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Puppetry and the Destruction of the Object

Matthew Isaac Cohen

Published in Performance Research 12 (4): 119-27.

For all the violence in certain shows, many unfolded a drama about the care of puppets. It was as if they
wanted to make these creatures the guardians of a kind of love that was relentless, yet also relentlessly
vanishing. This came through only at moments, often in secret. One felt it in the way a puppet was cradled,
passed from hand to hand, and then bundled into a box; the way a nightshirt on sticks might tenderly touch
a living cheek, but then rustle shapelessly away; the way a gaudy rag was stuffed into or pulled out of a
hollowed doll-like head; the way a performer quietly took a bow beside a resting harlequin, or abandoned a
dead clown-puppet on a bier. The puppet thus seemed a thing subject to pain as well as reverie, entities
with bodies such as ours are, the ponderable form of spirit. The effect was often unintended, almost
accidental. It could betoken a lapse in technique, or a moment when technique was given over, when the
puppet’s thingness was more visible than its capacity to be animated. But this phantasm of care contributed
to a vision of things transformed: these performing objects were neither commodities, nor fetishes; they
were lucidly present, but subject to dream; possessions freed of possessiveness, precious, but easily set
aside, even trashed; sexual, yet without fixed gender; both weightless and grave, vehicles of an ancient
tradition, yet without solemnity; things subject to our playful remaking, but demanding an odd kind of
responsibility. These small things measured the size of the soul (Kenneth Gross, ‘Love among the Puppets’,
1997).

Puppets occupy an ambivalent position in traditional and modern performance cultures

around the world. Puppets are intimate and familiar objects associated with the world of

childhood play. Puppet characters inside and out of a performance frame are addressed

directly in warmly affectionate tones as ‘Brother Semar’ or ‘Mr Punch’ or ‘Big Bird,’

without explicitly acknowledging the mediation of the artists who craft and animate

them. Puppets are simultaneously objects of veneration, awe and sometimes fear that

occupy a potential space between the world of imagination and the world of actuality.

Digital puppets and avatars of the Internet restore antique magic to the world (Nelson

2001).

Light on the symbolic ambivalence of this class of performing object can be shed

by psychoanalytic object relations theory. As Kleinian analyst Marion Milner (writing

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under her pen name Joanna Field) describes in her seminal practice-based study, On Not

Being Able to Paint, art simultaneously mediates elements of the self and transfigures the

outside world. One has to be able to realise the other in one’s own terms, and also

maintain the autonomy of self and other. One of art’s major functions, in Milner’s

understanding, is providing a safe setting for the con-fusion of ‘me’ and ‘not me’ and the

indulging in reverie that such con-fusion engenders (Field 1957).

Puppets by their nature are material objects that con-fuse materiality and

imagination. Puppets can be construed as auratic and highly symbolic art objects with

autonomous existence. As Edward Gordon Craig recognised, puppets are eminently

artifices of the stage; like masks, they are emblems of theatricality and stylisation. The

aura of the performance event adheres to puppets in the performance aftermath,

potentiating their meaningful display in museums (see particularly Dircks 2004). Puppets,

in other words, are ‘not me’ and as what Gross (1997) calls ‘the ponderable form of

spirit’ with bodies commensurate to our own, puppets can communicate on their own

accord in the absence of direct human mediation.

At the same time, as most puppets abstract and caricature elements of reality, they

stimulate spectators and performers to fill in details in their imagination and project

expressive qualities upon the objects in motion. As Shaw states vis his late puppet play

Shakes versus Shav (1949), ‘their unvarying intensity of facial expression, impossible for

living actors, keeps the imagination of the spectators continuously stimulated’ (Shaw

1965: 916). Performers and audience conspire in performance to grant puppets the

illusion of life; in performances ‘co-created’ (Proschan 1987) by performers and

spectators, puppets take on the appearance of their own volition. Puppets are extensions
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of the body in a way closely related to how Marshall McLuhan describes mass media.

Puppets are devices for communication with an audience that amplify, distort, project and

focus a performer’s gestures (see particularly Mrázek 2005). Puppets are alien others and

closely associated with the person. They are ‘not me’ and also ‘not not me.’

The uncanny thingness of the puppet, its potent con-fusion of intimate familiarity

and alien otherness, grants it special purchase in coping with trauma and the vicissitudes

of social relations, taking over a psychic function assumed in childhood by solitary object

play. Erik Erikson tells us that ‘the microsphere—i.e., the small world of manageable

toys—is a harbor which the child establishes, to return to when he needs to overhaul his

ego’ (Erikson 1963: 221). The most famous example of this in the psychoanalytic

literature is, of course, the fort/da episode of Freud’s essay ‘Beyond the Pleasure

Principle’ (1963). Freud famously describes his 1½-year-old grandchild Ernest repeatedly

throwing away a wooden reel with a piece of string tied around it as a symbolic repetition

of the inexplicable goings away of Ernest’s mother. The passive becomes active and

mastery is thereby achieved. But this is not all, Freud observes. One might also describe

the throwing away as revenge upon the mother for going away. It was a non-verbal way

for Ernst to say ‘All right, then, go away! I don’t need you. I’m sending you away

myself.’

This sort of violence against the object or its surrogate is a normal means to

achieve social differentiation. Citing Oscar Wilde’s maxim that ‘each man kills the thing

he loves’ (Winnicott 1991), D.W. Winnicott theorizes that from infancy we fantasize

about destroying the internal objects we hold most dear (Winnicott 1971). According to

Winnicott, the infant’s recognition that ‘magical destruction,’ that is the fantasy of
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annihilating the object, does not result in the destruction of the actual person as the

beginning of objective perception. With this realization, the infant is now able to

distinguish between objects that are part of ‘me’ and objects that are ‘not me.’

The relation between the subject and the object is dramatized by Winnicott in

dialogue – of the sort that Adam Phillips calls ‘mock Punch-and-Judy dialogue.’

The subject says to the object: ‘I destroyed you,’ and the object is there to receive

the communication. From now on the subject says: ‘Hullo object!’ ‘I destroyed

you.’ ‘I love you. You have value for me because of your survival of my

destruction of you. While I am loving you I am all the time destroying you in

(unconscious) fantasy’ (Winnicott cited in Alford 2002).

Owning up to the guilt of destructive impulses toward the loved object is a critical step in

becoming ‘a fully integrated person’ who ‘takes full responsibility for all feelings and

ideas that belong to being alive’ (Winnicott 1986: 82).

Those of us who grew up on Sesame Street and Jim Henson’s Muppets delight

continually in the destruction of our childhood icons in adult puppet productions such as

Meet the Feebles, Peter Spears’ controversial film Ernest and Bertram, Greg the Bunny,

Avenue Q and a host of youtube-fuelled imitators. This destructive rampage will last as

long as the Muppets are loved. Behind the obsessive destruction of the Muppets is the

same impulse which causes teenagers to destroy Barbie dolls as a rite of passage marking

the end of childhood (Ward 2005). This sort of ruthless object use is prefigured in the

puzzling destruction of toy theatre described by Robert Louis Stevenson with the
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gastronomic metaphors of sucking honey and getting the marrow out of his beloved toys

(Stevenson 1895). Baudelaire, likewise, describes the perplexing enthusiasm children

take in destroying toys as ‘a way to see the soul of their toys.’ Baudelaire observes, just

as Winnicott tells us, that the destruction of the toy results initially in pride—’he is the

stronger’—which shifts into guilt or ‘the beginning of melancholy and gloom’

(Baudelaire 1964: 203). Baudelaire’s ability to integrate his melancholy, manifested as a

longing for lost objects, provides him with a ‘fixed point of reference’ that enables him to

write poetry (Billone 2001:288).

Winnicott extends his theory of the use of objects in one’s immediate social

environs to fantasies of destroying social institutions, including the British monarchy.

The king’s invulnerability to destruction (‘the king is dead, long live the king’) and the

monarchy’s survival despite constant testing are guarantees of the health of the political

system. Only a democratic system where people feel they can ‘turn a government out in a

parliamentary election or get rid of a prime minister’ (Winnicott 1986: 264) will freely

debate the destruction of the monarchy while simultaneously displaying great affection

for the royal family across various registers of expression.

In this line, debate on the survival of folk puppet theatres appearing to espouse

values out of synch with contemporary norms (whether the ‘feudalism’ of Javanese

wayang, or Punch’s apparent approbation of infanticide) and its simultaneous

embracement as symbols of national identity (represented in postage stamps, museums,

UNESCO awards) thus underlines the health of a political system. This sort of debate on

the social function of puppetry makes it useful for defining and thus defending human

rights. Only a robustly democratic society can celebrate the embarrassments of its
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residual culture; there was no little room left for Petrushka in the Soviet Union after the

Revolution (Kelly 1990). In debates of puppet survival, we see once again how

something ‘socially peripheral is so frequently symbolically central’ (Stallybrass and

White 1986: 5).

Puppetry Post-9/11

As an aside, take the uproar the followed the appearance of a poster with Osama bin

Laden and Sesame Street character Bert at an October 2001 pro al Qaeda rally in

Bangladesh. Similar imagery had been appearing since 1996 at the official U.S.-based

‘Bert is Evil’ website (now based at www.bertisevil.tv), showing Bert in the company of

Hitler and Klan leaders and arguing his implication in the Kennedy assassination with

little notice or attention.1 One tolerates parody in civil society. The appearance of Bert in

Bangladesh in October 2001, however, immediately roused antipathies and suspicion and

garnered national coverage in the U.S. on the one month anniversary of 9/11. CNN

concludes its news report of 11 October 2001 that ‘it is not clear whether the protesters

actually knew who the character Bert is, and what he means to U.S. children’ (CNN

2001). The implications of this post 9/11 statement are two-fold.

1. Islamic radicals display their ignorance of U.S. society through their arbitrary

collage of Osama and Bert. This might be considered a defence against fears that

Islamist groups had too much knowledge of ‘us’ and were capable of mounting

another attack based on this knowledge.

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2. Islamic radicals were intentionally targeting children through their use of a

Sesame Street character, thereby displaying their inhumanity.

Both rationalizations lack empirical support but smack of a rear guard attempt to shore up

a threatened sense of reality one month after 9/11.

The destruction of the World Trade Center was not an act of magical destruction,

but real. The soot and ashes that New Yorkers were inhaling literally as well as

figuratively undermined distinctions between ‘me’ and ‘not me.’ Hollywood had long

fantasized about the Twin Towers’ destruction and we had consumed this spectacle of

destruction. Living in Indonesia in the 1990s, I had grown accustomed to hearing anti-

American speeches and calls for jihad. I am not alone, I think, in my feelings of

complicity in 9/11 and guilt in not having done enough to prevent the carnage. In the

immediate aftermath of 9/11, many of us were in a state of psychic confusion due to the

actualization of our infantile fantasies of destruction of the object. Exegesis of the

outrageous pairing of ‘evil Bert’ and Osama alleviated this confusion and guilt by

replacing individual fantasy (‘I caused 9/11’) with equally fantastic, but culturally-shared

tropes of the brutal and ignorant Oriental critiqued by Said (1978). The poster served to

transform the inexplicable into the homely, as pointed out by one commentator in

October 2001.

In these unsettling times, when so much is unknown and we cannot understand

the hatred on these faces so far away from us, the appearance of Bert on these

posters is somehow comforting, and in a small way tempers our fear. Seeing Bert,
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it's as if a symbol of American childhood, of innocence […] has infiltrated these

posters, and in a time of loss of innocence and fear, that is no small comfort

(Hodes 2001).

The point of my aside has not been to condemn the cross-cultural appropriation of

puppets, nor to suggest that there is a right way or wrong way to symbolically destroy

objects. And I am certainly not intending to pose another explication about why a

Bangladeshi poster artist might have included Bert in his work. What I am saying instead

is that the anxiety evoked by the Bert/Osama poster indexes psychic confusion, and the

poster’s overly-quick exegesis is a gauge of how mediated representations of the Other

remain obdurate even in unsettling times. The unexpected appearance of Bert, in Gross’

words, ‘measured the size of the soul.’

Destructive Puppets for Adults

Puppetry’s distinction comes from the fact that its objects of performance are already

designed to be destroyed. The Queen may take personal affront to the attack on her

office, confusing her destruction as a symbolic object with an attack on her dignity as a

person. Puppets are by nature silent, and can be magically destroyed and magically re-

constructed in performance. Only puppet fetishists might protest against this ‘fair use’

practice. Much adult puppetry from Ubu to the present capitalizes on the puppet’s

destructive ontology.

Traditional puppet figures are fashioned with the understanding that they will be

subject to displaced symbolic violence; they are made to be destroyed in performance and
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return magically to life. The puppet representing Dorna, one of the chief antagonists of

the Pendhawa brothers in the Javanese version of the Mahabharata, the character

everyone ‘loves to hate,’ is sometimes torn limb-from-limb by spectators in wayang kulit

ritual dramas in a frenzied rebutan (struggle). Yet everyone knows that while the puppet

of Dorna might perish, the character will remain intact. Punch ‘professor’ Geoff Felix

tells me that the signs of past violence against puppets with wooden heads (cracks, chips,

fissures) actually improves them in a sense. They become less rosy and cheery, less like

toys and more attuned to their performative ontology.

The destruction of the puppet is not only an analytical concern, but also informs

artistic production. Edward Gordon Craig not only championed puppetry as a

rehabilitative force in human theatre, in the puppet plays he wrote around the time of

World War I he re-enacts the violence of the Great War. Craig’s Romeo and Juliet: A

Motion for Marionettes (1917), for example, depicts the gradual decomposition of

Romeo, who loses an arm, two legs and an eye in the play, and the construction of Juliet

as a person, who begins as a half figure with only a stick below the waist but ends the

play ‘fully developed’ with two feet and legs. The war brings destruction and ultimately

death to Romeo, while Juliet grows into a person who is a ‘dear, dear friend to everyone’

in the homosocial company of ‘girl boys and boy girls.’ The agency of puppets allows

Craig to deconstruct Shakespeare’s ideal of embodied romantic love and manifest his

own fantastic anxieties about the vampiric power of women. Craig’s School: An

Interlude for Marionettes ends with a class of public school boys being taught the value

of being non-committal by a pompous master being scattered helter-skelter by a charging

bull with all the ferocity of an exploding bomb (Craig 1929).

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The play of destruction has been an especially prominent theme in recent

puppetry-based visual art (Cohen 2007). Susan Hiller’s 1990-91 video installation An

Entertainment focuses on Punch to critique the gratuitous violence of English popular

culture. Paul McCarthy’s bloody automata and puppets likewise highlight alienation and

the absurd excesses of cruelty and abuses of power in politics and the media.

Fragmentary narratives and genealogies emerge to implicate viewers in shared fantasies

and repressed memories.

One of the most profound meditations on destruction and the puppet in recent

years is Jerk, a short hardcover book that on the surface resembles in size and feel the

Little Golden Books many of us collected as children, complete with a ‘this book belongs

to’ plaque in the inside cover. The book juxtaposes puppet conceptual art by Nayland

Blake that poses and stages attacks on store-bought toy puppets (including Wayland

Flowers’ Madame) with the story of a prison puppet show staged by David Brooks, one

of the accomplices of Texas serial killer Dean Corll, a.k.a. The Candyman. Brooks’ show

represents the rape and murder of boys and young men as a form of object animation.

Puppet master Corll uses the bodies of victims as instruments of performance. In a

running game Brooks plays with a fellow accomplice, one boy addresses the corpse while

the other provides the corpse’s voice. The book and the pictures are alternately amusing

and horrific, and maintain a moral detachment and casualness typical of pornography.

‘On-screen, Wayne is cutting off the boy’s fingers with pliers. Dean has one fist in the

boy’s butt, the other hand around the boy’s throat, and he’s sucking the boy’s limp cock

like they’re in love. The boy screams, or at least his mouth is wide open’ (Blake and

Cooper 1993: 42f).

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The book purposefully confounds academic analysis by ending with an essay

written by a psychology student in attendance of the puppet performance—an essay

intentionally burdened by sophomoric jargon and stylistic excess which received ‘a rather

paltry D’ from the course’s professor. (Ah, one sighs nostalgically, for the days before

grade inflation!)

Perhaps these crimes would have disappeared into abstraction had the puppeteer

not, at an irreversible moment of sexual energy, attempted to understand them,

and thereby awaken a childish response which refuses to yield to the formalist

unity he now requires of his art. For while puppets have emerged, they merely

confront his understanding with a hermeticism that is impossible to break open,

further decentering and fragmenting his thoughts as they draw to them the

emotion he believed he’d revoked, reanimating within their contagious parameters

a set of desires he would prefer remain hidden (Blake and Cooper 1993: 52).

The shift to academese artfully disrupts attempts to recuperate the book as a moral lesson.

We are prevented from integrating the vicarious destructive impulses we experience and

the feelings of guilt that we might have been entertained by the murders and perhaps

sexually aroused by sadistic representations. We are unable to take responsibility for our

feelings, and affirm that the destructiveness of Jerk belongs to ourselves. It is hard to

know which way is up: we lose our moral bearings. Blake and Cooper’s puppet show

haunts us for its hermetic invocation of a set of desires. Side-by-side with the narrative,

the store bought puppets in the photographs acquire a new set of meanings, reminding us
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of our own childhood perversions against objects and living beings treated as objects—

such as the time we tore the wings off an insect.

While Erikson tells us that the microsphere generally functions as a safe harbour,

‘the thing world has its own laws; it may resist reconstruction […] Often the microsphere

seduces the child into an unguarded expression of dangerous themes and attitudes which

arouse anxiety and lead to sudden play disruption. This is the counterpart in waking life

of the anxiety dream (Erikson 1963: 221). Jerk serves to reawaken childhood phobias of

the puppet by reminding us how easily we are seduced by puppets and objects. The book

demonstrates how susceptible we are to shedding morals when we no longer consider

people as fellow human beings but as body-things that can be manipulated and used

instrumentally to give form to private and shared fantasies.

Abuse photographs from Abu Ghraib show that puppets can also be puppeteers.

Prisoner-puppets are hooded, draped limply over railings, piled up in stacks, made to

pose with outstretched arms, and perform unspeakable acts. The puppeteer-guards

animating the bodies of prisoners re-enact their own initiation into the armed services.

The horror of Abu Ghraib lies in its legibility as an instance of a legitimately American

cultural form. It is a puppet show of an infantile fraternity initiation, a rite of passage

welcoming Iraq to the violence of mainstream America. The smiling puppeteers are

themselves puppets of mass media violence enacting a cultural script for our edification.

Objectification and dehumanization can occur not only in the secluded military

prisons of Iraq, but also in full view of civil society—as in the use of facilitated

communication (FC) in autism. In the now discredited technique of FC, ‘communication-

impaired clients are helped at keyboards by facilitators who brace the clients’ hands
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while they type’ (Wegner, Fuller and Sparrow 2003: 5). The underlying belief was that

children with autism were ‘endowed with a normal intelligence blocked by a cerebral-

palsy-like speech impediment’ (Schopler 1992). Though only introduced to the United

State in the late 1980s, by 1994, there were more than 50 allegations of sexual abuse

made through FC, mostly parents accused by facilitators of sexually abusing their

children (Berger 1994). Some facilitators might have cynically used their charges for

their own gain. But many, like Wilhelm van Osten, the trainer of the counting horse

Clever Hans, appeared unaware of providing subtle cues to be interpreted by their

charges. As Wegner, Fuller and Sparrow have shown in laboratory research, it is easier

than one might imagine for people to ‘lose the sense of authorship for their own actions

and attribute them to agents outside themselves’ (Wegner, Fuller and Sparrow 2003: 5). It

seems reasonable to describe the FC clients as puppets in the hands of facilitators, who

used them as performing objects to manifest destructive impulses against parents,

possibly surrogates for their own internal objects. In this reading, the puppet-clients

facilitated not communication, but rather the magical destruction of the facilitator’s

parents.

The adult puppet drama of destruction is not simply an expression of inner drives

and desires. Psychiatrist Harry M. Tiebout (1959: 611) comments that ‘only certain

elements in the Umwelt [thing world] are subject to manipulation and control.’ We might

extend this to note that entering the umwelt of puppets opens up the seductive possibility

of renouncing agency. The puppet-things can exert agency over people, the puppeteer can

become the puppet as social strictures are suspended and destructive strips of behaviour
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patterned into puppets are played out. The adult’s encounter with the puppet thus tests

moral mettle.

Dissimulation

Much performance theory has fetishized the ‘liveness’ of human-to-human interaction

and drawn artificial analytical boundaries between direct and mediated performance

(Auslander 1999). Puppetry, broadly conceived, is a form of mediated communication

that presents an object which appears to have independent volition between an actor-

animator and her addressee. Mediated performance of this sort has been suspect

politically and philosophically ever since Plato castigated seekers after the truth to stop

looking at shadow puppetry in his allegory of the cave. Yet puppetry has a capacity for

representing aspects of experience that elude human performance.

Acting is about truth, while at its core puppetry deals in dissimulation. Statesman

and philosopher Sir Francis Bacon in his 1597 essay ‘Of Simulation and Dissimulation’

provides a model for the sort of ludic dissimulation characteristic of puppetry. Bacon

recognizes that in the political sphere it is often necessary for one to hide and veil one’s

self. Dissimulation involves the process by which ‘a man lets fall signs and arguments,

that he is not that he is.’ While Bacon cautions that dissimulation is ‘but a faint kind of

policy or wisdom,’ I think it offers its own truths that serve human rights. As an art of

dissimulation, puppetry provokes us ‘to discover the mind of another. For to him that

opens himself men will hardly show themselves adverse; but will fair let him go on, and

turn their freedom of speech to freedom of thought. And therefore it is a good shrewd
 15

proverb of the Spaniard, Tell a lie and find a troth. As if there were no way of discovery

but by simulation’ (Bacon 1597).

In Indonesia, President Soeharto was widely believed in his lifetime to be the

wayang puppet of a powerful dhalang behind the throne. Nobody could be sure of the

identity of this puppeteer, surely contributing to Soeharto’s political longevity, but the

most popular candidate was his own wife, Ibu Tien. Soeharto, known to the West as ‘the

smiling general’ due to his implacable and enigmatic facial expression, presented himself

with gravitas to the Indonesian public favouring Javanese homilies and indirect

circumlocutions in his public addresses. Presidents before and since have tried to rally the

public through trust and belief. Soeharto never opened himself emotionally to the public,

a trait both admired as an instantiation of the traditional Javanese value of cool-

headedness and generally interpreted as a sign of his arch-dissimulation. When Tien died

in 1996, many believed that Soeharto would soon leave office. The prophecy was

fulfilled in 1998 through rioters and political protesters emboldened by the notion that

Soeharto was only a puppet without a puppeteer. The metaphor of Soeharto as wayang

justified his rule and contributed to his downfall. Through grappling with this metaphor

of Soeharto as puppet, the Indonesian people found a truth about its own ability to act as

a social body.

Dissimulation and political puppetry flourish in the absence of political

accountability and transparency of governance. The kathputli politicians of Rajasthan,

women hidden by veils who nod and gesticulate as their husbands give speeches in their

stead, are synecdoches for the lack of genuine representation in Indian politics more

generally: the concreteness of the dissimulation serves as the subject of a poster warning
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against political impostors, serving to awaken Rajasthanis to be vigilant against political

fraud more generally (Kumar 2005).

Similar lessons might be discussed regarding puppet politicians and their

constituents in the US, Europe, Latin America, and elsewhere.

Tell a lie and find a troth: in art, politics and life, actual puppets, symbolic

puppets, puppeteers, and puppet spectators play important roles in safeguarding,

undermining and defining human rights. Through this discussion, I have attempted to

bring some perspective onto the triadic relation of puppeteer, puppet and spectator to

demonstrate that puppets in performance can provide powerful lessons in how to deal

humanely with other people. Though destroyed in play and fantasy again and again,

puppets survive this destruction to allow us to take responsibility for emotions, ideas and

actions in society.
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Note
1
Subsequent reporting in the mainstream media and the Internet revealed that the

photoshopped image of Osama and Bert was first posted in 1998 at a mirror site of the

original Bert is Evil website hosted by a Dutch webmaster calling himself J-roen. This

website (http://www.j-roen.net/bert/) was taken down in October 2001.

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