive sentences, Artaud suggests the readers find the meaning (if any) by him/herself. Interestingly enough, Oshii also does not give any direct explanations about what is happening in Ghost in the Shell with Puppet Master and Kusanagi when they merge at the end of the movie. Oshii provides the viewers with the absurd paradox of consciousness with the help of Puppet Master’s dialogue. Puppet Master states that an individual is a person only since he or she possesses intangible memory; “memory cannot be defined, but it defines mankind” (Oshii). Both Artaud and Oshii show that the human experience is defined by ‘nothing'. The human mind can neither explain nor understand consciousness.

In my opinion, Artaud and Oshii want to demonstrate the same absurdity of existence using different means. For Artaud, life and consciousness are “the internal nothingness of my self” (73). I believe that this absurdity is expressed not only through the content but through the format as well. The lines in Artaud’s passage are short, disrupted, as well as dismembered, much like the bodies in Ghost in the Shell. The author makes suggestions and withdraws them, hence providing other interpretations of what it means to be conscious and alive that he also casts aside. I would define Artaud’s absurd as the feeling of constant unease, uncertainty, and madness that his text evokes. In Ghost in the Shell, the absurdity is created through the deconstruction of gender and the human body. With the fusion of organic life, artificial, and human intelligence, the very understanding of what it means to be conscious changes. Using montage, long shots that focus on Puppet Master's emotionless but engaging speeches, and destroyed bodies that are sentient, Oshii demonstrates the absurd I can interpret as similar to Artaud’s work. It also resides on the feeling of uncertainty and anxiety related to the world that is transforming itself and others, hence causing madness.

In conclusion, Artaud and Oshii demonstrate the same understanding of the absurd but utilize different media and tools to do so. The emptiness of human and non-human existence and the transformation of concepts of sexuality, sex, and gender are distinct traits of the absurd shown in To Have Done with the Judgment of God and Ghost in the Shell. The role of human consciousness is either reduced, or its own definition is completely changed. The transformed, absurd worlds leave the audience with the anxious urge to construct meaning, which is never discussed explicitly.

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