PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY VOL 3, NO 1 (2017):1–3 DOI: https://doi.org/10.21476/PP.2017.31169

ISSN 2057-7176

PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY

EDITORIAL

THERON SCHMIDT UNSW SYDNEY

This latest issue of Performance Philosophy is timed to coincide with the third biennial international conference for Performance Philosophy, hosted this year by the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, Czech Republic. So it is in Prague that I put the finishing touches on this expansive volume; and even though the content we publish here has been in preparation for some time, and has no causal connection to the conference themes, it nevertheless resonates with the core question posed by the Prague organisers: ‘How does performance philosophy act?’ (http://web.flu.cas.cz/ppprague2017/). This is a question that can be (and is being) engaged, well, philosophically, in all the diverse understandings of that term—but it is also a practical question, one that applies as much to the structures and configurations of things calling themselves ‘Performance Philosophy’ (with big Ps) as to those myriad individual acts of ‘performance philosophy’ that constitute the field.

Alice Lagaay, one of the Prague conference organising team—and also, with me and several others, one of the conveners of the research network—underscored this point at the conference opening: Performance Philosophy, the network, has so far chosen not to pursue a legally binding organizational structure (with a director, etc.), nor permanent alliance with a particular institution, but has instead formed itself as a networked model of affiliation and voluntary initiative. This has its weaknesses as well as its strengths, and we are always wary of what Jo Freeman (1970) called ‘the tyranny of structurelessness’; and so it is an issue that is regularly re-visited in gatherings such as this one in Prague. But for the time being, what characterises ‘Performance Philosophy’ is the condition of being collaborative, in-process, and under negotiation. No one person speaks on behalf of the network.

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The situation is somewhat different for ‘Performance Philosophy’, the journal, which depends on an editorial team, and the generous support of an international editorial board and expert peer-reviewers, to ensure a high quality of academic scholarship. But the journal also remains an experiment in working outside conventional structures—and therefore interrogating those conventions as conventions, as configurations to which we give our tacit consent when we work within them—in being open access, running on open source software, and not affiliated with a for-profit publisher or academic institution, so that authors retain full ownership of their work under the terms of a Creative Commons license.

However, one of the risks of networked, non-hierarchical structures is that the labour of individuals in maintaining them can become obscured and anonymised: so I want to acknowledge the work of my co-editors, Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca, Eve Katsouraki, and Daniel Watt, in guiding the open submission articles we publish in this issue through the process of peer-review and editorial crafting—and to thank the authors for their patience during this process. In their diversity of both objects of study and forms of approach, these articles demonstrate something of the range of ethical, ontological, and epistemological endeavours that the naming of a field of ‘performance philosophy’ can make possible: from a speculative manifesto on the ‘aliveness’ (as opposed to liveness) of performance (Alifuoco), to a theorization of violence through the Hebrew neologism ‘ha-Rav’ (Pimentel); from two different considerations of performance as a site for exploring the onto-ecological (Dimitrova) and political (D’Arcy) implications of technology and the non-human, to a practice-based exploration of phenomenological intersubjectivity in Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt (Montrose); and from an excavation of the performance philosophy of early 20th-century Croatian theatre director Branko Gavella (Petlevksi), to a search for Alain Badiou’s ethics of play in contemporary headphone performance (Dalmasso).

This issue also sees an expansion of the editorial team to include Will Daddario and Ioana Jucan, leading a new peer-reviewed section called ReView: an alternative to the conventional review structure, which emphasises the ‘re’ in review by calling for essays or creative responses to works/books/events that the author has already encountered at least once before. As with the [Margins] section (curated by Kélina Gotman) that is a recurring feature of the journal, ReViews can—and ideally will—utilize forms and modes of ideation that differ from the traditional essay or, in this case, book review. Not a review of a pre-existing work of scholarship or artistic expression, but, rather, a Re-viewing of an experience, the ReView puts forth the personality of the author who is winding his or her way through a particular repetition. Therapeutic encounter (Gough), Barthes’ personal voyage through the photograph (Wilson), neo-baroque grids (Nielsen): these are the epicentres of repetition one will encounter in this edition of the journal. (If you’re interested in submitting a future ReView, see performancephilosophy.org/journal/about/submissions#ReView for details on how to make a proposal.)

Finally, we are delighted that this issue also expands the collaborative nature of the journal by featuring a special section dedicated to a particular theme. Brilliantly conceived and guest-edited by Lucia Ruprecht, taking inspiration from a phrase from Mark Franko, this collection of articles thinks ‘Towards an Ethics of Gesture’, building on Giorgio Agamben’s Notes On Gesture (2000), but

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also diverse other sources, explored across a broad range of gestural forms (dance, film, protest, philosophical essay). Ruprecht’s introduction, which immediately follows this editorial, lays out the points of departure for this collection more fully.

This is the first of several forthcoming issues that will be dedicated to specific themes, including an issue on Philosophy On Stage: The Concept of Immanence in Contemporary Art and Philosophy that is in preparation for publication later this year, to be published simultaneously in English and German; and an issue on ‘Crisis’ next year, for which the call for papers is forthcoming. How does Performance Philosophy act? In an expanding and inclusive collaboration, we hope.

Works Cited

Agamben, Giorgio. 2000. ‘Notes on Gesture’. In Means Without End: Notes on Politics, translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, 49–60. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Freeman, Jo. 1970. “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.” http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

Biography

Theron Schmidt is a writer, teacher, and performer. He is one of the co-conveners of Performance Philosophy and an editor of this journal.

© 2017 Theron Schmidt

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY VOL 3, NO 1 (2017):4–22 DOI: https://doi.org/10.21476/PP.2017.31167

ISSN 2057–7176

PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY

INTRODUCTION: TOWARDS AN ETHICS OF GESTURE

LUCIA RUPRECHT EMMANUEL COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

‘The gesture is the exhibition of a mediality: it is the process of making a means visible as such. It allows the emergence of the being-in-a-medium of human beings and thus it opens the ethical dimension for them’, Giorgio Agamben writes in his ‘Notes on Gesture’ (2000a, 58).1 This special section of Performance Philosophy takes Agamben’s statement as a starting point to rethink the nexus between gesture and ethics. While both are bound together here, their association is not evident at first sight. What is an ethical gesture if we assume that ethics concerns a good ‘way of being, […] a wise course of action’, which is the Greek definition? Or, if we go with the moderns, when we take it that ‘ethics is more or less synonymous with morality’, with ‘how subjective action and its representable intentions’ relate to a ‘universal Law’, as in Immanuel Kant (Badiou 2001, 1–2)? What is such a gesture if we understand by ethics, with Alain Badiou, a specific relationship between subjective action and the extraordinariness of what this philosopher calls ‘the event’—that is, a ‘fidelity’ to particular, radical experiences of art, science, politics, and love (67)? What might a Levinasian gestural ethics look like, one that is grounded in the immediacy of an ‘opening to the Other’ which disarms the reflexive subject (19)? Gesture has indeed been described as an opening of the body beyond itself, as something that is often, or perhaps even necessarily, relational. In her Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude (2016), Adriana Cavarero develops a decidedly gestural ethic which is, as the title suggests, based on the posture of inclination: a bending of the body towards those who are vulnerable and dependent, and whose need of protection is as actual and given as that of a child. More generally, it has been argued that the body in gestures is ‘attracted by the world, by an already existing object, by the achievement of a future action that I can already perceive’, and so is suspended vis-à-vis its opposite at a distance that allows a specifically gestural ‘tension’ to ‘flourish’ (Blanga-Gubbay 2014, 125, 127). This implies that gesture often avoids touch—

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although it may not exclude it—and thereby foregoes the possessiveness of the haptic (Mowat 2016).

The ethical is tied to action and acting, to the ways in which one conducts one’s life.2 Despite its diverse conceptualisations in the history of philosophy, current understanding of the topic in cultural theory tends to rest on a distinction between moral codes and ethics, which has found one of its most acute formulations in the twentieth century in Michel Foucault’s genealogical project.3 James Laidlaw describes it succinctly:

Foucault distinguishes between what he calls moral codes—rules and regulations enforced by institutions such as schools, temples, families and so on, and which individuals might variously obey or resist—and ethics, which consists of the ways individuals might take themselves as the object of reflective action, adopting voluntary practices to shape and transform themselves in various ways […]. Ethics, including these techniques of the self and projects of self-formation, are diagnostic of the moral domain. (2014, 29)

The gestural, by contrast, seems to come into its own where it departs from what is usually considered manifest action, where it is taken out of the functionality of an ‘operational chain’ (André Leroi-Gourhan) to assume expressive or pantomimic power. Expressivity, however, is only one element of gesturality, and functionality can be handled creatively. As Asbjørn Grønstad, Henrik Gustafsson, and Øyvind Vågnes outline in the introduction to their recent collection Gestures of Seeing (2017), Vilém Flusser’s influential theory of gestures distinguishes between ‘good and bad gestures’ in relation to how they interact with a given apparatus, for instance the camera.4 Bad gestures, in this setting, follow the camera’s presumed rules; good gestures imply ‘the active resistance of the photographer to become a function of the apparatus she uses. The gesture of photography, then, is an effort of resistance against the apparatus (the program or code) by using it in ways not intended or imagined by its inventors’ (2). Agamben’s expanded use of the term apparatus thus seems to be in (unacknowledged) conversation with Flusser. He writes: ‘I shall call an apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions or discourses of living beings’; and Flusser’s effort of resistance returns in Agamben’s ‘hand-to-hand combat with apparatuses’ to bring back to ‘common use’ that which ‘remains captured and separated’ in them (Agambem 2009, 14, 17). By differentiating ‘good’ from ‘bad’ modes of technical interaction, Flusser declares photography to be an ethical (and indeed also philosophical) practice.5 He conceives of gesture as a ‘movement’ of good usage that cannot be ‘objectively explained by [its] purpose or function’: it ‘expresses the freedom to act and resist’, in order to ‘truly communicate’ (Grønstad et al. 2017, 1). ‘To understand a gesture defined in this way’, Flusser (2014) argues, ‘its “meaning” must be discovered. […] The definition of gesture suggested here assumes that we are dealing with a symbolic movement’ (3).

The gestures of photography will recede, in the following, behind those of film, dance, performance art, and philosophical discourse. But even if photography is not one of the central media in this enquiry, Flusser’s account of it advances our argument by thinking together expression,

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communication, and action: we do things with gesture. That which has been introduced above as gesture’s abstaining from (haptic) acting must, then, be qualified. As the following contributions will amply demonstrate, gesture—whether it is considered within or beyond the paradigm of expression—does not evade the act; it possesses an agency that might be called acting otherwise. It is in the forms, kinetic qualities, temporal displacements, and calls for response which this acting-otherwise entails that a gestural ethics takes shape. In other words, gestures can act ethically as they en-act what they name, even if their naming must always remain contested. Carrie Noland (2009) argues that a gesture is a performative: ‘it generates an acculturated body for others—and, at the same time, it is a performance—it engages the moving body in a temporality that is rememorative, present, and anticipatory all at once’ (17).6 As Rebecca Schneider will show, this temporality of gestural performance is also reiterative and citational, bearing a capacity for bringing back that which has been enacted before, but also enabling reformulation and difference. Focusing on gesture’s relationality, Schneider introduces a decidedly ethical slant to political discussions of reiteration.

Despite the fact that the contributors to this special section do not necessarily share the same definitions of gesture, a focus on the ethical potential of gestural acts as singular instances of physical, filmic and writerly performance unites their approaches. All of them tease out the ethics of the works and acts that they address: dances by Ted Shawn (Alexander Schwan) and Merce Cunningham (Carrie Noland), films by François Campaux (Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky), John Ford, George Stevens, and Clint Eastwood (Michael Minden), gestures of hail and of political protest (Rebecca Schneider), and gestures of philosophical criticism in Walter Benjamin (Mark Franko). Indeed, all authors also trace, what Laura Cull (2012) in her Deleuzian exploration of the immanent ethics of theatre calls, an ethical feeling of ‘respectful attention’ or ‘attentive respect’ in their various objects of enquiry (237). 7 Gesture emerges more broadly as the gesturality of dance or as a gestural mode of thinking and writing, and more narrowly, in specific instances of expressive or functional movement, or of movement that hovers at the cusp between the narrative and the non-narrative.

The following will both introduce the argument of each of the contributors and continue to develop some of the overarching questions posed by our collaborative investigation of the ethics of gesture—what it might mean, what it might look like, and what it might do. Along the way, I will discuss two highly gestural video installations by Danish artist Joachim Koester, The Place of Dead Roads (2013) and Maybe this act, this work, this thing (2016), which serve as performed commentaries on the questions at hand.

Gesture, Potentiality, and Act in Agamben

To return to Flusser for a moment: His pictures are produced by a photographer who communicates a subjective position in the shape of a philosophical idea by leaving a kind of ‘fingerprint’ on a surface (2011, 286). In Flusser, it is precisely the communication of this intention which turns the activity of taking a photograph into a gesture. He thus subscribes to a theory of expression that Agamben in his understanding of gesture actively negates. Rethinking entirely ‘our

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traditional conception of expression’ (2002, 318), Agamben’s gestures do not have any circumscribed intention. What they communicate is ‘communicability’ (2000a, 59), the dwelling in language of human beings. Agamben’s turn towards mediality in his ‘Notes on Gesture’ has been much discussed (see Grønstad and Gustafsson 2014), and will be productively reread and probed with regard to filmic, dancerly and critical performances in several of the following contributions. I will not therefore go back to the essay’s argument in any detail here, but will highlight one of its ethical concerns: that it is the emptying-out or, with Simone Weil, ‘decreation’ (Saxton 2014, 62) of meaning that frees gesture to become a carrier of potentiality; which is, in Agamben, the condition for ethical choice. ‘The point of departure for any discourse on ethics is that there is no essence, no historical or spiritual vocation, no biological destiny that humans must enact or realize’, he writes in The Coming Community (1993). ‘This is the only reason why something like an ethics can exist, because it is clear that if humans were or had to be this or that substance, this or that destiny, no ethical experience would be possible—there would be only tasks to be done’ (43).8

Where, then, is the place of the act in Agamben’s ethics of potentiality? In the epilogue to The Use of Bodies (2016), the ninth and final instalment of the Homo Sacer project, entitled ‘Toward a Theory of Destituent Potential’, Agamben explains the relation between potential and act in Aristotle:

Potential and act are only two aspects of the process of the sovereign autoconstitution of Being, in which the act presupposes itself as potential and the latter is maintained in relation with the former through its own suspension, its own being able not to pass into act. And on the other hand, act is only a conservation and a ‘salvation’ (soteria)—in other words, an Aufhebung—of potential. (267)9

The operationality of Aristotle’s ‘potential/act apparatus’ (276), however, must be interrupted to reach the destituent potentiality towards which Agamben’s epilogue is geared. What does Agamben mean by destituent potentiality? He uses the term ‘destituent’ for grasping the paradoxical nature of ‘a force that, in its very constitution, deactivates the governmental machine’ (2014, 65). This force does not simply destroy a power or a function, but liberates ‘the potentials that have remained inactive in it in order to allow a different use of them’ (2016, 273). He conjures up a situation where potential becomes a ‘constitutively destituent’ ‘form-of-life’ (277):10 a ‘properly human life’ (277) from which, quoting Spinoza, a ‘joy’ is born, where ‘human beings contemplate themselves and their own potential for acting’ (278). Agamben links destituent potentiality to a process of rendering inoperative or neutralising operations in order to expose them, which is echoed in the emptying-out of meaning that frees gesture to appear as such, and to become a carrier of potentiality. Such destitution attempts to think an act that does not act, or a non-act that acts: a (de)act(ivat)ing, perhaps; or an acting-otherwise.11

The destituent is connected in Agamben to the advent of various kinds of newness. With reference to Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’, the new emerges in the shape of the ‘proletarian general strike’ (269): ‘“on the destitution [Entsetzung] of the juridical order together with all the powers on which it depends as they depend on it, finally therefore on the destitution of state violence, a new historical epoch is founded”’ (268). With reference to Christ’s deposition from the cross, the new emerges in the shape of redemption: ‘in the iconographic theme of the deposition […] Christ has

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entirely deposed the glory and regality that, in some way, still belong to him on the cross, and yet precisely and solely in this way, when he is still beyond passion and action, the complete destitution of his regality inaugurates the new age of the redeemed humanity’ (277). With reference to the imagined politics that is intimated at the end of The Use of Bodies, destitution emerges, finally, in the shape of a ‘constituted political system’ that embraces within itself ‘the action of a destituent potential’, for which

[i]t would be necessary to think an element that, while remaining heterogeneous to the system, had the capacity to render decisions destitute, suspend them, and render them inoperative. […] While the modern State pretends through the state of exception to include within itself the anarchic and anomic element it cannot do without, it is rather a question of displaying its radical heterogeneity in order to let it act as a purely destituent potential. (279)

The vocabulary of contemplation, exposure, and display that informs the preceding discussion leads us back, then, to the realm of the ethics of (gestural) art, which (together with politics, in Agamben) names ‘the dimension in which works—linguistic and bodily, material and immaterial, biological and social—are deactivated and contemplated as such in order to liberate the inoperativity that has remained imprisoned in them’ (278). Inoperativity is associated with the energies of ‘anomie’ and of an ‘anarchic potential’ (273), that which is without law, command or origin; that is—to draw on Agamben’s gestural understanding—without pre-given meaning.12

Gestural acting-otherwise certainly includes strategies that, by making given gestural routines inoperative, opens up a space for experiment, improvisation, reflection, and the new. While anarchic and anomic elements—from the resignification to the running wild of gestures—do appear in the following case studies, acting-otherwise is only partly characterised by such excessive forms of inoperability. Often, subtler ways of modifying the operative continuum will come to the fore, such as: the detaching of gestures of violence from their usual ends, as in Koester’s The Place of Dead Roads; the delicate filmic defamiliarisation, through slow motion, of the process of applying a brush stroke, as Deuber-Mankowsky shows; or the rhythmical punctuation of the continuum of thought with caesuras in Benjamin’s ‘physiological’ style, as traced by Franko. Noland’s suggestion to consider gestural agency as ‘differential rather than oppositional alone’ is path-breaking here, as it allows us to study ‘a whole range of deviations from normative behaviour—from slight variation to outright rejection—while simultaneously construing the normative as equally wide-ranging in its modes of acquisition’ (2009, 3).

Gestural Acting-Otherwise

Alexander Schwan’s essay ‘Ethos Formula: Liturgy and Rhetorics in the Work of Ted Shawn’ (2017) opens this special section by exploring forms of gestural normativity and ‘spiritual vocation’ that fall to the wayside in Agamben’s gestural ethics. Addressing how such gestural normativity is not only acquired, but passed on through ethical attitudes ‘encoded’ in movement patterns, Schwan turns to the other side of Agamben’s self-reflexive modernism, exemplified by Ted Shawn’s

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liturgical dances. With a head-nod in the direction of Aby Warburg’s pathos formulae, Schwan suggests using the term ‘ethos formulae’ for postures and gestural routines which are ‘motivated by decision-making rather than emotional content’’, while still retaining a relationship with a form-giving or task-setting law. Shawn’s choreographic aesthetics—or in fact, ethics—is set within the greyzone between liturgy and modernist dance and thus proves to be a rich ground for ethos formulae. Influenced both by François Delsarte’s nineteenth-century system of gestural meaning-making and his own Methodist background, Shawn’s choreographic ‘decisions’ were guided by the gestural ‘tasks’ which they carried out, and the codifications which they performed. If gestures, as has been argued above, can act ethically as they en-act what they name, Shawn made sure that this ‘naming’ remained recognisable:

Standing upright and having his hands folded in front of his solar plexus, he opened his arms slowly and symmetrically, raising them to a point where his fingers still pointed to the ground and his open palms reached towards the audience in a gesture of devotion, greeting and blessing. (Schwan 2017, 32)

Moving from the gestural rhetoric of liturgy to that of the Western, forms of generic recognisability are at stake in Michael Minden’s essay too. His ‘Ethics, Gesture and the Western’ (2017) begins with a brief discussion of Koester’s The Place of Dead Roads, which I would like to address in more detail before turning to Minden’s argument. Koester’s installation presents a group of four androgynous dancers in nineteenth-century cowboy gear who are engaged in an apparently involuntary, almost feverishly obsessive pantomimic reenactment of the stock postures, gestures and moves of the Western genre: they eye and circle each other chins down, launch into chimeric gun battles, revolve as if lassoing, bounce as if riding a horse, convulse as if being hit by a bullet or even ‘step-dance as if having their feet shot at in the saloon’ (Börcsök 2017).

Sometimes, the recognisability of their moves is not so much a matter of the latter’s mimetic shapes than of their ‘effort quality’, to use Rudolf von Laban’s term: it is with abruptness that the dancers swing around or stop and start movement sequences, reminding us of the hypervigilance and the speedy reactions of gunfighters. One description speaks of a deconstruction of the Wild West’s ‘ritualised gestures’ (Camden Arts Centre 2017), pointing up the fact that the choreography (which was created by Koester together with the striking performers Pieter Ampe, Boglárka Börcsök, Liz Kinoshita and Halla Olafsdottir) takes generic gestures out of their embedding in a plot structure. It also takes them out of their usual gender assignment, as each

Image 1: Joachim Koester, The Place of Dead Roads (2013). HD Video installation [33:30 min] (Boglárka Börcsök, Liz

Kinoshita, Halla Olafsdottir).

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dancer enacts a vocabulary that would be considered largely masculine within the genre-framework. At the same time, displacements of genre vocabulary across body parts produce cross-over genderings: the circling wrist movement of (a man’s) lassoing returns in the undulations of a woman’s hips. For Noland, gesturality consists not least in the fact that ‘movements of all kinds can be abstracted from the projects to which they contingently belong’, so that, ‘accordingly, they can be studied as both discrete units of meaning and distinct instances of kinesis’ (2009, 6). Koester’s video installation incites this kind of study. Detached from their sites and props, from their usual operationality and from narrative context, his gestures are performed in a space that is similarly abstracted, segmented by loosely mounted wooden walls which suggest make-shift cabins. The soundscape is denaturalised, amplifying the inhales and exhales of breath, the shuffling of feet, and muffled blows. A form of muffling also affects the field of the visual, with the dancers moving in and out of shallow zones of focus, and even moving in and out of camera frames, as if each medium shot defined a new stage-like square.

If the physical vocabulary of the Western is thus derealised and exposed in its dance-like gesturality, the mechanically repetitive performance of the dancers also exhibits the automatism with which gestural regimes enter bodies, especially when automatic reaction is a matter of survival in violent encounter. Koester refers to such automatisms when speaking of a gestural move that he and the performers called the ‘electric gun’, which they defined as an ‘electric current connected to holding a gun which would cause the hand, the arm and sometimes the whole body to shake and vibrate’ (Koester 2017b). Not only are bodies shown to be radically immersed in and driven by their motor actions, we also get the impression that many of their strategic moves are always already infected by the tremors of combat trauma. This automatic gesturality undergoes subtle changes in the course of the film, which is looped indefinitely in the gallery space. Sequences where the dancers perform the expected (if defamiliarised) score build up towards less painstakingly executed, less obviously scripted and more anarchic passages. Described by Koester as instances of a ‘happy dance’ that ‘can be seen as an attempt to end the spell of historic violence’ (2017a), these sequences constitute passages of unleashed gestural force, moments of gestural recovery which at the same time resemble gestural crises. Agamben’s fairly clear-cut dialectic of gestures lost and regained (see Agamben 2000a) is complicated here: While the bodies of the performers are bound up within functioning representational patterns as long as they follow the guiding rhetoric of the Western, they are performed by the gestural vocabulary which they use; once they start performing their own gestures, they cease to signify.

In an essay on contemporary Flemish dance, Rudi Laermans (2010) describes such passages into non-signification with recourse to Agamben as a foregrounding of ‘the body as a medium of non-verbal expressivity that becomes notable as such only when the will to express something is hampered by the very same body’ (411).13 This aesthetic of ‘gesturing dance’ variously discloses ‘the performing body as a failing medium of expressivity’, one that paces out ‘the very limits of the body as a medium of communication and representation, while still not giving up an underlying sense of humanism’, or focuses on ‘the borderline zone where physicality becomes expressive but does not yet fully represent something. The very presence of the moving body then crosses out its unavoidable “being in representation” when performing in front of an audience’ (411–412). The

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Place of Dead Roads belongs on this terrain of gesturing dance. Its choreographic oscillation between representationality and non-representation thrives in the liminal spaces between the operative and the inoperative, the scripted and the non-scripted. It derives its ethics from the attentiveness and the reflectiveness with which it crosses from one side to the other, or lingers on the various degrees of entanglement between the two.

It is important to note that the muscular reactions, which have entered the bodies’ neurophysiological set-up and form their motoricity, are tied in Koester’s video installation to a history of violence. By mimicking, rather than enacting, aggressive and defensive moves—‘the performers never touch the revolvers they wear, despite their obsessive miming of the gestures of aiming, shooting etc’., writes Minden (2017, 40)—by in fact turning functionally motivated movement into gestural movement, this history of violence is placed at one remove, and finally interrupted when the dancers slip into non-signification. What returns at this point is a gestural acting-otherwise that abstains from launching into the fully-fledged haptics of (violent) action. No longer-operational movement is put to new use as gesture. The ethico-critical impact of Koester’s work, then, participates in a genealogy that goes back to Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin. In her recent rereading of the second version of Benjamin’s essay on Brecht’s epic theatre, Judith Butler emphasises how gesturality, in this tradition, can be defined as abstention from violent deed. Butler focuses on a scene which Benjamin uses to explain how interruption becomes a precondition for the production of gestus, and thereby for discovering—in the sense of relearning to see, and possibly change—the ‘conditions of life’ (Benjamin 1982, 152). It is a scene from the stock elements of melodramatic middle-class family drama in which the sudden entrance of a stranger prevents the mother from hurling a bronze bust at her daughter, and the father from calling a policeman from the open window. ‘Benjamin stops the scene quite suddenly’, Butler (2015) writes,

giving us only the gesture, the frozen image, but not the act of violence itself. The gesture, then, functions as the partial decomposition of the performative that arrests action before it can prove lethal. Perhaps this kind of stalling, cutting, and stopping establishes an intervention into violence, an unexpected nonviolence through an indefinite stall, one effected by interruption and citation alike. In other words, the multiplication of gestures makes the violent act citable, brings it into relief as the structure of what people sometimes do, but does not quite do it—relinquishing the satisfaction of the complete act for what may prove to be an ethos of restraint [my emphasis], if not a critical act of nonviolence. (41)

Minden observes such an ethos of restraint in the John Wayne character’s iconic lifting of his niece towards the end of John Ford’s The Searchers, characterising it as a gestural moment ‘in which a stronger person forbears from violence’ and ‘dominance’ (42). While literally stalling or foregoing cruelty, moments like these also reflect back on gesturality as such, drawing attention to its foregoing of the (possibly violent) act. But Minden also addresses violence head-on. He joins Agamben in thinking about gesture as a formal frame for communicability, and he relates this to the similar function of genre. Even though few genres might be more ‘generic’ than the Western, Minden argues, genre here does not necessarily mean ‘destiny’ (Agamben 1993, 43). Therefore, it

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does not have to be broken or ‘subverted’, but should be considered a potentiality within which there are spaces for ethical reflection. If genre thus provides the conditions for communicability—for telling a story—its exposure of its own narrative structures draws our attention to its intrinsic ethical potential. As Minden shows, such an instance of exposure—or ‘exploitation’ (46)—of genre at the climax of Clint Eastwood’s 1992 Unforgiven opens violence to philosophical reflection by making ‘explicit’ and leaving ‘unresolved’ the Western’s ‘violent payback’ formula (David Foster Wallace cited in Minden 2017, 48). To come back to Agamben’s wording in The Use of Bodies, the incommensurate or exceptional quality of the violent bloodbath that takes place at the end of Unforgiven—its ‘anarchic’ and anomic nature—is removed from its inclusion/exclusion within the establishment of justice, to be displayed in ‘its radical heterogeneity’. Its ethical appeal then consists in the fact that it acts indeed, despite its manifest nature, ‘as a purely destituent potential’ (2016, 279). Fulfilling with hyperbolic excess and thereby at once remaining within and deactivating generic demands, haptic violence itself becomes gestural.

Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky’s essay ‘The Paradox of a Gesture, Enlarged by the Distension of Time: Merleau-Ponty and Lacan on a Slow-Motion Picture of Henri Matisse Painting’ (2017) leaves Agamben behind, to address little-discussed gestural thinking in Lacan, in juxtaposition to Merleau-Ponty and Benjamin. Deuber-Mankowsky provides a close reading of Merleau-Ponty’s and Lacan’s reactions to a slow-motion sequence of Matisse painting, shot in 1946 by François Campaux. Addressing how Merleau-Ponty and Lacan read the minute hesitations of Matisse’s hand, Deuber-Mankowsky argues for a gestural ethics that is rooted not so much in the phenomenological body (as in Merleau-Ponty) or in the self’s implication in its foundational relationship to a ‘gesturally’ organic unconscious (our relationship ‘to the organ’ [62], as in Lacan), but in the experimental setting of the filmic medium: Benjamin’s technologically enhanced ‘room for play’ (Spielraum). This room for play is characterised less by resistance against or combat with the apparatus, as in Flusser and Agamben, but by the latter’s use as creative and heuristic tool. Theodor W. Adorno, Deuber-Mankowsky reminds us, took the technological dimension of this room for play seriously, and saw its influence on literature too. He criticized Benjamin for linking it, in his work on Kafka, to a Brechtian theatrical aesthetic rather than a cinematic one. Adorno himself thought of Kafka’s gestures as akin to the aesthetic of the silent movie (see Adorno 2001, 70), situating them in the historical context of a modernist crisis of representation that was perceived to be marked, not least, by a ‘dying away of language’. The specific animation or life-force of Kafka’s gesturality, Deuber-Mankowsky argues, thus appears to be infused with the technological energy of media of reproduction, whose ‘rhythm […] reappears in gesture as a trembling’ (63). Think, for instance, of the quivering élan of ‘Desire to be a Red Indian’ (Wunsch, Indianer zu werden), or of the larger oscillations of the two ‘gestural’ celluloid balls in ‘Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor’ (Blumfeld, ein älterer Junggeselle), pointing up the dynamic (and material) quality of the filmic medium.14

Gesture, here, becomes one of the fulcra of media change, and it is its very embodiedness that allows it to do so. In the case of Kafka, literary gesturality achieves a seismographic quality, one which is reflective not only of the fact of a media revolution, but also of this revolution’s not yet entirely firmed-up technicity; of a rhythm that is not yet always, and in every instance, effortless. The typically mechanical quality of the gestures that Kafka observes, that he notes down in his

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diaries, and that serve as inspiration for the bodily conduct of his protagonists often gives rise to the impression that its functionality is in danger. In his Paris travel diary of 1911, Kafka (1964) describes a man and two women in a hotel lobby: the man’s ‘arm continually trembled as if at any moment he intended to put it out and escort the ladies through the centre of the crowd’. A few pages later we read about the less formal etiquette of the brothel visit—where a gap-toothed ‘[girl]’ was ‘[a]nxious lest I should forget and take off my hat’ (456, 459). In his diary accounts of social gestures, Kafka notices moments where codes of conduct draw special attention to themselves. They are not naturally enacted—or avoided—but affected by a specific kind of stress that bears on the potential of social automatisms to fall out of kilter at any moment, making inoperative too, perhaps, the conventionalised ‘busy-bodyness’ (Santner 2015, 102) which they sustain. Butler considers this a kind of psychosocial dysfunction with an implicit potential for transformation when she writes:

for the most part mechanical tends to be associated in popular language with automatic, yet every mechanism has within itself the possibility of not quite working as smoothly as it should. So though the mechanism is governed by the reproduction of social relations through the reproduction of the subject, there is sometimes “play” in the mechanism, which means that it can veer in a different relation, or it can, indeed, fall apart and fail to reproduce in the way for which it is designed. Most of Kafka’s efforts to treat the mechanical foreground this constitutive possibility of breakdown, or malfunction. (Butler 2015, 23–24)

Technicity, in this context, is not just an indicator of shaky or alienating rationality, or of hyper-intellectual ‘cybernetics’, as in Merleau-Ponty. The technical is also defined by a ‘productivity’, as Deuber-Mankowsky writes, which ‘revolutionizes not only perception, but the very relation between the subject and knowledge’ (62).

Koester’s video installation Maybe this act, this work, this thing, showcases this immense promise of a filmic room for play, but also a sense of limitation or malfunction in the shape of a certain gestural stress. Maybe this act is set in the very same turn-of-the-century media revolution, as the writing of Benjamin and Kafka. It features two dancers whose costumes indicate their association with the vaudeville tradition in a stylised way, reenacting rather than reconstructing the slightly worn glamour of pre-twentieth-century performance practitioners. Koester’s film, the descriptive material argues,

conveys the advent of cinema through the bodies of vaudeville performers. Mimicking the apparatus of a new world that threatens their livelihood as stage actors, they simulate shutters of cameras and projectors, quivering electricity and the whirring celluloid. Their movements are amplified by the sounds of their heels hoofing, limbs shuffling and voices muttering with a sense of desperate urgency that echoes the cultural revolution that dawned with the film industry. (Camden Arts Centre 2017)

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Despite this situation of endangerment, the choreography also conveys that the unfamiliar, different and expanded gesturality of the apparatus enters the body in creative ways; it is productive of a new kinaesthetic. Maybe this act is performed by Boglárka Börcsök and Zeina Hanna, and choreographed by Liz Kinoshita (both Börcsök and Kinoshita were also involved in The Place of Dead Roads). Börcsök’s webpage includes an early draft by Koester that suggests a séance in which the performers become spiritualistic ‘media’ for the new medium of film: ‘They are channeling the spirit(s) of the newly developed cinematic apparatus, miming the machine, embodying the machine. As the spirit(s) enter they are transformed into cogs and wheels and moving belts. […] Their movements are accompanied by occasional moaning; like squeaks of metal and sizzling of hard rubber’ (Börcsök 2017). Over the course of its creation, however, the performance began to incorporate more agency: the performers, Koester writes, are in fact ‘working on a new act in a dimly-lit theater’ (STUK 2017), and do not seem to be in a permanent state of possession, but of fine-tuned perceptiveness and concentration. We are witnessing a rehearsal situation, where the dancers are trying out poses—maybe this one, maybe that—whispering to themselves, ‘marking’, that is, suggesting gestural movement sequences instead of performing them to completion. Rehearsing and working-towards become the (ethical) act in this video installation. More casual, explorative passages are set off against more frantic ones; routines are occasionally metaphorical—such as a short tap dance section, or a brief gesture of introduction, hands on lapels, mouth whispering ‘here we are’—but more often metonymic—in other words, suggesting a contiguity between body and filmic apparatus—shoulders shuddering, fingers flickering, forearms cutting squarely through the air. If Adorno (1996) writes pessimistically in Minima Moralia of technology’s impact on our ‘most secret innervations’, that it is making gestures ‘precise and brutal’, expelling from movements all ‘hesitation, deliberation, civility’ (40), Koester opens up a counter-vision, ‘an alternative space of possibility through technologies, bodies and minds’ (STUK 2017), which is a space of gestural room for play.

The movement of the camera is highly perceivable here, sometimes giving the impression of swinging back and forth in a slightly wonky way, as if attached to the pendulum of a huge clock which both keeps time and is dizzied by its change. Koester explains that he and the dancers wanted the camera to be like a ‘third performer’ so that ‘sometimes the cinematographer would move as much as the performers themselves’, filming ‘360 degrees’. ‘This eliminated the feeling of a privileged direction and created the impression that the performers were not only “looking for an act”, but also “for an audience”’ (Koester 2017b). Media competition becomes a form of not-

Image 2: Joachim Koester, Maybe this act, this work, this thing (2016), HD Video installation [20:00], checkerboard

floor. (Zeina Hanna)

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quite-settled media cooperation, reflecting back on the historical moment at the beginning of the twentieth century, but also pointing up the capacity and élan of screendance in the gallery space. Dance’s modification by filmic intervention, that is, should not be considered under the sign of loss (of liveness, presence, and immediacy), but as the beneficial result ‘of a particular kind of longing for kinesthetic stimulus that emerges from the space of optical media’, as Douglas Rosenberg puts it (2012, 14–15). Optical media allow us, not least, to observe gesture from great proximity, and to do so repeatedly. They enable an enhanced kind of perception and a specific kind of attentiveness, generating an echo in the viewer of the dedicated focus of the performers on the new kinetic world of the apparatus.

In light of the preceding remarks, an ethics of gestural acting-otherwise can be further specified as appearing in a situation that is suspended between the possibility of malfunction and the potential of room for play. We might talk of a gestural ethics where gesturality becomes an object for dedicated analytical exploration and reflection on sites where this gesturality is not taken for granted, but exhibited, on stage or on screen: in its mediality, in the ways it quotes, signifies and departs from signification, but also in the ways in which it follows a forward-looking agenda driven by adaptability and inventiveness. Noland’s essay ‘Ethics, Staged’ (2017) returns to these questions when asking: ‘What do dance gestures expose that ordinary gestures do not? Why would such an exposure be “ethical” in Agamben’s terms? And why would (his notion of) the ethical rely on a stage?’ (67). One answer to these questions is Agamben’s emphasis on the value of contemplation, on the above-cited ‘joy’ of ‘human beings’ who ‘contemplate themselves and their own potential for acting’ (2016, 278). This emphasis on self-reflection and potentiality might be challenged, of course. Cavarero—without engaging with Agamben—does so by developing her ethics of the inclined posture from the immediate givenness of a ‘sure and practical love, so everyday and spontaneous that it does not express signs of suffering or self-sacrifice, and even less of excessive self-awareness’ (2016, 174). Noland’s essay, in turn, scrutinises Agamben, bringing to the fore how the ‘gesturality’ of gesture is exposed, on stage, and in dance; and furthermore, how such exposure, while carrying ethical potential, cannot ever be exclusively ‘pure’.15

This reading is especially provocative as it focuses on the major proponent of twentieth-century ‘pure dance’, choreographer and dancer Merce Cunningham, through the 2016 reconstruction of his 1964 choreography, Winterbranch. Noland critically engages both with the tenets of Cunningham scholarship and with Agamben’s mediality of gesture by writing ‘[a] means is never pure […] it can in fact never be exposed as “an end in itself”’ […] the means is itself mediated by what it bears’ (72). Rereading Agamben’s analysis of pornography, Noland questions the idea that Agamben ‘opens the ethical dimension […] at the point where communication is lost’. Instead, she argues that he does so

at the point where saying ‘something in common’ (the clearly legible pornographic gesture) and saying ‘nothing’ (the gesture interrupted, exposed as a gesture) occur simultaneously. […] He points us toward that ambiguous point where a narrative unfolds and yet that narrative is suspended, revealing a ‘stratum’ ‘not exhausted’ by a narrative […], a point where the communication is interrupted, yet still ‘endured’. (72)

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Noland locates the ethics of Winterbranch precisely at this point—the choreography ‘practices an ethics of gesture insofar as it suspends movement between an “impure” manifestation (“passion for her”, “anger against him” [Cunningham quoted in Noland 2017, 73]) and raw human kinesis imagined as a “pure” support’.

Noland’s essay also demonstrates that strategies for the exposure of gesturality go beyond Brecht’s and Benjamin’s emphasis on interruption, still very present in Butler’s engagement with a stalling ‘ethos of restraint’ (2015, 41). Noland singles out, for instance, the modifications of one of Winterbranch’s partnering movements, where a female performer rolls in a deep arch across the bent back of a male performer, while the front of her body is exposed. Depending on the style and speed of its execution, this movement, which is based on the relation of weight between two people, exposes its gestural potential by creating impressions ranging from protectiveness to possible crash. When executed carefully, however, it draws out nuances of ‘kinaesthetic awareness’ (Brandstetter 2013)—of how it might feel to perform a movement—which might be re-imagined in an equally kinaesthetic sense by an audience who tunes into the dancing on stage (also see Reynolds 2007 and Foster 2010).

Mark Franko’s essay, ‘The Conduct of Contemplation and the Gestural Ethics of Interpretation in Walter Benjamin’s “Epistemo-Critical Prologue”’ (2017), observes an equally kinaesthetic (and ethical) sensibility in Benjamin’s style of thinking and writing. Franko is concerned with the gestural quality of literary and philosophical interpretation, with the ‘rhythm’ and ‘relative velocity’ that structure ‘the operations of critical attention’ (91) which Benjamin describes in his prologue (Vorrede) to The Origin of German Tragic Drama (Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels). Benjamin is addressing his own method here, and Franko shows how this method is defined by a discontinuous temporality. Meticulous in its detours, it is marked by the intermittency of breathing, and by the stops and starts of turning towards and stepping back from the object of study.16 Gesturality, in this case, is less a matter of content than of mode, of the temporal and spatial choreography of what Franko calls the conduct of contemplation.17 Franko argues that the ethics of such conduct lies in the ‘essential rapport’ and ‘performative relation […] with the interpretive content of the analysis and, hence, to the artwork or works under scrutiny’ (91)—in our example, German baroque drama. The sequentiality of contemplation that ‘always encounters its own death in and as expired breath’ thus adapts to the broken historicity of baroque drama as mourning play, which is fragmented by ‘mortality and decay’ (95, 99). Franko’s ‘essential rapport’ might, in Badiou’s words, be called a gesture of ethical ‘fidelity’ to the Trauerspiel, brought about by Benjamin’s radical experience and ‘sustained investigation’ of the genre (Badiou 2001, 67).

Franko’s elaboration of Benjamin’s gestural method, then, also goes beyond Agamben’s pure mediality of gesture. And again, a questioning of violence comes into play. Here, with Franko’s elucidation of Agamben’s use of Benjamin’s idea of ‘violence as pure medium’, which leads Agamben to ‘the idea of gesture in his later essay as itself the communication of communicability, or a means without end’ (93). Arguing for a more complex understanding of gesture and the ethics of gesture in Benjamin, Franko considers gesturality as instrumental to the methodology of philosophical criticism. This is less a matter of a presumed fullness or emptiness of gesture, than

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it is of the fact that ‘any gestural “manifestation” becomes caught up in reflection’, as Franko suggests (102–103). This burden of reflection affects the temporality of processes of reading and understanding. He specifies: ‘While the communication of communicability would presumably be instantaneous and swift’—as swift as ‘the sovereign decision’, or a physical act of violence—‘the ethical gesturality that emerges as method in the Vorrede is founded on a rejection of the “purity” of gesture because said purity must by definition remain inaccessible to a hermeneutics’ (103).

Benjamin’s enhanced gestural awareness links a style of writing and thinking to the bodily performances of gesture which are discussed in the other contributions to this special section. Rather than the differences between writerly, dancerly, and filmic gestures (see Ness 2008 and Noland 2008), our focus on ethics seems to draw out their fault lines. A gestural ethics is also a prime site for the fault lines between theatre, dance (or film) studies, and performance studies. Gestural practice or action is a performance that does not require the proscenium stage (or screen); as Noland (2009) argues: ‘the term “gesture” […] encourages us to view all movements executed by the human body as situated along a continuum—from the ordinary iteration of a habit to the most spectacular and self-conscious performance of a choreography’ (6). Schneider’s approach exemplifies this sense of the expanded gestural stage. Her contribution, ‘In our Hands: An Ethics of Gestural Response-ability’ (2017), not only revisits her own thinking and writing about gesture across her work to date, but also indicates the directions that it might take in the future, and the kind of ethics this might yield.

As the final piece of this special section, Schneider’s essay opens up the field in more than one way. Taking the form of a conversation that was triggered by a number of questions that I posed to begin with, it might be called a ‘response’, but it also develops an ethics of ‘response-ability’ that goes beyond the singular writing situation, to reflect on relationality as a fundamental ethical category of calling out, and answering calls. Rethinking her explorations in The Explicit Body in Performance and Performing Remains of gestural reiteration and citation, and their potential to at once reinstate the same and bring about the different, Schneider engages with the gesture of the hail. Both predicated upon a fundamentally ethical relationality (see Benjamin 2015, Levinas 1969) and susceptible to ideological investment, the hail epitomises the operations of the ‘both/and’, a logic of conjunction that structures and punctuates Schneider’s thoughts on gesture: from the classic Brechtian tactic in which performance both replays and counters conditions of subjugation to Alexander Weheliye’s reclamation of this tactic for black and critical ethnic studies. The gesture of the hail leads us, then, to the gesture of protest of the Black Lives Matter movement. The hands that are held up in the air both replay (and respond to) the standard pose of surrender in the face of police authority and call for a future that might be different. By doing so, this gesture of protest literally stages what has been called, at the beginning of this introduction, a Levinasian ‘opening to the Other’, albeit in a situation of threat and resistance to threat: a gesture of disarmament which also disarms the onlooker.

Without going back to Agamben, Schneider’s response also radically questions the viability of a pure mediality of gesture, as such a proposition would need to be predicated upon the assumption that everyone has equal opportunity to blend in with the unmarked agent of this mediality, the

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ahistorical ‘liberal humanist figure’ (Weheliye 2014, 8) of white Man. What her response-ability thus equally effectuates, is a shift away from potentiality as unmarked space. Following Schneider’s argument, gesture’s acting-otherwise can only ever be accomplished by the ways in which gestures act on their own implication in the signifying structures of gender, sexuality, race, and class, on how these structures play out relationally across time and space, and between historically and locally situated human beings.

To conclude: A note of thanks. A series of serendipitous moments made this project possible. It began in summer 2015, when I was encouraged to apply for conference support by a newly-established network—an application that was, in the end, unsuccessful. But instead, the Schröder Fund and the German Endowment Fund of the Department of German and Dutch at the University of Cambridge stepped in, and my thanks goes to the boards of these two funds, especially to Sarah Colvin. In his editorial note to that summer’s issue of Dance Research Journal, Mark Franko (2015) suggested that the assembled contributions, which included an article of mine, together worked ‘toward an ethics of gesture’ (1)—a formulation which I found so pertinent that it stuck in my mind, so much so that I turned it into the title of the symposium that I organised at Emmanuel College, Cambridge in April 2016. Thanks are due to Alyce Mahon and Andrew Webber, who chaired sessions during the day and enriched the discussion with their interventions. I also thank Emmanuel College for the provision of conference facilities and for a memorable dinner. All but one of the contributions to the symposium are documented in this special section. Jonas Tinius, for whose input I remain grateful, decided to publish his contribution elsewhere; Rebecca Schneider agreed to embark on a question-based revisiting of her work on gesture instead of contributing her conference paper, leading to a shared intellectual journey that proved as exciting as it was enlightening—my heartfelt thanks are due to her. A brilliant gesture workshop at the Warburg Institute London, which took place in December 2016, confirmed my sense that a renewed engagement with gesture in and beyond Agamben was warranted, and I thank Andrew Benjamin and Christopher Johnson for their hospitality and for facilitating such stimulating discussions during that event. I had the good fortune of being able to attend a seminar by Mark Franko at Gabriele Brandstetter’s series of research colloquia at Free University Berlin in January 2017, where he developed the elegant gestural reading of Benjamin’s epistemo-critical prologue which is testified to in his present contribution to this special section. I would also like to extend my thanks to Joachim Koester, whose art instigated much of the thinking in this introduction, and who so generously shared his works and insights.

I am thrilled that Performance Philosophy agreed to publish the following array of articles, and my thanks goes to the editors, especially to Theron Schmidt, for their support throughout the publication process; to the anonymous reviewers, for their careful reading and expert advice; to Rosa van Hensbergen, for her brilliant editorial and administrative assistance and wonderful dance conversation; and, last but not least, to all of the contributors, for their stellar work, and for the enthusiasm with which they entered into this collaborative exploration of how gesture acts otherwise.

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1 Giorgio Agamben first published this text in 1991 under the title ‘Notes sur le geste’ in the cinema journal Revue Trafic, founded in the same year by French film critic Serge Daney. 2 Note here the topic of this year’s Performance Philosophy conference (Prague 2017), ‘How does Performance Philosophy Act? Ethos, Ethics, Ethnography’.

3 For current research in the anthropology of theatre and performance that engages with the ethics of theatre and rehearsal practice as a form of Foucauldian self-cultivation, see, for example, Tinius (2015).

4 Flusser’s theory was published in German in 1991, the same year as ‘Notes sur le geste’. In 2014, an English translation appeared under the title Gestures.

5 ‘The gesture of photographing is a philosophical gesture, or to put it differently: since photography was invented, it is possible to philosophize not only in the medium of words, but also in that of photographs. The reason is that the gesture of photographing is a gesture of seeing, and so engages in what the antique thinkers called “theoria,” producing a picture that these thinkers called “idea”’ (Flusser 2011, 286).

6 Even though Carrie Noland’s seminal Agency and Embodiment (2009) does not explicitly focus on the ethics of gesture, its engagement with the agency of kinaesthetic experience, and with the subtleties and varieties of gestural deviations as well as norms, provides cornerstones for the present enquiry.

7 See also André Lepecki’s notes on Gilles Deleuze and an ethics of dance, as ‘a project of affirming life as a desire to activate powers (pouissance) and affects that are not bound to organizational tyrannies or majoritarian imperatives on how to live one’s life’ (2007, 119).

8 For a discussion of this passage, see also Minden and Schwan in this special section.

9 Aufhebung is used here in the Hegelian sense of both ‘abolishment’ and ‘preservation’.

10 For Agamben’s use of ‘form-of-life’, see the following: ‘By the term form-of-life, […] I mean a life that can never be separated from its form, a life in which it is never possible to isolate something such as naked life. […] It defines a life—human life—in which the single ways, acts, and processes of living are never simply facts but always and above all possibilities of life, always and above all power (Agamben 2000b, 3–4).

11 In contrast to Agamben’s ‘action of a destituent potential’, my use of ‘acting-otherwise’ shifts the emphasis from philosophical reflection to corporeal practice, while retaining Agamben’s differentiation between action that constitutes something and action that is potential and destituent. I suggest ‘acting-otherwise’ as a general formula that needs to be fleshed out and made specific by addressing the particularities of singular gestural practice, which take precedence over and might challenge philosophical consistency. It would be fruitful, but goes beyond the scope of this introduction, to include a third term here, Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘agencement’, as used recently by Erin Manning (2016). As opposed to agency’s focus on an individual or a group’s volition, agencement values ‘modes of experience backgrounded in the account of agency’, especially those that deviate from neurotypicality; agencement also ‘carries within itself a sense of movement and connectibility’ (123), questioning any clear-cut dialectic of willed/unwilled action.

12 Agamben’s use of ‘gag’ in Notes on Gesture as ‘something that could be put in your mouth to hinder speech’, but also ‘in the sense ‘of the actor’s improvisation meant to compensate a loss of memory or an inability to speak’ (2000a, 59) is another way of naming that which he, in The Use of Bodies, calls the ‘constitutively destituent’ (2016, 277).

13 It should be noted here that the dancers who perform in The Place of Dead Roads are all linked to the Flemish dance scene which Laermans addresses.

14 Andrew Webber writes: ‘The balls are, suitably enough, made of celluloid: fabricated, that is, as objects of projections for a theatrical home-movie’ (Webber 1996, 327).

15 For a helpful philosophical discussion of ‘purity’, see Cull (2012, 229–234).

Notes

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16 Compare Koester’s amplification of the sounds of breath-taking in The Place of Dead Roads, and Minden’s remarks on gestures of breath in his contribution to the special section.

17 Franko’s gestural ethics of interpretation should therefore not be confused with Agamben’s ‘gestic criticism’, which is concerned with the ‘intention’ of the work or works that are being studied (1999, 77).

Works Cited

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———. 2001. ‘Letter of 17. 12. 1934’. In Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940, edited by Henri Lonitz, translated by Nicholas Walker, 66–72. Harvard: Harvard University Press.

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———. 1993. ‘Ethics’. In The Coming Community, translated by Michael Hardt, 43–44. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

———. 1999. ‘Kommerell, or On Gesture’ in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, edited and translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen, 77–85. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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———. 2002. ‘Difference and Repetition: On Guy Debord’s Films’. In Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, edited by Thomas McDonough, translated by Brian Holmes, 313–319. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

———. 2009. ‘What is an Apparatus?’ In What is an Apparatus and Other Essays, translated by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, 1–24. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

———. 2014. ‘What is a Destituent Power?’ Translated by Stephanie Wakefield. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32, 65–74. https://doi.org/10.1068/d3201tra

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———. 2017. ‘The Conduct of Contemplation and the Gestural Ethics of Interpretation in Walter Benjamin’s “Epistemo-Critical Prologue”’. Performance Philosophy 3 (1): 91–106. https://doi.org/10.21476/PP.2017.31166

Grønstad, Asbjørn, and Henrik Gustafsson, eds. 2014. Cinema and Agamben: Ethics, Biopolitics and the Moving Image. New York: Bloomsbury.

Grønstad, Asbjørn, Gustafsson, Henrik, and Øyvind Vågnes, eds. 2017. Gestures of Seeing in Film, Video and Drawing. New York: Routledge.

Kafka, Franz. 1964. Diaries 1910–1923. Edited by Max Brod, translated by Joseph Kresh, Martin Greenberg and Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken.

Koester, Joachim. 2017a. ‘The Place of Dead Roads’. Wall-mounted description at Camden Arts Centre, London, where the video installation was exhibited from 28 January to 26 March 2017.

———. 2017b. Email conversation with Lucia Ruprecht. April 29.

Laermans, Rudi. 2010. ‘Impure Gestures Towards ‘Choreography in General’: Re/Presenting Flemish Contemporary Dance, 1982–2010’. Contemporary Theatre Review 20 (4): 405–415. https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2010.50576

Laidlaw, James. 2014. ‘The Undefined Work of Freedom: Foucault’s Genealogy and the Anthropology of Ethics’. In Foucault Now: Current Perspectives in Foucault Studies, edited by James Faubion, 23–37. Cambridge: Polity.

Lepecki, André. 2007. ‘Machines, Faces, Neurons: Towards an Ethics of Dance’. TDR 51 (3): 118–123. https://doi.org/10.1162/dram.2007.51.3.118

Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.

Manning, Erin. 2016. The Minor Gesture. Durham: Duke University Press.

Minden, Michael. 2017. ‘Ethics, Gesture and the Western’. Performance Philosophy 3 (1): 39–52. https://doi.org/10.21476/PP.2017.31160

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Ness, Sally Ann. 2008. ‘Conclusion’. In Migrations of Gesture, edited by Sally Ann Ness and Carrie Noland, 259–279. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Noland, Carrie. 2008. ‘Introduction’. In Migrations of Gesture, edited by Sally Ann Ness and Carrie Noland, ix–xxviii. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

———. 2009. Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674054387

———. 2017. ‘Ethics, Staged’. Performance Philosophy 3 (1): 66–90. https://doi.org/10.21476/PP.2017.31165

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Biography

Lucia Ruprecht is an affiliated Lecturer at the Department of German and Dutch, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Emmanuel College. Her Dances of the Self in Heinrich von Kleist, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Heinrich Heine (2006) was awarded Special Citation of the de la Torre Bueno Prize. She has co-edited Performance and Performativity in German Cultural Studies (with Carolin Duttlinger and Andrew Webber, 2003), Cultural Pleasure (with Michael Minden, 2009) and New German Dance Studies (with Susan Manning, 2012). From 2013 to 2015, she was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Institute of Theatre Studies, Free University Berlin. She is currently completing the manuscript of a book entitled Gestural Imaginaries: Dance and the Culture of Gestures at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century, under contract with Oxford University Press.

© 2017 Lucia Ruprecht

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY VOL 3, NO 1 (2017):23–39 DOI: https://doi.org/10.21476/PP.2017.31168

ISSN 2057-7176

PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY

ETHOS FORMULA: LITURGY AND RHETORICS IN THE WORK OF TED SHAWN

ALEXANDER SCHWAN FREIE UNIVERSITÄT BERLIN

Ethics and aesthetics are one.

Wittgenstein (1922), 6.421

1. Choreoethics

Giorgio Agamben begins his seminal chapter “Ethics,” in The Coming Community, with a bold claim. Almost in the form of an aperçu he demands for “any discourse on ethics” to start with the allegedly indispensable fact “that there is no essence, no historical or spiritual vocation, no biological destiny that humans must enact or realize” (Agamben 1993, 43). Drawing a traditional distinction between ethics and morality—individual ethical reflection on the one hand, and adherence to an heteronomous moral law on the other—Agamben links ethics to a radically increased potentiality. Ethics does not provoke or guide moral decisions, but nor does it derive from them as secondary reflection. It is rather the fact that human beings are consigned to an array of possible decisions, which brings ethics into play. Making any decision involuntarily spurns the majority of these possibilities, and so potentiality always meets with experiences of lacking and missing, of being and feeling guilty without having committed “any blameworthy act” (Agamben 1993, 44). Agamben here admits that this potentiality very much resembles the Biblical understanding of sin as an anthropological constitution rather than a moral default or misdemeanour. Ethics doesn’t have a foundation but is fundamentally linked to potentiality through the experience of lack, of doing something by not-doing something else and of making one decision by deciding against any other possible option.

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Agamben’s alignment of ethics to potentiality also lends itself to dance. For dancers are well acquainted with the experience of making one decision against the entire field of possibilities. Simply by moving, by making a step, taking a leap, or turning and twisting the body, they elect this particular movement over all other possible ones. And by executing this choice, they deliver themselves to a new field of potentiality opened up by this single moment of dance. Thus moving the body in space doesn’t follow a mere heteronomous law, and if it attempts to do so, it nevertheless deviates from this law in every single inexactitude, every shaking, trembling, and dismissing of a prescribed figuration. Dance studies, often in direct reference to Giorgio Agamben’s or Gilles Deleuze’s philosophical thinking, has drawn upon this close relation between movement and potentiality, arguing for dance as an eminently potentiality-bound art form (Gil 2006; Manning 2009, 15–28).

Yet, what dance studies has not yet explored in full is the integration of ethical concerns into dance’s alignment to potentiality. Does the openness of dance, its refraining from executing a mere prescription, evoke any kind of responsibility? And how does ethics apply to forms of dance which—unlike those strands of postmodern or contemporary dance that choose to use improvisation or highlight the individuality of dancers—value the heteronomy of a choreographic law or traditional movement codification?

By refusing any foundation of ethics including “historical or spiritual vocation,” Agamben places himself in relation to a traditional Christian discourse of antinomianism (see Liska 2008, 47–67). Rooted in a one-sided reading of Pauline theology that diminished Paul’s appreciation of the Torah, the antinomistic tradition emphasized his criticisms of νόμος (nómos, law), which to some extent also includes the universal law or the general law of nature (see Taubes 1993, 37). While Agamben seems to follow this antinomistic tradition in his questioning of a historical vocation of ethics, he simultaneously opposes an account of the Christian tradition as overcoming the influence of an external law through turning to an inner or spiritual law. But Agamben also approaches the tradition of antinomianism dialectically: Much as he wants to abolish any heteronomous foundations of ethics he also emphasises the fact that Paul’s criticisms of the law do not cancel out his appreciation of the Torah. This Hegelian understanding of Paul’s relation to the law is made explicit in his recent publication The Use of Bodies, where he uses the German verb aufheben as meaning both “abolish” and “preserve” (Agamben 2016, 273).

This dialectical understanding of the non-foundation of ethics in pure potentiality also bears consequences for dance and the question of how bodily movement can relate to the law. Following, or at least paralleling, Agamben in his discussions of law and heteronomy, in particular, dance theorist André Lepecki emphasizes the anarchic aspects of dance. According to Lepecki dance’s presence shall ultimately be nothing less than “undecidable, multiple, lawless, a presence whose present can point simultaneously toward yet unthinkable ontological coimpossibilities of pastness, presentness, and futurity” (Lepecki 2004, 137). Lepecki ultimately argues that dancing, particularly in its contemporary forms, can—and even shall—separate itself from any prescriptions of the law, whether this might be in the shape of the instructions of a choreographer, the demands of a score

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or the embodied traditions of movement codifications and normalisation in general. By contrast, Gerald Siegmund echoes Agamben’s more dialectical approach when he writes:

The body with its infinite possibilities of moving, which are always already the result of both cultural and dance techniques, touches the law that in the act of connecting also produces this very dancing body. In the absence between the body and its manifold possibilities of moving and choreography, a negotiation of the relation between body and law takes place. (Siegmund 2012, 212)

Taking another angle, the French psychoanalyst and philosopher Daniel Sibony, who has studied with Emmanuel Lévinas and was educated in the system of Jacques Lacan, also focuses on the idea of the dancing body as always already related to a law, yet a law in the status of scarcity lacking its presence and final fulfilment. This lacking law nevertheless governs the moving body, since the body wants to free itself precisely from its absence: “Il faut comprendre qu’il s’agit souvent de se libérer d’un manque de loi, de reprendre contact avec la loi qui est à l’œuvre—pour qu’elle décharge le corps d’un poids qu’il n’a pas à porter” (It is important to understand that, in most cases, we have to free ourselves from a lack of law and have to reconnect with the law that is at work, so that it may discharge the body of a weight the body cannot carry) (Sibony 1995, 117). Needless to say, this positioning of dance and law also leads to different perspectives on the ethical implications of dance: While Lepecki’s and Siegmund’s positions on dance’s relationship to the law tend to address the politics, rather than the ethics of dance, Sibony’s approach allows for reflections on the ethical responsibility of dance in conjunction with an appreciation of the responsivity of the moving body. Dance, and particularly contemporary dance, in Sibony’s account, does not only claim a position of otherness insofar as it might circumvent the law and possibly escape the heteronomous determination of the body, but also in terms of the alterity of dancer and spectator, and the alterity of the unconscious—both the dancer’s and the spectator’s (Sibony 1995, 123–27).

Are dancers responsible for their movement, when do they move ethically, and can dancing itself be a guilty act? Agamben’s ethics of potentiality and ontological lack answers such questions only in parts. It is Sibony’s emphasis on the heteronomous character of law as a transcendental condition of dancing which offers richer possibilities for opening up an entire field of relationships between dancing and ethics. Sibony’s Lacanian understanding of la Loi does not identify the law with mere rules or prescriptions or with basic physical laws such as the law of gravity (see Schwan 2011, 116–17). He rather regards law as a general and indispensable background to the human body, a condition or nexus, from which any movement derives—in particular the movements of dancing. These movements, more than other purposeful movement, are deeply affected by the fact that the general law is always in the status of being too weak, too absent and too ineffective. Law in such an extended interpretation cannot and must not be restricted to specific normalizing rules or standardizing factors. To reduce the nexus of law and movement solely to the constraints and restrictions that seek to govern and oppress the body (see Legendre 1978, 73–81) would be a simplification that loses the potential for dialectic, seeking liberation, like antinomianism, from a distorted picture of the law. However understanding law as a complex nexus of factors and

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processes that structure and influence the moving body—a nexus that includes heteronomous aspects but exceeds them—allows for a more subtle and rich understanding of how ethics and gesture might be related.

History and tradition have loaded certain movements, poses and gestures with cultural meanings, which—albeit arbitrary and dependent on context—are to some extent consistent in their codification. Such repeatable and recognizable movement patterns also belong to the nexus of heteronomous influences on the human body and are thus part of the law with which dancing is unavoidably connected. This applies in particular to the interweaving of movement patterns with emotions, which might bring Aby Warburg’s theory of pathos formula into play (Warburg 2010). Warburg used this configuration to analyse the Western artistic tradition of representing emotional or affective content—like fear or anger—in specific poses through showing how pathos-driven movements affect, say, the falling of hair or the drapery of a billowing robe.

Beyond the narrow field of emotion, these movement formulae, as part of the nomistic nexus that facilitates and structures bodily movement, must be readable as gesture. For here, in the realm of intentional and communication-oriented gesturing—greeting, welcoming, or refusing—the formula- and sign-like character of movement demands the deciphering of encoded content. Through this process of decipherment, gesturing becomes part of a rhetorical system. It is worthwhile asking to what extent this rhetorical understanding of movement applies to dancing, and especially to those forms that visibly follow modes of codification or locate themselves within textual understandings of movement, of writing and reading dancing (see Brandstetter 2015, 25–29).

The readability of these movement formulae partakes of the structuring process of a law that is always already behind or—as Sibony would rather put it (Sibony 1995, 41–53)—in front of the dancing body. This opens an entire nexus of ethical dimensions, which can be termed, after Aby Warburg’s pathos formula, ethos formula (see also Brandstetter 2013, 521). The idea of ethos formula refers, in a way that is equivalent to the pictorial tradition of a pathos formula, to the encoded movement patterns of ethical attitudes or comportments that are motivated by decision-making rather than emotional content. Gestures and their citation in dance might bear an ethical dimension similar to the encoded transmission of emotions through movement in a pictorial tradition.

Gestures that signify greeting, welcoming, help-offering, neglecting, refusing, or oppressing, are by no means universal, but rather culturally encoded, and as such, they transport ethical content. This idea of ethos formula stands in stark contrast to Agamben’s attempt to locate—or, better, dislocate—ethics, but it does not distort ethical decision-making to a mere following of moralistic imperatives. Ethos formulae are heteronomous, because their encoding of gestures is already part of an existing, supra-individual network of structuring ideas. But this does not imply absolution from responsibility or culpability. On the contrary, conceptualizing, executing and reading a gesture as an encoded ethos formula requires decisions to be made according to an individual understanding of context in an always newly established congruence with ethical principles like justice, proportionality, and reciprocity.

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2. Modernist Dancing

Reflecting on the ethical impact of bodily movements in the context of art and performance affects the many-faceted relationship between ethics and aesthetics and between dance and religion. With the autonomization of the arts in modernity, dance allegedly shifted towards an oppositional relationship to religion. Whereas dance in antiquity and the Middle Ages was a core expression of virtue and was, in an albeit limited way, charged with morality—for example in the Neo-Platonic parallelisation of the spheric harmonies of stars with the circular movements of human dancers (Miller 1986)—the different waves of modernity gradually questioned those equations of bodily virtuosity and moral virtuousness. The last of those waves, the rise of modernism around 1900, seemed to destroy the idea of an ontological equation between beauty and virtue to such a degree that it now seems far-fetched, if not erroneous, to ask for morally correct dancing. Finally, the modernist withdrawal from classical ballet and from its strict movement codification gave birth to the anti-nomistic fascination with lawlessness, presence and the ideal of self-expression that is still palpable in dance theories today (Lepecki, Siegmund).

A closer look at dance’s modernist aesthetics, however, reveals a strikingly different picture. In this picture, high-modernism is characterized by a profound ambiguity, where dancers and choreographers seek authenticity in bodily expression, yet still cling to older ideas of taxonomizing and codifying movements—even if not in the form of classical ballet. This attempt to overcome the alienation of modernity by reaching back to older, allegedly purer and less corrupt forms of living and dancing (for instance in Greek antiquity) pursues an anti-modern discourse within modernity itself. Much like the protagonists of other liberation movements of the time, the lead figures of early modernist dance remained in ambivalent relation to the avant-garde—both claiming a departure into the new and unfamiliar, and simultaneously longing for older essentialist ideas of life and art.

Modernist dance, however, also had to cope with the particular burden of long-standing restrictions and disallowances at the hands of Christianity. While Judaism had maintained a more positive attitude towards dancing that goes back to the psalms and stories of the Bible, Christianity developed a clearly pejorative and even punitive attitude towards dance, implementing prohibitions and preaching through sermons against dance. This gave rise to a deep social and discursive gap between the realm of dance on the one hand and church and religion on the other. As part of the Constantinian shift and the rise of Christianity to political power, there was a wide adoption of the Stoic criticisms of dance prevalent in late antiquity (see Andresen 1961), and this led to an almost complete exclusion of dancing from church services—with some remarkable and peculiar exceptions like the Shakers’ dance (Wagner 1997, 178–80).

In harsh contrast to the tribute early Christianity could pay to dancing when it came to well-regulated bodily movements paralleling the movements of the stars, the later Church demonized dancing, as encouraging lust or immorality (see Wagner 1997). The impact of this equation is of course immense when it comes to the question of ethics in dance. For against the background of a century-long denial of moral status, modernist dancing not only had to break free from religious

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repression, but also from the denial of its moral value and from the exclusion of its positive ethical reflection. Modernist dance thus had to deal with a clear double-bind: As part of the aesthetic autonomization of the arts, dance separated itself from religious or moral dominance, whilst simultaneously reclaiming the high moral status it had been denied by the Church for centuries. To counter this moral disbarring and to gain full entrance into ethical responsibility, modernist dance did nothing less than become religious in itself, promising its disciples a better life through dance (see LaMothe 2006).

Many protagonists of modernist dance, such as Ruth St. Denis, Ted Shawn, Isadora Duncan, Mary Wigman, Charlotte Bara and Martha Graham, understood dance movement in extremely religious terms (see Zander 2001). While escaping from the narrow boundaries of institutionalized religion on the one hand, they also developed a new religion of dance on the other. And most interestingly, the religious upbringing of the protagonists of early modernist dance often influenced their ideas about dance, such that theologoumena of their confessional backgrounds correspond to facets of their dance philosophy. While Mary Wigman’s Lutheran background agreed with the submissive and mystical aspects of her dancing and her emphasis on topics like death, sacrifice and suffering (see Schwan 2009), Martha Graham’s understanding of dance had a decisively Presbyterian character. She could trace her American family history back to Myles Standish—one of the Pilgrim Fathers who arrived with the Mayflower in Massachusetts in 1620—and a Puritan background was still clearly visible in Graham’s strict attitude towards training and in the discipline and execution of movement. Graham even transferred the distinctive Presbyterian doctrine of election to the realm of dancing, convinced that certain people were chosen to be dancers and should therefore behave and move according to this elect status (see Graham 1991, 5). Charlotte Bara, who converted to Catholicism at the age of 27, focused her expressionist dancing on topics such as purity, piety, and the Arcanum, where protagonists of modernist dance in Israel like Baruch Agadati and Gertrud Kraus gave their dancing a distinctly Jewish character with numerous references to texts form the Hebrew Bible (see Manor 1986; 1988).

3. Ted Shawn

Ted Shawn (1891–1972), the “Father of American Dance” (Terry 1976), conceptualized dance with strong theological implications. He had briefly studied Methodist theology before becoming a dancer and choreographer and this theological background remained legible in his dance works. Many of these works transferred religious texts, topics and tropes into dancing, sometimes with biblical figures as core references for the choreography. One could think of Shawn’s impersonation of Joseph in his piece Joseph’s Legend (1915) or, most notably, his involvement with the figure of Jacob, who even became eponymous for Jacob’s Pillow, his training centre for exclusively male dancers in Becket, Massachusetts.

Ted Shawn did not only develop dances inspired by Biblical texts and choreograph entire series of dance pieces dedicated to a wider spectrum of religion or spirituality (though these nonetheless still followed Protestant presuppositions), he also wrote and published extensively on the relationship between dance and religion. Whether echoing Nietzsche’s dictum “I would only believe

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in a god who knew how to dance” (Nietzsche 2006, 29) in the title of his book Gods Who Dance (Shawn 1929), or writing of religion in The American Ballet (Shawn 1926) and Dance We Must (Shawn 1974), Shawn proclaimed dance as a legitimate form of religious expression. He sometimes combined this proclamation with a confessional autobiographical reference to his early career as a student of Methodist theology and his conversion experience of turning to dance. This again reveals a typically Protestant attitude of authenticating an argument through individual experience:

Studying to be a Methodist minister, I was interrupted in my junior year at University by a severe illness, which kept me in bed quite motionless for many weeks. During this enforced quiet I had time to think deeply, and I thought myself out of the ministry, out of the Methodist church, and free from all previous moorings. And when I finally crystallized, within my consciousness, and came out with a form, it was the form of the dance as religious expression. Of course, all of my friends thought that I was headed straight for the south gate of Hell. It was not really a change of base at all, it was only a change of form […]. I, pursuing religion […] found the dance was the first and finest means of religious expression. (Shawn 1926, 12)

Shawn referred to the idea of dance as a primordial form of religious expression extensively in his books, lectures and public presentations. Yet, in some respects his use of terms like spiritual, ritual, sacred, myths and mysticism remained remarkably unclear and imprecise. How did they differ from one another, not to mention from the sphere of the profane, the contemporary, and modern everyday-life? This imprecision was linked to another more serious problem when it came to interreligious or transreligious references. For Shawn used adjectives like religious, spiritual, or sacred not only in relation to the phenomena of his own Christian background, but also emphatically in his approaches to non-Christian religions and beliefs. Here, he worked with the impossible assumption of universality, which in itself betrayed the heritage of Christian claims to superiority. Much like his wife and dance partner Ruth St. Denis, Shawn exoticized expressions of non-Christian spirituality and, as part of a “cultural imperialism” (Desmond 2011, 256), colonized them in his project of a religiously-charged modernist dance aesthetic.

As a white American Protestant, Shawn constructed religious otherness in his dances by declaring movement in non-Christian contexts as spiritual while at the same time using a Christian vocabulary that was not sensitive to the specific understandings of religious movements within those non-Christian contexts (say, Hinduism or Buddhism). Shawn mimicked this distorted understanding (or misunderstanding) of religious dancing in his choreographic work in the name of spirituality or sacredness. But this was always effected within a declaredly nationalist sentiment that came along with an apparently racist position of white supremacy (see Scolieri 2016, 196). Arguing from this point of view in his book The American Ballet (Shawn 1926), Shawn characterized “the influence of black dance on American social dance as a degenerated one” (Burt 1995, 109) and in Dance We Must (1940) he even complained about this influence in an openly racist way:

I was sick at heart that we, this whole vast country of millions of white people, still kept on dancing dances of negro derivation. Have we lost completely the qualities that made us a great nation? We were capable in the past of creating our own

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dances. Why is it in this last period that we have let this negroid influence so completely obliterate everything else? (Shawn 1974, 84)

Despite this position, and the fact that he had no dancers of a Black-American or Native American background, he developed religious themed choreographies, like Negro Spirituals or Xochitl, that colonized non-white dance and music traditions from the North- and Middle-American continent. While in Xochitl, Shawn clearly exoticized Indian American culture in a stereotypical use of feathers, weapons, leather-skirts and naked skin, the case of Negro Spirituals is different. Here, Shawn completely neglected the specific black context of the spiritual tradition and performed instead “generalized moods of lamentation and lament” (Manning 2004, 10) by declaring his own modernist dance movements as expressions of allegedly universal spiritual experiences.

The ideology of Ted Shawn’s and Ruth St. Denis’s white Christian supremacy in dance also included arguments and practices of Anti-Semitism. According to Doris Humphrey’s biography, St. Denis limited the number of Jewish students in the Greater Denishawn school to ten percent (see Humphrey 1995, 62). One might expect a similarly Anti-Jewish discourse in Ted Shawn’s conception of dance as a means of religious expression. But Shawn’s own dance theology seems to be free from any explicit Anti-Judaism and, in contrast to Ruth St. Denis (see LaMothe 1998) he never argued with Christological theologoumena that would exclude a Jewish or non-Christian approach to dance. Rather than referring to Jesus Christ as the Lord of the Dance—a typically Christian way of justifying dancing—Shawn saw dance as a primordial form of religious expression which had been lost in the process of Western civilization and which, according to a primitivist argument, had mainly survived in non-Western cultures. This was waiting to be revived in Western culture by Shawn and other choreographers who brought dance and religion back into dialogue.

This idea clearly rested upon the biblical scheme of a paradisiacal state of nature—its decay and redemption—and Shawn’s affinity for this scheme was shared by many other protagonists of early modernist dance and of Ausdruckstanz or expressionist dance in particular. With the rootedness of Ausdruckstanz in the philosophy of life (Lebensphilosophie) of the 19th century, and in its ideals of movement, nature and organic becoming, early modernist dance worked with this tripartite salvation-oriented scheme. Industrialization, urbanization and, paradoxically, modernity itself signified a metahistorical decline from an allegedly pure past that was then necessarily followed by its amelioration and (self)redemption. In this line, Isadora Duncan claimed that “dance was once the most noble of all arts—and it shall be again. From the great depth to which it has fallen it shall be raised” (Duncan 1903, 15).

4. Liturgical Gestures

Ted Shawn proclaimed a pronouncedly religious understanding of what dancing is and how dancers should move, strike a pose or make a gesture. And it comes as no surprise that these dance moves often emulated gestures from a religious context like private worship, ecstasy, and—quite frequently and very symptomatically for Shawn’s aesthetics—situations in which an individual is confronted with an overwhelming divine power and reacts to these experiences of the

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sublime with submission and devotion. To depict these situations, Shawn tended to position the body sitting or even laying on the ground, often with uplifted hands and the torso bowed backwards as if in self-abandonment to the experience of being overpowered by an invisible divine entity. As movement formulae of spiritual experience, Shawn quoted these poses and gestures from the history of Christian religious art and interpreted them in his own modernist aesthetics. Rather than dealing with movements of uncontrollability, fragility and weakness—also part of the vocabulary of spiritual movement formulae in the history of Christian art—Shawn radically emphasized aspects of strength, expansiveness and bodily erectness. Thus combining religiousness with athleticism and spirituality with homoerotic virility, Shawn’s male-centred body aesthetics referred back to Muscular Christianity, a philosophical movement that originated in England in the mid-19th century and became popular in North America in its propagation of moral and physical beauty (see Burt 1995, 108; and also Foster 2001, 160–69).

A similarly citational and elevating appropriation of pre-existing religious gestures can be seen in the way Shawn invoked the realm of public worship. His choreographies re-incorporated either gestures performed by members of a congregation, like kneeling, bowing, turning—or, and with a remarkable emphasis—gestures that in a service would normally be carried out by the figure leading the service as λειτουργός (leitourgós, officiant). It is here, in the quotation of these liturgical gestures—or ethos formulae—of greeting, welcoming, and directing the members of a congregation, that Shawn’s dance aesthetics displays its most pronounced overture towards an ethics of gesture.

These liturgical gestures are variously relational—they can relate the officiant both towards the presence of the congregation or public (coram publico) as what directs and conducts, and towards a divine entity (coram deo). Depending on the specific understanding of liturgy in the different religions and denominations, these two basic alignments of liturgical gestures can be either indistinguishably interwoven or held in separation. The complexity of religious divergences in these questions becomes still more intricate in light of other possible alignments of liturgical gesture. For instance, they can also be directed towards oneself (coram meipso) or towards the entire world outside the congregation (coram mundo, coram hominibus) to cite just one example of a Christian, distinctly Lutheran Protestant, conception of the various possible alignments of liturgical gestures (see Kabel 2002, 38–55).

In 1915, Ted Shawn developed a short choreography based on Psalm 23, which “was to be one of three Dances of David (The Boy, The Shepherd, The King)” (Shawn 1979, 70). Shawn would return to the Twenty-Third Psalm continuously over the following decades and considered this biblical-themed dance piece so important that he put it at the beginning of the opening ceremony for his new dance studio in Los Angeles in April 1920. But most importantly, he integrated the Twenty-Third Psalm into his Dance Church Service, which had its premiere in the First Interdenominational Church in San Francisco in 1917 and later became part of a programme with which Shawn toured the U.S.—holding performances on major stages like the Carnegie Hall or the Metropolitan Opera in New York. The Dance Church Service represented a Protestant church service in rhythmic movement. It transformed liturgical pieces like Opening Prayer, Doxology, Gloria, and a Psalm into

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dancing, and centred around a danced sermon on John 8:32 “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free”, danced by Shawn himself, after Martha Graham had danced an Andante Religioso.

This cornerstone of his early choreographic work was subsumed, by Shawn, under his tripartite salvation-oriented scheme for the primordial connection of dance and religion. This scheme wasn’t proposed as an intervention against the U.S. religious establishment, but rather as a legitimate innovation that any Protestant church might accept with open arms. He recounts its largely positive reception:

I […] did this dance church service in some thirty or forty cities and only once was serious opposition shown, when two hundred preachers and laymen threatened to tar and feather me in Shreveport, but the entire police force protected me by saying that these fanatics would be treated like any other lawbreakers. When the service was over, the mayor and aldermen came and congratulated me and gave me letters on their official stationery attesting that the service was reverent, and that they recommended it to other cities; while over and over again in other cities, ministers would come to me after my dance service and tell me how they felt its rightness how they wished they could introduce it into their churches. (Shawn 1974, 31–32)

In the same publication, Shawn admitted that his Dance Church Service wasn’t the very first intermingling of a Christian service with early modernist dance. The Episcopelian clergyman William Norman Guthrie, during his time as rector of St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, New York, had also created services and liturgies that incorporated the arts, literature, and various religious traditions. Contemporaneous to Shawn’s Dance Church Service, but independently from it, Guthrie initiated a Ritual Dance of the Della Robbia Annunciation in which the dancers’ poses referenced a replica, hanging behind them on the Church wall, of Andrea Della Robbia’s famous fifteenth-century terracotta. As in Ted Shawn’s work, later choreographic interventions in St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery also made way for prominent protagonists of early modernist dance like Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham, who helped to turn this particular Church into a hub for the modernist entanglement of dance and religion (see Wenger 2006).

Pictures of the Ritual Dance of the Della Robbia Annunciation showing the dancers in situ of St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery have survived. Interestingly, in mimicking and interpreting religiously themed body positions from Andrea Della Robbia’s fifteenth-century terracotta through modernist dancing, the gestures of the dancers also resemble those poses that Ted Shawn had presumably shown in his own works. Unlike the Ritual Dance of the Della Robbia Annunciation, however, the actual performances of Shawn’s Dance Church Service and the Twenty-Third Psalm were not photographed. The surviving paraphernalia in the Harvard Theatre Collection at the Houghton Library and the New York Public Library mainly consists in programmes and studio photography showing Shawn in costume striking key poses. Dressed in flowing white cloths with his head wrapped in an orientalising turban, Shawn illustrated the Biblical text not only with poses of standing, kneeling, and lying, but also with liturgical gestures of greeting and blessing. Most

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peculiarly, Shawn even preferred the outdoor surrounding of a Californian landscape as a setting for the Twenty-Third Psalm, which Edward Weston (1886–1958) photographed in the real locations of a meadow and a pond, as a reflection of the line in Psalm 23: “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.”

Presenting Shawn in orientalising costumes and lasciviously posing in a Californian landscape-setting, Edward Weston’s pictures of the Twenty-Third Psalm are stellar examples of a Proto-Camp aesthetics that approaches the pictorial traditions of Christian art from a modernist perspective by giving it a homoerotic twist. Shawn even added further layers of such queer appropriation, when he used one of Weston’s pictures for a Christmas card in 1915. Yet, this peculiar fact reinforces the question, who is Shawn impersonating in his version of Psalm 23? Is he embodying Jesus Christ as the Good Shepherd, referring to a Christian tradition of reading the Psalm as a prefigurative notion of Christ? Or is he, rather, depicting a member of the flock, protected by the shepherd God? These questions are crucial to the character of the liturgical gestures that Shawn quotes and re-enacts: Is he, in impersonating the Good Shepherd, an officiant or priest who not only administers a blessing, but rather donates and bestows it? Or is he receiving a blessing himself? It seems appropriate to argue for the latter reading inasmuch as “Three Dances of David” suggests that Shawn means to personify David, the alleged author of the Psalm who expresses his experiences with God through the metaphor of sheep and shepherd.

The question also arises as to how far Shawn’s gesture material from the outdoor pictures of the Twenty-Third Psalm resemble his body movements in the actual choreography onstage. This problem also applies to the studio photography of the Dance Church Service and most prominently to the sermon, as the centre-piece of the choreography. Yet, even accepting that the pictures would have stressed the more durable poses rather than Shawn’s dynamic movements, it seems fair to assume a visual similarity between his posing at the bank of a pond in California and his dancing on stage. Since he declared outdoor- and studio-photography as related to his stage performance, it seems fair to suggest that at some points of the choreography, most probably at its climax, Shawn actually struck the poses and made the gestures captured in the photographs. Standing upright and having his hands folded in front of his solar plexus, he opened his arms slowly and symmetrically, raising them to a point where his fingers still pointed to the ground and his open palms reached towards the audience in a gesture of devotion, greeting and blessing.

The liturgical character of this gesture still resonated with Shawn’s Methodist background, since he primarily positioned arms and palms as if virtually receiving or gathering a divine blessing, rather than donating or radiating it. While the latter would have been the case in a Catholic or Lutheran approach, Shawn’s gestures by contrast maintained the theonomous character of blessing. For in a Reformed Protestant tradition, God himself is the only source from which all blessing flows, whereas the liturgical gesture of a human officiant can, at most, only solicit this divine blessing. This gesture thus ultimately integrates the λειτουργός (officiant) into the community—the people leading a service are not inherently different from the people attending the service, they are pares inter parem, and only represent a sacred or divine other. Their liturgical gestures have a much more rhetorical or citational character. Rather than performing a holy act or opening up a sacred sphere,

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these gestures are predominantly this-wordly, deriving as they do from the realm of politics and rhetoric. In this sense, they are ethos formulae: conventionalised gestural patterns that indicate ethical relationality, rather than metaphysical superiority.

This, again, draws on Shawn’s Methodist background in its understanding of ethics. For the Methodist movement, which began in the mid-18th century as a reform movement within the Church of England, forms part of the Arminian tradition of Christianity. It denies the idea of a double predestination, in which God had pre-ordained a handful of the elect to eternal bliss while others were doomed to perish eternally. By contrast, the Arminian tradition and with it the Methodist movement and church asserted that people are all by nature dead in sin, are justified by faith alone and not by merits. This status of faith results in an ethical lifestyle and is thus testified by a visible involvement in charity, social activities, and politics. One might interpret Shawn’s pedagogical ambitions, his lecturing and teaching, and even his participation in missionary practices, as part of this involvement in Methodist ethics. Here, too, Shawn was a product of his Protestant background, but his interest in dancing in non-Christian religions interfered quite problematically with his support for religious missions, as when, for instance, he presented his dances at fundraising events supporting Christian missions to China.

5. Rhetorical Gestures

Shawn’s liturgical gestures not only embodied the specific ethical aspects of Reform Protestantism, such as sanctification, self-enhancement and socio-political commitment, in all of their ambivalence. There is another, highly complex spectrum of references within these liturgical-rhetorical gestures: the Delsarte system, created by 19th century French musician and teacher François Delsarte. Very popular both in Europe and in North America at the end of the 19th century, Delsarte’s system was used to analyse, codify, prescribe and ultimately train certain movements, especially in the context of public speaking, acting, pantomiming or dancing (see Ruyter 1999, Preston 2011, 59–99). Shawn himself wrote a book on the system called Every Little Movement. A Book about François Delsarte, The Man and His Philosophy, His Science of Applied Aesthetics, The Application of This Science the Art of the Dance, The Influence of Delsarte on American Dance (Shawn, 1963). This book, first published in 1910, remains one of the most comprehensive summaries of the Delsarte system, and there is no doubt that this system served as a key source of inspiration for Shawn’s choreographic work, especially during his early years.

Not unsurprisingly, this system carries inherently religious undertones—it is based, after all, on varying structures of intermingling trinities. François Delsarte, coming from a decidedly Catholic background, follows the main premise that transcendence is mirrored in the materiality of bodies, and that depending on the bodily part from which a movement originates and where it points to, a certain fixed meaning or emotion can be expressed through codified gestures. In codifying these gestures, and in following this codification, specific expressions may be transmitted from the performer of the gesture to the spectator. Rather than a strict nomistic system, capturing the body and prescribing “every little movement,” it allows for the idea of communication—in what is almost

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a 19th century anticipation of the model of kinaesthetic correspondences between stage-performers and audience.

One cannot overestimate the importance of the Delsarte system, not only for Shawn, but for most of the lead figures of early modernist dance, and of Ausdruckstanz in particular (see Jeschke/Vetterman 1992; Wedemeyer-Kolwe 2012). Explicitly or unconsciously they followed the main idea that expression is not an internal, spontaneous feeling that is expressed in improvised movement but rather a communication of codified and pre-existing movement materials. From a contemporary perspective, this codification was more likely arbitrary and founded on assumptions clearly rooted in mid- to late-19th century religious or pseudo-religious, even occult, beliefs and practices (see Cavenaugh 2011; Waille 2012). A gesture pointing to the heart, for instance, as the spiritual centre of the body also had a spiritual connotation or meaning, a gesture pointing to the head was regarded as rational, whereas a gesture in any form connected to the lower body was, as one might expect, related to carnal and more profane aspects of human life. Shawn described the division of the human body according to Delsarte as follows: “Head: Concentric, mental, intellectual zone / Torso: Normal emotional, moral, spiritual zone / Limbs: Excentric, vital, physical zone” (Shawn 1963, 32). He then explained how far the origin of a gesture corresponded to its attributed character:

For example, a movement originating in the upper torso would start with a strong influence of the emotional, affection, moral or spiritual—but if, proceeding through the arm, it finished lower than the hips, it would take on a more physical, sensuous character; if it ended within the realm of space opposite the upper torso, it would be pure and strong as to its moral-emotional-spiritual quality (i.e. pure affection); if it ended in the strata of space surrounding the head, it would take on a mental, directive quality; and if it ended above the head, would indicate a quality of ecstasy, a degree of emotion more than normal or natural; if directed front, a vital and mental quality, if sideways (outward) a stronger emotional indication, and if behind the body, out of the line of sight, a negative indication of rejection, fear. (Shawn 1963, 33)

Here, Shawn’s shift from conceptualizing gestures emotionally (as pathos formulae) to a deliberate usage of ethos formulae becomes remarkably clear: Rather than surrendering the body to experiences of overwhelming, almost uncontrollable affectivity—like ecstasy, grief or fear—expressed in poses and gestures that stand in continuity with history or art, Shawn seems to opt for a far more controlled and reflective usage of gestures. He is obviously not primarily interested in the idea of a spontaneous, uncontrollable expression of emotions, but in indicating content or quality—be it moral, emotional or spiritual—through movement. Shawn thus uses gestures or ethos formulae in a rhetorical way: Rather than expressing emotions on stage, he seeks their communication to the audience by stimulating affective reactions in the individual audience members.

This might be related back to Aristotelian rhetoric, where orators—to which we might add, performers and dancers—don’t necessarily act out emotions on stage, but rather evoke effects in the audience to influence and spurn them in their decisions. According to Aristotle’s Rhetoric (Arist.

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Rh. 1356a), one of the three artistic proofs or modes of persuasion to achieve these effects is ἦθος (êthos) which refers to the integrity and character of the orator, but is also related to ἔθος (éthos) meaning custom and convention. The other two modes of persuasion are λόγος (lógos), the logical appeal, and πάθος (páthos), which again does not belong to the speaker, performer, or dancer, but to the audience members, who react to the action onstage with a deliberately evoked affectivity (Knape 2010, 25). In a further development of this rhetorical system, Quintilian characterizes ethos as the milder and pathos as the stronger aspect and attributes to the first an appeasing effect while the latter is related to emotional turmoil (Inst. orat. VI, 1, 30).

Shawn’s special understanding of Delsartism and his peculiar recourse to the codification of gestures, stands in the tradition of Aristotle’s and Quintilian’s rhetorical differentiation between ethos and pathos. Although his movement formulae certainly included gestures stirring pathos in the audience, the entire word field of ethos, with its meaning of custom, convention, and personal integrity, best reflects his own usage of movement formulae. The question remains, however, whether there is any particular ethical or moral dimension in Shawn’s version of Delsartism and whether these are differentiated, as in Agamben’s account? Shawn uses the term “ethical” only once in his study on Delsarte and not in clear distinction from morality. Referring to Alfred Giraudet’s extensive introduction into the Delsarte-system (Giraudet 1885) Shawn writes:

[T]here is one gesture frequently abused by actors—the elongating of the index finger with the other fingers closed against the band. The expression of this position of the hand draws its meaning more from the point of departure of the whole gesture than from the position itself of hand and fingers. If the action starts naturally from the back of the head, it takes on a coloring of violence or menace; if the movement starts with the hand at or near the opposite shoulder, it shows a more controlled menace or intellectual force dominating the situation; and if the normal rotation of forearm and wrist starts with the band near the top of the head, there is a more moral or ethical and elevated character to the gesture. The first of these would threaten physical violence, the second would convey an intellectual threat, and the third, a moral admonition. (Shawn 1963, 111)

In arguing that “there is a more moral or ethical and elevated character” to a single gesture and in realising this attitude in his religiously themed choreographic work, Shawn distances himself from any critical investigation into the boundaries of movement codification. He rather approaches the ethics of gesture in an utterly nomistic way, almost completely contrarily to how Agamben conceptualizes ethics several decades later. In bringing ethical so close to moral, even using both terms interchangeably, and relating them to particular movements without keeping the arbitrariness of this relation in mind, Shawn best exemplifies those attempts to constitute ethics that Agamben so vigorously opposes. He reduces ethics to establishing and observing a nexus of highly nomistic movement codifications and, undermining the sheer potentiality of dancing, he realizes in Agamben’s words “the destiny of morality […], to regard potentiality itself, which is the most proper mode of human existence, as a fault that must always be repressed” (Agamben 1993, 44). Furthermore—and with regard to dancing—shifting ethos formula towards morality partly exempts the individuality of the one who embodies an encoded gesture in dance and also of those

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who perceive this movement. What is actually part of the concept of ethos formula, the triggering of individual decisions in accordance to ethical principles like justice, proportionality, and reciprocity, isn’t totally suspended, but it is endangered. The essentialist understanding of movement codification that Shawn inherits from Delsarte, here culminates in a crucial ambiguity between the potentiality of dancing on the one hand and its unavoidable dependence on heteronomy on the other.

Shawn’s strikingly hybrid usage of ethos formulae from the 19th century Catholic theorist François Delsarte and his parallel practice of quoting liturgical gestures from Protestant, more specifically Methodist, services, pursues the ambiguity and uncanniness of modernity itself. For Shawn, like many other protagonists of modernist dance, argues on the one hand for freeing the body from the boundaries of classical ballet in the name of individual expression, and on the other hand for an instrumentalized body that still clings to principles of taxonomy and normativity. Furthermore, his belief in the essentialist character of ethos formulae and his conviction that gestures encode a universally valid form of communication goes together with his general view of dancing as a means of religious expression. For him, ethos formulae and liturgical gestures coincide since they both rely on assumptions of putatively universal significance that his own work hopes to exemplify. It is here, in Shawn’s characteristically modernist delusion of grandeur, that ethics and aesthetics do indeed converge.

Works Cited

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———. 2016. The Use of Bodies: Homo Sacer IV, 2. Translated by Adam Kotsko. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Andresen, Carl. 1961. “Altchristliche Kritik am Tanz – ein Ausschnitt aus dem Kampf der Alten Kirche gegen heidnische Sitten.” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 72: 217–62.

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———. 2015. Poetics of Dance: Body, Image, and Space in the Historical Avant-gardes. Translated by Elena Polzer and Mark Franko, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Burt, Ramsay. 1995. The Male Dancer. Bodies, Spectacle, Sexualities. London: Routledge.

Cavenaugh, Greg. 2011. “Corresponding with Delsarte: Occult and Ontological Dimensions of Nineteenth-century Elocutionary Performance.” Text and Performance Quarterly 31 (2): 130–48. https://doi.org/10.1080/10462937.2010.551137

Desmond, Jane. 2001. “Dancing Out the Difference: Cultural Imperialism and Ruth St. Denis Radha of 1906.” In Moving History/Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader, edited by Ann Dils and Ann Cooper Albright, 256–70. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.

Duncan, Isadora. 1903. Der Tanz der Zukunft/The Dance of the Future. Eine Vorlesung. Translated by Karl Federn. Leipzig: Diederichs.

Foster, Susan Leigh. 2001. “Closets Full of Dances: Masculinity and Sexuality in American Modern Dance.” In Dancing Desires: Choreographing Sexualities on and off the Stage, edited by Jane C. Desmond, 147–208. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

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Gil, José. 2006. “Paradoxical Body.” Translated by André Lepecki. TDR 50 (4): 21–35. https://doi.org/10.1162/dram.2006.50.4.21

Graham, Martha. 1991. Blood Memory. New York: Doubleday.

Giraudet, Alfred. 1895. Mimique: physionomie et gestes. Methode pratique d’apres le systeme de F. del Sarte pour servir a l’expression des sentiments. Paris: Librairies-imprimeries reunies.

Humphrey, Doris. 1995. An Artist First. Edited and completed by Selma Jeanne Cohen. Pennington: Princeton Book Co.

Jeschke, Claudia, and Gabi Vetterman. 1992. “François Delsarte.” In Ausdruckstanz. Eine mitteleuropäische Bewegung der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts, edited by Gunhild Oberzaucher-Schüller, 15–24. Wilhelmshaven: Florian Noetzel.

Kabel, Thomas. 2002. Handbuch Liturgische Präsenz. Zur praktischen Inszenierung des Gottesdienstes. Vol. 1. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus.

Knape, Joachim. 2010. “Rhetorischer Pathosbegriff und literarische Pathosnarrative.” In Pathos. Zur Geschichte einer problematischen Kategorie, edited by Cornelia Zumbusch, 25–44. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.

LaMothe, Kimerer L. 1998. “Passionate Madonna: The Christian Turn of American Dancer Ruth St. Denis.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 66 (4): 747–69. https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/66.4.747

———. 2006. Nietzsche’s Dancers. Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, and the Revaluation of Christian Values. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Lepecki, André. 2004. “Inscribing Dance.” In Of the Presence of the Body. Essays on Dance and Performance Theory, edited by André Lepecki, 124–139. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.

Liska, Vivian. 2008. Giorgio Agambens leerer Messianismus. Hannah Arendt. Walter Benjamin. Franz Kafka. Wien: Schlebrügge.

Manor, Giora, ed. 1986. Agadati: The Pioneer of Modern Dance in Israel. Tel Aviv: Sifriat Poalim/The Dance Library of Israel.

Manor, Giora, ed. 1988. Gertrud Kraus. Tel Aviv: Sifriat Poalim/The Dance Library of Israel.

Manning, Erin. 2009. Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Manning, Susan. 2014. Modern Dance, Negro Dance: Race in Motion. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Miller, James L. 1986. Measures of Wisdom. The Cosmic Dance in Classical and Christian Antiquity. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2006. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. A Book for All and None. Translated by Adrian Del Caro. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Preston, Carrie J. 2011. Modernism’s Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, Solo Performance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ruyter, Nancy Lee Chalfa. 1999. The Cultivation of Body and Mind in Nineteenth-Century American Delsartism. Westport: Greenwood Press.

Schwan, Alexander. 2009. “Expression, Ekstase, Spiritualität: Paul Tillichs Theologie der Kunst und Mary Wigmans Absoluter Tanz.” In Tanz, Bewegung & Spiritualität, edited by Dagmar Ellen Fischer and Thom Hecht. 214–26. Jahrbuch Tanzforschung 19. Leipzig: Henschel.

———. 2011. “Tanz, Wahnsinn und Gesetz. Eine kritische relecture von Pierre Legendre und Daniel Sibony.” In Tanz & WahnSinn/Dance & ChoreoMania, edited by Johannes Birringer and Josephine Fenger. Jahrbuch Tanzforschung 21: 111–19. Leipzig: Henschel.

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Shawn, Ted. 1926. The American Ballet. New York: Henry Holt & Co.

———. 1929. Gods Who Dance. New York: Dutton & Co.

———. 1963. Every Little Movement: A Book About François Delsarte, The Man and His Philosophy, His Science of Applied Aesthetics, The Application of This Science to the Art of the Dance, The Influence of Delsarte on American Dance. Rev. ed. New York: Dance Horizons.

———. 1974. Dance We Must. New York: Haskell.

———. 1979. One Thousand and One Night Stands. New York: Da Capo Press.

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Wenger, Tisa J. 2006. “The Practice of Dance for the Future of Christianity: ‘Eurythmic Worship’ in New York’s Roaring Twenties.” In Practicing Protestants: Histories of Christian Life in America, 1630–1965, edited by Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, Leigh E. Schmidt, and Mark Valeri, 222–249. Baltimore: John Hopkins Press.

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Zander, Helmut. 2001. “Körper Religion: Ausdruckstanz um 1900: Loïe Fuller, Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis.” In Protestantismus und Ästhetik: Religionskulturelle Transformationen am Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts, edited by Volker Drehsen, Wilhelm Gräb, and Dietrich Korsch, 197–232. Gütersloh: Kaiser.

Biography

Alexander Schwan is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Institute of Theater Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. Prior to this, he studied Protestant theology, Jewish studies and philosophy in Heidelberg, Jerusalem, and Berlin, as well as theater directing at the Academy of Performing Arts, Frankfurt/Main. His dissertation, Correlations between Dancing and Writing in the Work of Trisha Brown, Jan Fabre, and William Forsythe, was awarded the 2016 Tiburtius Award. In his current book project, Alexander researches theological implications in the works of modernist choreographers such as Ruth St. Denis, Mary Wigman, and Martha Graham, as well as the reception of German and Austrian expressionist dance (Ausdruckstanz) in British Mandate Palestine. In the fall term of 2017, Alexander will be a visiting scholar at Harvard University.

© 2017 Alexander Schwan

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY VOL 3 NO 1 (2017):40–53 DOI: https://doi.org/10.21476/PP.2017.31160

ISSN 2057-7176

PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY

ETHICS, GESTURE AND THE WESTERN

MICHAEL MINDEN JESUS COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

Hollywood Western films constitute one of the truly unmistakeable genres in the era of cinema. This reality of genre, and the expectations and effects that it enables in real people, demand to be taken seriously when one thinks about how cultures of performance and fiction relate to the challenge to think creatively about ethics. However, the commercial and formulaic nature of the products of Hollywood seem to represent a kind of medial discourse quite antithetical to serious ethical reflection. Giorgio Agamben is in my view exemplary in the creativity of his thinking about ethics. As part of this engagement he is deeply interested in what he calls the ethics of gesture in performance and film. I would like, in what follows, to think about the Western, despite its origins in the sphere of commodities, within an Agambenian framework. At the same time my intention is to exploit the genre’s accessibility with a view to probing and clarifying Agamben’s sometimes tangled elucubrations. Drawing on David Foster Wallace’s reflections on genre structures in his novel Infinite Jest, my conclusion will be that alongside an ethics of gesture, we should also be thinking about an ethics of genre when we reflect upon a possible ethical life today.

The Hollywood Western: An Unlikely Place for an Ethics of Gesture?

Agamben takes the position that western society of the twentieth century ‘lost its gestures’ in the sense that pathological forms of the loss of bodily control, ‘ataxia, tics, and dystonia’, became the norm, and thus invisible and forgotten (2000, 51). This is associated for him with the coming to dominance of images—Debord’s ‘spectacle’—and the fateful subordination of the authenticity of human gesturality, along with the ethical responsibility for how human creatures conduct themselves and their political institutions in the world. Broadly understood, this echoes that

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fundamental deformation opposed by Agamben, namely the line of demarcation between ‘bare life’, or the breath of existence, and sovereign power—manifest in the radical disconnection between the machinery of the state and those marginalised by modernity, such as camp inmates and refugees, to whom personhood is effectively denied (see Birmingham 2011, 132–3).

In Agamben’s view, the medium and technology of cinema can ‘lead images back to the homeland of gesture’ (2000, 55). The example he gives is Samuel Beckett’s final piece for television, named after and featuring Schubert’s Lied ‘Nacht und Träume’. In this ten-minute piece a performer places his head on his hands while his dream of comfort and companionship, forthcoming from disembodied hands appearing out of the surrounding darkness, is shown twice, once in the opposite corner to the dreamer, and once occupying the centre of the screen. Agamben writes: ‘According to the beautiful definition implicit in Beckett’s Traum und Nacht [sic], [cinema] is the dream of a gesture. The duty of the director is to introduce into this dream the element of awakening’ (55).

A recent installation piece by the Danish artist Joachim Koester points to a link between an Agambenian ethics of gesture and the Western movie.1 Koester’s response to Agamben’s challenge to do his directorial duty by introducing the element of awakening into a cinematic traffic of images, is an approximately thirty-minute video, The Place of Dead Roads, shown in a perpetual loop in one of the darkened spaces of the installation. Four cowboys compulsively repeat actions recognizable as motifs from the Western genre (drawing guns, circling menacingly, waiting in ambush etc.). The gestures they make, radically separated from the narrative context from which they derive, seem to arise from deep within their bodies. To quote from the wall-mounted exposition:

Gradually, as the cowboys engage in an exploration of these dark sensations, the jerks and involuntary movements of their actions come to resemble a strange dance. Koester writes about the film [...] ‘The “happy dance” [...] can be seen as an attempt to end the spell of historic violence’. (Koester 2017)

In other words, Koester’s video corresponds very well to, and indeed helps clarify, Agamben’s position, detaching the creaturely body from the ritualistic straitjacket of the forms of spectacle to which it has fallen subordinate—with the Western movie functioning here as a sort of paradigm. In Koester’s re-working, the genre’s formulaic gestures of violent interaction are negated—the performers never touch the revolvers they wear, despite their obsessive miming of the gestures of aiming, shooting etc.—and through ‘jerks and involuntary movements’ (like Agamben’s ‘ataxia, tics and dystonia’), the cowboys find a route to a gesturality freed, rather than fixed, by the moving image.

Conversely, it is clear that the narrative control exerted by the Western genre as such is unlikely to leave any of the gestures it captures untouched. This is a point understood even by those commentators most sympathetic to the aesthetic potential of the genre. As Jane Tompkins writes in her superb book, West of Everything, ‘There is never a moment when you aren’t being programmed to believe, act, or feel a certain way’ (1992, 210). Greil Marcus, in an essay called ‘Cowboys and Germans’, finds himself asking: ‘in what sense is a mystification, that is the standard

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heroic Western image, free?’ (1995a, 100). And, of course, this control is not just a matter of a narrative logic constraining gesturality, but is also ideologically driven. The Western unrolls against the horizon of Manifest Destiny, an ideology of White European-American entitlement and power with scant regard for ethical or aesthetic abstractions—the mantle of which, as Marcus says, John Wayne ‘wears easily, happy to represent America to the world’ (1995b, 209). Indeed, the very notion of destiny is described by Agamben as antithetical to what he means by ethics:

the fact that must constitute the point of departure for any discourse on ethics is that there is no essence, no historical or spiritual vocation, no biological destiny that humans must enact or realize. This is the only reason why something like an ethics can exist, because it is clear that if humans were or had to be this or that substance, this or that destiny, no ethical experience would be possible—there would be only tasks to be done. (Agamben 1993, 43)

For Agamben, destiny and meaningfully human gestures are mutually exclusive: ‘For human beings who have lost every sense of naturalness, each single gesture becomes a destiny’ (Agamben 2000, 52).

One might expect a narrative concern with destiny to seep into every frame of the Western, leaving no residual space—in Agamben’s terms—for gestures to breathe. In what follows I wish to argue that such a reading would be too narrow.

The Ethics of Gesture and the Medium of Cinema

I take from what Agamben says in ‘Notes on Gesture’ and elsewhere that cinema in its technological constitution captures and cuts up human movements, and in doing so can release the dynamic of gesture from the captivity of images (thus, in a Benjaminian way, mounting resistance from within technology to the general deforming application of technology).2 This potential is intrinsic to the medium of cinema, and therefore presumably observable in any cinematic instance, including Western films—even if Agamben would prefer Beckett, Debord, or Godard.

Although perhaps not straightforwardly definable in Agamben’s terms, there is a prominent example of gesturality in the individual Western movie usually regarded as the greatest of them all, John Ford’s The Searchers (1956). This is the climactic moment near the end, when the John Wayne character (Ethan Edwards) whom the audience has cause to fear is about to kill his niece Debbie, lifts her into the air instead. Now, of course, this moment is integrated into a narrative (and has words attached: ‘Let’s go home, Debbie’), but it is a narrative that is astonishingly problematic in relation to Marcus’s ‘standard heroic Western image’ (1995a, 100). Behind a familiar revenge schema there is an implication that Ethan is in the grip of an irrational racial hatred reaching so deep within him that he identifies with the Native American ‘other’ he hates.3 This is why he is thought likely to kill Debbie, abducted by Indians, when he finally catches up with her after years of searching: for him death is a better fate than miscegenation.

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However, as the philosopher Robert Pippin says in a remarkable analysis of The Searchers, the motivation of the John Wayne character is much more complex than this. Ethan never articulates his racism and its interpretation depends upon ‘many unknowns intimated visually, demanding some pursuit of purely visual intelligibility’ (2010, 117).4 Of these, the culmination is the gesture at the end:

one element of the enormous emotional power of that famous scene of transformation and redemption is the realization that none of the archetypes [mobilized by the film and often rooted in the person of John Wayne] is adequate to the sudden, transformative gesture of Ethan picking up Debbie. (Pippin 2010, 134)

In another gesture, possibly even less integrated within narrative, Ethan’s feelings regarding what subsequently turns out to have been the discovery of the body of Debbie’s sister is expressed only by a mute but violent digging into the earth with a knife. The gesture has no instrumental or effective narrative function, although it recalls both sexual violence and the digging that has just served off-screen to bury the violated body. If it is a gesture to convey the opaque ethical confusion which has Ethan in its grip, his later action is obviously positive within the ethical narrative of the film.

And this positive turn is definitionally gestural. As Pippin and others have noted, it repeats and amplifies an ordinary social gesture from near the start of the film, in which Ethan, returning from a not-fully-explained post-civil-war sojourn in violent territory, had picked up Debbie as a child. These gestures suggest a moment of civilization in which two bodies touch, in which a stronger person forbears from violence while demonstrating superior strength, and the renunciation of potential for dominance. More profoundly, the final gesture acknowledges the genocidal stain in the construction of American identity—without, of course, being able to remove it.

Readers of film with a sharper gaze than my own have registered what might indeed be called an Agambenian importance of gesture in Westerns. Here is Alexander Horwarth, the Austrian film writer, on a film made by Ford ten years before The Searchers, My Darling Clementine:

It’s Sunday. Wyatt Earp [Henry Fonda] freshly groomed and shaven after his visit to the barber, strides slowly across the hotel veranda. He sits and balances on the chair, resting first one leg then the other against the veranda upright. This sublime moment contains the whole film: it is in a state of equilibrium [Er schwebt]. (Österreichisches Filmmuseum 2016; my translation)

For Christian Petzold, the contemporary German filmmaker, Henry Fonda on the veranda is the epitome of the ‘Schwebezustand’, a ‘state of hovering, floating or being poised’, which, Petzold says, defines the ethically creative potential of all genres in cinema, generating for the filmmaker the very possibility of significant narrative: ‘as long as there is this kind of balance, one can tell a story, one can make a film’ (cited in Fisher 2013, 155). The consciousness of potential that inheres in the generic Schwebezustand, brought about by gestural performance in My Darling Clementine,

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epitomises gesturality as such as a phenomenon of potentiality and suspension. What makes the particular genre of the Western movie at once aesthetically and ethically interesting is that this Schwebezustand clearly has to do with the moment of potential in US foundation myths—as is clear from the linkage of the veranda gesture with the visual drama following it. Wyatt Earp and Clementine Carter (Cathy Downs) walk from the veranda and join the townsfolk in a dance on the site of construction of a church, Monument Valley in the background, beneath the flag of the young United States. This is the Schwebezustand of the New World. As Gilberto Perez puts it, this half-completed church at the edge of the desert is a place ‘where Wyatt Earp will forever dance with Clementine’ (1998, 241).

In their equilibrium and sense of suspended potentiality, these gestures point toward that quality which characterises the best Westerns: that they are not ideologically rigid. Pippin, whose interest is in the political-philosophical implications of the Westerns of Ford and Howard Hawks, writes of the celebrated passage from My Darling Clementine on which we have just quoted Horwarth, Petzold and Perez: ‘the civil societies at issue in such Westerns are “open and unfinished”, and so any so-called nostalgia is for a time when the possibilities were open, not for any prefounding fixed way of cowboy life’ (2010, 143). While the ethical-gestural content of these Westerns does not point forward to an as-yet-unknowable ‘coming’ community, the genre does concern what Perez, defining Ford’s political viewpoint, calls ‘a past that looked forward to a future’ (241). There is a balance between what Agamben might describe as this gestural capture of ethical potentiality and what he disparaged above as ‘tasks to be done’ (Agamben 1993, 43). In the Western’s retrospective view of a sense of a future, we are at a point upon which the shadow of the realisation has begun to fall that the sheer abundance of the new continent can never be perfectly converted into an actual political order.5

‘The Weary Gunfighter’ and the Ethics of Gesture

The essence of this ethical Schwebezustand is distilled in a particular subgenre of the Western. This is the subgenre of what David Foster Wallace (via his protagonist, Hal) summarises as ‘the seductive formulae of violent payback’ in Infinite Jest:

i.e. the cathartic bloodbath, i.e. the hero trying with every will-fiber to eschew the generic world of the stick and fist and but driven by unjust circumstances back to the violence again, to the cathartic final bloodbath the audience is brought to applaud instead of mourn. (1996, 704)

Politically the ‘weary gunfighter’ motif reflects a moment at which the US is ‘nearly an ordinary European country and no longer the place of promise’ (Pippin 2010, 143). The figure is that of the killer who wishes to become bound by the restraints of civilization, but finds that that civilization cannot exist without his violence. In a passing allusion to Carl Schmitt and Agamben, Pippin says: ‘a state of exception always looms’ (145), one which will require the killer to kill again, and thus be excluded from civilized order after all; instead, he rides off into the sunset, alone, except for his horse. The two classical examples of this plot model to which I wish to draw attention are Shane

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(George Stevens, 1952) and Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, 1992). Like The Searchers and My Darling Clementine, they are among the most well-known Westerns of all: the American Film Institute’s third and fourth ‘best Western’ of all time respectively (The Searchers heads that particular list).

To take Shane first: the titular hero (Alan Ladd) arrives, from the endless landscape that provides the margin or penumbra of every Western plot, at a homestead containing a family called Starrett (father, mother, son). His past as a killer is established in various ways, but so is his readiness to help Joe Starrett with the struggle to make this individualist project work. There is a cattle man, Ryker, whose agricultural business strategy requires the whole range unfenced, and who therefore seeks to be rid of the fence-building Starretts and other homesteaders like them. He eventually hires a gunfighter (Jack Palance) to make good what he regards as his rightful claim by force. At this, reluctantly, and to prevent Starrett from suicidally confronting the killer himself, Shane takes his place and kills the Palance character and various others who get in the way. He then rides off back into the landscape, bonded only with his horse, and deaf to young Joey who entreats him to stay: ‘Joey, there’s no living with a killer...’.

The major part of the action of the film therefore takes place in what Agamben would call the ‘zone of indistinction’ between the aspirations of the Starrett family—impeccable in the ethical terms of the narrative (their name comes out as ‘Start’ in the dialogue, as if to suggest the foundation of a moral order)—and the need for murder outside the law in order to make their realisation possible. Somebody says at one point, in a memorable phrase, ‘The law is three days’ ride from here’. (There is an interesting contrast here with the line ‘I AM the law’ spoken by Wade Hatton [Errol Flynn] in the Flynn vehicle Dodge City [1939], which is clearly not ironical, and attests to the greater depth and subtlety of the more self-conscious, pure ‘myth’ of the best Westerns [see Bazin 1971, 152].) The actual shape and import of the narrative is as follows: once Shane has actually disclosed the state of emergency that dwells within the modern political order, he has to disappear, or, more precisely, to become an abstraction. His disappearance allows the law to enter and appear to fill the space that he must vacate. (This whole problematic is brilliantly explored in another Ford Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance [1962].) Young Joey Starrett, who has represented the viewer throughout, embodies the benefit to the viewer and by extension civil society of the sacrifice made by Shane: ‘Tell your mother there are no more guns in the valley… you go home to your mother and father and grow up to be strong ‘n’ straight…’.

But the film itself is not the disappearance into abstraction; it is in fact a series of gestural performances that flourish before the necessity of abstraction makes good its claim. Consider the first performance of Shane’s readiness to help the Starrett family. Without saying a word, he gets up from the dinner table, goes outside the cabin and starts attacking a huge tree stump with an axe. At length, also without comment, Joe joins him and the two men are shown working together. The actual task they undertake is curiously indeterminate: they are getting rid of the remains of an enormous tree. They are neither felling it (it’s already gone), nor uprooting it (there’s no need), just levelling the ground. At a later point, the ‘suspended’, hovering, gunfighter gives in to Joey’s pleading to teach him how to shoot. Shane impresses upon the boy that a gun is just a tool. But, of course, when Shane uses his gun in earnest, he is banished from the field in which tools have

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their rightful place. This ‘telos’ is fatal. In contrast, the stump chopping has a less clear outcome: what it captures and exposes by means of the editing is two potentially lethal weapons used as tools in a performance that bonds two men in labour.

About halfway through the film, there is a conversation between Ryker and Starrett about the rights and wrongs of their claims to the land and forms of livelihood. Ryker speaks on behalf of Manifest Destiny (i.e. big business) while Starrett presses the legal rights of the individual. This much is an explicit US political debate between commercial interests on one side and government-protected rights on the other. But the cinematic passage is a counterpoint that intersperses shots of the interlocutors and images of their respective enforcers, who circle round each other in a kind of choreography of menace: what is manifest here is the shadow of violence cast by the rational argument. And, clearly, the underpinning of potential violence is not just on the side of the ruthless rancher.

If such moments of gestural ethics contain an Agambenian kernel, they in their turn are clearly contained within the more mystifying ethical narrative (to use Marcus’s adjective) in which the mutual dependence of violence and order is hidden within the abstraction of the law. In contrast, Unforgiven is a demystification of this untroubled confidence in the law, and it achieves this by exploiting (but, as we shall claim, not subverting) the genre that Shane exemplifies so purely.

Clint Eastwood, who plays the lead in Unforgiven, which he also produced and directed, himself carries a specific significance in terms of the history of the Western genre from Shane to the Spaghetti Western. If in Shane the gunfighter rides off into the sublime landscape, in the Spaghetti Western he emerges from nowhere, as at the beginning of A Fistful of Dollars (Sergio Leone, 1964), minus any name, shame or scruple. In Unforgiven, this nameless, metaphysical instance is re-located in an ‘ethical vision’.6 At some point before the story begins, the Eastwood character, Will Munny seems to have achieved the status of penniless but honest homesteader desired by Shane, but denied to him. The credit sequence pictures a figure silhouetted by the twilight of morning (or evening) digging a grave on a horizon empty of anything but a small cabin and a tree. It records visually the fusion of homesteader and killer (the axe imperceptibly becomes a spade7), but also the end of that dream. On the left-hand side of the screen text scrolls down, contextualising the action—and music8—already attracting our visual pleasure, in cold, judgemental prose:

She was a comely young woman and not without prospects. Therefore it was heartbreaking to her mother that she would enter into marriage with William Munny, a known thief and murderer, a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition. When she died, it was not at his hands as her mother might have expected, but of smallpox. That was 1878.

We move straight into the originating event of the plot, now set not in the nuclear/holy family of Shane, but in a frontier brothel. A cowboy slashes the face of a prostitute (Delilah Fitzgerald, played by Anna Levine/Thomson) who has mocked the size of his membrum virile. Unsatisfied with the

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measures taken by the law (in the person of Gene Hackman’s Marshall, Little Bill), the sex workers club together and hire Munny to come out of retirement and kill the offenders. The murders are accomplished, though barely competently, by Munny and two associates. However, when one of them, Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman), is caught, publicly tortured and executed by Little Bill in a procedure of savage law enforcement, Munny reverts to his killer persona (the moment of disinhibition is the moment he takes his first slug of whisky in ten years), and kills everybody in a climax very like that of Shane—even down to the mise-en-scène, camera angles and menacing jangling of spurs—an ending that, as Vaux writes, ‘activates the film’s suppressed genre elements’ (71).

The film is characterized by gestural moments which demystify the gunfighter as homesteader. The interaction of cattle, pigs, deer, the dog and humans at the beginning of Shane beautifully orchestrates the arrival of the hero. When we are introduced to Munny, by contrast, he is shown in uncomfortable low-angle close-up scrambling in the mud with his pigs, unable to keep upright. As if to emphasize the point, the self-glorifying ‘Schofield Kid’, who, it will transpire, has come to enlist Munny in the justice/revenge action of the frontier sex workers, articulates off-screen what the audience is thinking: ‘you don’t look like no rootin’ tootin’ sonovabitch assassin’. Shane emerges into his story on horseback, of course. Tompkins writes: ‘More than any other single element in the genre, [horses] symbolize the desire to recuperate some lost connection to life’ (1992, 94). In Unforgiven, this symbolization is intentionally blocked. When Munny attempts to mount his horse he falls off haplessly (twice) in a passage lasting almost a minute. A similar device is used to show how hard it is in reality to shoot small objects off fence rails using a revolver.

In these and many more moments—indeed, practically the whole development of the plot—the ethical point of the narrative is explicit from what Sara Anson Vaux calls the ‘suppression’ of the genre (2012). That is to say that what emerges in the suspended space between the passionate desire for justice and the ensuing bloodbath is the creaturely reality of suffering; the insistence of the body; how hard it is in fact morally to kill, and how brutal and undignified in practice; how unreliable firearms are as tools; how easily violence overshoots the requirements of justice; and so on. All this is clear. What is less clear is the role of the shootout with which the plot of Unforgiven, like that of Shane, culminates. Its function (and our pleasure in it) in the latter is clear enough. Little Joey, who relishes Shane’s competence and mimes our own consumption of it throughout the film, must also accept his loss—the final words are Joey’s ‘Shane, come back!’ The implication is that the viewer, too, having been entertained by the murders, can now grow up to be strong and straight and so on, having paid the price of renunciation.

Joey’s equivalent in Unforgiven as our surrogate consumer/commodifier of violence is the character of W.W. Beauchamp, the writer. We cannot ignore his surrogacy on our behalf, but to identify with him is shameful since he is both a physical coward—he graphically and realistically wets himself when actual violence threatens—and the agent of commercial exploitation of killing as entertainment. I have long reflected upon my bad conscience at enjoying the concluding bloodbath, an enjoyment that I take to be required by the aesthetic and thematic structure of the

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film. My conclusion is that Eastwood and David Webb Peoples, who wrote the screenplay, make explicit and leave unresolved in a meaningful way what Shane disavows and resolves.

The return of the hyper-competent killer, after so much assurance that such persons do not exist in reality, introduces what can only be described as a metaphysical element. Earlier in the film English Bob (Richard Harris) had explained, a propos of the contemporaneous wounding of President Garfield, why it is that you can assassinate an elected president, but not a sovereign monarch: ‘If you were to point a pistol at a king or queen your hands would shake at the sight of royalty and would cause you to dismiss all thought of bloodshed, you would stand how shall I put it, in awe, but a president, well, I mean, why not shoot a president…?’9 At the end of the film, Munny inspires a similar sort of sovereign awe. After he has completed his massacre he leaves the saloon, and anybody is in a position to shoot him down. But nobody does. He remains invincible, but not because of any respect derived from civil structures of authority, but by the awe inspired by the certainty of pitiless violence hidden within it. We are in the state of exception. It is pitch black and pouring, you can’t see a thing clearly except Munny’s white horse. ‘Alright’, he says, in a strikingly resigned, impersonal or disinterested tone, ‘I’m coming out, any man I see out there, I’m going to kill him [...], anyone takes a shot at me I’m going to kill him, kill his wife, burn his damn house down….’ The logic of genre allows Eastwood and Peoples to confront the violence which Little Bill has striven to put to use in the establishment of justice, albeit with an undertow of sadism, with the reality of violence, which is that it is in a sense absolute. The state of exception that the killer embodies cannot be sublated. The means cannot be contained within the ends.

I would argue that our pleasure—the visceral reality of which is difficult to deny without negating the dramatic and aesthetic shape of the whole work—although we might be ashamed of it, is removed from the sphere of entertainment. It is unforgiven: our shame.10 But the climax is also removed from the sphere of conventional ethics 11 in which, according to Agamben, ‘the false alternative between ends and means […] paralyzes morality’ (2000, 56). After Munny has ejected the fawning Beauchamp (thereby possibly taking us beyond our shame), this dialogue ensues between the mortally wounded Little Bill on the bar-room floor and Munny towering above him:

Little Bill: I don’t deserve this. To die like this. I was building a house.

Munny: Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.

Little Bill: I’ll see you in hell, William Munny.

Burst of storm sound; sounds of cocking of Spencer rifle at distance of a few feet.

Munny: Yeah

Little Bill takes one last breath.

Gunshot.

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Little Bill’s last breath, perhaps, is the gesture, unstressed, but inseparable from the cinematic medium (which alone among media will capture and preserve such a point of undifferentiated life), that comes closest to that ‘something like an ethics’ beyond ethics of which Agamben speaks.12

The Ethics of Genre

In his remarks on the vicissitudes and significance of gesture, Agamben concludes by claiming that the ‘appearance’ or ‘exposure’ of mediality (such as he discerns in authentic gesture) is the condition of human community and opens an ethical space (2000, 58–9). Perhaps we are now in a position to make sense of these words in relation to the genre of the Western movie. The relevance here of Wallace’s Infinite Jest goes beyond simply providing the term and definition for the ‘violent payback’ narrative arc. In referring to that topos, Wallace’s character Hal was in fact mounting a critique of his father’s avant-garde film-making tendencies in relation to genre:

Hal’s critical take on the film is that Himself [how Hal refers to his father], at certain dark points when abstract theory-issues seemed to provide an escape from the far more wrenching creative work of making humanly true or entertaining cartridges [a fictional futuristic format for the distribution of films], had made films in certain commercial-type genre modes that so grotesquely exaggerated the formulaic schticks of the genres that they became ironic metacinematic parodies on the genres. (1996, 703)

Hal’s disapproval is clear from the words that follow: ‘“sub/inversions of the genres,” cognoscenti taken in were wont to call them’. Wallace’s point, as I understand it, is that genres are not ultimately sub- or invertible, pace Joachim Koester. This crucially serious moral position is, I would argue, driven home in the next few pages of Wallace’s novel.

Throughout Infinite Jest, the demands placed on a recovering addict by collectives such as Alcoholics or Narcotics Anonymous serve to represent the extraordinary effort demanded of an individual if he or she is to recover moral agency in contemporary reality (what Guy Debord, to whose memory Agamben’s Means without End is dedicated, characterised as ‘the society of the spectacle’):

many not-yet-desperate-enough newcomers to Boston AA see Boston AA as just an exchange of slavish dependence on the bottle/pipe for slavish dependence on meetings and banal shibboleths and robotic piety, an ‘Attitude of Platitude,’ and use this idea that it’s still slavish dependence as an excuse to stop trying Boston AA [...]. (706)

This false assumption of freedom provides, I suggest, an analogy with the erroneous idea that genre can be transcended at will. In Agamben’s terms, it is to wrongly dismiss mediality as ‘platitude’. The return to dependence that inevitably ensues in the case of Wallace’s smug substance abusers, we read, beats ‘them into such a double-bound desperation that they finally

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come back in with their faces hanging off their skulls and beg to be told just what platitudes to shout, and how high to adjust their vacant grins’ (706).

Against this powerful depiction of the reality of addiction and the rigours that alone can overcome it, the novel provides an image of positive resistance to dependency that is linked to the generic ‘violent payback’ pattern. This occurs through one of the most persistent leitmotif characters, Don Gately, who embodies the problematic of addiction and its implications for an ethics of modernity. He has submitted to the proper discipline of AA and become rehabilitated, but, in a climactic moment of the novel, he throws off all restraint in order heroically to protect the inmates of the centre for recovering addicts, in which he now has a role as custodian, against the threat of extreme violence. This is a bloodbath if ever there was one, and it is hard to imagine that Wallace, who thought extremely highly of Unforgiven and David Webb Peoples (see Rose 1997), didn’t wish us to make the connection, so effectively does he bring us ‘to applaud instead of mourn’ this relapse on Gateley’s part into murderous criminality. Where Hal’s father, in his darkest most ‘theoretical’ and uncreative moments, seeks to parody and subvert, Wallace acknowledges the non-transcendable nature of ‘the generic world of stick and fist and (sic)’ by himself employing the cliché or platitude offered by the genre. But his hero, Don Gately, does not ride off into the sunset like Shane, leaving the ambivalence of the law in suspension. This much he has in common with Will Munny. Instead he displays a moral heroism commensurate with his physical prowess, by refusing to accept the palliation of drugs (and thus an inevitable relapse into dependence) in the many hundred-page recovery process from the terrible wounds he has received in ‘performing the platitude’. Wallace’s enormous novel, which directs much of its moral and aesthetic effort towards tracing the convergences and divergences between literature and film, can go further than Eastwood and Peoples in probing the limits of genre. But through the novel’s structural use of the violent payback motif, it nevertheless maintains the same position as they do: that it is not philosophically responsible to claim to transcend it.

Where Petzold, cited earlier, attested to the potentiality of genre (‘...as long as there is this kind of balance, one can tell a story, one can make a film’), Wallace amplifies the ethical dimension of Petzold’s point. By blocking the delusion that there is an ‘outside’ to human discourses from which some help or redemption might be expected (of which delusion the ‘attitude of platitude’ or avant-garde disdain for genre patterns are representatives) Wallace focuses the formidable ethical demands posed by the reality of what Agamben would know as Debord’s spectacular modernity. Exposing the resistance of ‘genres’ to meaningful sub- or inversion can therefore have the same function as ‘gesture’ does in relation to ‘language’ for Agamben, who writes:

if we understand the ‘word’ as the means of communication, then to show a word does not mean to have at one’s disposal a higher level (a metalanguage, itself incommunicable within the first level), starting from which we could make that word an object of communication; it means, rather, to expose the word in its own mediality, in its own being a means, without any transcendence. The gesture is, in this sense, communication of a communicability. It has precisely nothing to say because what it shows is the being-in-language of human beings as pure mediality. (2000, 58)

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The fact and display of mediality, whether in the case of words, gestures or genre, rather than facilitating transcendence, can and should be acknowledged as the ground for genuine ethical experience. It bears witness to the ‘being-in-a-medium of human beings’ and it therefore ‘opens the ethical dimension for them’ (57). This is a dimension not determined by an overriding destiny or direction—hence the great Westerns suspend the ‘end’ of Manifest Destiny—but a space of human responsibility, in which means are not instrumentalised by ends, nor are they ends in themselves (see Agamben 2000, 57). The political aporia generated by the perpetual non-coincidence of hope and possibility is one that must be ‘endured and supported’ rather than sublated or concealed within closed logics of production or action.13

1 Koester’s installation, In the Face of Overwhelming Forces, was mounted at the Camden Arts Centre in London from 28 January to 26 March 2017.

2 For an overview of Agamben’s view of cinema see Grønstad and Gustafsson (2014).

3 For Ethan’s complicated identification with the hated ‘other’, see Pippin (2010), especially 112.

4 On the same page (117), Pippin draws attention to the enigma of this moment: ‘What is the meaning of Ethan’s famous gesture at the end, raising Debbie once again above his head?’

5 The United States of America did indeed once seem to promise a ‘coming community’ in which scarcity, injustice and inequality would disappear. Hannah Arendt, for whom the American, rather than the French, Revolution was the superior but sadly neglected, historiographical example, quotes John Adams: ‘I always consider the settlement of America as the opening of a grand scheme and design in Providence for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth’ (cit. Arendt 2006, 13). In the context of the ambivalence of ‘destiny’ in US culture it is instructive to glance at the way Agamben and others make use of that iconic US writer, Herman Melville. While Agamben sees a prolepsis of a kind of ‘anti-destiny’ in Bartleby’s refusal of the deformations of modernity, Bonnie Honig draws attention to Melville’s alternative model, of a possible cooperative community, in Ishmael and the crew of the Pequod (2016, 158). This affords a glimpse of a perpetual tension between political hope and political possibility.

6 I take the phrase, but not my argument, from Sara Anson Vaux’s, The Ethical Vision of Clint Eastwood (2012). Vaux takes a conventional (fundamentally theological) line about the subversion of genre to which, as will become clear, I cannot give assent. For David Foster Wallace, Unforgiven is ‘not a Western at all’, but ‘a moral drama [...] It’s Henry James, basically’ (Rose 1997).

7 I am grateful to Rebecca Schneider for pointing out this subtle transition.

8 For a thoughtful and persuasive analysis of Eastwood’s use of music in this opening sequence and elsewhere, as opposed to that of John Ford, for instance, see Vaux (2012), 224–5.

9 Perhaps the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was to mark the definitive historical end of this kind of attitude.

10 The moment of shame that dwells both within our pleasure at ‘violent payback’ and in the creaturely necessity of dwelling between hope and possibility, brilliantly exposed in Unforgiven, is perhaps also present, but hidden by the mask of one consonant, in the title of our other example of this subgenre.

11 The reconstructed Munny is full of platitudes about ‘deserving’ and ‘wickedness’—in other words he is portrayed

Notes

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with psychological realism. However, at the end of the film, he is not a psychologically realistic figure. It is not aesthetically legitimate to link the possible shallowness or conventionality of his moral position with his generic reversion to type (i.e, say it is just another weakness).

12 It is notable that after the ‘happy dance’ in Koester’s The Place of Dead Roads, referred to above, there is a fifteen second close-up of one of the exhausted performer’s faces, just breathing.

13 ‘What characterizes gesture is that in it nothing is being produced or acted, but rather something is being endured and supported’ (Agamben 2000, 56). Eastwood himself, in publicly coming out in favour of Donald Trump, betrayed this political ethic. For what must deeply distress the civilised western individual about the assumption of power of the Trump interest is the return of an ideology of what was referred to above as a ‘White European-American entitlement and power with scant regard for ethical or aesthetic abstractions’. Rhetorically at least, this interest disregards the disparity between hope and possibility, plumping instead for a closed logic of action in terms of which there is nothing problematic about the direct violent suppression of those opposed to itself, proclaiming (like Errol Flynn) ‘I AM the Law’.

Works Cited

Agamben, Giorgio. 1993. The Coming Community. Translated by Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

———. 2000. ‘Notes on Gesture’. In Means without End: Notes on Politics, translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, 49–59. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Arendt, Hannah. 2006. On Revolution. London: Penguin.

Bazin, André. 1971. ‘The Western, or the American Film par excellence’. In What Is Cinema?, 2:140–48. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Birmingham, Peg. 2011. ‘Agamben on Violence, Language, and Human Rights’. In Philosophy and the Return of Violence: Studies from the Widening Gyre, edited by Nathan Eckstrand and Christopher S. Yates, 124–34. London: Continuum.

Fisher, Jaimey. 2013. Christian Petzold. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Grønstad, Asbjørn, and Henrik Gustafsson. 2014. ‘Introduction: Giorgio Agamben and the Shape of Cinema to Come’. In Cinema and Agamben: Ethics, Biopolitics and the Moving Image, edited by Asbjørn Grønstad and Henrik Gustafsson. New York: Bloomsbury.

Honig, Bonnie. 2016. ‘Charged: Debt, Power, and the Politics of the Flesh in Shakespeare’s Merchant, Melville’s Moby Dick, and Eric Santner’s The Weight of All Flesh’. In The Weight of All Flesh: On the Subject-Matter of Political Economy, by Eric L. Santner, edited by Kevis Goodman, 131–82. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Koester, Joachim. 2017. ‘The Place of Dead Roads’. Wall-mounted description at Camden Arts Centre, London, where the video installation was exhibited from 28 January to 26 March 2017.

Marcus, Greil. 1995a. ‘Cowboy Boots and Germans’. In The Dustbin of History, 103–110. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

———. 1995b. ‘John Wayne Listening’. In The Dustbin of History, 209–215. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Österreichisches Filmmuseum. 2016. "My Darling Clementine." Accessed 1 November 2016. https://www.filmmuseum.at/jart/prj3/filmmuseum/main.jart?j-j-url=/kinoprogramm/produktion&veranstaltungen_id=1110&ss1=y

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Perez, Gilberto. 1998. The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Pippin, Robert B. 2010. Hollywood Westerns and American Myth: The Importance of Howard Hawks and John Ford for Political Philosophy. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Rose, Charlie. 1997. "Interview with David Foster Wallace. The Charlie Rose Show March 27 1997." Accessed 22 November 2015. http://www.smallbytes.net/~bobkat/rose.html

Tompkins, Jane. 1992. West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Vaux, Sara Anson. 2012. The Ethical Vision of Clint Eastwood. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.

Wallace, David Foster. 1996. Infinite Jest. New York: Little, Brown and Company.

Biography

Michael Minden was until 2016 Reader in German Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge and is Emeritus Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. He has written on a wide range of topics in German literature, thought and film, including books on Arno Schmidt and the Bildungsroman. His most recent book is Modern German Literature (Polity, 2011), since the publication of which he has written on Christa Wolf, Günter Grass, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ingeborg Bachmann and Ruth Klüger, all more or less under the broad heading of ‘Literature and Experience’.

© 2017 Michael Minden

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY VOL 3 (2017):54–66 DOI: https://doi.org/10.21476/PP.2017.31164

ISSN 2057–7176

PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY

THE PARADOX OF A GESTURE, ENLARGED BY THE DISTENSION OF TIME:

MERLEAU-PONTY AND LACAN ON A SLOW-MOTION PICTURE OF HENRI MATISSE PAINTING

ASTRID DEUBER-MANKOWSKY RUHR UNIVERSITY BOCHUM

TRANSLATED BY MARKUS HARDTMANN

In his 1964 series of lectures, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan briefly mentions a “delightful example” (1981, 114) that Maurice Merleau-Ponty had given in an excursus to his book, Signs (1964c, 45–6). Lacan describes it as “that strange slow-motion film in which one sees Matisse painting” (114). What the psychoanalyst is referring to is a scene in the documentary Henri Matisse by François Campaux, a 16-mm black-and-white sound film from 1946.

Lacan mentions Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of the filmic example only in passing. This reference, however, is anything but arbitrary, for it marks the conclusion of an intense altercation he had with the aesthetics of perception and ontology of Merleau-Ponty, who had passed away three years earlier. Lacan had been friends with the philosopher since the early 1940s (Roudinesco 1997, 210). Seven days after Merleau-Ponty passed away, Lacan expressed his grief on May 10, 1961, to a full auditorium with the following words:

It was a heavy blow to us. […] I can also say that because of this mortal fatefulness, we will not have had time to bring our formulations and statements closer together. (cited in Roudinesco 1997, 280; translation modified M.H.)1

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The differences alluded to by Lacan refer to an intervention by Merleau-Ponty at a congress in Bonneval in the autumn of 1960. At the meeting, Lacan defended his thesis that the unconscious is structured like a language against the advocates of a phenomenological Freudianism. Lacan is said to have counted on Merleau-Ponty’s support, but the latter rejected Lacan’s thesis as totalitarian (Roudinesco 1997, 254; also see Lacan 1981, 71).

How strongly Lacan felt about the need for a clarification of their respective positions can already be seen from the short article that he wrote as an homage to Merleau-Ponty in 1961, published in a special issue of the journal Les temps modernes dedicated to the philosopher. In Merleau-Ponty’s last published article, “Eye and Mind” (first published 1961; written July 1960), in particular, and especially in the remarks on painting developed therein, Lacan saw a point of connection between their respective positions. Thus Lacan declares his agreement with Merleau-Ponty’s view that there is a reality at work in painting that affords it a truth function sui generis. Lacan emphasizes the fact that painting is the truth function of a reality that cannot be captured physically and has to remain invisible for the natural sciences.

In the following discussion of how Merleau-Ponty and Lacan refer to the filmic example showing Matisse painting, I will not seek to reconstruct Lacan’s altercation with Merleau-Ponty. Rather, I would like to pursue the following two questions: First, I will reconstruct the different ways in which Merleau-Ponty and Lacan determine, in their respective discussions of the recording of Matisse painting, the mediality of gesture in the constitution of the subject. Merleau-Ponty raises the question of an ethics of gesture by situating the subject in the field of tension between rationality and the presence of bodily experience: gesture establishes the link to the reality of the creative act and leads to “this fabric of brute meaning” (cette nappe de sens brut) which, according to Merleau-Ponty, the “activism [of scientific thinking] would prefer to ignore” (Merleau-Ponty 1964a, 161).2 At the same time, gesture functions as a protection against the intellectualiziation (Vergeistigung) that threatens the subject when rationality takes on a life of its own. Lacan takes up the argument at the precise point where Merleau-Ponty, in contradistinction to Platonic philosophy, assumes that we are beings who are looked at, rather than beings looking at the truth of the world in the ideas. That is to say, Lacan likewise starts out from the pre-existence of the gaze—and thus also from gesture. Unlike Merleau-Ponty, however, Lacan does not assume that gesture leads to a “fabric of brute meaning”; for him, it leads to the split of the subject. As I am going to explain in more detail, gesture is characterized, for Lacan, by a paradox that manifests itself as arrest and haste in the dimension of time, and as fissure and suture in the dimension of space. The question of an ethics of gesture also arises for Lacan in relation to the recognition of the limitedness of the subject. Whereas Merleau-Ponty associates the latter with the recognition of the intimacy between mind and body, however, Lacan connects it to the recognition of the split nature of the subject.

What role do the philosopher and the psychoanalyst ascribe to the technical in their critique of an intellectualizing philosophy of mind (Geistesphilosophie)? This is the second question that is going to guide my reflections on the mediality of gesture. After all, the “strange[ness]” (Lacan 1981, 114) of the filmic example is the result of a strategically used technical intervention: slow motion. Do Merleau-Ponty and Lacan take the specific productivity of the technical into account? And if so, how

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do they reflect on it? Do they develop concepts that would allow one to plumb the new, previously unseen, aesthetic spaces that have become possible with technical media of reproduction? Or do Merleau-Ponty and Lacan, in their critique of the philosophy of reflection and substance, ultimately reproduce the very dichotomies of this philosophical tradition? If this were the case, then—and this is will be my final thesis—their approach towards an ethics of gesture would have to be reconsidered.

The Artificiality of Slow Motion

The film begins with a female model clad in a bright, wide dress entering Matisse’s studio—a space suffused with light. The model sits down in an armchair, and the master adjusts her position and arranges her dress a bit. Merleau-Ponty does not mention the gender coding of the scene, while Lacan comments on it only indirectly, along the lines of his psychoanalytic reading. At first, the scene unfolds at the usual speed. The camera wanders from the model to the easel, before focusing on the canvas and the hand of Matisse, who is holding a brush and transferring the outlines of the face and the hair with a succession of deliberate brushstrokes onto the canvas. The scene is set to a movement with much forward momentum from César Franck’s well-known symphony in D minor, and it is accompanied by a voice-over that rushes forth in a similar manner. At the conclusion of the scene, it is repeated, but this time it has been recorded at a much higher frame rate and thus appears in slow motion when it is replayed at normal speed. This shift is also marked acoustically by a change in rhythm. As the voice-over comments, “grace au cinéma,” thanks to the technology of cinema, one is able to analyze, in slow motion, the gestures with which Matisse transfers paint onto the canvas.

Lacan’s mention of the scene refers to the description and interpretation of it by Merleau-Ponty, which I would now like to present. Merleau-Ponty introduces the scene with the following words:

A camera once recorded the work of Matisse in slow motion. The impression was prodigious, so much so that Matisse himself was moved, they say. That same brush which, seen with the naked eye, leaped from one act to another, was seen to meditate in a solemn and expanding [dilaté] time—in the imminence of a world’s

Fig. 1. Still from A Great French Painter, Henri Matisse, a film written and directed by François Campaux (1946). © 1946, Michel Valio-Cavaglione / Distribution Argos Films. Showing Matisse’s painting Jeune femme en blanc, fond

rouge (1947). © Succession H. Matisse/ DACS 2017

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creation—to try ten possible movements, dance in front of the canvas, brush it lightly several times, and crash down finally like a lightning stroke upon the one line necessary. (1964c, 45)

As Matisse himself reported, he felt “naked” when he saw the scene showing his gestures. The “strange journey” made by his hand was not, as he emphasized, a sign of hesitation. Rather, he was “unconsciously establishing the relationship between the subject” he was about to draw and the size of the paper (cited in Bois 1990, 46).3

While Lacan will highlight the ambivalence expressed in Matisse’s look at himself and the movements of his brush and connect this ambivalence to the sovereignty of the unconscious, Merleau-Ponty bases his interpretation on the analysis put forward by the voice-over. In the commentary, the voice-over emphasizes that Matisse’s gestures appear carefully considered when viewed in slow motion, as though the artistic act arose from a process of meditating and measuring and were based on an act of reflection, of calculation, and of conscious choice. The important point is that calculation and choice do not need to exclude one another on the level of reflection. Against this backdrop, Merleau-Ponty interprets the gestures circling above the canvas as a scanning of possible lines in order to realize, out of an infinite number of possibilities, the one, optimal line. As Matisse is shown painting in slow motion, he is reminiscent of the God of Leibniz who acts rationally in a particular way: following the rule that the greatest variety of things must be combined with the greatest order, he chooses, out of an infinite number of possibilities, the best one. The choice made by Leibniz’ God is not predetermined, but it is nonetheless necessary, and can, at least in principle, be predicted. Merleau-Ponty does in fact compare Matisse filmed in slow motion to the God of Leibniz, who chooses the perfect world among all possible worlds and thereby solves the difficult problem of minimum and maximum. However, Merleau-Ponty adds that Matisse would be wrong if, putting his faith in the film, he assumed that he did indeed proceed like God. This impression is “artificial” and, as Merleau-Ponty makes clear, owes itself entirely to the technology (Technik) of slow motion (1964c, 45).

It is not difficult to recognize in this critique—and in the comparison with Leibniz’ God who chooses among infinite options—the critique of the “cybernetic ideology” that Merleau-Ponty formulated in his essay “Eye and Mind.” As Merleau-Ponty maintains, cybernetics transforms operational thought into an “absolute artificialism” (artificialisme absolu) and derives “human creations […] from a natural information process, itself conceived on the model of human machines” (1964a, 160). Cybernetics thus represents, for Merleau-Ponty, an apex of the rationalist tradition. It belongs to a philosophy of pure vision that substitutes an intellectual eye for the perceiving eye, and replaces the world with a model of the world or, as Merleau-Ponty laconically puts it, with its “[b]eing thought” (1964a, 176).

Opposing this cybernetic way of thinking, Merleau-Ponty demands that:

Scientific thinking—that is, a thinking in overflight (pensée de survol), a thinking of the object-in-general—must return to the ‘there is’ which underlies it; to the site, the soil of the sensible and opened world such as it is in our life and for our body—not

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that possible body which we may legitimately think of as an information machine but that actual body I call mine, this sentinel standing quietly at the command of my words and my acts. (1964a 160–1; translation modified, M.H.)

The body here functions as a sentinel not only against the “overflight” of scientific thinking, but also as a guard protecting the connection between body and life against a technology associated with “artificiality” and the ideology of cybernetics.

When Merleau-Ponty describes the slow-motion film as “artificial,” he is not implying that it is fictional. He is suggesting, rather, that it makes us believe that “the painter’s hand operated in the physical world (monde physique) where an infinity of options is possible,” instead of showing us the event “in the human world of perception and gesture” (1964c, 46). According to Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation, slow motion shows Matisse painting from the perspective of rationalist and scientific thinking. In this way, however, the film misses what it purports to analyze: the reality of the creative act. For Merleau-Ponty, the reality of the creative act can only be grasped from the situated, partial perspective of perception, which is conditioned by corporeality. This situated perspective, in turn, is based on the supposition that human beings do not primarily stand opposed to the world; they are, rather, a part of life which, according to Merleau-Ponty, grounds the meaning and the becoming visible of things. How closely related aesthetics and aisthesis are in Merleau-Ponty is shown by his interpretation of art works—and especially images—as “signs for the points of view of seeing” (Wiesing 2000, 274). His philosophy is a kind of Leibnizian Monadology, as it were—a Monadology, however, that does not find its final reason in the vision of God, but posits the belief in perception as the start and endpoint of the questions it pursues. Accordingly, Merleau-Ponty regards the difference between these viewpoints—a difference that is expressed in the style of an image—as the condition for the possibility of generating meaning in painting and language. This, then, is the sense in which one should understand Merleau-Ponty’s proposition: “But art, especially painting, draws upon this fabric of brute meaning [sens brut] which [the] activism [of scientific thinking] would prefer to ignore” (1964a, 161).

Despite appearances to the contrary, the painter emerges as a sovereign subject from Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of the filmic example. His sovereignty, however, is not based on a comparison with a God but relates, instead, to that which connects the painter, through his body, with the “flesh […] of the world” (1964a, 186): namely, his individual situatedness in space and time. The painter is, according to Merleau-Ponty, “incontestably sovereign in his rumination (rumination) of the world. With no other ‘technique’ than what his eyes and hands discover in seeing and painting” (161).

As this citation indicates, Merleau-Ponty places the technical on the side of reflection and scientific thinking in his interpretation of the filmic example. He describes both as “artificial,” as a thinking in “overflight” (survol). Hence, we can infer that for Merleau-Ponty, “the technical” belongs to the rationalist tradition that he seeks to ground ontologically in the context of his new philosophy. Merleau-Ponty believes that this grounding can be accomplished by means of a “hyper-reflection”

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(surréflexion) that traces reflection and scientific thinking back to an original bond with the world, which is experienced in the corporeality of perception.

This identification of thinking and rationality corresponds precisely to a remark made by Merleau-Ponty in his well-known lecture “The Film and the New Psychology” (1964d, 48–62). Addressing the relation between cinema—which is after all a technical invention—and Gestalt psychology, Merleau-Ponty affirms that “after the technical instrument has been invented, it must be taken up by an artistic will and, as it were, re-invented before one can succeed in making real films” (1964d, 59). But what are “real films”? For Merleau-Ponty, they are films that make us sense, by means of technology—for instance, through the use of montage—“the coexistence, the simultaneity of lives in the same world” (55). They are films that “make manifest the union of mind and body, mind and world, and the expression of one in the other” (59). In light of this, the slow-motion film of Matisse painting would have to be described not only as artificial, but also as unreal. For in this scene, technology intervenes in the customary perception of the world and does not adapt to the intimacy of body and mind described by the philosopher.

Small Strokes Raining from the Brush

Lacan’s reference to the “delightful example” occurs at the end of the second part of his lecture series On the Gaze as Petit Objet a, which would become very important in the history of psychoanalytic film theory. In his first lecture on February 28, 1964, Lacan already announces that his discussion of the scopic function would be inspired by Merleau-Ponty’s unfinished book The Visible and the Invisible, which had recently been published posthumously (Lacan 1981, 71). With the insight that the idea and philosophical tradition of Idealism had proverbially been guided by the eye, Merleau-Ponty brought to light, according to Lacan, the point at which the philosophical tradition that had begun with Plato’s theory of ideas reached its end in the middle of the 20th century (71). Indeed, Merleau-Ponty describes the primacy of perception in his late work in terms of an interrogation already at work in perception itself—that is, in the gaze—rather than only in philosophical reflection (Waldenfels in Burke and Van der Veken 1993, 3). As he maintains, it is “not only philosophy, it is first the gaze that questions things” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 103).

In this context, Merleau-Ponty’s claim that we are not, as Plato would have it, beings who look at the truth of the world in the ideas but, rather, “beings who are looked at, in the spectacle of the world,” acquires a particular significance (Lacan 1981, 75). For Lacan, this insight marks the proximity between his own interpretation of the scopic function and Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the eye and the gaze. By showing that we are beings who are looked at, Merleau-Ponty opened up “that new dimension of meditation on the subject that,” as Lacan literally puts it, “psychoanalysis enables us to trace” (1981, 82; translation modified, M.H.).

Together with Merleau-Ponty, Lacan assumes the pre-existence of the gaze, but he does not relate it to a scopic point of origin. In his analysis of the phrase “I see only from one point, but in my existence I am looked at from all sides,” Lacan instead describes the gaze as a “bipolar reflexive relation” (1981, 81). He does not equate the split above which the subject constructs itself with the

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distance between the visible and the invisible. Summarizing the decisive difference to Merleau-Ponty, Lacan maintains, rather, that the “gaze is presented to us only in the form of a strange contingency” (1981, 72).

To return to the example of the film, Lacan’s insistence on the role of contingency in the constitution of the gaze leads him to describe Matisse’s brush strokes not as the sovereign gestures of a creative artist, but as “the rain of the brush,” as “little strokes raining from the painter’s brush” in a particular “rhythm” (1981, 114; translation modified, M.H.).4 In a series of strong images that allow the reader to sense the “strange contingency” of the gaze, Lacan then compares the “rain of the brush” with the feathers a bird lets fall, the scales a snake casts off, and the leaves a tree allows to tumble down.

Lacan agrees with Merleau-Ponty’s view that it is an “illusion” that every brush stroke by the painter is perfectly deliberate. But the conclusions Lacan draws from this fact are different. According to Lacan, it is not slow motion that is deceptive. Rather, slow motion shows “the paradox of this gesture”—of a gesture, that in its turn seeks to deceptively suggest the “subject is not fully there,” but that she is, as Lacan puts it, “remote-controlled (téléguidé)” (Lacan 1981, 115; translation modified, M.H.). With this reference to remote control, Lacan’s formulation indicates that the technical will come into play here. Yet in this particular context, the technical has nothing to do with film per se; it relates instead to the scientific status that Lacan accords to the psychoanalytic meditation on the subject.

While Merleau-Ponty denies the scientificity of phenomenology, Lacan follows Freud in holding on to the idea that psychoanalysis is a science. However, the Freudian question of what kind of science psychoanalysis might be is given a new and decisive twist by Lacan: he relates it to the question concerning the origin of modern science as such. As Lacan specifies, the “science in which we are caught up, which forms the context of the action of all of us in the time in which we are living, and which the psycho-analyst himself cannot escape, because it forms part of his conditions, too, is Science itself” (1981, 231). In Lacan’s reading, it becomes apparent that the concept of science in the modern sense is not older than the concept of the subject, whose truth is the concern of psychoanalysis. Both concepts lead Lacan back, not to Leibniz and the Monadology, but to Descartes, his methodological doubt, and his voluntaristic conception of God. In Lacan’s discussion of the history of philosophy, Descartes appears as a precursor to the discovery of the unconscious.

The founder of Rationalism seeks certainty for the subject, as Lacan explains, and at first finds it in the sentence: I doubt, therefore I think. But how could this statement lead to the phrase: I doubt, therefore I am? Or to use a formulation of Lacan’s, how could it lead to the sentence: “by virtue of thinking, I am” (De penser, je suis) (1981, 35; 1990, 44)? In order to accomplish this transition, Descartes takes up the ontological proof of God; that is, he infers, from the thinking of man, the thought of God, in whom Being and Thinking coincide. According to Lacan, Descartes thus situates the field of knowledge “at the level of this vastest of subjects, the subject who is supposed to know [le sujet supposé savoir], God” (224; translation modified, M.H.; 1990, 250). And thus Descartes performed, as Lacan comments, “one of the most extraordinary sleights of hand [tours d’escrime]

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that has ever been carried off in the history of mind [l’histoire de l’esprit].” By giving “primacy […] to the will of God” (225), the founder of modern science put God in charge of eternal truths. In other words, “what Descartes means, and says, is that if two and two make four it is, quite simply, because God wishes it so” (225; 1990, 251).

“I dare to state as a truth,” Lacan writes, “that the Freudian field was possible only a certain time after the emergence of the Cartesian subject, in so far as modern science began only after Descartes made his inaugural step” (1981, 47). This link between psychoanalysis, science, and the cogito, however, only became apparent in retrospect; that is, after Freud had revised the certainty of the subject. Unlike Descartes, Freud does not assume the existence of an infinite, omniscient substance that would guarantee the eternal truths; on the contrary, Freud demystifies such an assumption as wish-fulfillment. What is certain for Freud, according to Lacan, is that here, “in this field of the beyond of consciousness,” there are thoughts, which Lacan in turn interprets as chains of signifiers (44). If Descartes situated the subject at the level of the vastest subject, God, who is supposed to know, Freud locates it in the field of the unconscious. This means that Freud put everyone, including Lacan, in a position to think the subject in relation to the reality of desire.

With this step, Freud in turn transformed the world. If ‘I’ is another, then this also affects modern science as it was inaugurated by Descartes. In analysis—Lacan here refers to the psychoanalytic experience—consciousness appears as “irremediably limited” not unlike in Descartes. But in contrast to Cartesian Rationalism, there is, in psychoanalysis, no perfect and infinite being who would offset this limitation. Rather, God is unconscious, as Lacan emphasizes (1981, 59). The discovery of the unconscious leads to the realization that God is not the True. The Real that cannot be assimilated is the True, and “the world […] struck with a presumption of idealization” (81).

The realization that God is unconscious is one side of the scientific character of psychoanalysis. It implies that at the center of our experience is not the relation with an infinite and perfect being, but the “relation […] with the organ” (1981, 91; translation modified, M.H.) 5—with the breast, excrement, but also with the eye, among others. This authorizes Lacan to compare the brush strokes of Matisse with the feathers a bird lets fall.

The other side of the scientific character of psychoanalysis results from a fact that Lacan also knows from the analytic experience: namely, the Real “always comes back to the same place”—which is precisely the place “where the subject in so far as he cogitates, where the res cogitans, does not meet it” (1981, 49; translation modified, M.H.).6 Regarding the status of psychoanalysis as a science, the decisive question is whether or not this return—which is accidental and oscillates between hazard and fortune—can be operationalized. In other words, it is a matter of basing the randomness of this return of the Real on a scientific foundation that is not deterministic. In this context, Lacan refers to some of the most recent developments in the sciences of his day—developments that “demonstrate,” as he puts it, “what we can ground on chance.” Lacan is well aware that first a limited structuring of the situation is required for this purpose, a structuring “in terms of signifiers [signifiants]” (40). By drawing on mathematical game theory and cybernetics,

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Lacan is then able to reformulate psychoanalysis as a conjectural science of the subject, and thus as a technical discipline.

This reformulation of psychoanalysis proceeds in close contact with clinical experience. Here, in psychoanalytic practice, consciousness does not only appear as irremediably limited insofar as it is instituted as a principle of idealization; it also manifests itself as a principle of misunderstanding and misrecognition—or of méconnaissance. Lacan also refers to this principle of méconnaissance as scotoma, a term used to describe a partial loss of vision, a spot or, precisely, the gaze. And it is, according to Lacan, this spot, this partial loss of vision, this gaze, that Descartes failed to see when he saw the field of knowledge “at the level of this vastest of subjects, the subject who is supposed to know [le sujet supposé savoir], God” (224; translation modified, M.H., 1990, 250).

Yet there are some who, according to Lacan, did see the strange contingency in the geometral image—and thus in the image of modern science and the geometral perspective it created: the painters who were contemporaries of Descartes. As Lacan writes: painters, “above all, have grasped this gaze as such in the mask and I have only to remind you of Goya, for example, for you to realize this” (1981, 84). Hence there is a certain complicity between painting and psychoanalysis. Painting and psychoanalysis show that which the geometral dimension elides. Or as Lacan puts it: “If one tries to represent the position of the painter concretely in history, one realizes that he is the source of something that may pass into the real” (1981, 112).

In his interpretation of the slow-motion film of Matisse painting, Lacan combines this cultural-historical justification with the systematic legitimization of psychoanalysis as a conjectural science. Using slow motion as a kind of magnifying lens for time, Lacan explains that “the moment of seeing” (l’instant de voir) can only appear as a suture conjoining the Imaginary and the Symbolic (1981, 118). According to Lacan, slow motion makes visible, in every moment of seeing, the self-referential production of a “sort of temporal progress that is called haste, thrust, forward movement” and hides the strange contingency of the gaze (118). From this analysis, Lacan derives the distinction between the gesture, which belongs to the Imaginary, and the act, which pushes forward into the Symbolic. The brush stroke appears as a movement that on the one hand terminates, and on the other hand refers back. It is a motor activity that produces behind itself its own stimulus: the gesture is hesitant. The act, by contrast, is moving forward. According to Lacan, the act is projected forward as haste in the identificatory dialectic of the signifier and the spoken. It is nothing but the first moment of seeing, the Augenblick, the moment of the creation of seeing. The act is the gesture in motion, as Lacan writes, the gesture that is “shown to be seen” (118). The gaze not only terminates the movement, it freezes it. This arrest of the movement, its terminal moment, the interruption, is to be understood, according to Lacan, as a mortification meant to dispossess “the evil eye of the gaze” (118).

To return to the question of the place of the technical in the relation between the aesthetic, knowledge, and the subject, we can say that Lacan uses slow motion as an instrument. From the perspective of the conjectural science of the subject, which is, for Lacan, a technical science, the point of the instrument is to make visible that which remains hidden from “human perception” and

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the empirical sciences. For Lacan, it is not, as Merleau-Ponty maintained, slow motion that deceives; rather, deception appears as the irreducible end of gesture.

Not unlike Merleau-Ponty, however, albeit in a different manner, Lacan also restores the body as a “sentinel” (Merleau-Ponty 1964a 160–1). In Lacan, the body functions as a guard who secures the constitution of the subject in the experience of her central relation to the organ. The construction of the subject proceeds, as Lacan explains, by way of the gesture that materializes on the canvas with the brush stroke and will “always [remain] present there” (1981, 115). The trace of the organic left by the gesture on the image—a trace, one might add, that points toward something human, rather than something machinic—is nothing other than the direction of the hand. According to Lacan, this trace of the organic is responsible for the fact that one cannot laterally invert a technical image—for instance, a diapositive—of a painted picture, without its being immediately noticeable. Gesture—which Lacan analyzed with the help of slow-motion technology—thus becomes the stand-in for the alleged centrality of the relation between the subject and the organ.

Gesture and the Technical

In conclusion, I would like to emphasize that the sentinels of Merleau-Ponty and Lacan do not only protect thought from a flight into metaphysics. They also prevent access to the question of what Walter Benjamin termed in 1936 “a vast and unsuspected field of action [Spielraum]” that the age of reproduction had opened up, through the camera’s technical pictures, the close-up, and its use of slow motion (‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility’: 2nd version [1935], in Benjamin 2008, 37). Although Merleau-Ponty and Lacan accentuate their critiques of the philosophical tradition and the philosophy of the subject differently, their references to the slow-motion film of Matisse make clear that they both continue to think on the basis, and within the conceptual framework, of this tradition. This philosophical tradition, however, does not provide any concepts for the analysis of the potential—and highly specific—productivity of the technical that revolutionizes not only perception, but the very relation between the subject and knowledge.

Probing this new room-for-play would require concepts of technicity and mediality that allow one to think not only the historicity of technology, but also the historicity of perception in its relation to technology. In contrast to Merleau-Ponty and Lacan, Benjamin did not equate technology with rationality. Instead, he outlined a philosophy of technology, which related technology to the way we inhabit and perceive the world and attempted at the same time to conceive of perception as a medium. For Benjamin, film does not depict something, nor does it show an artificial world; rather, it is the result of an “intensive interpenetration” (intensive Durchdringung) of the apparatus and reality (2008, 35; 1985, 374). “The illusionary nature of film is of the second degree. It is”, as Benjamin underscores, “the result of editing” (35; 373). In this “nature of the second degree” the human being is no longer at the center. Thus I would like to conclude, not with Merleau-Ponty or Lacan, nor with the ethics of gesture that Agamben has in mind, but with Benjamin’s proposal to associate gesture with the technical. Benjamin removes gesture from its association with the body or the organ. As I can only outline here, he instead focuses his reflections on the artificial that links gesture with the technical. The starting point of these reflections is Brecht’s theater of gesture,

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which links gesture to distance, alienation, and literarization—and thus in an explicit manner to the increasingly technical nature of the lifeworld. Unlike the Futurists, for example, Benjamin conceives of this link in terms of a tender movement: the rhythm of the technical reappears in gesture as a trembling.

In the first version of his manuscript “What is Epic Theatre?” from 1931, Benjamin calls the epic theatre a “literarized theatre” because of its use of posters and lettering, but also because of its use of gestures, which relates epic theatre to Chinese theatre. For Brecht according to Benjamin, in epic theatre it is possible that an actor acts in front of the picture of his character (such as a poster, a projection, an image). The result is that we can no longer know which is the original and which is the copy, what is real and what is performed. Benjamin discusses this approach to epic theatre against the background of the question of how the relation of the gesture to the situation should be understood. Now it must be noted that ‘situation’ is nothing other than die Lage, which refers to the singular moment, the actual presence. Benjamin answers this question by referring to the “quivering” or “tremulousness of the contours” of the back-projections, which, as he puts it, “suggest the far greater and more intimate proximity from which they (the materialistic ideas) have been wrenched in order to become visible” (Benjamin 1998, 12; see Weber 2008, 104). This “tremulousness of the contours” is the medium in which the dialectics at standstill enfolds (104).7

Now it is well known that Adorno (in his letter dated December 17 1934) excitedly praised Benjamin’s essay on Kafka. Yet he disagreed with Benjamin’s reference to epic theatre. His argument is twofold. First, Adorno writes, Kafka’s novels cannot be regarded as a script for epic theatre because they have no audience who could directly intervene into the experiment. Secondly, he writes, the reason why the gesture is important is not to be found in Chinese theatre, but instead in modernity and in the dying away of language. From this he concludes that Kafka’s novels are the last and vanishing textual link to the silent movie. In other words, Adorno sees the ambiguity of gesture situated between the sinking into silence with the destruction of language and the rising of language in music. Though Benjamin admitted that Adorno was right in his response, he nevertheless referred to his original thoughts on the experimental character of Kafka’s writings in his 1938 letter on Kafka to Scholem. There he admits that Kafka lived in a “complementary world” (1995 112; translation, M.H.)—that is to say, Kafka’s experiments were in fact not addressed to an audience that could intervene in the experiment. Nonetheless Benjamin holds on to the idea that the gestures of Kafka’s figures are part of an experimental process.8 Thus he states that Kafka’s gestures of horror benefit from “the fantastic room-for-play, which the catastrophe will not know” (1995, 112; translation, M.H.).9

The decisive word here is “fantastic room-for-play.” It points back to the second version of the 1936 article on the Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility, in which Benjamin relates the turn from representation to experimentation with what he calls second technology and second technology with play.

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1 The French reads: “Nous l’avons reçu en plein coeur. […] Je puis dire aussi que temps nous aura manqué, en raison de cette fatalité mortelle, pour rapprocher plus nos formules et nos énoncés” (Lacan 1991, 329).

2 The French reads: “Or l’art et notamment la peinture puisent à cette nappe de sens brut dont l'activisme ne veut rien savoir” (Merleau-Ponty 1964b, 13).

3 The passage reads:

Before my pencil ever touched the paper, my hand made a strange journey of its own. I never realized before that I did this. I suddenly felt as if I were shown naked—that everyone could see this—it made me feel deeply embarrassed. You must understand, this was not hesitation. I was unconsciously establishing the relationship between the subject I was about to draw and the size of my paper. (Bois 1990, 46)

4 The French passage reads:

Au rythme où il pleut du pinceau du peintre ces petites touches qui arriveront au miracle du tableau, il ne s’agit pas de choix, mais d’autre chose. Cet autre chose, est-ce que nous ne pouvons pas essayer de le formuler? Est-ce que la question n’est pas à prendre au plus près de ce que j’ai appelé la pluie du pinceau? Est-ce que, si un oiseau peignait, ce ne serait pas en laissant choir ses plumes, un serpent ses écailles, un arbre à s’écheniller et à faire pleuvoir ses feuilles? (Lacan 1990, 129)

5 The French reads : “Le rapport du sujet avec l’organe est au coeur de notre expérience” (Lacan 1990, 105).

6 The French reads “Le réel est ici ce qui revient toujours à la même place—à cette place où le sujet en tant qu’il cogite, où la res cogitans ne le rencontre pas” (Lacan 1990, 59).

7 The passage reads:

For as in Hegel, the sequence of time is not the mother of the dialectic but only the medium in which the dialectic manifests itself, so in epic theatre the dialectic is not born of the contradiction between successive statements or ways of behaving, but of gesture itself. (Weber 2008, 104)

8 Benjamin compares Kafka’s literary procedure with gestures with Arthur Stanley Eddington’s description of the world from the perspective of the theory of relativity quantum theory in his popular book “Weltbild der Physik”.

9 The German reads: “Seinen Geberden des Schreckens kommt der herrliche Spielraum zu gute, den die Katastrophe nicht kennen wird” (1995, 112).

Notes

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. 1985a. Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. VI. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

———. 1985b. Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. VII. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

———. 1995. Gesammelte Briefe. Vol. VI. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

———. 1998. “What is Epic Theatre?”. In Understanding Brecht, edited by Anna Bostock and Stanley Mitchell, 1–15. London: Verso.

———. 2008. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media. Edited by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin. Translated by Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, and Howard Eiland. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bois, Yves-Alain. 1990. Painting as Model. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

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Lacan, Jacques. 1981. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Alan Sheridan. Vol. XI. New York: Norton.

———. 1990. Le séminaire, livre XI: Les quatres concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil.

———. 1991. Le séminaire, livre VIII: Le transfert: 1960–1961. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964a. “Eye and Mind.” In The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, edited by James M. Edie, translated by Carleton Dallery, 159–92. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

———. 1964b. L’Oeil et l’Esprit. Paris: Edition Gallimard.

———. 1964c.Signs. Translated by Richard McCleary. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

———. 1964d. “The Film and the New Psychology.” In Sense and Non-Sense, translated by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus, 48–62. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

———. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Roudinesco, Elisabeth. 1997. Jacques Lacan: Outline of a Life, History of a System of Thought. Translated by Barbara Bray. New York: Columbia University Press.

Waldenfels, Bernhard. 1993. “Interrogative Thinking: Reflections on Merleau-Ponty’s Later Philosophy.” In Merleau-Ponty in Contemporary Perspective, edited by Patrick V. Burke and Jan Van der Veken, 129:3–12. Phaenomenologica. Dordrecht: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-1751-7_1

Wiesing, Lambert. 2000. “Merleau-Pontys Phänomenologie des Bildes.” In Maurice Merleau-Ponty und die Humanwissenschaften, edited by Regula Giuliani, 263–80. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag.

Biography

Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky is Professor of Media Studies and Gender Studies at the Ruhr University Bochum. She has published extensively on feminist and queer theory, representation and mediality, media theory and philosophy as well as religion and modernism. She was a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley (2007), visiting professor at the Centre d'études du vivant, Université Paris VII - Diderot (2010), Max Kade Professor at Columbia University (2012), and Senior Fellow at the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie (IKKM) Weimar (2013). She is also an associate member of the Institute for Cultural Inquiry Berlin (ICI Berlin).

© 2017 Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY VOL 3 NO 1 (2017):67–91 DOI: https://doi.org/10.21476/PP.2017.31165

ISSN 2057–7176

PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY

ETHICS, STAGED

CARRIE NOLAND UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE

In March 2016, I had the opportunity to attend three weeks of rehearsals for the reconstruction of one of Merce Cunningham’s most controversial works, Winterbranch, at the Lyon Opera Ballet.1 Winterbranch was choreographed for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s first major tour and was first performed in New York, just before the tour began, in 1964. It is a work that fell out of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s repertory fairly early, perhaps because it was too firmly connected not only to a particular phase in the development of Cunningham’s aesthetic but also to the particular historical moment known as “the 60s” when the relation of art to context—especially political context—was on everyone’s mind. 2 The Director of the Lyon Opera Ballet conceived of the Ballet’s spring program as an homage to the experimental dance of the 1960s; he chose to pair Winterbranch with Lucinda Childs’s Dance, a bright, brisk, almost antiseptic minimalist piece from 1979 that contrasts sharply with Cunningham’s somber, eery, and in some ways more engaged minimalist work. Jennifer Goggans, a former Cunningham dancer and presently an active reconstructor of his works, arrived in Lyon in mid-March to begin training the dancers in Cunningham technique. From the first day of rehearsals I was able to watch her guide Lyon’s balletically trained, exquisitely skilled dancers toward a performance of Winterbranch that, I believe, remained faithful to its rebarbative, even gritty nature, despite the unavoidable change in reception context.

As chance would have it—and when working on Cunningham one is always attentive to chance—while attending the rehearsals at the Lyon Opera I was also working on a paper for a conference on the ethics of gesture, organized by the editor of this volume, Lucia Ruprecht; a conference that would center on questions raised by Giorgio Agamben in his famous essay, “Notes on Gesture” (2000, 49–59; 1996, 45–53). Naturally, my two objects of study—Winterbranch and the ethics of gesture—began to enter into dialogue. The juxtaposition encouraged a comparison between Agamben’s and Cunningham’s respective approaches to the semiotics of dance, the way that dance

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can generate meaning but also evade meaning in a way that Agamben deems “proper” to the “ethical sphere” (2000, 56). For Agamben, dance is composed of what he calls “gestures” that have “nothing to express” other than expressivity itself as a “power” unique to humans who have language (“Languages and Peoples”) (2000, 68). For Cunningham, dance is composed of what he calls “actions”, or at other times “facts”—discrete and repeatable movements sketched in the air that reveal the “passion,” the raw or naked “energy” of human expressivity before that energy has been directed toward a specific expressive project (1997, 86). I will look more closely at what Cunningham means by “actions,” and to what extent they can be considered “gestures” in Agamben’s terms; I will also explore the “ethical sphere” opened by the display of mediality, the “being-in-a-medium” of human beings (“The Face”) (2000, 57). But for the moment I want simply to note that for both, dance involves the exposure on stage of an energy or, in Agamben’s terms, a “power” (potere) (“The Face”) (2000, 95), that derives from the fundamentally “communicative nature of human beings,” their “linguistic nature” (“Languages and Peoples”) (2000, 68).3 In addition, the exposure of this communicative energy as energy has, for both, important emancipatory, even utopian implications. That said, the choreographer and philosopher understand the ethics of dance in slightly different terms. The following essay constitutes my effort to understand how these terms differ. I seek to clarify what Cunningham shares with Agamben’s neo-phenomenological approach to gesture but also the nuance he brings to the philosophical table as a choreographer—that is, as someone who works through and with movement as a theoretical tool.

Few scholars have been attentive to Agamben’s interest in dance per se. This may be because Agamben’s interest in dance is motivated neither by a deep knowledge of dance history nor by a fascination with the work of a particular choreographer. 4 Rather, his interest stems from an intuition that danced gestures throw into relief what is gestural in the gesture, its “media character” (2000, 57)—and mediality, as we shall see, ensures the ethical, or relational sphere of the human. Likewise, in the parallel universe of dance studies, very little has been written on Winterbranch as a study of gesture, although it has been recognized that, perhaps more than most of Cunningham’s dances, Winterbranch solicits on the part of the audience the act of interpretation, that is, its gestures appear to spectators as charged with specific meanings. Indeed, if there is a dance in Cunningham’s repertory that conjures an ethical sphere, it is Winterbranch. Juxtaposing Winterbranch with Agamben’s writings on gesture allows for an exploration of critical theory through a specific example of choreographic practice. Such a juxtaposition urges us to question precisely what a dance gesture is, and whether gesture is in essence an exposure of “communicability itself” (Agamben 2000, 83). What do dance gestures expose that ordinary gestures do not? Why would such an exposure be “ethical” in Agamben’s terms? And why would (his notion of) the ethical rely on a stage?

Part I: Agamben on Gesture

The first thing one notes when approaching Agamben’s “Notes on Gesture” is the fluidity or vagueness of the term “gesture.” By “gesture” Agamben does not necessarily mean a

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communicative gesture, such as a thumbs up or a hand extended. Nor is he talking about functional gestures à la Leroi-Gourhan—elements of a chaîne opératoire or a “habitus.”5 Instead, I think Agamben is getting at a larger category of gestures that, at least in their familiar, non-spectacular contexts, disclose a project or an intention (to use a Sartrean vocabulary), gestures that are part of an “intentional arc” (Merleau-Ponty’s term), that “always refer beyond” themselves “to a whole” of which they are “a part” (Agamben 2000, 54).6 This category includes locomotion, which is not traditionally understood by dancers as gestural. Rudolf Laban, for instance, considered “gestures” to be an affair of the upper body and separated them from “steps.” “Steps,” constitute a large group encompassing all one can do with the feet—advance, turn, hop, leap, and so on, whereas a “port-de-bras” and an “épaulement” are gestures in Laban’s sense of the term (see Laban 1960).

In contrast, Agamben appears to believe that dance—in its totality—is the ultimate gesture. In “Notes on Gesture,” he asserts that dance “exhibits” in exemplary fashion what is gestural in the gesture: “If dance is gesture, it is so, rather, because it is nothing more than the endurance and the exhibition of the media character of corporal movements” (57). “The gesture,” he italicizes, “is the exhibition of a mediality: it is the process of making a means visible as such” (57). Dance, it would appear, distills, in aestheticized, heightened form what the essence of gesture is, namely, a medium that exposes itself as such. But how does a medium expose itself as such? What is it in dance that allows it to be the site of such an exhibition?

To begin to answer this question, we need to refer to a lesser known essay that, to my knowledge, has only appeared in a French version, “Le Geste et la danse.” 7 The essay reiterates certain passages found in “Notes on Gesture”—it was published the same year, 1992—while emphasizing different terms. Here, gesture appears as a kind of power (in French, “pouvoir” or “puissance”), a power of “expression.” Linking the two essays, Agamben writes that the most precise definition he can give of the “pouvoir du geste”—or the power that is gesture—is the power to expose itself as “pure moyen” (pure means). “Ce qui dans chaque expression, reste sans expression,” he underscores, “est geste” (That which in each act of expression remains unexpressed is gesture) (12). Another way to say this would be that gesture, in its ideal state (before being subordinated to what Agamben calls elsewhere “a paralyzing power”) is the embodiment of a force or “dynamis” (2000, 55, 54). Gesture is the medium of movement; it is movement as a medium, a kind of kinetic surface of inscription, as opposed to other media or supports, such as the painted image or the written word. Gesture exhibits the movement that is mediality—crossing over, traversing space, connecting points, communicating.

Insofar as gestures move, are themselves movement, they represent for Agamben the very opposite of the static image. In Means Without End, the static image is associated with all that is “stiffened” or hardened—an “image” (“Notes on Gesture”), a “character” (“The Face”), or a “spectacle” as commodity (“Marginal Commentaries on The Society of the Spectacle”) (2000). In contrast, gesture is associated with all that is dynamic, fluid—in short, mediamnic, understood as both support and in-between, intervalic.8 In his essay “The Face,” for instance, the “face” plays the same role as gesture; it is a “revelation of language itself.” “Such a revelation,” he proposes, “does

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not have any real content and does not tell the truth about this or that state of being, about this or that aspect of human beings and of the world: it is only opening, only communicability. To walk in the light of the face means to be this opening—and to suffer it, and to endure it” (2000, 91). In contrast, a “character” is produced when the face “stiffens,” when it must protect itself from the vulnerability, the openness and lack of finitude that is its nature (96). The “face” is thus like gesture, which also “suffers” and “endures,” or which is the process of suffering or enduring one’s medial character, one’s existence as a surface or support of communication.

As has been noted, Agamben’s understanding of the ethical is very close to that of Emmanuel Levinas, whose chapter “Ethics and the Face” (1979) is clearly an important influence on many of the essays in Means Without End. Levinas maintains here that the ways in which human beings appear to one another (their “face,” but also all signifying surfaces and supports) are necessarily flawed; they communicate a message about the person, but they also hide what cannot be communicated, what is not exhausted in the act of communication. The “face” both exposes and betrays; it is “proper” and “improper” (Agamben 2000, 96–7). The exposure of this insufficiency or impropriety in the signs that bear us is itself an ethical—even a “political”—act, for it implies that what is known of the human is never complete, that human mediality—our capacity to become sign—is endless: “The task of politics is to return appearance itself to appearance, to cause appearance itself to appear” (“The Face”) (2000, 94). Agamben mirrors Levinas when he writes in “Kommerell, or On Gesture” that one gestures at the point where language appears “at a loss” (1999, 78). Other essays in Means without End make a similar point from a more politicized angle. For instance, in “Marginal Notes on commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle,” Agamben is concerned with the means and relations of production that prevent such an exposure of “loss.” He describes capitalist modes of spectacle that reduce gestures to flat, immobilized appearances severed from the unpredictable continuum of intentions that once animated them. Gestures, he claims, have become pure image; they appear on a screen, limitlessly appropriable, combinatorial. If “Marginal Notes” is concerned with the spectacularization of gestures, Agamben presents the opposite scenario in “The Face” and “What is a camp?” Here, in the fascist version of the same predicament, the human being is seized as raw life lacking the capacity to become image, to become something legible in the currency of the other (114–5). The human being is reduced to pure self-identity, incapable of circulating as a sign, and thus no longer a “being-in-a-medium”—no longer human—at all. Thus, if in “Marginal Notes,” the danger is that human beings will be reduced to pure surface, “stiffened” into a circulating sign or commodity form, in “The Face” and “What is a camp?” the danger is that human beings will be robbed of that very surface-generating capacity: they will be seized as “nature” tout court and thus deprived of their “linguistic nature,” their “mediality.”

In this context we should recall that for Agamben gesture is always related not simply to the act of bearing but also, like the face, to the process of exposing, or exhibiting. The Italian terms Agamben employs are “esporre”—which means both “express” and “exhibit” and “esibizione,” a “show,” “display,” or “performance” (1996, 52–3, 51). We can begin to understand why Agamben privileges gesture, and dance gesture in particular. As movement, gesture exceeds dynamically its signifying or operational functions. It is highly visible—kinetically and optically—and thus ideal for “making a

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means visible as such.” Agamben’s examples of the gesture include ambulation (the gait), Warburg’s pathosformel (or dynamograms) (1999, 89–103), the mime gestures of the Commedia del’Arte (1999, 77–85), “everyday gestures” (1999, 83), and of course dance gestures, or dance as a series of gestures. Speech, too, can be gestural, just as there is in gesture something of speech. As he insists, gesture “is not an absolutely non-linguistic element,” it points to that “stratum of language that is not exhausted in communication...” (1999, 77; my emphasis). In all these cases, what makes gesture gesture is that it carries something forward that is not equivalent to, or reducible to, sense. As Agamben stresses, gesture “has precisely nothing to say” (2000, 58).9 To expose this gestural quality of the act of communication—which is not exhausted by semantics—is to open the “ethical dimension” (2000, 57). The fact that many of his examples of gestures capable of opening that ethical dimension are those that occur on stage suggests the degree to which exposing relies on performing. Twice-behaved behavior, gestures on stage, exemplify the act—in both the practical and theatrical senses of the word—that “cause[s] appearance itself to appear” (2000, 94).

Part II: From the Ethics of Gesture to the Ethics of Dance

But why does dance embody that act of exposure par excellence? What are the ethics—or, in another version, the politics—of the gesture that is dance? 10 Let us recall that dance enters Agamben’s account at precisely the moment when “human beings [...] have lost every sense of naturalness,” when they have “lost [their] gestures” (2000, 52). Despite the emerging domination of capitalist relations which “stiffen” gestures, dance remains an instrument of liberation, or at least a form of critical nostalgia for a time when gestures were both natural and under the subject’s control. If, by the twentieth century, an entire generation has “lost its gestures,” then how is it that the gestures of dancers have managed to escape this pathological condition?

A glance in the direction of Agamben’s source for his understanding of dance (and its relation to historical periods) might help us answer this question. Agamben may very well have been influenced by the work of Susanne Langer, whose Feeling and Form of 1953 was one of the first important philosophical treatments of dance. Agamben seems to refer indirectly to Langer’s book when he turns to dance in “Notes on Gesture”:

The dance of Isadora Duncan and Sergei Diaghilev, the novels of Proust, the great Jugendstil poetry from Pascoli to Rilke, and, finally and most exemplarily, the silent movie trace the magic circle in which humanity tried for the last time to evoke what was slipping through its fingers forever. (2000, 52–3; my emphasis)

The phrase “the magic circle” is one that Agamben might have borrowed from Langer, who in turn borrowed it from a text by Mary Wigman (Langer 1953, 188–207).11 Langer in fact titles a chapter “The Magic Circle,” referring to what Curt Sachs hypothesized was the oldest dance form, the circle dance (1953, 190). Within this circle, human beings first recognized the “terrible and fecund Powers that surround” them and that enter their very bodies, transforming them into a source of movement power (196). Basing much of her argument on Sachs, Langer describes the “magic circle” as implicit in all forms of dance, both “primitive” and contemporary. Today, secular or

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ballroom dance, she states, “enthrall the dancer almost instantly in a romantic unrealism,” whereas “primitive” dance achieves the ecstatic “by weaving the ‘magic circle’ around the altar of the deity, whereby every dancer is exalted at once to the status of a mystic” (196). What Langer calls “virtual gesture”—meaning gesture that has been lifted out of its “common usage” and placed on the stage—is “the appearance of Power” (52, 198). Dance exhibits the “magnetic forces that unite a group” when dancers exhibit this “Power” as such (202).

Agamben might have called on Langer’s (and Sachs’s) notion of the “magic circle” to evoke a break between a pre-modern and a modern relation to gesture. Like Agamben, Langer also maintains that a loss has occured. In modernity, although the “magic around the altar” has been broken, modern dance in particular is still animated with that “Power,” it is still serving the same function (207). However, she qualifies, “we”—the moderns—”evoke [that same Power] with full knowledge of its imaginary status” (206). Langer’s words help us understand why Agamben strings together turn-of-the-century dance (e.g., “Duncan and Diaghilev”) with Proust and Rilke, for they share—at least according to Agamben—a nostalgia for an experience that has moved from the realm of ritual communion to the realm of the stage (an “imaginary status” [206]). However, Agamben departs from the type of primitivist rhetoric that Langer could be accused of perpetuating when he insists that gesture contains a linguistic element, that it is “closely tied to language,” to “the stratum of language that is not exhausted in communication” (1999, 77).12 Presumably, then, dance would not be any more primitive than language itself; and yet, as visibly and undeniably movement, it promises to expose more dramatically that which moves in language, the inexhaustible “stratum” that language is “at a loss” to convey. It is perhaps for this reason that in “Le Geste et la danse,” instead of evoking what has been irrevocably lost, dance exemplifies what is not lost—at least not to dance—that which dance alone can continue to exhibit, namely, the human potential to be a “milieu pur” (2000, 57). 13 Agamben presents concert dance in particular as the last refuge of “communicability”: “Ce qui dans chaque expression, reste sans expression, est geste. Mais ce qui, dans chaque expression, reste sans expression, c’est l’expression elle-même, le moyen expressif en tant que tel” (That which in each act of expression remains without expression, is gesture. But that which, in each expression, remains without expression, is expression itself, the means of expression as such). Dance gestures, it would appear, are a hypostatized form of gesture, or the gestural; they evoke that “Power” (Langer) to express a world, to have a world, the “Power” that is our “linguistic nature” and that holds us within the “magic circle” of the human. Sounding much like Langer, Agamben concludes “Le Geste et la danse” by affirming that “la danse des danseurs qui dansent ensemble sur une scène est l’accomplissement de leur habilité à la danse et de leur puissance de danser en tant que puissance” (the dance of dancers who dance together on a stage is the accomplishment of their skill in dancing and their power to dance as power) (12; my emphasis).

It is not clear to me that in “Le Geste et la danse” Agamben has provided a convincing portrait of dance, or that he has revealed its nature as a gestural form “closely tied to language” (not “not linguistic”) (1999, 77; my emphasis). In his treatment, dance retains too much of its relation to a primitive, pre-verbal world of ritual, even if only from the perspective of a modernist “imaginary.” What is perhaps more useful for our purposes—especially as we move toward a reading of Winterbranch—is Agamben’s account of how the gesturality of the gesture is exposed, that is, how

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“le moyen expressif en tant que tel” (the means of expression as such) might be made to appear. Ironically, in “Notes on Gesture” he associates such an appearance or display with the act of interruption, not with the fluid movements of the dancer, bathing blissfully in the “milieu pur” of a “power to dance as power.” To close this part of my argument, and to prepare for my reading of Winterbranch, let us return briefly to a passage in which Agamben takes up the example of the pornographic, the gestures of which can be suspended, he argues, to reveal their intrinsic and irreducible “mediality”:

The gesture is the exhibition of a mediality: it is the process of making a means visible as such [original emphasis]. It allows the emergence of the being-in-a-medium of human beings and thus it opens the ethical dimension for them. But, just as in a pornographic film, people caught in the act of performing a gesture that is simply a means addressed to the end of giving pleasure to others (or to themselves) are kept suspended in and by their own mediality—for the only reason of being shot and exhibited in their mediality—and can become the medium of a new pleasure for the audience (a pleasure that would otherwise be incomprehensible) [my emphasis]... so what is relayed to human beings in gestures is not the sphere of an end in itself but rather the sphere of pure and endless mediality. (2000, 57–8)

I would like to keep in mind this scene as we move forward, one in which the ethical dimension appears to open within the pornographic, one in which something “pure” and without end is captured in a filmed act that obviously has a very concrete end. As opposed to his brief excursus on dance, which confuses dancing with an uninterrupted “magic circle,” Agamben’s comments on film (and the pornographic film in particular) allow us a firmer purchase on what dance, as a form of gesture, might be—and what it might be able to accomplish, or expose. Here, also, instead of indulging in the fantasy of the “en tant que tel” (as such), and the “moyen pur” (pure means), Agamben suggests, albeit obliquely, that a means is never pure, that it can in fact never be exposed as “an end in itself,” and that the means is itself mediated by what it bears. That is, it is mediality only insofar as it is actively mediating.

In sum, what is interesting and revealing about this passage on the pornographic film is that, as in “The Face,” Agamben opens the ethical dimension not at the point where communication is lost, but rather at the point where saying “something in common” (the clearly legible pornographic gesture) and saying “nothing” (the gesture interrupted, exposed as a gesture) occur simultaneously (“Form of Life”) (2000, 9). He points us toward that ambiguous point where a narrative unfolds and yet that narrative is suspended, revealing a “stratum” “not exhausted” by a narrative (1999, 77), a point where the communication is interrupted, yet still “endured.”.

I believe that it is in this type of suspension—understood as a medium—that Agamben’s ethics of gesture resides. In the next section I will argue that it is in this type of suspension that we might discover Cunningham’s ethics of gesture as well.

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Part III. The Cunningham Gesture

As is well known, Cunningham often expressed his intention to create dances that would not impose a particular interpretation on his audience: “We don’t attempt to make the individual spectator think a certain way,” he stated in a 1979 interview: “I do think each spectator is individual, that it isn’t a public. Each spectator as an individual can receive what we do in his own way and need not see the same thing, or hear the same thing, as the person next to him” (Cunningham and Lesschaeve 2009, 171–2). 14 Earlier, in 1968, Cunningham had already advanced a similar view: dance “can and does evoke all sorts of individual responses in the single spectator” (1968, n.p.). “Any idea as to mood, story, or expression entertained by the spectator is a product of his mind, his feelings” (1970, 175).

Cunningham’s resistance to conventional plot-lines and psychological interpretations is well known. Influenced, as was John Cage, by the reception theory of Marcel Duchamp, Cunningham aimed to address—and thus create—a spectator who would “complete” the work (see Duchamp 1975). This was in large part a reaction against what he saw around him in the dance of the 1940s: “It was almost impossible,” he wrote in 1968, “to see a movement in modern dance during that period not stiffened by literary or personal connection” (1968, n.p.; quoted in Vaughan 1997, 69). In an effort to avoid imposing literary or personal connections, Cunningham developed a set of procedures that would ensure, at least in principle, that his own intentions, his “personal connections,” would not shape or “stiffen” the movement material. Since many compositional decisions would be taken out of his hands, he could with some justification insist that meanings generated by viewers were theirs alone. Some critics took this to mean that there was no expressive content to his dances.15 John Martin wrote in a dismissive review of 1950 that there is “little in content and nothing of conspicuous formal value” in Cunningham’s dances (1950, 69) while Doris Hering lamented in 1954 that his chance compositions were like “tired utterances suspended in an emotionless void” (1954, 69). And yet Cunningham was quite clear on this point: his goal was not to suppress the expressivity of his dancers but quite the opposite, to intensify that expressivity, to expose on stage not “anger” or “joy,” but rather what he called the pure undifferentiated “source of energy out of which may be channelled the energy that goes into the various emotional behaviors” (1952; reprinted in Vaughan 1997, 86). “Dance is not emotion, passion for her, anger against him. […] In its essence, in the

Fig. 1: Carolyn Brown in Merce Cunningham, Winterbranch (1964), studio photograph by

Jack Mitchell. Permissions to reproduce generously granted by Craig B. Highberger,

Executive Director, Jack Mitchell Archives

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nakedness of its energy it is a source from which passion or anger may issue in a particular form” (86; my emphasis).

Here, Cunningham seems to anticipate Agamben, defining dance as a movement form that displays “the nakedness” of an “energy” drawn from “common pools of motor impulses” (in Vaughan 1997, 86), impulses presumably shared by human beings moving within the magic circle of communicability. But Cunningham also takes care to acknowledge the “particular form” in which that energy is exposed. For that reason, the “nakedness” to which he refers is not reducible to the purity evoked by the phrase “milieu pur” that Agamben borrows from Mallarmé.16 There is in fact something almost pornographic about Cunningham’s “nakedness,” “that blatant exhibiting of this energy,” as he puts it (in Vaughan 1997, 86). As I have argued elsewhere, Cunningham engages in an erotics of the not-quite-abstracted; he is keen to exhibit the dirt—the literal dirt, as we shall see in the case of Winterbranch—that clings to the movements of dancers like a semantic residue weighing them down (see Noland 2017). What makes Winterbranch a particularly interesting case to study in this regard is that the gestures the dancers perform are at once legible and inscrutable, related to specific operational and expressive tasks and yet disaggregated, distorted, interrupted. One could say that Winterbranch practices an ethics of gesture insofar as it suspends movement between an “impure” manifestation (“passion for her,” “anger against him”) and raw human kinesis imagined as a “pure” support. Put differently, the dance seems to play on the fine line between a “naked” and a “channelled” energy, between a “source” of emotion and emotion in a “particular form” (in Vaughan 1997, 86). While remaining mysterious and illegible, Winterbranch nonetheless inspires the act of interpretation, the search for meaning, and thus the attribution to movement of expressive content. During the 1960s and 1970s audience interpretations invariably indexed the sinister, even apocalyptic tone of the piece and the task-like nature of the movement content. But just what is this movement content and to what extent can it be considered gestural?

One of the obstacles we face when moving from philosophy to choreography, from Agamben to Cunningham, is lexical in nature. Cunningham uses many terms to refer to what Agamben calls the “gestures” of dance: “actions,” “facts,” “movements,” and “gestures.” He often has recourse to the word “gesture” to refer to the “ordinary” gesture one finds in the street, task-related gestures (such as potting a plant), 17 and even “intimate gesture[s]” that convey a feeling (Cunningham and Lesschaeve 2009, 106). Speaking of Signals (1970), for instance, he notes that a movement of one of his dancers suddenly struck him as an “intimate gesture,” although he had not intended it to be so (106). The particular combination of dancers and the particular place the movement appeared in the sequence made it look like a gesture of intimacy shared between partners: “you don’t have to decide that this is an intimate gesture,” Cunningham states, “but you do something, and it becomes so” (106; my emphasis). This tells us something about Cunningham as an observer (rather than a creator) of gestures: he is able to acknowledge the evocative—even conventionally expressive—quality of a danced gesture. Moreover, as the anecdote suggests, he is interested in that evocative gesture, especially if it suggests a relationship (and thus a scenario or drama). For him, a movement has the status of a gesture when it is eloquent of a relation (whether “found” or developed by the dancers), or when, alternatively, it mimes or actually completes a specific task. In sum, the word “gesture” in Cunningham’s vocabulary references both a task-like, “ordinary”

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movement and an expressive movement. Cunningham recognizes that gestures have a signifying dimension insofar as they are part of a culturally legible situation.

Yet “gestures” are simultaneously technical building blocks, movements to be placed in an array and thus removed from the contexts in which they either say something (in a system of meaning) or do something (in a habitus). The purpose of the grids, lists, and chance procedures that Cunningham developed over the course of his career was to reveal through recombination new local contexts in which decontextualized human actions might be viewed. Cunningham puts it this way in Changes: “you do not separate the human being from the actions he does, or the actions which surround him, but you can see what it is like to break these actions up in different ways” (1968, n.p.). To “break up” an action is to interrupt it. It is to expose the modality of movement, the tonus or type of effort supporting the intention. In short, to “break up” an action is to seek contact with the “nakedness” of an energy underlying “passion for her [...] anger against him” (1952; reprinted in Vaughan 1997, 86). It is to interrupt the flow of gestures, to expose the support that gesture is—in Agamben’s terms—that gesture is as such. It is also, as Cunningham puts it, to take the ground away from beneath the feet of the spectators, to shift them toward an “abyss” where conventional associations no longer function:

I think that dance at its best [...] produces an indefinable and unforgettable abyss in the spectator. It is only an instant, and immediately following that instant the mind is busy [...] the feelings are busy [...] But there is that instant, and it does renew us. (Cunningham in Dalva ed. 2007, n.p.)

The question remains, though, whether such suspension over an “abyss” opens the ethical dimension or whether instead that dimension opens as one crosses the abyss, in an interval that also promises connection. Winterbranch is a study of what happens when one “breaks up” an action—in this case, the action of falling. A fall can be broken, cinematically interrupted, but a falling body inevitably lands.

Part IV. Falling in Winterbranch

Winterbranch dates from a phase in Cunningham’s career when he was less interested in incorporating “ordinary gestures” than in investigating what the fundamentals of a dance vocabulary might be.18 In the early 1960s, he began to focus on what he called “facts in dancing”: “I have a tendency to deal with what I call the facts in dancing,” he explained to David Vaughan, his archivist (Vaughan 1997, 135).19 Influenced, perhaps, by the Classical Hindu Rasa theory of the “eight permanent emotions,” he sought to reduce his vocabulary to a set of eight essential movement varieties, without, however, attaching any particular emotive value to them. We find in the “Choreographic Records” for Crises (1960), for instance, the following list: “Bend /Rise /Extend /Turn /Glide /Dart /Jump /Fall” (box 3, box 11, Cunningham, n.d.). After identifying these eight “facts,” the choreographer then declined them into sub-categories, thus exploring systematically the anatomical possibilities of the human body. Here, Cunningham exemplifies the “materialist” sensibility of John Cage and the composers of “la musique concrète” who maintained that the

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materials of a craft could be enumerated in a non-hierarchical, a-semantic taxonomy with no reference to their value in a harmonic system. In Cunningham’s “The Impermanent Art” we hear an echo of Cage’s aesthetics as they are presented in “Lecture on Something” (1959). Cage: “each something is really what it is.” Cunningham:

A thing is just that thing […]. In dance, it is the simple fact of a jump being a jump, and the further fact of what shape the jump takes [my emphasis]. This attention given the jump eliminates the necessity to feel that the meaning of dancing lies in everything but the dancing, and further eliminates cause-and-effect worry as to what movement should follow what movement, frees one’s feelings about continuity, and makes it clear that each act of life can be its own history: past, present and future, and can be so regarded, which helps to break the chains that too often follow dancers’ feet around.” (Reprinted in Vaughan 1997, 86)

For Winterbranch, Cunningham chose to focus not on the “jump” but rather on the “Fall.”20 The dance is composed of eighteen sections, each of which centers on a different way of falling (Winterbranch “Choreographic Records,” Cunningham, n.d.). However, when he writes in the passage above that the “simple fact of a jump” is complicated by a “further fact”—namely,” “what shape the jump takes”—he departs from a strict Cagean materialism. That the first “fact” has to be accompanied by a “further fact” (a movement has to be realized by a particular person in a particular sequence) indicates that the categories of movement themselves are “facts” only in a virtual sense. That is, they exist as classes of physical action to be actualized in a particular phenomenalized “shape.” Even in a classroom exercise,, “a “Bend,” for instance, is contoured by the movement that comes before and the movement that follows; “a “pré-mouvement,” as Hubert Godard terms it, anticipates and orients what will come next (Ginot and Marcel eds. 1998, 224–9). That is why the movement’s place in a sequence is so vital to the manner in which it will be performed, and thus to the manner in which it will strike the eye. Just as the “fact” of extending a hand to the sternum of one’s partner might, as in Signals, become “a “gesture” recognized as “intimate,” so too a “Bend” “Twist,” or “Fall” might be phenomenalized as a gesture resonant with expressive, dramatic, even semantic force when executed in a particular sequence by a particular dancer and under the unique conditions of a theatrical performance. As Jill Johnston wrote succinctly in 1963, in a Cunningham dance “the gesture is the performer; the performer is the gesture” (10).

Thus, what Cunningham calls “the attention given the jump” excludes neither his interest in nor his desire to solicit the input of the individual dancer. On the contrary, such attention (cultivated in the dancer as well) allows each one to discover and reveal his or her singularity: “from the beginning I tried to look at the people I had, and see what they did and could do... You can’t expect this one to dance like the other one. You can give them the same movement and then see how each does it in relationship to himself, to his being, not as a dancer but as a person” (Cunningham and Lesschaeve 2009, 65).21 Especially during the 1950s and 1960s, Cunningham was acutely attuned to the movement qualities as well as the personalities of his dancers. In fact, he often began the choreographic process by compiling “a “gamut” of movements—one gamut for each dancer—that

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would serve as the fundamental movement vocabulary for the piece, thus taking full advantage of the unique “shapes” each dancer tended to make when actualizing the dancing “fact.”

However, Winterbranch is concerned less with highlighting the qualities of a particular dancer than with the “Fall,” one of the eight movement “facts” on Cunningham’s list. Cunningham explained to Jacqueline Lesschaeve that he “wanted to make a dance about falling” (Cunningham and Lesschaeve 2009, 101). So, quite simply, he “worked on falls” (101). first alone in the studio and then with the dancers he had in the Company at the time: Carolyn Brown, Viola Farber, Barbara Lloyd, William Davis, and Steve Paxton. In his account of the work he insists repeatedly that his main interest was in “the idea of bodies falling,” resisting the implication—made by Lesschaeve and others—that he had any other message in mind (Vaughan 1997, 137). While admitting that the dance caused “a “furor” whenever it was performed, he remains coy in the Lesschaeve interview, acknowledging but never validating the strong reactions to which it gave rise:

In Sweden they said it was about race riots; in Germany they thought of concentration camps, in London they spoke of bombed cities; in Tokyo they said it was the atom bomb. A lady with us took care of the child [Benjamin Lloyd] who was on the trip. She was the wife of a sea captain and said it looked like a shipwreck to her [...]. Everybody was drawing on his own experience, whereas I had simply made a piece which was involved with falls, the idea of bodies falling. (Vaughan 1997, 135, 137)

Carolyn Brown, who danced in Winterbranch throughout the 1964 tour, writes in her autobiography Chance and Circumstance that “In Germany, interestingly, no one thought to liken Winterbranch to the Holocaust, although this happened regularly in other European countries” (2007, 389). Meanwhile, the reviewer for the London Times wrote that “Winterbranch is a disturbing work [...] The dancers, dressed in all-over black like wartime commandos, writhe and grope their way through gloom” (1964, 4). After a New York performance in 1967 Don McDonagh commented that Winterbranch had been “variously interpreted as a plea for civil rights and a shipwreck” (1976, 289). And Arlene Croce, reviewer for Ballet Review, wrote that “Winterbranch seems to me a pre-vision of hell” (1968, 25).22 But whether critics identified Winterbranch with Auschwitz, the battlefield, or hell, they all remarked on what Brown calls “the ethos of Winterbranch; darkness, foreboding, terror, devastation, alienation, doom” (2007, 477).

Before proceeding to a closer analysis of the movement content of Winterbranch, we need to recall both the artistic and the political contexts of the work. With respect to the artistic context, Cunningham was in the process of assimilating developments in the New York dance scene, developments that—at least for a short period—caused him to rethink his dance vocabulary. Members of the Judson Dance Group, including Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti, and Trisha Brown, started incorporating everyday and task movement into their works as early as July 1962 (see Banes 1993). Simultaneously, the “Junk Art” and Fluxus movements of the 1960s encouraged the incorporation into performance and exhibition spaces of urban detritus and industrial waste.23 Winterbranch reflects both these trends. Further, the directions that Cunningham gave to his Artistic Director of the time, Robert Rauschenberg, reveal the influence on his work of his own

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personal experience. These directions are particularly precise, more detailed and explicit—and thus constraining—than Cunningham typically supplied. He even republished in Changes: Notes on Choreography elements of the letter he wrote to Rauschenberg in which he outlines his preferences for décor and lighting:

The lighting is done freely each time, differently, so that the rhythms of the movements are differently accented and the shapes differently seen, partially or not at all. I asked robert rauschenberg [sic] to think of the light as though it were night instead of day. i don’t mean night as referred to in romantic pieces, but night as it is in our time with automobiles on highways, and flashlights in faces, and the eyes being deceived about shapes by the way the light hits them. There is a streak of violence in me...I was interested in the possibility of having a person dragged out of the area while lying or sitting down. (Reprinted in Vaughan 1997, 135–7)

As Mark Franko has noted, the scene on the highway seems to be taken right out of Cunningham’s personal experience while touring in the infamous VW van with Rauschenberg, Cage, and his Company members (1992, 146; also see Cunningham and Lesschaeve 2009, 106). Responding to Cunningham’s directions, Rauschenberg invented a lighting arrangement that would approximate an experience of the highway at night he knew only too well, creating stark contrasts between total obscurity and blinding illumination by cueing the lightboard to follow an aleatory order of soft beams determined according to a chance algorithm that changed for each performance. For the music, Cunningham commissioned an original piece from La Monte Young, a composer who was very much in vogue at the time. Young offered 2 Sounds, a minimalist composition that has become over the years the object of a lively polemic. 2 Sounds juxtaposes a screechy tone, produced by dragging an ashtray against a mirror, with a more resonant low tone, produced by stroking a piece of wood across the surface of a Chinese gong. The first ten minutes of the dance are performed in absolute silence. Cunningham heightened the contrast between the silent beginning and the second half by amping up the volume of La Monte Young’s score to a decibel level that most spectators (and dancers) found—and still find—intolerable. Finally, Rauschenberg added a piece of junk art to the scenography, a combine composed of whatever he could find around the set at the time. (Don McDonagh describes it as “a strange little machine with winking lights... a cartoon version of an official police car.” [McDonagh 1976, 288–9]). Rauschenberg designed not only the sets and lighting but also the costumes; he chose to dress the dancers entirely in black with contrasting white sneakers on their feet. As for the make-up, Rauschenberg elaborated on the sneaker motif: he applied a black smudge under the eyes of each dancers, evoking in this way the protective stroke of black that football players apply when they have to play in a brightly-lit stadium. Significantly, during the rehearsals for the Opéra Ballet production in Lyon, Jennifer Goggans directed the dancers to scuff up and dirty the white sneakers as much as possible presumably to give the impression—as in the original production—of a grubby workspace, a stage graced only by the clutter of unused equipment in the back.

Goggans’s explicit directive (to dirty the shoes) in the context of the 2016 reconstruction confirms that none of the directions Cunningham gave were indifferent or expendable. Clearly, he intended to create a frame for the movement, he wanted to conjure a very specific mood. Thus it was

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misleading to state—as he did—that any association made by the spectators would be drawn “from individual experience” alone. The lighting, the grubby décor, the make-up, and the costumes all collude to render the “falls” of Winterbranch not simply “facts in dancing” but, more specifically, facts framed in a certain way. That frame—the menace of nighttime darkness—remains a constant throughout all performances of the piece. It is by no means insignificant that Winterbranch, when excerpted later on for an Event, was still performed in the original constumes and lighting; as dance critic Nancy Dalva notes perspicaciously in her 2005 review, of the Events at the Joyce Theater in New York, Winterbranch was

presented in its own special outfits—namely black jumpsuits—and its own almost completely dark, glancing, harsh light. This was unusual for Events—I don’t know of any other dance for which this is done—when the material is usually stripped of its usual presentation context. (Dalva 2005, 18)24

The question is, to what extent does the dance material for Winterbranch rely on this “presentation context”? Much of the choreography is period-specific; that is, we find in many of the dances of the 1960s dance figures that evoke the workings of machines—pulleys, pistons, and levers. A trio that occurs near the end of Winterbranch is only a slight modification of a trio found in Crises (1960); the turning figures in which one dancer rolls over another prefigure similar figures found in Walkaround Time (1968). At the same time, the “presentation context” of Winterbranch encourages us to look at these figures and the gestures they contain not only as mechanical but also as task-like, the variety of movement that would be accomplished under the flickering, irregular lighting of an apocalyptic landscape. At various points a dancer is dragged off the stage by means of a small square black rug; we witness the effort involved in tugging or carrying a body off stage and recognize the unmistakable silhouette of a still figure wrapped in a shroud and transported on a stretcher. The theme of the body as dead weight is thus impossible to miss, although this theme seems to be contrasted with another, that of the body as eloquent weight. It is as though Cunningham were exploring the difference between what Agamben calls “bare life” and “form-of-life,” that is, between “naked life” and “a life that can never be separated from its form” (or “shape”) (2000, 2–3). On the one hand, the associations the audience makes with these figures—victims of a holocaust, sinners writhing in hell—are overdetermined by the context in which they are presented; on the other, the gestures as performed arguably project meanings that the scenography merely underscores.

Consider, for instance, the opening of the dance. A male dancer—Cunningham, in the original production—traverses the stage from back stage left to back stage right lying on his back, wrapped tightly in a black tube that prevents him from using his arms. (During the rehearsals for the 2016 reconstruction, Goggans referred to the tube as a “body bag.”) 25 In the original production, Cunningham held a flashlight so that while he slithered and writhed, the beam would light up different areas of the stage. The figure is thus at once a passive victim of the constraining bag and an active participant in setting the mood of the piece. Cunningham may have insisted that in choreographing Winterbranch he was merely interested in “the idea of falling,” but the many props

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of the dance suggest that “the idea of falling” was—even for him—by no means denuded of symbolic implications.

The following sections of the dance also emphasize the weight of the body, both as a thing to be manipulated and as a force to be countered or taken into account. Soon after the opening solo, a man and woman enter into a duet that resembles the awkward manoeuvres of a mechanical pulley: one serves as a counterweight to the other. The man holds the arm of the woman, who, to begin with, is lying on her side on the floor facing the audience. Little by little he succeeds in lifting her torso, head, and hips off the ground by leaning his feet against hers and pulling her toward him with all his force. As soon as the woman is upright, she begins to descend toward the other side, supported only by the counterweight of the man (see fig. 2). A few minutes later, the two dancers form a figure that resembles a rotating ball inside a socket (see fig. 3).

In both cases (the pulley and the ball-and-socket), the falls are carefully controlled; we observe a calculated and steady displacement of weight as the woman holds herself rigid, manipulated (but also protected) by the motions of the man. In the second phrase, however, which Cunningham referred to in his notes as the “twine roll,” the woman makes herself completely vulnerable, rolling over the back of the man, her back arched, exhibiting her pubis, stomach, chest and throat to the audience. Meanwhile, the man transforms himself into a support for her weight, bearing his burden (the woman) as he shifts her toward the ground (see fig. 3).

The duet seems to juxtapose contrasting tonalities: we witness industry qualified by empathy, a task is executed with exquisite care. The slowness of the first apparition of the “twine-roll” (it will

Fig. 2: Adrien Délépine and Kristina Bentz during a rehearsal of Winterbranch at the Opéra de Lyon, March 2017,

photograph by Monick Dimonte. Permission to reproduce granted by photographer.

Fig. 3: Noëllie Conjeaud and Raúl Serrano Nuñez performing “Twine Roll” in Merce Cunningham’s Winterbranch

(screenshot from performance video attributed to Lyon Opera Ballet, 2016)]

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be repeated twice) invites the specator to contemplate the skill of the dancers who are performing it. At one point during the rehearsals I asked one of the women who performed the “twine-roll,” Chaery Moon, what she thought the gestures meant, what she was imagining as she executed the phrase. Her answer was that she had no time to think about what her gestures might mean because the balancing operation was so difficult to execute. The challenge, she said, was to remain conscious of what her partner was doing at every moment, to adjust her movements to the micro-adjustments of his back muscles, to attend to the slow but inexorable shifts of his weight beneath her prone frame. In order to avoid falling and injuring herself, she had to remain riveted on the incremental displacements of his weight, displacements that were always in response to her own redistributions of weight.

On the one hand, Moon’s account implies that the relationship between the dancers was nothing more than a relation of weight. Of course, to some extent, this relation characterizes all dance duets (especially ones in which there are lifts), but this dancing “fact” is usually disguised by mannerisms or narrative contexts. During the rehearsals for the reconstruction, Goggans was careful to foreground this relation of weight. Presumably channelling Cunningham, she explicitly instructed the two dancers to avoid suggesting an amorous relation while performing the “twine-roll.” At one point, the male and female dancers (Mario Menendez and Chaery Moon) clasped hands as a way of maintaining their balance. Goggans swooped down to correct them, insisting that if they needed to hold hands to prevent themselves from falling they could do so but only if their gesture remained invisible to the audience. ‘Do it in such a way that no one sees you’re touching each other,’ she advised. To her mind, at least, any rapport between dancers that might emerge over the course of the rehearsals had to be muted; any plot that could be projected had to be suppressed.

The “twine-roll” appears twice more in the course of Winterbranch. The second time we encounter this phrase it is executed by three couples simultaneously at a brisker pace. The third and last time the “twine-roll” appears in the dance it is performed at a much faster pace. As a result, the woman in each couple is destabilized, caught off balance. Unable to calibrate her movements to those of the man beneath her, she comes crashing down to the floor. Each appearance of the “twine-roll” is thus distorted either by slow motion or acceleration, indicating that Cunningham was indeed interested in seeing how a “fact in dancing” could appear each time in a different “shape.” Throughout the 1950s and 60s, deceleration and acceleration were among the means Cunningham used to detach a potentially signifying gesture from a particular context. Cunningham had other means at his disposal as well, such as the breaking up or disaggregation of gestural continuities. We can see how this disaggregating technique functions in another duet, one that I will refer to, for lack of a better title, as “leaning towards.” The “leaning towards” phrase is revelatory, for it contains gestures that we recognize as meaningful (part of a legible vocabulary of “intimate” human gestures) but that suddenly become deprived of their context, shifting us into that “abyss” toward which Cunningham directs his viewers. In “leaning towards,” a man and a woman lean toward each other until they balance precariously only a mere centimeter apart. Poised in relevé, they execute a hinge in parallel, back to back. The male dancer twists his upper body to the side, keeping his hips straight ahead, then he extends his arms in the direction of the woman. Balanced

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also in a hinge, she leans closer to him; he leans closer to her. But they never touch. It is as though the man were reaching out to catch the woman in her fall, a fall that never comes.

In the context of the phrase, his gesture could easily be read as a gesture of protection. The moment is rich with longing and frustration, proximity and distance, all the ingredients of a romantic duet. An instant later, the woman abruptly stands up straight and the man repeats the same protective gesture—as if to catch her—but at a speed that the eye can barely register. This time, the gesture we registered earlier as protective, takes on a mechanical quality; it is detached from anything the other dancer is doing, emptied of affect and integrated into what seems to be an arbitrary sequence of rapid, interrupted, almost spasmodic gestures that bring the man to the floor. We understand at this juncture that the gesture which seemed a moment ago to be a gesture saturated with meaning, a “protective” gesture, has been abstracted from its earlier function—as were the accelerated gestures of the “twine roll.” Momentarily, we glimpse something close—but not identical—to a “fact in dancing,” an element in a taxonomy of such “facts,” part of an alphabet or gamut of possible moves. Isolated and abstracted, “to lean toward” seems to mean little more than “to lean toward.”

But a question remains: Can a gesture be entirely liberated from a context to reveal itself as “fact”? To answer that question we need to consider the “shape” of the “fact” and how that shape comes to appear. On one level, we might define the shape that phenomenalizes the fact as the peculiar orientation the fall takes when inserted into a continuity—here, when the hinge appears first as part of a flowing protective gesture, then suddenly abruptly as part of a chain of broken-up gestural bits. This orientation can be considered the first order of shaping, the degree zero of choreography as a time-based art. But this shape, inflected to be sure by its place in a continuity, does not actually exist until it has been executed by an individual dancer. That dancer also contributes to “the further fact” that modifies—and in modifying actualizes—the “fact in dancing.” The dancer, that is, brings to the now oriented fact-shape not simply a momentum and a rhythm but also an emotional color or mood. Finally, in addition to the shape the “fact” takes within the continuity and the singular dancer’s performance of it, there is the scenography, the “presentation context” that ineluctably influences the way the oriented, performed fact-shape will be perceived.

Given that for Winterbranch Cunningham opted for such a highly charged presentation context, it is highly unlikely that he believed the dance was just about “falling” or that ultimately he wanted it to be interpreted as such. His careful directions to Rauschenberg and his attempt to preserve the original scenographic details of the work during Events indicate that an interpretative frame for the movement mattered to him a good deal. The historical context of Winterbranch helps explain why this might have been so. The period of the 1960s was one in which dance works addressed in increasingly explicit ways contemporary political events. By 1964, spectators would have been particularly alert to allusions in modern dance to scenes of violence: The United States had just entered into the war in Vietnam in 1961, and 1964 in particular was a year of escalating violence, both in the air and on the ground. (The Gulf of Tonkin attack was conducted on August 2, 1964.) If Cunningham wanted at that very moment to display the simplicity of “facts in dancing,” he made very little effort to guarantee that simplicity in Winterbranch. Far from attempting to suppress

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associations with recent and current events, he allowed them to multiply. The black costumes, the rugs that serve as stretchers, the lighting evocative of surveillance strobes—all these elements converge to amplify the mood of menacing violence that the public couldn’t but apprehend. Even at the level of the danced gestures themselves, which accelerate over the course of the dance until they are performed at a frenetic, break-neck speed, Cunningham seems to have been working with far more than “the idea of bodies falling” (Vaughan 1997, 137).

In addition, there is much evidence to suggest that “falling” carried many personal and literary associations that Cunningham continued to explore throughout his career. His “Choreographic Notes” are full of allusions to H. C. Earwicker (Here Comes Everybody), the hero of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake who, let us recall, dies of a fall. There is no reason to exclude the possibility that Cunningham associated the “fact” of falling with literary figures, historical events, religious symbols, and personal preoccupations, and that all of these associations are present in the piece.. In any case, the cultural associations of the act of falling are never far from the surface of Winterbranch. And how could it be otherwise? Falling is without doubt the most symbolically weighted physical action that exists.26 It is by no means clear, then, that the “fall,” as a gesture, could be revealed, or even approached, as just a “fact.”

As if to bring the point home, Cunningham produced with the photographer Robert Propper a series of studio stills of Winterbranch in the late 1960s that underscore the mortuary, religious, and even pornographic implications of falling. Studio shots are in general an untapped but important source of information about Cunningham’s dances, for they indicate how he wanted the dance to be publicized, emblematized, and recalled. Those taken by Propper are particularly eloquent. In figure 4 we see Cunningham lying prone in his black tube, a flashlight protruding strangely from the wrap, thus suggesting a curious displacement—yet lingering presence—of the erotic drive.

At no point in the dance does the male dancer lie in the position Cunningham assumes for Propper’s photograph. However, near the middle of the piece, a

Fig. 4: Merce Cunningham, Winterbranch, photograph by Robert Propper (c. 1964–1970)]

Fig. 5: Julia Carnicer dragged off by Marco Merenda in Merce Cunningham’s Winterbranch (screenshot from video of

2016 performance attributed to Lyon Opera Ballet).

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woman, lying still and prone on her back, is indeed wrapped in one of the black carpets and dragged offstage by a male partner (see fig. 5).

The studio still thus captures something central to the piece, not “falling,” but rather the state of “having fallen,” the weight of the stilled body as a material object that, when presented on the stage, implies a narrative, a dramatic past (“having fallen”). The question is, then, whether the ethics of Cunningham’s dance should be located in what he consistently represented as his refusal of symbolism, a resistance to culturally over-determined meanings, or whether instead his ethics inhere in both the movement and the presentation context, a set of choreographic and staging decisions that at once confirm those cultural meanings and put them to the test?

Part V. Conclusion: Winterbranch and the Ethics of Gesture

As in the example Agamben provides of the pornographic gesture suddenly interrupted to expose its mediality, so too the gestures in Winterbranch expose their mediality, their quality as movement support, while nonetheless retaining their connection to a frame, a context, that suggests a way to interpret them. At times, Cunningham seems to want to leave that frame behind, to remind us that the frame is a frame (not the “thing” itself), and even to claim that it is ethical—or at least emancipatory—to do so. And yet, I doubt Cunningham ultimately believed that it is either ethical or emancipatory to seek to leave all frames behind, to suppress all “particular forms” or “shapes,” to expose the dancing “fact” as such. That would mean neglecting to make a new continuity of the fragmented, disaggregated gestures with which he worked (and he always emphasized with his dancers the need to discover, in their own bodies, that new continuity); it would mean suppressing the independence of the individual dancer who provides the dynamic, the “shape,” the emotional color; it would mean removing all scenographic choices and rejecting all studio stills in an effort to keep the movement clean of context. If Cunningham sometimes leaned in that direction, Winterbranch is clearly not an example of that tendency.

Carolyn Brown hits the mark when she refers, in the passage quoted earlier, to “the ethos of Winterbranch: darkness, foreboding, terror, devastation, alienation, doom” (2007, 477). Cunningham must have intuited that in 1964 it was time to produce a more topical piece, to expose the fact that falling bodies are eloquent, they are not just “facts” to be manipulated or carted away. Winterbranch suggests that because we are human, even simple shifts in weight can speak, can have something to say—even if it is simply that the body is in danger of being hurt. In that sense, Winterbranch is from beginning to end a meditation on the body as a sensate, living organism subject to injury. The pulley- and piston-like figures underscore the fragility of the dancers as they lift and set one another down. The make-up Rauschenberg devised for the dance points to the element of risk: the black smudges under the eyes of the dancers at once protect them, literally, from the blinding lights and suggest that vulnerability; the black smudges recall to spectators the fact that the dancers, as sensate beings, require protection. And this sense that dancers require protection characterizes Cunningham’s approach to dance in general. He is known to have adjusted his choreography—even if chance derived and supposedly fixed—to prevent one dancer from colliding with another, or to better control a lift. Choreography was always, for him, a

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manifestation of care as well as an unfolding of the seemingly impossible permutations suggested by chance. Thus it is not surprising that elements of care are built into his technique. When I spoke to two of the dancers cast to perform the phrase “leaning towards,” Chiara Paperini and Tylor Galster, I learned that they were both experiencing pain in their lower backs while performing the hinge.27 Trained largely as classical ballet dancers, they were not used to executing the kind of off-center hinges that are a primary building block of Cunningham’s technique and choreographic vocabulary. During the rehearsals Goggans, a seasoned Cunnngham teacher as well as dancer, advised Paperini and Galster to make use of the muscles of the abdomen to support the lower back in the hinge (as all Cunningham-trained dancers learn in technique class). The care the dancers had to exercise to protect their backs while performing the hinge must be considered a significant part of the actualization of the dancing “fact,” a component of its “shape” as performed. It is precisely this aspect of the actualization that constitutes what is gestural in the gesture: a sensitivity to the body as a support, as a lived support. If Agamben and Cunningham share an interest in the suspension of “communication” in favor of “communicability,” if both view that suspension as opening the ethical dimension, Cunningham adds a further element to which he, as a choreographer and dancer, is acutely sensitive. That element is the dancer’s own experience—as a medium, a support for meaning, but also as a person living and shaping that support-ness, that “media character,” on a stage.

The gesture in “leaning toward” that I interpreted as protective demands focused concentration on the part of the dancer: she must tighten the muscles of the abdomen, straighten the lower back, and draw the sacrum in. To some extent, this skillful use of the muscles becomes automatic over time; yet the effort involved always leaves a trace in performance, what I have called elsewhere “the affect of skill” (see Noland 2002, 120–35). This primary affect already directs the gesture toward the pole of expression and meaning; it gives the gesture its first shape, its first frame. Agamben shows some sensitivity to this layer of lived experience when he writes in “Le Geste et la danse” of “the dance of dancers who dance on stage, the accomplishment of their skill as dancers and their power to dance as power” (12; my emphasis). What Agamben refers to as the dancers’s “skill as dancers” is not “nakedness”; there is nothing pre-cultural or natural about it (Cunningham in Vaughan 1997, 86). In fact, as an example of technique it can be traced back to a very precise historical moment. Dance technique, or skill, is a language; it is acquired, an “accomplishment” that might, at times, afford an experience of the “abyss.” It is the “linguistic” element in gesture, a manifestation of our “linguistic nature,” or, more precisely, of our natural disposition to be acculturated, to acquire languages and skills, to become a vocal or gestural support for signs. To stage this skill in its clearest form was always one of Cunningham’s cherished goals—one could even say one of his ethical goals. But skill is not the same thing as mediality “as such,” or “expression as such,” or “communicability” as “milieu pur.” Skill is dirty and sweaty; it bears the marks not only of the person who attains it but also of a specific training developed at a specific point in time. As Winterbranch seems to insist, skill as exercised by a dancer on stage is an invitation to a reading, an invitation to interpretation, that, at certain historical junctures, it might be unethical to ignore.

Winterbranch can be said, then, to occupy one pole on a large spectrum of works in Cunningham’s repertory, none of which—I maintain against the grain—ever achieves, or could achieve, a display

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of energy in its “naked” form. Winterbranch incessantly, even doggedly, drags its gestures toward legibility, toward communication and message, even as they are interrupted, suspended, exposed as the instances of technique they also are. As in Agamben’s account, the two orders—or extreme poles of the spectrum—co-exist: the gesture is a sign (“communication”) and the gesture is a support, a medium (“communicability”). The ethical dimension is not opened, then, by seeking to suspend, to remain in an “abyss” of endless mediality understood as a thing in itself (“as such”). The ethical dimension is opened by recalling that suspension is itself suspended, that we are “condemned to meaning,” as Merleau-Ponty put it, and that communication is a betrayal but also a chance. If at certain moments in history it might be more ethical to press for the suspension of semantics, even of expression, at others it might be more ethical to emphasize the semantic and expressive weight a gesture can support. There is ultimately no one way for art to be ethical, nor one way for it to be political.28 It is impossible to ensure that a communication will be successful, just as it is impossible to ensure that “nothing” will be communicated at all. If the stage can display anything, it is that fact.

1 That Winterbranch was indeed a controversial work is confirmed by the reviewers who saw it and the dancers who danced in it. See, for instance, Arlene Croce (1968): audiences of Winterbranch “got restless, laughed, hissed, yelled” (25); Don McDonagh (1970): “He shocked a dance audience with his first solo recital in New York in 1944, then later with ‘Sixteen Dances for Soloist and Company of Three’ in 1951, and over a decade later in 1964 with ‘Winterbranch’” (33). See also Carolyn Brown (2007): “Without question Merce’s work was the most controversial of the season” (59).

2 David Vaughan indicates that the last full performance of Winterbranch was in 1974 (see 1997, 293).

3 Agamben (1999), thinking of Aristotle, calls this “linguistic nature” our “factum loquendi.”

4 As far as I know, Agamben has published only one essay (1997) on a particular choreographer: Hervé Diasnas.

5 See Noland (2009) for a discussion of André Leroi-Gourhan’s Gesture and Speech and Marcel Mauss’s “Techniques of the Body.”

6 Gesture is thus to be understood as the alternative to an “image,” a “reification and obliteration of a gesture”. See Lucia Ruprecht’s brilliant consideration of gesture as continuum versus gesture as arrest (2015), with which the present essay is in dialogue.

7 All translations are my own. It was thus published the same year as the Italian version of “Notes on Gesture” as “Note sul gesto,” in Trafic, 1992.

8 See “Notes on Gesture” where Agamben describes how a gesture is “stiffened and turned into a destiny” (53), or where he speaks of the “mythical rigidity of the image” (54).

9 The passage reads: “It has precisely nothing to say because what it shows is the being-in-language of human beings as pure mediality” (Agamben 2000, 58); or elsewhere: “gesture, having to express Being in language itself, strictly speaking has nothing to express and nothing to say other than what is said in language—gesture is always the gesture of being at a loss in language” (Agamben 1999, 78).

10 That “ethics,” “politics,” and “gesture” all share a common semantic and philosophical space in Agamben’s writing is verified by a quick glance at “Notes on Politics,” which ends with an italicized sentence we have already read in “Notes on Gesture” (57); Agamben just replaces the word “gesture” with the word “politics”: “Politics is the exhibition of a mediality: it is the act of making a means visible as such” (2000, 115–116); original emphasis. Agamben is drawing from Walter Benjamin's notion of politics, presented in "What is Epic Theater?" (first version), as the act of making appearance appear.

Notes

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11 Feeling and Form was translated into Italian in 1956 and 1970. Langer quotes Mary Wigman’s “The New German Dance”: “The shape of the individual’s inner experience [...] will also have the unique, magnetic power of transmission which makes it possible to draw other persons, the participating spectators, into the magic circle of creation” (1953, 23). Another possible source is Walter Benjamin’s Notes aux Tableaux Parisiens, which Agamben cites in “Pour une éthique du cinéma” (1992).

12 Agamben’s understanding of the relation between gesture and verbal language could be fruitfully compared to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s comments on the “geste linguistique” (1945, 216–7).

13 Agamben is alluding to Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Mimique”: “un milieu, pur, de fiction” [a milieu, pure, of fiction] (2003, 179). Citing loosely, Agamben removes the comma between “milieu” and “pur.”

14 Cunningham makes some of his clearest statements about audience reception in these interviews, which were first published in France in 1980 and thus were probably recorded around 1979. “I don’t think what I do is non-expressive,” he states, “it’s just that I don’t try to inflict it on anybody, so each person may think in whatever way his feelings and experience take him” (Cunningham and Lesschaeve 2009, 106).

15 Jill Johnston wrote in 1963, for instance, that “Cunningham’s dances are still beyond the general public because he doesn’t give the public anything literal to hold onto. His dances are all about movement, and what you see in them that relates to your common experience is your own business and not his” (1963, 10). Likewise, Marcia Siegel wrote in 1971 that Cunningham “refuses to assume a metaphorical or illusionary intent. In other words, his dancing is not about something else” (1971, 471). Siegel’s approach changed over time, but her early appraisals were shared by many, including Roger Copeland who wrote 1979 that Cunningham’s work is “virtually devoid of ‘expressive’ or symbolic elements” (1979, 26); see also Susan Leigh Foster (1986). For a subtle approach to expression in Cunningham, see Mark Franko (1992).

16 On Stéphane Mallarmé’s “milieu pur” as a problematic notion for dance, see Frédéric Pouillaude (2014, 118–21).

17 Variations V (1965). For Collage (1952), working with untrained performers, Cunningham made a gamut of simple task gestures.

18 Cunningham began working on Winterbranch in 1963. The dance constitutes the final chapter in a four-part series on the seasons that he began almost a decade earlier: Springweather & People (1955); Summerspace (1958); Rune (the original title of which was Autumn Rune) (1959); and Winterbranch (1964). For a more detailed account of how the dance was made, see Noland (forthcoming).

19 See also “Choreography and the Dance”: “I am more interested in the facts of moving rather than my feelings about them” (Cunningham 1970, 181).

20 Other dances of the 1960s were studies in one of the eight “facts in dancing”: Summerspace (1958), for instance, is based on an exploration of the “Turn.”

21 Speaking of RainForest Cunningham affirms: “Yes, it’s a character dance and since such a dance is made specifically on a given body, its flavor changes sharply when some other dancer takes over the part” (Cunningham and Lesschaeve 2009, 113).

22 A reviewer of Benjamin Millepied’s 2013 reconstruction of Winterbranch remarks on the “urban” noise and the “headlights” that sweep the stage but does not mention disasters or holocausts (2013). Audience members I interviewed at the March 2016 performance in Lyon compared Winterbranch to a scene of post-nuclear disaster.

23 Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns were both present at Allan Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts in 1966; even earlier they kept abreast of works by Jean Tinguely, George Maciunus, and others (see Lussac 2004).

24 Winterbranch was performed in a few other Events without the original scenography (1974; 1978); however, the fact that Cunningham later made the choice to retain it indicates his awareness of a possibility that extends to all his works—their integrity as performances, as statements or mood pieces.

25 The crawling, wriggling figure returns at the end of the dance; a group of five dancers simultaneously fall to the

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ground then leave the stage crawling on their back without the use of their hands, their bodies covered almost entirely by one of the black rugs.

26 The history of dance offers ample evidence that the fall has played a primary role in the development of several modern dance techniques: Doris Humphrey based much of her choreographic practice on two central actions, “fall and recovery”; Laban was fascinated by the body’s weight; and Graham explored the effects of gravity on movement. Given the importance of the fall in the history of dance, it is not surprising that Cunningham would eventually take it up as a theme.

27 A “hinge” requires a dancer to balance on the balls of feet, heels held off the floor, while bending at the knee and keeping the back in line with the hips and shoulders. A twisted hinge, à la Cunningham, requires the dancer to simultaneously twist the upper torso toward the side while maintaining the hips straight in relation to the knees.

28 See Rancière (2009) for a pertinent reflection on the politics of meaning in art.

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———. 1996. Mezzi senza Fine: Note sulla Politica. Turin: Bollati Boringhiere.

———. 1997. “Le corps à venir.” Les Saisons de la Danse 292 (May): 6–8.

———. 1999a. “Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science.” In Potentialities, translated by David Heller-Roazen, 89–103. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

———. 1999b. “Kommerell, or on Gesture.” In Potentialities, translated by David Heller-Roazen, 77–85. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

———. 2000. Means Without Ends. Translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Brown, Carolyn. 2007. Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham. New York: Knopf.

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———. 1970. “Choreography and the Dance.” In The Creative Experience, edited by Stanley Rosner and Lawrence E. Abt. New York: Grossman.

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Duchamp, Marcel. 1975. Duchamp du signe. Edited by Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson. Paris: Flammarion.

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———. 2002. “Energy Geared to an Intensity High Enough to Melt Steel: Merce Cunningham, Movement, and Motion Capture.” Leonardo Electronic Almanac 17 (2): 120–35. https://doi.org/10.5900/SU_9781906897161_2012.17(2)_120

———. 2009. Agency and Embodiment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674054387

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Biography

Carrie Noland is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Poetry at Stake: Lyric Aesthetics and the Challenge of Technology (Princeton, 1999), Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture (Harvard, 2009), and Voices of Negritude in Modernist Print (Columbia, 2015). She is also co-editor of two interdisciplinary collections: Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement with Barrett Watten, and Migrations of Gesture with Sally Ann Ness. At present, she is completing a manuscript entitled Merce Cunningham: After the Arbitrary (forthcoming from Chicago University Press).

© 2017 Carrie Noland

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY VOL 3, NO 1 (2017):92–107 DOI: https://doi.org/10.21476/PP.2017.31166

ISSN 2057-7176

PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY

THE CONDUCT OF CONTEMPLATION AND THE GESTURAL ETHICS OF INTERPRETATION IN

WALTER BENJAMIN’S “EPISTEMO-CRITICAL PROLOGUE”

MARK FRANKO BOYER COLLEGE OF MUSIC AND DANCE, TEMPLE UNIVERSITY

In the “Epistemo-Critical Prologue” (“Erkenntniskritische Vorrede”) to The Origin of German Tragic Drama (Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels) (henceforth Vorrede), Walter Benjamin was concerned with the ethics of his own interpretive gesture in that the rhythm and/or relative velocity of the operations of critical attention that he was at pains to describe as necessary to the methodological procedure of philosophical criticism had an essential rapport—one could also even more pointedly call it a performative relation—with the interpretive content of the analysis and, hence, to the artwork or works under scrutiny. My reading of the Vorrede here is designed to explore the gestural character of Benjamin’s propaedeutic.1 Benjamin’s idea of the Baroque (and the related notion of allegory) in the Trauerspiel book (1928)2 concerns, I shall argue, not only movement quality in seventeenth-century performance, but the quality of movement of thought necessary to effectively shadow the perception of the “baroque” intermittency inherent to a gesturally-oriented analysis and hence to the analysis of baroque gesture. I shall attempt to show this through a close comparative reading of the German text with the English translation, as the latter elides many of the subtleties crucial to a gesturally oriented reading of the text.

There is no mentality without motility and the question of movement reconstruction concerns the possibility that thought would capture itself in and through its affinities with its own movement. As Samuel Weber has said: “[W]hat Benjamin seeks to articulate in that Preface is not simply another form of cognitive investigation, but rather a form of interpretation that does not take cognition for granted” (1991, 467). If thought partakes of an ethics and aesthetics of gesture, this realization

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affects not only the movement of bodies that we refer to as dance, but also the movement of texts that we refer to as writing.3 Making these two modalities interdependent could be taken from an academic perspective as an anti-disciplinary move in that text and gesture are generally considered to be cognitively disparate.4 But, beyond this, the movement in question is itself multifaceted in that it extends from dramaturgical movement to verse movement to stage movement and, ultimately, to a conception of the movement of history or how we perceive history to move on stage. This multifaceted conception of movement encompasses both the movement of thought as occasioned by an analytic methodology and the movement within the artwork itself whose interpretation is essential to an understanding of same. One outcome is that the gestural rhythm of intermittency or irregularity can be considered both as a textual gesture and a gestural text. This resultant interdisciplinarity unites the ethical and the aesthetic dimensions of art and its interpretation.

Yet, given the subject of his study—the seventeenth-century German tragedy of mourning—the ethical dimension of the Vorrede overflows the performative quality of interpretation in that the object of interpretation itself is also ethically fraught: the gesture of tyranny and/or martyrdom of the baroque sovereign. For this reason, Benjamin’s methodology of a fitful and intermittent rhythm of interpretation begs comparison with Carl Schmitt’s discussion of the state of exception in Political Theology wherein the sovereign decision emanates directly from the state of exception, and is accordingly rendered as swift and decisive rather than fitful and ponderous. “In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition” (1985, 15).5 By declaring the state of exception that effectively suspends the juridical order, the sovereign exercises “the decision in absolute purity” (13), which is the decision liberated from any juridical norm. And, the first decision is to decide on the exception itself.6 As Giorgio Agamben has argued: “While for Schmitt the decision is the nexus that unites sovereignty and the state of exception, Benjamin ironically divides sovereign power from its exercise and shows that the baroque sovereign is constitutively incapable of deciding” (2005, 55).7

Agamben reflects on one aspect of Benjamin’s analysis that hews to the dramaturgy of character in the plays, yet there are many other dramaturgical considerations that need to be accounted for. The Vorrede, for example, is not about the baroque sovereign, and in its intentional confusion of different cognitive modes it too allows life to break through “the crust of mechanism,” one that Benjamin characterizes as the use of the authoritative quotation habitual to the philosophical treatise. Agamben’s indecision could be one way to qualify or give semantic content to intermittency, but what is at issue in the Vorrede is the character of the interpretive gesture itself, which is not so much indecisive or “roundabout” as fastidious (umständlich). “Ausdauernd hebt das Denken stets von neuem an, umständlich geht es auf die Sache selbst zurück” (Tirelessly the process of thinking makes new beginnings, returning in a roundabout way to its original object) (Benjamin 1991, 208; 1977, 28). “Roundabout way” does not do justice to the punctilious fussiness of umständlich, which suggests a fastidious rather than meandering procedure. Benjamin’s methodology of contemplation is no more norm-governed than the action of the decisive or, for that matter, the indecisive sovereign.8

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Agamben’s approach, in any case, is to pinpoint a crucial relation between Schmitt’s theorization of the sovereign exception and an earlier essay by Benjamin, “Critique of Violence” (1921) (in Benjamin 1986). “The theory of sovereignty that Schmitt develops in his Political Theology can be read as a precise response to Benjamin’s essay” (Agamben 2005, 54). What I wish to problematize, however, is the extension of Benjamin’s concept of gesture as pure violence to the larger concerns of interpretation implicit in baroque gesture. For, it seems to me that the violence at issue in the Trauerspiel book in addition to that of the tyrant and the martyr in the plays of mourning is the dialectical violence applied to the body as symbol or allegory, beautiful organic form or petrified thing: the entire attempt at interpretation is geared to the violence of this dialectic and not to the sovereign violence of Gerechtigkeit as in “Critique of Violence.” While Agamben makes a convincing argument that in Political Theology Schmitt is responding to Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence,” it is also possible that Benjamin’s Trauerspiel book, which develops a far richer and more nuanced thinking on gesture than does “Critique of Violence,” itself responds to Schmitt’s Political Theology. And, here we are faced with the difference between Schmitt’s sovereign decision as gesture and Benjamin’s interpretation as gesture. What the Vorrede adds to this discussion is the fact that gesture concerns the whole project of the Trauerspiel book as regards the interpretation of the Baroque, not just the comportment of the baroque monarch on the stage. For, in the analysis of the relation of Schmitt’s Political Theology to Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence,” Agamben develops the thinking that leads to his essay “Notes on Gesture” (2000). It is because Benjamin’s idea of gesture in “Critique of Violence” amounts to “violence as pure medium” that Agamben arrives at the idea of gesture in his later essay as itself the communication of communicability, or a means without end. This comes down to understanding gesture, as he puts it in State of Exception, as “never a means but only a manifestation” (2005, 62). What I am arguing for here is a more complex understanding of gesture and the ethics of gesture in Benjamin as instrumental to the methodology of philosophical criticism of the artwork.

The Vorrede

I begin with where movement can be found in Benjamin’s writing, and for this we must consult the original German in order to perceive certain of Benjamin’s crucial subtleties of meaning that are lost in translation. These concern chiefly the specificities of movement analysis that are lost to non-German readers of the 1977 English translation The Origin of German Tragic Drama.9 The “Epistemo-Critical Prologue” (abbreviated here to Vorrede) shall serve as the main axis of my approach to the Trauerspiel book. This text, although notorious for being difficult to reconcile with the book’s two long chapters, is actually crucial to an understanding of Benjamin’s idea of the Baroque in the German play of mourning, which can only be fully grasped in and as an aesthetics and ethics of gesture. 10 Its title in German—“Erkenntniskritische Vorrede”—suggests that the Vorrede is questioning (in the sense of critical of) axiomatic knowledge (erkenntniskritisch) rather than concerned with the critical qualities of epistemology (as epistemo-critical might suggest): it is critical, that is, of the disciplinary status of philosophical knowledge, which projects certitude about its own self-containment (Abgeschlossenheit) qua knowledge. Scientific or axiomatic knowledge

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displays its truth in immediate and self-evident terms. Let us retain the term immediacy, which shall have purchase on the aesthetic categories that subsequently emerge.

Benjamin begins with the observation that philosophy is confronted at every turn (mit jeder Wendung) with the question of representation (die Frage der Darstellung).11 Thought (Denken), which is an action of contemplation, is confronted by writing (Schrifttum), the only representational system through which it can be conveyed. The stakes of representation are that it be the representation of truth (Darstellung der Wahrheit). The form the representation of thought-as-truth takes, in other terms, is writing. If truth is assured by thought (as subjective contemplation), however, writing betrays it inasmuch as philosophy cannot reflect truth in the form of its own expression. What philosophy lacks is the relationship between form and content proper to art.12 Philosophy compensates for this lack by asserting its authoritative and systematic method as didacticism (Lehre). Benjamin characterizes the form representation takes in philosophical discourse as “historical codification,” more precisely, “das autoritäre Zitat” (the authoritative quotation) that typifies the medieval scholastic treatise (1991, 208; 1977, 27).

To say that thought is confronted by the question of representation at every turn, therefore, means that philosophy, once having given up its disciplinary pretense of unimpeachable scientific status (as mathesis universalis), is called upon to recognize itself as hermeneutic rather than foundational. It is, in other terms, called upon to recognize its fragmented rather than totalizing character. Writing cannot transform the act of thinking into authoritative knowledge for the very reason that writing shares the structure—I would almost prefer to say the conduct—of contemplation. The experience of contemplation cannot present itself mimetically in writing because contemplation itself does not have a presentational or mimetic structure.13 What this means is that philosophy has misconstrued its own method, which, when correctly understood, is that of art as an object presenting itself for contemplation.14 Benjamin arrives, in this way, at his notion of philosophical criticism.15 The problem of thinking and writing—the reason why thinking is always “confronted with” representation—is that it cannot present itself in terms of its own experience as temporalized subjective awareness. Here, we reach Benjamin’s first important conclusion: the very method of philosophical criticism is Umweg, a term translated into English by digression (1991, 208; 1977, 28), but which might better be translated according to its literal meaning—way around or detour. Definitive for representation as a method is detour (Darstellung als Umweg). Detour can be neither authoritative nor systematic. As discussed above with regard to the interpretative gesture, it pertains to digression and its quality is umständlich: fussy or fastidious, because taking exception with itself rather than pursuing an inevitable forward movement.

This begs the question: What is the form of thought once we accept that our access to it takes place exclusively through writing, and more specifically through the intermediary of a literary genre? The form of thought that is palpable in its scriptural building block is the sentence. Where does the sentence rejoin the very process of thought from which it issues? By imposing a series of halts, the sentence creates a series of pauses and recommencements: “[A] writer must stop and restart with every new sentence” (1977, 29). The sentence presupposes a rhythm of thought. It is worth noting that in German, the subject is not the writer, but writing itself: “[I]st es der Schrift eigen [it is proper

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to writing itself], mit jedem Satze von neuem einzuhalten und anzuheben” (1991, 209). It is, in other terms, the property of the prose form—writing (Schrift)—to stop and start, a procedure whose structural necessity is vouchsafed by the sentence itself. The pause at the end of the sentence, like the pause at the expiration of breath, creates a terminus or temporary halt in consequence of which thought is then set moving in a new direction: it is fundamentally discontinuous and, in this sense too, umständlich. “The continual pausing for breath is the mode most proper to the process of contemplation” (1991, 208; 1977, 28).

The pausing for breath (Atemholen) determines the very conduct of the sentence: its limited duration, termination, and new beginning. Benjamin attributes an uneven rhythm to sentences as determined by the very temporality of contemplation (die eigenste Daseinsform der Kontemplation) they impose by virtue of their interruptiveness. “The mode most proper to the process of contemplation,” as the English translation renders it, omits Daseinsform (1991, 208): form of being there (Dasein) of contemplation. Contemplation lives in the sequentiality of breathing. The form taken by contemplation as linguistic expression (a series of punctuated sentences) is dictated by its very existence in time as part of life process. Since it always encounters its own death in and as expired breath it cannot embody vitality. Here we acquire a deeper understanding of detour as method because it occurs through time as the intermittent rhythm of sentences: beginnings may be slow; maximum speeds are interrupted. With the emphasis placed on starting over, getting distracted, returning to, but differently…. the time-based quality of perception and thought emerges. “For by pursuing different levels of meaning in its examination of one single object it receives both the incentive (Antrieb) to begin anew, and the justification for its irregular rhythm” (intermittierenden Rhythmik).

Once the term “irregular rhythm,” is proffered the metaphor of the artwork as mosaic makes its appearance in the text: “Just as mosaics preserve their majesty despite their fragmentation to capricious particles, so philosophical contemplation is not lacking in momentum [Schwung]” (1991, 208; 1977, 28). With the metaphor of the mosaic the grammatical and physiological are detoured, as it were, into the visual. Detour is also motivated by interpretation, that is, by the complexity of issues that arise in interpretation such that a linear path cannot be forged through the artwork and the attendant observation necessitating the renewed return to the object of contemplation. The mosaic itself embodies the formal qualities that oblige its contemplation to proceed fragmentarily, so to speak. “Both [the mosaic and contemplation] are made up of the distant and the disparate” (1991, 208; 1977, 28). Part of interpretation is responsive to the form of writing itself; part is responsive to the visual structure of the artwork. The notion of detail and fragment is essential to both subject and object, if I may put it thus. “The value of fragments of thought is all the greater the less direct their relationship to the underlying idea.” And: “[T]ruth-content is only to be grasped through immersion in the most minute details of subject matter” (1991, 208; 1977, 29). It is precisely at this moment in the text that the necessity to observe—or rather, to contemplate—the object merges with the will to fragment it: to regard it as in pieces, or to segment it. 16 The notion of the artwork is here transported into a corresponding temporality of contemplative conduct. And, this necessity is in itself double. It arises because our vision cannot take in the totality, which instead presents itself as a mosaic; but also, because language itself

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cannot flow uninterruptedly. Hence, thought itself takes on the form (movement and rhythm) of contemplation that is wholly adequate to its own representation in writing.

Benjamin adds that contemplation does not lack impetus. However, Schwung is translated with the English term momentum, which suggests the potential for acceleration is assumed, whereas this is quite the opposite of his meaning as I understand it.17 Contemplation contradicts the idea of gathering momentum. The very irregularity of movement that Benjamin repeatedly evokes refers to a periodic suspension within movement.18 Momentum, for its part, is more typical of articulated language and pantomime (“voice and gesture”) than it is of writing, and it inevitably leads to a false synthesis. The formal inter-implication of breathing and writing, one within the other, yields “ideas:” “Truth, bodied forth in the dance (Reigen) of represented ideas, resists being projected, by whatever means, into the realm of knowledge” (1991, 209; 1977, 29). The term for dance used in the German is Reigen, which suggests the circular patterns of cosmic dance and foreshadows the notion of constellation in Benjamin’s thought. 19 Here, a relation emerges between ideas, in Benjamin’s particular sense of the term, and dance; a relation that will be further evidenced in the term choreography in what follows.

We thus return to the title of the Vorrede in which knowledge (Erkenntnis) is criticized for privileging the concept (Begriff) to the detriment of the idea (Idee). It is almost as if with Benjamin one comes into contact with the idea phenomenologically—on the basis, that is, of the formal congruence between breathing, grammatical sentence structure, and artwork as mosaic. This congruence in the gestural components of contemplative and hence hermeneutic method constitutes the ethical quality of interpretive conduct. The concept is from this perspective a possession (ein Haben) of consciousness (and hence transcendental) whereas the idea cannot be possessed: it exists in its fragmentary state to be contemplated inasmuch as it hews to the object and to the complementary form of perception of the object. The idea is part of the world and, as fragment of itself, it is the relic of a world past. This sense of the fragment as physical part of the past-real is what lends the fragment its truth status, in Benjaminian terms, as inseparable from its very materiality. Philosophical truth is manifest only in “the formal elements of the preserved work of art” as epitomized by the ruin, which comes to replace the mosaic in the main body of the text as a key allegorical term for the object of contemplation.

In the process of these opening pages Benjamin performs the movement between ideas—representation, breathing, sentence, fragment, mosaic, idea—that make the point of confluence between writing, research, perception, and thought palpable as a movement of thought and as a textual movement. The movement between these terms shows us how movement moves allegorically. This serves in turn to underline the importance of allegory as a keyword for the Trauerspiel book since in allegory there is no formal transcendent term but only a sequence of substitutions. “The false appearance of totality is extinguished” (1991, 352; 1977, 176). Writing is productive of the idea as thought-fragment and allegory demands contemplation because its interpretation is necessarily time consuming: neither instinctive nor momentary, it is always mediated in the sense of subject to intermittence.

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Symbol/Allegory

If allegory displays the temporality of ethical contemplation of the artwork, this is specific to the play of mourning as the object of analysis of the Trauerspiel book. Herein lies an opportunity to establish a relation between what I believe Benjamin is about in the Vorrede and how he deals with the distinction between symbol and allegory in the Chapter “Allegory and Trauerspiel.” The contrast in temporalities between the symbol and the allegory could not be more evident, and returns us to the differences between the concept and the idea as discussed in the Vorrede and to the difference between the swiftness of the decision in Schmitt and the halting rhythm of contemplation and interpretation in Benjamin. The symbol is immediate—“‘a momentary totality’”—whereas allegory is “‘progression in a series of moments’” (1991, 341; 1977, 165). Benjamin’s symbol-allegory pair seems inspired at least in part by the dialectical relationship of Apollo and Dionysus in Nietzsche. Symbol and allegory are in a dialectical relation in that each presupposes a relation between the visual and meaning that is not entirely dichotomous with the other. In the symbol, meaning is “contained within,” whereas allegory unleashes depths that separate the visual being from immediate meaning through the depth that is proper to it as well:

The measure of time for the experience of the symbol is the mystical instant in which the symbol assumes the meaning into its hidden, and if one might say so, wooded interior. (1991, 342; 1977, 165)

The temporality of the symbol is “the mystical instant” inasmuch as the immediacy of the symbol imposes a condensation of experience that suggests the inexpressible or sublime. What prevents its retreat into obscurantism, however, is “the organic, mountain and plant-like quality in the makeup of the symbol” (1991, 342; 1977, 165). In other terms, the symbol “adapts itself to natural forms, penetrates and animates them” (Wilamowitz-Moellendorff cited by Benjamin, 1991, 341; 1977, 164). In sum, “[T]he artistic symbol is plastic,” (1991, 341; 1977, 164), which is how the symbol reconciles plastic form with the inexpressible quality of the “mystical symbol.” The instant is transformed into a quickening whose consequences can be observed in the natural world of forms. Benjamin refers to Winckelmann and evokes Greco-Roman figure sculpture in allying the symbol with classicism. In this sense, the mystical temporality of the symbol condenses into a sparkling present of the beautiful human form.

But, allegory, too, is dialectically split:

[A]llegory is not free from a corresponding dialectic, and the contemplative calm with which it immerses itself into the depths which separate visual being from meaning, has none of the disinterested self-sufficiency which is present in the apparently related intention of the sign. (1991, 342; 1977, 165–166)

If the written sign (Zeichen) also benefits from a condensation of meaning, Benjamin recognizes the dangers of ascribing to writing itself (Schrifttum) the allegorical temporality of interpretation. It is here that an important qualitative shift occurs in which the idea of form extends itself to a theory of genre: in this case, the drama of mourning itself, which deploys narrative temporality. “The

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violence of the dialectical movement within these allegorical depths” (1991, 342; 1977, 166) is made clearer not only by resorting to the way genre reorients the use of language with respect to the visual, but also by virtue of a transition toward one of Benjamin’s most elusive concepts, that of natural history or the “strange combination [Verschränkung] of nature and history [through which] […] the allegorical mode of expression is born” (1991, 344; 1977, 167). In the German, Verschränkung (crossing) has a more dialectical ring than combination. The drama of this crossing between nature and history is, like the violence of the dialectic perpetrated on the body by the symbol/allegory dialectic, productive of allegory itself inasmuch as the latter calls forth a specific interpretative methodology that frees itself from timeworn academic authority.

Beatrice Hanssen refers to the contradictory meanings of natural history in the Vorrede: “In the course of the investigation, natural history could either signal the temporality of transience or, quite to the contrary, refer to the dehistoricizing tendency that marked baroque drama,” she writes. For Hanssen, “in turning to natural history the mourning play brought about a spatialization (and hence de-historicization) of history – a dynamic Benjamin captured by what he called the ‘setting-to-stage’ of history” (1998, 50). I would disagree that spatialization in a discussion of dramaturgy can be interpreted as de-historicizing, particularly because spatialization is closely linked to choreography as a means to undercut the sense of forward motion implicit in Aristotelian verisimilitude.20 But, as with the particular sense of rhythm set forth in the Vorrede, space too is not without rhythm and movement. It is the very presence of the stage prop—the main ‘protagonist’ of the setting—in its palpable physical presence on stage that allows us to perceive what transpires there less as a symbolic allusion to life based on organic metaphor than as a reality whose import is palpably historical on the very basis of its dehumanization, its necessity to endure beyond the narrative limits of life expectancy as ruin. 21 Here too, if we read Benjamin’s philosophical aesthetics of dramaturgy in the light of the symbol/allegory distinction and attend to the temporalities implied by these categories, we note that the symbol—which is plastic form or mimesis par excellence—is characterized as “a momentary totality,” whereas in allegory “we have progression in a series of moments” (1991, 341; 1977, 165). Where the present is insisted upon, as in theatrical representation, allegory cannot be bereft of temporality and hence of historicity. The point is that this temporality is secular. “For where it is a question of a realization in terms of space – and what else is meant by its secularization other than its transformation into the strictly present – then the most radical procedure is to make events simultaneous” (1991, 370; 1977, 194). The simultaneity of the performative event and the historical event confers a re-enactive logic on theater. 22 So, Benjamin also writes: “History is secularized in the setting […] chronological movement is grasped and analyzed in a spatial image” (1991, 271; 1977, 92). I would understand the secularization of history as a rejection of a theological notion of political power (see Franko 2007). This is, of course, what Benjamin so ruthlessly exposes in “Critique of Violence.” Also worthy of note here is Benjamin’s insistence that the setting and the court are one and the same: “For the court is the setting par excellence” (1991, 271; 1977, 92). In other terms, the court is always theatrical and hence a socially determined form of self-representation. As a milieu, therefore, the court has no recourse to a theological or spiritual dimension. The setting is history concretized on the stage as an event simultaneous with the present as self-presentation and self-representation—hence a site of intrigue—and not a theologically symbolic site.23 By the same token, as Weber

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points out, it is also not the space of the sovereign exception: “The state of exception is excluded as theater” (1992, 17).

History as Setting, Prop, and Sign(language)

Benjamin describes allegory in its essential relationship to human life and human history. Here, history refers not to official history of the body politic: “This is the heart of the allegorical way of seeing, of the Baroque, secular explanation of history as the Passion of the world” (Das ist der Kern der allegorischen Betrachtung, der barocken: weltliche Exposition der Geschichte als Leidensgeschichte der Welt) (1991, 343; 1977, 166). “The Passion of the world” (as rendered in English) tends toward a ‘symbolic’ representation of suffering—a “general concept” more in line with allegory (1991, 341; 1977, 164)24—whereas, in the German, the secular quality of suffering is underlined quite starkly as “history of suffering.” As such, it relates to the “biographical historicity of the individual” as well as the riddle of human suffering (1991, 343; 1977, 166). Here, the presence of death is emphasized as the condition of meaning— “The greater the significance, the greater the subjection to death, because death digs most deeply the jagged line of demarcation between physical nature and significance” (1991, 343; 1977 166). Death is the corollary of breathing as contemplation’s condition of possibility. With the presence of the phenomenon of death we have the clearest indication of what demarcates history from what Benjamin calls natural history. It is because “nature has always been subject to the power of death” that its significance is historical in a secular sense that differentiates, precisely, in a theatrical sense, classical tragedy from the play of mourning. Benjamin’s use of the term symbol resonates with Kantorowicz’s use of the term body politic in the context of history. Whereas the body politic is undying, the physical death of the body of the king must be qualified as abject and hence as belonging to the transitory aspect of life: devoid of a symbolic position within remembrance. History is, in this connection, the history of the body politic—“the process of an eternal life,” (1991, 353; 1977, 178) which is the life of power—not that of the body natural, in Kantorowicz’s terms. But, Benjamin is not speaking here of a symbolic political death that confirms the continuity of power throughout history, but of the death of the body natural: the unrecorded suffering in/of history (Leidensgeschichte) and the fact of mortality and decay (Vergänglichkeit).

To explore the tension between nature and history, Benjamin attends to the qualities of space rather than to movement. Herein lies the connection between the stage prop and the ruin because in both temporality is captured within the spatial. The landscape in its relationship to a stage- setting becomes the scene of a dialectical encounter between history and nature or natural history:

Whereas in the symbol destruction is idealized and the transfigured face of nature is fleetingly revealed in the light of redemption, in allegory the observer is confronted by the facies hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial landscape. (1991, 343; 1977, 166)

The petrified landscape will become the locus and, actually, the visible scene of dialectical exchange between symbol and allegory, history and nature. Landscape as scene of this encounter is the ideal

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locus for such an exchange both because of its theatrical potential as setting and because of its ability to expose culture to nature in the figure of the ruin. “For when nature bears the imprint of history, that is to say, where it is a setting (Schauplatz) does it not have a numismatic quality?” (1991, 349; 1977, 173). The staged representation of nature is itself paradigmatic of an attempt to impose (as if to imprint or emboss) symbolic and therefore redemptive meaning upon the inhuman course of history, one that cannot be reconciled with classical historical discourse. Its stamping or imprint as coin of the realm (its numismatic quality) underlines its political teleology. History clings to one of the fundamental forms of theatrical representation—the décor—even if the décor is a “natural” one in that it is fortuitously placed in nature.

The arbitrary quality of allegorical meaning does not lend specificity to the representation of nature because it endows nature with a force whose only meaning can be derived from the imprint of history upon it. Here, the role of writing (now referred to as script in the English), in its hieroglyphic sense combining writing with image, is to inscribe meaning upon it, hence its numismatic quality, which gives us nature (the landscape) as stage setting. And hence, the tragedy of mourning itself is a symbol of allegorical interpretation inasmuch as it transpires within a setting where the theory of allegory can be manifested as dialectic between history and nature.

But, in the quasi-natural setting history is, nonetheless, defeated. “The transfixed face of signifying nature is victorious, and history must, once and for all, remain contained in the subordinate role of stage-property” (1991, 347; 1977, 171). Since history and the symbolic register are responsible for the illusion of plasticity and ephemeral humanity as protagonists in the setting, to relegate history to the category of the prop is truly to make of history an object rather than an organic body. It is for this reason Benjamin later says there are strictly speaking no actual characters in the genre of Trauerspiel, only things.25 The word Requisit—stage prop—reduces the function of history within nature to an element within the setting. As with certain of de Chirico’s images of furniture seemingly abandoned in a natural landscape where they are washed away by a flood, history is reduced to a prop, its events “shrivel up and become absorbed in the setting” (1991, 355; 1977, 179). History itself is a stage set inundated by the forces of nature, a mere representation to be swept away. The stage property/setting quality of history when confronted with the eventfulness of nature presents itself in the tragedy of mourning as writing (Schrift): “The word ‘history’ stands written on the countenance of nature in the characters of transience” (1991, 353; 1977, 177). The allegory of history as prop is “transient” writing (Zeichenschrift): writing as a sign or gesture—as related to sign language, but not to the theatrical script. French ballet à entrées of the early seventeenth century also deployed the body as both decor and writing (see Franko 2015).

No sooner has the stage setting become Schrift (as distinguished from Schrifttum) than the scene of the ruin as a device with which to stage the dialectic relation between nature and history becomes clear: “The allegorical physiognomy of the nature-history, which is put on stage in the Trauerspiel is present in reality in the form of the ruin” (1991, 353; 1977, 177). The ruin, in other terms, is history subject to and subjected to the force of nature. Put otherwise, the ruin is itself the theatrical setting where we see history as staged in nature: “In the ruin, history has physically merged into the setting” (1991, 353; 1977, 178). For history to be staged is for it to become a theater

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of objects. The consequence is that we cannot read nature directly as with the momentary appearance of the symbol: we read nature indirectly through history as prop.

The image of the ruin is the ultimate expression of allegory, whose detail or motif is the fragment.26 Benjamin explains theater with the visual allegory of the image, but brings the two series together when he writes: “Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things” (1991, 354; 1977, 178). Allegory absorbs history within its own ruination. Philosophical criticism can obtain a truth-value not as logos, but by becoming a thought-thing, a Gedanken-Ding. Such a thing undermines the momentum of history.

The irregular rhythm of Benjamin’s analysis is the result of the superimposition of two critical operations. A dialectical operation through which allegory and symbol are in a superimposed tension because each is found to be perceptible within the other while also being bound in a struggle containing a political dimension; and, a more properly allegorical operation in which meaning is manifested in the slippage or metonymical movement between terms that occurs as if by association or analogy. It is this superimposition of the paradigmatic axis of the dialectic onto the syntagmatic axis of the trace that produces a poetics of Trauerspiel that tends toward immobility. Here it would seem fitting that Trauerspiel itself evidences the very rhythm of the contemplation required to interpret it: “The Trauerspiel is therefore in no way characterized by immobility, nor indeed by slowness of action […] but by the irregular rhythm of the constant pause, the sudden change of direction, and consolidation into new rigidity” (1991, 373; 1977, 197).27 These are the very descriptive terms, or can be seen to constitute the descriptive system, of contemplation as discussed in the Vorrede.

In this extension of interpretation into the artwork the role of contemplation is relayed to that of choreography. Benjamin attributes the tendency toward stasis in the slowing down of the action of the play of mourning to choreography as image: “[C]hronological movement is grasped and analyzed in a spatial image” (1991, 271; 1977, 92). It is as if all the threads of the analysis thus far converge in the theatrical representation of the court, which is at once verbal and visual. These are depths that contain a certain violence, but not the violence of pure mediality or of the gestural manifestation as Agamben would have it. The depths are dialectical and they affect the human body above all. As mentioned above, the court itself is a theatrical entity, one that is self-representing in that it is self-theatricalizing. In Benjamin’s language the sense of setting and image merge here as an encounter between thought and representation that underlines the concordance between what is analyzed and how it is analyzed as discussed apropos of the Vorrede. In this case, however, the way history merges into the setting brings choreographic space into being, a space that is the prime modality of expression of the court itself. “The image of the setting, or more precisely, of the court is the setting par excellence” (1977, 92). The setting is a set of spatial relationships that can be read. The German reads: “der innerste Schauplatz” (the most inward of showplaces) (1991, 271) implying thereby that the proverbial superficiality and show of the court—the court in its constitutive theatricality—has, in actuality, its own “wooded interior” or subjective reason for being. The expressive quality of the court is none other than “the spatial continuum, which one might describe as choreographic” (1991, 274; 1977, 95). Hence, the notion of writing as

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representation that was earlier identified as containing within its own rhythms the conduct of contemplation as itself an ethical methodology, is elaborated upon in the Trauerspiel book as choreographic and presented in spatial terms in the third chapter as an attribute of Trauerspiel itself. The dialectic of history and nature becomes theater as choreography: where nature takes over for history, choreography takes over for theater, movement takes over for words. More precisely, the role of movement and visual pattern in what would otherwise be a theater of the word signals not just the influence of (court) ballet as such but the becoming nature of history, the secularization of what might otherwise too easily appear as the outcome of myth or fate. It is in the spatial accent of choreography where the court as setting becomes the expressive material of theater that the historical past can be viewed as a natural phenomenon, that is, as a phenomenon destined to mortality and corruption, “the stations of decline” (1991, 343; 1977, 166). This being is, somewhat counter-intuitively, likened to an object theater.

A vertiginous accumulation of terms of substitution in a dispersed series counterbalances the formulations of the dialectic. This is another form of the manipulation of (discursive) space Benjamin calls choreographic. The space of discourse qua space is one in which the dialectic can be used as a spatial choice in willful juxtaposition to metonomy. The discursive outcome of the dialectic history/nature is the gradual reification of the terms locked in struggle and their consequent tendency to be reshuffled on the horizontal playing board of analogy and substitution. To the becoming fragment of the totality and the becoming thing of the person is added the becoming space of the court and the becoming court of the setting. Fragment, thing, space, court, setting—all avatars of the timeless rebirth of the truth in the fragment—are the very conditions of the return of the unrealized as mourned. Benjamin’s understanding of allegory as Baroque is not a period concept but, as I have argued, the fundamental propaedeutic of philosophical criticism. In the body of the Trauerspiel book, Benjamin’s concern for the rhythm of contemplation as explored in the Vorrede migrates to the temporality of allegory and the role of choreography in the spatialization of the theater scene as historical. This, I would like to suggest, is the most proper realm of gesture, which assumes at once a temporal and a spatial presence through its choreographic complexity as a movement-object. In this way, the contemplative gesture is seen to exist in the staging of the play of mourning as a choreographic principle.

Conclusion

What I hope to have shown in the foregoing analysis is that Benjamin positions gesture in the Vorrede as an act that opens up time within space and space within time. This is most evident in the playful and sometimes confounding exchanges between history, nature and setting. The representation of organic form is taken to be a spiritualizing tendency that, as in “Critique of Violence,” conceals its law-making functions beneath an aura of inevitability. This also means that gesture can be understood as an act existing between visuality and textuality, an act, in other words, that is able to think itself in and through its own movement. In this sense, then, gesture in the broader sense cannot be understood as a “manifestation.” The dichotomy between action and interpretation in gesture effectively dissolves, and consequently any gestural “manifestation”

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becomes caught up in reflection. While Agamben’s gesture as the communication of communicability would presumably be instantaneous and swift—like the manifestation of the sovereign decision itself or like the instantaneousness of the symbol as distinct from the slow temporality of allegory—the ethical gesturality that emerges as method in the Vorrede is founded on a rejection of any “purity” of gesture because said purity must by definition remain inaccessible to a hermeneutics. Benjamin’s treatment of gesture as a spatio-temporal phenomenon at once of interpretation and of dramaturgy thus begs attention for its relation to space and time as operations of theater and methodology at one and the same time.

1 As such, it differs from a recent study (Newman 2017) of the Vorrede as deeply engaged with contemporary interlocutors on the national significance of the historical Baroque to German national identity.

2 Interest in Benjamin’s import for dance theory is relatively recent in dance scholarship (see Ruprecht 2015).

3I argue elsewhere that this transfer between text and gesture is constitutive of the Baroque as a twentieth-century phenomenon in dance (see Franko 2017; see also Franko 2016).

4 For a recent exception to this generally held assumption, see Saussy (2016).

5 I am grateful to my graduate student Amanda DiLodovico for having pinpointed the significance of this gestural distinction with ramifications for the distinction between ableism and disablement in historical political theory.

6 “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception” (Schmitt 1985, 5).

7 On Benjamin and Schmitt, see Weber (1992) and Bredekamp (2017). Bredekamp examines in depth the postwar fallout from Benjamin’s admiring letter to Schmitt in 1930. Bredecamp nonetheless pursues a line of argumentation based on textual analysis as he concludes: “The explanation need be sought on a level that is located beyond the limits of historical circumstances” (686).

8 As Weber puts it: “Benjamin encounters the question of sovereignty not simply as a theme of German baroque theater, but as a methodological and theoretical problem: […] according to Benjamin every attempt to interpret the German baroque risks succumbing to a certain lack of sovereignty” (1992, 6).

9 A discussion of the French translation, Origine du Drame Baroque Allemand, by Sibylle Muller (1985), exceeds the space available here.

10 In the following analysis I see Benjamin’s discussion as more than, in Rainer Nägele’s terms, a question of philosophical versus literary discourse. The “kind of staccato [that] seems to be indicated” (1991, xvi-xvii) is not just a question of philosophical and literary discourse, it is a question of the procedures of contemplation necessary to interpretation and the physical and rhythmic processes these procedures demand of the subject.

11 The French translation tells us philosophy is ceaselessly confronted with the problem of presentation rather than representation: “[…] confrontée à la question de la présentation” (23). “Darstellung,” of course, can mean presentation, as in theatrical presentation, but the subject of the sentence is the limits encountered by thought in its representation in and as writing. The French translation runs the risk of conflating the meanings of representation and presentation. The danger of the translation of the Vorrede is repeatedly to move precipitously toward a synthesis of ideas.

12 In the Goethe quote at the start of the Vorrede, art is understood not globally but in “every individual object” (1977, 27) or “jedem einzelnen Behandelten” (1991, 207), which attributes to art an always already fragmented being.

Notes

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13 We find ourselves here in a very Derridean realization that thought has the structure of writing.

14 But, not any art object: an art object, such as the mosaic, which is always already determined by its fragmented qualities as paradigmatic of art. In fact, as we shall see, the mosaic is exemplary of the art object inasmuch as it subjects itself to contemplation.

15 Philosophical criticism presupposes that the philosophical status of the work of art emerges on the basis of the demonstration of the artworks “ruined” status. The force of the term truth for Benjamin inheres in the notion of a power to return: “the basis for a rebirth” (1977, 182). In this sense, the Baroque itself does not return, the Baroque is rather a method of philosophical criticism.

16 This is precisely what Benjamin will do to his object of study—the play of mourning—which he does not treat as a genre in the literary-critical tradition he opposes.

17 “Philosophical contemplation is not lacking in momentum” (1977, 28).

18 This movement aesthetic was theorized in the Italian Renaissance as fantasmata (see Franko 1987).

19 Since classical and Christian antiquity, the cosmic dance is depicted as a round dance (see Miller 1986).

20 Here a reference could easily be made to the differences between tragedy and the history play in Shakespeare, for example; and, to the relation of the history play to Brecht’s epic theater, which Benjamin also wrote about.

21 See Benjamin’s references to the “primacy of the thing over the personal” (1991, 362; 1977, 187).

22 See Franko (2017a).

23 “In the process of decay, and in it alone, the events of history shrivel up and become absorbed in the setting” (1991, 355; 1977, 179).

24 Hence, it relates to “’symbolic’ freedom of expression” and “classical proportion” (1991, 343; 1977, 166) and in this way we can see how the translation does betray the meaning of the text by translating it into symbolical rather than allegorical terms.

25 “Allegorical personification has always concealed the fact that its function is not the personification of things, but rather to give the concrete a more imposing form by getting it up as a person” (1991, 362-3; 1977, 187). On the same page, Benjamin speaks of “the primacy of the thing over the personal” as parallel to “the primacy of the fragment over the totality.” The fragmented body is the person become thing, and the sculptural fragment—akin to the ruin – becomes the model for the dramatis personae of mourning plays. Here, the very persistence of the person is tantamount to the figuration of the symbol as an organic totality. The presence of the person on stage is a priori symbolic—which leads us to see how the modernist interest in the dehumanization of the actor in theorists such as Kleist and Craig is fundamentally baroque. See Franko (1989).

26 In the same year Benjamin’s thesis appeared in print, Jean Cocteau published a study of Georgio de Chirico in Le Mystère Laïc: Essai d’étude indirecte (1928), translated into English by Arno Karlen as “The Secular Mystery: Essay in Indirect Criticism.”

27 The German adjective rendered in English by “rigidity” is “erstarrt,” which is also used for the frozen face of allegory (Erstarrtes Antlitz).

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Works Cited

Agamben, Giorgio. 2000. “Notes on Gesture.” In Means without End: Notes on Politics, translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, 49–59. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

———. 2005. State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822386735-013

Benjamin, Walter. 1977. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Translated by John Osborne. London: Verso.

———. 1985. Origine du Drame Baroque Allemand. Translated by Sibylle Muller. Paris: Flammarion.

———. 1986. “Critique of Violence.” In Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, edited by Peter Demetz, translated by Edmund Jephcott, 277–300. New York: Schocken Books.

———. 1991. “Ursprung Des Deutschen Trauerspiels.” In Gesammelte Schriften, I:203–430. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

Bredekamp, Horst. 2017. “Walter Benjamin’s Esteem for Carl Schmitt.” In The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt, edited by Jens Meierhenrich and Oliver Simons, 1-34. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cocteau, Jean. 1928. Le Mystère Laïc: Essai D’étude Indirecte. Paris: Editions des Quatre Chemins.

———. 1964. “The Secular Mystery: Essay in Indirect Criticism.” Translated by Arno Karlen 12 (4): 309–92.

Franko, Mark. 1987. “The Notion of Fantasmata in Fifteenth-Century Italian Dance Treatises.” In Dance Research Annual, XVII: 68–86. New York: Congress on Research in Dance.

———. 1989. “Repeatability, Reconstruction and Beyond.” Theatre Journal 41 (1): 56–74. https://doi.org/10.2307/3207924

———. 2007. “Fragment of the Sovereign as Hermaphrodite: Time, History and the Exception in Le Ballet de Madame.” Dance Research Journal 25 (3): 119–33. https://doi.org/10.3366/drs.2007.25.2.119

———. Dance as Text. Ideologies of the Baroque Body. New York: Oxford University Press.

———. 2016. “L’influence Du Baroque Sur La Chorégraphie D’après-Guerre.” Maison de la Recherche en Sciences Humaines, September 23. https://www.franceculture.fr/conferences/maison-de-la-recherche-en-sciences-humaines/linfluence-du-baroque-sur-la-choregraphie

———. 2017. “De la danse comme texte au texte comme danse: généalogie du baroque d’après-guerre.” In Gestualités/Textualités, edited by Frédéric Pouillaude, Stefano Genetti and Chantal Lapeyre. Paris: Éditions Hermann.

———. 2017a. Handbook of Dance and Reenactment. Edited by Mark Franko. New York: Oxford University Press.

Hanssen, Beatrice. 1998. Walter Benjamin’s Other History. Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Miller, James. 1986. Measures of Wisdom: The Cosmic Dance in Classical and Christian Antiquity. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Nägele, Rainer. 1991. Theater, Theory, Speculation. Walter Benjamin and the Scenes of Modernity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Newman, Jane O. 2017. Benjamin’s Library: Modernity, Nation, and the Baroque. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. https://doi.org/10.7591/9780801460883

Ruprecht, Lucia. 2015. “Gesture, Interruption, Vibration: Rethinking Early Twentieth-Century Gestural Theory and Practice in Walter Benjamin, Rudolf von Laban, and Mary Wigman.” Dance Research Journal 47 (2): 23–42. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0149767715000200

Saussy, Haun. 2016. The Ethnography of Rhythm. Orality and Its Technologies. New York: Fordham University Press. https://doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823270460.001.0001

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Schmitt, Carl. 1985. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated by George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Weber, Samuel. 1991. “Genealogy of Modernity. History, Myth and Allegory in Benjamin’s Origin of the German Mourning Play.” MLN 106 (3): 465–500. https://doi.org/10.2307/2904797

———. 1992. “Taking Exception to Decision: Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt.” Diacritics 22 (3–4): 5–18. https://doi.org/10.2307/465262

Biography

Mark Franko is Laura H. Carnell Professor of Dance at Boyer College of Music and Dance, Temple University (Philadelphia). He is founding editor of the Oxford Studies in Dance Theory book series and has edited The Handbook of Dance and Reenactment (Oxford 2017). Franko is recipient of the 2011 Outstanding Scholarly Research in Dance Award from the Congress in Research in Dance.

© 2017 Mark Franko

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY VOL 3 NO 1 (2017):108–125 DOI: https://doi.org/10.21476/PP.2017.31161

ISSN 2057-7176

PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY

IN OUR HANDS: AN ETHICS OF GESTURAL RESPONSE-ABILITY REBECCA SCHNEIDER IN CONVERSATION WITH LUCIA RUPRECHT

REBECCA SCHNEIDER BROWN UNIVERSITY LUCIA RUPRECHT EMMANUEL COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

The following conversation aims to trace the role of gesture and gestural thinking in Rebecca Schneider’s work, and to tease out the specific gestural ethics which arises in her writings. In particular, Schneider thinks about the politics of citation and reiteration for an ethics of call and response that emerges in the gesture of the hail. Both predicated upon a fundamentally ethical relationality and susceptible to ideological investment, the hail epitomizes the operations of the “both/and”—a logic of conjunction that structures and punctuates the history of thinking on gesture from the classic Brechtian tactic in which performance both replays and counters conditions of subjugation to Alexander Weheliye’s reclamation of this tactic for black and critical ethnic studies. The gesture of the hail will lead us, then, to the gesture of protest in the Black Lives Matter movement. The hands that are held up in the air both replay (and respond to) the standard pose of surrender in the face of police authority and call for a future that might be different. Schneider’s ethics of response-ability thus rethinks relationality as something that always already anticipates and perpetually reinaugurates possibilities for response.

Lucia Ruprecht: Rebecca, my first question addresses how gestures in your work travel through time, and how these travels are inflected by a spectrum of political agendas. In The Explicit Body in Performance (1997) you write about a 1990 piece by the Native American group Spiderwoman Theater called Reverb-ber-ber-rations. Thinking through this performance’s subversive mimicry of

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early twentieth-century modernist markers of primitivism, you invoke a definition of counter-memory “as the name of an ‘action that defines itself, that recognizes itself in words—in the multiplication of meaning through the practice of vigilant repetitions’” (1997, 168).1 But you give a decisive gestural slant to this line of thought when asking whether “counter-memory [can] be an action that defines not only in words, but in the vigilant repetitions of a body or an object, as in the visceral ‘words’ of a performer’s gesture or the violent vibrations of a drum which repeats itself, doubling as both trash can and tom tom” (168). As becomes clear in your subsequent analysis, gestural performance in Reverb-ber-ber-rations does indeed constitute a late twentieth-century counter-memory, neither re-playing nor re-claiming, but “counter-appropriating” (170) colonial constructions of the native subject.

If The Explicit Body in Performance explores a “body in representation” which is “foremost a site of social markings […] and gestural signatures of gender, race, class, age, sexuality” (2), your discussion of Civil War reenactments in Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment dives into the puzzling obsession with the “originary, true, or redemptive body” (1997, 2) that is at the center of authentic reperformances of historic events. I would like to juxtapose the vigilant gestural repetitions of the feminist, queer, and racially marked performances that are at stake in The Explicit Body with the “live repetition[s]” of gestures in Performing Remains (2011, 37). You describe them as follows:

It is as if some history reenactors position their bodies to access, consciously and deliberately, a fleshy or pulsing kind of trace they deem accessible in a pose, or gesture, or set of acts. If a pose or a gesture or a ‘move’ recurs across time, what pulse of multiple time might a pose or a move or gesture contain? Can a trace take the form of a living foot—or only the form of a footprint? Can a gesture, such as a pointing index finger, itself be a remain in the form of an indexical action that haunts (or remains) via live repetition? (Schneider 2011, 37)

Can you comment on the temporality of gesture in these two settings, and on the potential for (re)performance to redress or preserve—or to both redress and preserve—cultural and political investments which are attached to specific historical situations?

Rebecca Schneider: It is truly a gift when, like errant travellers or returned hand waves, one’s own words come back to pose more questions. Thank you. In 1997, as you note, I was engaging the footsteps of Spiderwoman Theater and other feminist performance groups I was diligently studying. And, as you say, I was interested in thinking about feminist works that engage in acts of overt repetition—through gestures, in stances, and via explicit poses that seem to both replay and counter art historical acts of dismissal of women’s work in general and, in the case of Spiderwoman, the important work of women of color in particular.

I am grateful to you for drawing out the connection between my thoughts on Spiderwoman’s tactics of “counter memory,” a phrase from Foucault that I morphed, in that book, into “counter mimicry,” and my thoughts on repetition in Performing Remains. In 1997, for Explicit Body, I was trying to work

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with the thought of Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht in relationship to feminist work and I took inspiration from feminist theorists such as Elin Diamond in that effort. Brecht’s theory about the ways in which performance can invite critical thinking insists upon the fostering of a “critical distance”—distance between the performer and that which the performer is representing or surrogating (sometimes termed distantiated or alienated performance); distance between the audience and the performers so that the audience can think for themselves; and also historical distance, in that a time gestured toward, referred to, or reenacted on stage should be removed from the time of the critical spectator in the house. Each of these distances—performer from character, performer from audience member, and one time from another time—can help, Brecht argues, to foster an atmosphere for critical thinking about the economic and political circumstances of human sociality as well as the social and political circumstances of representational practices. To my mind this translates as: The overt manifestation of an interval generates room for critical engagement, historical thought, and the possibility for future change. In the logic of Brechtian alienation, a performer’s gesture, indeed to use Brecht’s terminology the “social gestus,” of a situation is always already historical as well as always already pitched toward a future in which change might occur. Rendering replay explicit is an effort to ask one time to stand in critical relationship to another time, even within the shared time of a theatrical production. The space of repetition invites a critical opening for (re)experience, for analysis, for further engagement. In The Explicit Body in Performance I argued that Spiderwoman’s ludic “tom tom,” replayed as trash can, challenged a certain nostalgic representational apparatus that, unless interrupted, re-freezes the Native American at the point of settler-colonization circa 1890. The appropriated tom tom recurring as inappropriate trash can irrupts as a counter memory in a Foucauldian sense (oddly as the present irrupting onto the white imaginary past) and, in this case, counter memory takes place across the body as counter mimicry—counter-appropriating colonial appropriations. In Spiderwoman’s work, the ways in which Native Americans have been primitivized in representation is both replayed and countered in critical performance. And of course this is a classic Brechtian tactic of the “both/and.”

One interesting thing that arose for me in exploring 20th-century feminist artists who were critically replaying stereotypes—“striking the poses” that had arguably delimited them as women—was the manipulation of an interval for critical analysis toward the potentialities of an “otherwise.” Between a reiterative gesture and its overt replay there could be, at the level of an errant detail or even in exactitude, a world of difference. In Explicit Body, the interval in repetition, opened by women replaying primitivism and sexualization across their own bodies (and, in the case of the feminist artists in that book, doing it agentically), beckoned possibilities for change even as it, simultaneously and perhaps paradoxically, partook of sameness. This is perhaps the classic “paradox” of mimesis.2 But in response to your question I wanted to raise the issue of the interval here, because it is key to the matter of multiple temporalities that you pose, as well as to the way I am thinking of and with gesture. I take “interval” here to be the space or time that is opened, in repetition, between or among a singularity and its reiterations, both forward and backward and perhaps to the side in time (or space). Think of Andy Warhol’s repetitions, for example, in his massive silk-screened Brillo boxes or Campbell’s soup cans or Death and Disaster newspaper clippings. In such work one sees spatial intervals pronounced between seemingly identical images

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as between commodities produced by mechanical reproduction on an assembly line—intervals that mark both sameness and difference. Deborah Kass’s replay of Warhol in her massive silkscreens of Barbra Streisand also trade in sameness and difference through overt re-mimesis of Warhol’s mimesis, played by Kass to pronounce a racialized and gendered difference (see Schneider 2001a). If Warhol’s and Kass’s silkscreens pronounce spatial intervals in seriality, but also temporal intervals between their iterations, we can also think of temporal intervals by calling to mind a film or a dance or a play replayed night after night after night. Here, samenesses and differences might register as various contingencies enabled by the temporal intervals between runs. But the scene is paradoxical at best. Think of a photograph passed hand to hand. Does the photograph remain the same and only the hands differ? Or are hands the same, and photograph the same, and only the time(s) different? Or is it the act of passing that remains the same, while hands and image alter over time and space? How can we account for an act, a choreographed movement of passing an object hand to hand, say, as the manipulation of intervals? The spaces between or among the hands and between or among the photograph and its different temporalities might be something we can think about by thinking about gesture (and choreography).

But I feel that I am running away with your question, rather than sticking to its terms. Let me reiterate. You asked me to “comment on the temporality of gesture in these two settings” in which, on the one hand, an interval of reperformance sets up an opportunity for critical difference and, on the other hand, where a gesture repeated across an interval (or multiple intervals) might be said to be indexical—indeed a living reiteration of priority. Might a living foot, stepping out, be evidence, say, of historical continuity if not—but possibly also—historical specificity? This is an excellent question and it may be only by recourse to the paradox of mimesis, already suggested above, that I can craft an answer.

In some ways my answer is simply that by virtue of the interval of repetition a living footstep, for example, may be both—both the same and different. To grant this we would have to be willing to concede that difference need not cancel sameness (and indeed, the insight of Deleuze on this point is that difference is the vehicle of sameness, just as sameness is composed of difference). Just because my living foot, stepping where feet have stepped before, is not the “original” footstep (as a footprint is considered to index), does not mean that a stepping foot does not index cross-temporal remaining. Even as “my” live foot, stepping out, say, is the vehicle by which difference can be pronounced (my foot is not your foot for example), it is also reiterative of long chains of actions—walking in a city, say, or crossing a threshold, stepping out across a limen—a foot held in a moment, anticipating a step, navigating, perhaps, a stone step, or a wooden threshold that asks it, like a “scriptive thing” (Bernstein 2009, 69) to “step” again. If we are only able to think in linear time, and only able to orient ourselves to an idea of the live as that which vanishes and does not remain, then we will never see the live stepping foot as at once living and artefactual. But if we are able to concede that difference is also artefactual—i.e., that feet will be both different and the same in their stepping and that this both/and is in fact what remains the same across time—we will be less limited in our ability to think about the tracks of performance-based “survivance” across time.3 Where one time and another time might be said to coexist simultaneously, as any gesture might be

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said to instantiate (I can say more on this anon), then the interval by which one time is not another time even as the times coexist, is important to think carefully about.

But first, how can we say that two times coexist? In some ways, the coexistence of multiple times is very simple. The stage may be only an overt instance of the manipulation of multiple times. Remember—as I write of in Performing Remains—the way that Gertrude Stein becomes nervous at the theatre because of what she terms the theatre’s “syncopated time” (65). The time on stage, she argues (she is at a performance of Hamlet of course) is not the same time as the time of the spectators in the house, and this coexistence of different times in one theatre, different times in one time, is what makes Stein jumpy. But Stein’s example is already perhaps more complicated than it need be, and syncopation is not necessarily simultaneity. To think about this further, I have been engaging with the idea of a hail. Let’s use an example of words first, understanding that words might also be considered gestures (as I hope my example will illustrate). Let’s imagine that I wave my hand and call to you, saying hello. Perhaps only a moment later you respond. You wave and say “hello.” The time of my hello is not the time of your hello. And yet, the two times are also imbricated, one in the other. When I call out to you, I extend time in one sense. My word is a gesture by which I reach across one time, into another time. And you, in responding, double back (though “back” may not be the only direction) across my time and respond to me. Our times become one time, one might say. Or might we say that the time of your “hello” carries, through reiteration posed as response, my time? Perhaps my “hello” has returned to me, as one time in another time. My word in your mouth. My wave in your hand. It might be possible to say, as well, that my “hello” opened an interval and carried one time (the time of my call) into a future where it might meet a response—in this case, your response. The time opened by the hail is unfinished and inaugurates or re-inaugurates relation. Your “hello” repeats my “hello” (and of course, as a word, my “hello” itself repeats an infinite number of precedent hellos or anticipates any number of future hellos both forward and backward and to the many sides that are the condition of its own possibility as a word, or a gesture, that will be recognized in or through reiteration).

I hope that I am not responding to your question too ploddingly, as the example of mutual, multiple hellos may be flat-footed and obvious—the basic condition of relational performativity. But it is interesting to me how often we forget the imbrication of one time with other times, or, put another way, how deeply we, as late moderns I suppose, are conditioned to acknowledge only the idea of a linear time that flows in a singular direction from past to future, as if liveness were only a matter of disappearing and not reappearing. The forgetting of multiple times is, as Judith Butler has argued, the condition of performativity in that performativity, to be “felicitous,” must forget its foundation in repetition in order to appear unitary and original (when I say “I do” I am only marrying you, not everyone who has already said or will say “I do”)—and yet… obviously, in saying “I do” I am entering into an institution of marriage that contains all of us who have ever said or will say “I do” so long as the institution shall live!

But I digress again. To return to your question—the possibility of difference and social change opened up by the interval of repetition or reiteration, is also the possibility of sameness. If the feminists of Explicit Body were in search of difference, and the battle reenactors of Performing

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Remains were in search of sameness, the means are strikingly similar. For the feminists in Explicit Body, the difference was that they were reperforming their historical primitivization across their own bodies to take possession of the means to their delimitation. The intervals they opened by way of repetition were intended to inaugurate critical distance and reframe relation. As I hope I also illustrated in Performing Remains, many US Civil War reenactors, replaying historic battles, were also interrogating what they had received the Civil War to mean. Many of them believed, I argue, that they could “touch time” by playing it across their bodies (one time in another time) to access something history books themselves were gesturing toward by means of written words. In both cases, time is opened to touch and the vehicle of that opening is embodied, gestic repetition. Whether the desire was to ‘do it the same’ or, by doing it the same, to access difference, the gesture in and as repetition makes strange bedfellows of feminists and war reenactors. But for both, the body is a battlefield across which history takes a form to which, to cite Plato’s Phaedrus, it might be possible to say: “our feet bear witness” (2003, 6).

Lucia Ruprecht: I would like to return from feet to hands for a moment: your gesture of the hail is able to exemplify the coexistence of multiple times because of its fundamental relationality, in this case of two interlocutors who are greeting and answering each other. This relationality opens up the hail’s ethical dimension. In his Towards a Relational Ontology: Philosophy’s Other Possibility, Andrew Benjamin describes ethics as follows:

Ethics, as it emerges here, is not defined in relation to a single subject who comes to act morally. The subject within ethics is always relational. Moreover, the locus of ethics is not a link between a subject and future actions. Rather, the locus of the ethical is already at hand within the place of human activity and thus within what is called the “fabric of existence.” […] What is meant by this latter formulation—“the fabric of existence”—is that existence is a weave of relations in which singularities are after-effects. (Benjamin 2015, 17–18)

Your own recent work emphasises the fundamental importance of gesture’s relationality, the fact that gesture “inaugurates” relation (Schneider 2016). It seems to me that Benjamin’s concept of “relationality” draws out the ethical aspects of this claim. Can you talk a little bit more about “inauguration” and what it might suggest?

Rebecca Schneider: I do think that gesture is relational in that gesture suggests an articulate movement or attitude of a body or a thing in relationship to other bodies or things, or even in relationship to the space around the body. Movement generated by or moving off of one body or thing and toward another (whether that other is copresent in time or not) might be suggested by the word gesture. But the movement implied by gesture may also be a movement held in suspension. That is, a gesture may also be a stance, a posture, a pose—a body striking a movement that may come to an articulate still. The suspension of gesture in a pose or highly structured movement sequence is what the performance scholar Eugenio Barba termed the “decided body,”

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for example (Barba 2011, 16). A gesture, such as a gestic pose, might be a defined bodily articulation held durationally, and perhaps even pitched toward a future encounter (much as the statue of Marcus Aurelius on my campus here at Brown university gestures in perpetuity across a central green, hailing passers-by in relation not only to past and present empire but to each other). These kinds of gestures, commonly choreographed or directed in staged or codified performances (or indeed written in stone), are obviously relational in that a spectator or viewer is almost always assumed. But a gesture may also move in a “daily” mode and nevertheless be relational, whether or not that body comes to a standstill or is otherwise heightened as explicit performance. If I wave hello, for example, that gesture might be said to move off of itself toward another point (in time and in space). A gesture may then be a movement sequence that does not pause but changes a body in space and time, thus altering the environment of the body—the body, again, in relation to other bodies or to the body’s surround. A gesture may even, as in the hello example, jump between or among bodies in reiterative ricochet. A moving or articulate body is thus perhaps always relational in that the movement/stasis of the body (both/and) may be said to necessarily engage a broader scene in which the body is given to exist in space and time. That said, even a minor or unconscious gesture may be relational, and we can think here of the large body of work in psychoanalysis on the depth relationality of embodied tics, slurs, errors and breaks. Certainly, it is not a stretch to say that if my posture droops, or my head tilts, or my feet drag I may alter the environment of my social surround. These may not be conscious gestures, but they are gestic nevertheless, and contribute quite importantly to what Brecht termed, as I already discussed, the social gestus. Even our minor aspects of bodily comportment contribute to the fields of relation that we engage and navigate everyday—and the large body of work on “marked” bodies and epidermal schema (Franz Fanon) gives way to the depth of intersectional relations, welcomed or acknowledged or not, by bodies in everyday movement practices. This is to say that if bodies are caught in webs of relation, the movements made by those bodies will be relational as well. Gesture is relational, and the ethics of relations haunting our bodies in modes of reiteration make gesture a matter for ethical consideration.

What I am interested in thinking about, then, is the cross-temporal and cross-spatial aspect of gesture, or the ways in which gesture may be said to move off of one body and across other bodies in relation, both in time and in space. As a carrier of affect, gesture may be contagious, or always carry more with it than the intentions of an isolated gesturing body or thing. If we think of gesture as in any way contagious, or catchable, ridable, or even riding us, we might ask if gesture ever belongs only to one body or if it takes up its place as gesture between or among bodies. This might be to ask whether gesture is proper to the hand that is waving, or if, instead, gesture is that which might precede an articulation, and/or move off the hand and toward the relations it beckons, invites, or otherwise might provoke (whether it succeeds in such provocation immediately or not)?

What I have just been saying perhaps problematically opens “gesture” to all modes of relation between or among bodies—and this may be too wide a playing field for inquiry. With this line of thinking even a sentence or a word could be considered a gesture if it opens toward interaction, or if it suggests a line of argument or narrative to come (when the word or the sentence might meet the eye of a reader or the ear of a listener, for example). Indeed, any book or poem might

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then be a gesture if it is given to be read, where the gesture of the book or the sentence exists in relations between the book and the reader, or among speakers and listeners in conversation. I mention this by way of situating my comment about gesture inaugurating relation, and what I’d like to do now is talk a little bit about how I came to the sentence you quoted: “gesture inaugurates relation.” I will go on for a little while about text, but the aspects of bodies in gestic relation will return, I promise.

I was inspired to think of gesture as inaugurating relation at a conference in Paris where the dance scholar Macklin Kowal referred to Avital Ronell’s work on “greeting” as Ronell reads Hölderlin’s poetry as read by Heidegger. Returning to Ronell’s text I found that she argues, after Heidegger and Hölderlin, that “Greeting establishes a relationality” (2008, 206). Though I took the word “inaugurates” from Kowal’s reading of Ronell, in thinking about this further, and engaging Ronell with Marcel Mauss’s work on gesture—in which Mauss argues persuasively that gesture is reiterative—I have since come to think that “inaugurate” is probably the wrong word, as that which is inaugurated in a greeting is also arguably recursive, or entangled in cross-temporality, as I suggested in my reductive example of our mutual “hellos.” I am able to greet because the greeting recurs, and gesture in this sense not only moves off of discreet bodies toward other bodies, but does so via reiteration. Of course, in this line of thinking, Ronell’s word “establishes” might also be the wrong word.

Recently, I have begun to wonder whether we might instead choose a word like “recycle” to remember gesture’s fundamental reiterativity? Or perhaps the word “resurges”? I take the word “recycle” from Anita Gonzalez who argues, in the introduction to Black Performance Theory, that the “vocal physical expressive body becomes a conduit, or a cauldron, of expressive potential that recycles emotion, spirit, behavior” (2014, 6). Note that for Gonzalez, theory and practice are not necessarily distinct. “Performance theory,” she argues, “can be delivered through a hand gesture or sketch, embedded in a lecture, or disseminated within the pauses of a sound score.” Each instance of performance and/as theory (or theory and/as performance) “relocates” to manifest “articulate response” (6-7). With performance (whether as theatricality or as the sedimented sets of acts that compose everyday life), there can be no “proper” inaugurating original, but rather a ricochet or transfer or pass of reiteration that is nevertheless in each instance different, full of potential in each relocation.

Let us dwell with Ronell for a little while and possibly recycle something from her text, which itself recycles Heidegger recycling Hölderlin. In Ronell’s essay “The Sacred Alien: Heidegger’s Reading of Hölderlin’s Andenken,” a relation is “established” by a poem, when poems are thought of as greetings but also when a philosopher responds to or greets a poet in return. That relation, for Ronell, is “between texts and historicity.” At first strictly following Heidegger following Hölderlin, Ronell writes that a poet’s work is “shown to address some alterity and not posed by man for man” (2007, 208). And yet, she goes on to point out, “although it addresses some alterity and is not posed by man for man, the work, like being, nonetheless places a call to man and is therefore not without man” (208). Ronell then thinks deeply about what it means to call and respond, especially given that an aspect of cross-temporality is suggested in the paradox: “The response is what allows the

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call to occur.” And, a further paradox: “the Greeting first establishes a distance so that proximity can occur” (208). This is, then, also a theory of the interval, which is opened between or among us by our actions of call and response, of reiteration, of repetition and revision. And the interval—a distance inviting proximity inviting distance (much like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s or Jean Luc Nancy’s theories of touch)—entangles us, cross-temporally, in human and nonhuman relation (for in Hölderlin’s poetry, such as “Homecoming/To Kindred Ones,” clouds and rivers are poets too, to whom Hölderlin himself responds).

For Ronell, the greeting (which is referred to as “gesture” throughout her text) does not originate with the poet (and let us say, for our purposes, she who gestures). Ronell writes: “Greeting does not originate with the poet as a flex of agency or spark of will. The one who transfers the Greeting must be responding to something, to a movement already inclined toward the poet-receptor” (2007, 214). Her complicated and indeed poetic text goes on to elaborate that greeting opens time to a “historical standstill” (and this reverberates with Walter Benjamin’s notion of Jetztzeit) (214). The opening provoked by a gesture or call in anticipation of a response, or the response that founds (and holds) a call backward, forward, or to the side, is in fact an opening of history, or its suspension, for engagement anew, or now.4

What I am thinking about here, in thinking through Ronell about greeting, is that the opening that opens between or among us, in and as relation (re)inaugurated by gesture, occurs in anticipation of our response-ability. In this way gesture is not merely relational (as if relationality were even mere), but, as relational, reinaugurates possibilities or potentialities for response. Again and again we encounter the opportunity to respond to each other, across time, in time, and toward time (to come). For, as Ronell shows in close reading, such gesture as the Greeting “also brings about,” in Hölderlin and again in Heidegger, “a mark of gender and race.” Which is to say that gestures of call and response necessarily contain, even as they suspend, the irruptive materials of our marked histories that compose and recompose the “fabric of existence” or the “weave of relations” (after Andrew Benjamin, as put forward in your question to me) between and among us. How so?

I want to dwell just a moment longer with Ronell. In this essay, Ronell reads the moment in Hölderlin’s poem when he beckons toward “brown women” who “walk.” That is, the moment in his poem Andenken when “brown women” “walk” through the space of the page. And she unpacks Heidegger’s difficulty with the “sudden incursion of the foreign feminine” as he struggles to respond to Hölderlin. Ronell writes: “Time gets opened up to a historical standstill, a temporal clip, engaging a gesture that also brings about a mark of gender and race” (214). Perhaps brown women appear for Hölderlin as figures at the rip in the fabric of (white progressive development) time — as primitivist and romantic as that may be. Enigmatic, possibly anamorphosic, this walk of the brown women might be, of course, an exhausted white cultural re-irruption of historical specificity—the irruption of very specific (if unnamed as such) histories of capital-colonial-patriarchal relations. Whether they are tanned, labouring French country women or racialized “others,” their brownness and their gender mark them, like clouds, as figures for romantic alterity that play and replay, even if they might, as in Ronell’s revision, irrupt as “snags” (216), or counter-memories, across white European texts. As Ronell unpacks Heidegger’s many fumbles around

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“what to do with the brown women” (216), we might ask: Is there a way to respond differently to a call that keeps on calling (from Hölderlin, across Heidegger, across Ronell, to this text you hold in your hands)? Is there any way that what is continually re-opened in this gesture, this greeting marked “brown women,” is an opportunity to think again, critically, about the histories that bring us together in our reiterative gesturing, which is to say, our historical and ongoing relations?

Regardless of author’s intentions, such gestures, like greetings, precede and follow alike. Like “hellos,” they recycle. As Ronell asks the question recycling Heidegger recycling Hölderlin, the question becomes, again, “What to do with the brown women?” (216). Heidegger is clearly more comfortable with “the wind” that “calls” than with the brown women who may, in the logic of the poem itself, also be poets—that is, also be calling as they walk across the space of the page.5 Whether toward uncritical reproduction of what are unavoidably capital-colonial-patriarchal relations or toward possibilities for critical change, “What to do with the brown women?” holds volumes of history again at a standstill, calling, again, for us to ask after the ethics of response. If “What to do with the brown women?” is a question left hanging in Ronell after Heidegger, might we not, still, respond? If these are figures of the “sudden incursion of the foreign feminine,” even of the refugee (a figure that begins Ronell’s discussion), what do we do with that repeated historical incursion?

White and brown and many-colored women may rightly be tired, exhausted, by the continual re-suspension of “brown women” in a ricochet of greeting that nevertheless has repeatedly worked to re-silence brown women at some romanticized threshold between poetry and philosophy. And yet the opportunity recurs, like a question posed through Ronell rearticulating Heidegger rearticulating Hölderlin, and it has become, in her words, relocating Heidegger, a question which, like a gesture, might be a call toward a different answer: “What to do with the brown women?” History yawns again. And again.

And so, again: “What to do with the brown women?”

One response is surely, as in the call of Black Lives Matter: #Sayhername. (http://www.aapf.org/sayhername/). But we also call out: “Read her work.”

As I wrote above, for me, the idea of response-ability is embedded in an ethics of “call and response”—situated by Gonzalez and Thomas F. DeFrantz in Black Performance Theory as a “continual unfolding of experience” and a manifestation of global “black sensibilities” (2014, 8,11)—it is something that “gesture” might help us think through as we think about the ways in which relationality is always recycled. Even as history can be interrupted at a standstill in the intervals among call and response, that pause—in the break or in the wake—is where our relations re-sound, recycle, and potentially relocate. Recycling, whether recycling Hölderlin and Heidegger, or recycling DeFrantz and Gonzalez, is both reiteration and movement. Repetition and revision. Both/and.

As mentioned, contemporary theories of relationality authored by black feminists after Kimberlé Crenshaw’s important 1989 work on “intersectionality” and also in the wake of Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherrie Moraga’s 1981 This Bridge Called My Back, suggest that the relations that irrupt between

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and among us are a complex “weave” of intersecting relations generating a complex cross-hatch of identifications, marked by history, and always re-opening at the cross-roads, the bridges, of our interconnections. In the words of Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge:

Relational thinking rejects either/or binary thinking, for example, opposing theory to practice, scholarship to activism, or blacks to whites. Instead, relational embraces a both/and frame. The focus of relationality shifts from analysing what distinguishes entities, for example, the differences between race and gender, to examining their interconnections. The shift in perspective opens up intellectual and political possibilities. (Hill Collins and Bilge 2016, 27)

I cite this definition to suggest that interconnectedness, as a figure for relation, need not resediment us into binarized categories that endlessly replay a pre-determined drama of capital-colonial battles for “recognition” by which one (white) “self” is founded as a subject at the expense of a (brown) “other.” That is, the gestures that pass between us, and carry our histories across our bodies as always re-opening for engagement, need not resediment tired dramas of white male and white female privilege. Rather than a dyad of two in a battle for recognition, there may be a ricochet of calls and a ricochet of responses in any gestic intercommunication. And here I am indebted to Glen Sean Coulthard’s Red Skins White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition, a book that engages in call and response, or cross-temporal greeting, with Franz Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks. I wonder whether thinking with gesture, and the ways in which gesture carries bodies in relation across intersecting bodies, across intersecting texts, and across intersecting things, times, and spaces among (and not only between) us—can help us as we greet each other and lean, always again, toward ethical calls and responses, both anew and in historical re-irruption.

Lucia Ruprecht: The ways in which you extend the spatial and temporal relationality of call and response beyond an interaction between human beings, to also include “texts” and “things,” reminds me of Fred Moten’s term (recycling John Donne) “interinanimation” (2003a, 76, 192–210), which has such purchase on your argument in Performing Remains. How would you position gestural relationality with respect to this term? And how do the ethics of this relationality combine with the fact that it also “activates ideology,” as you have recently argued (Schneider, 2016)?

Rebecca Schneider: What I am thinking about, walking in the footsteps of black feminist and indigenous thought, are the ways in which gesture might be theorized as the opening, not of a call that mandates always only a predetermined response, but as the intervals, or breaks, beside and among us, as the opening for Collins’s “intellectual and political possibilities” (2016, 27). One feminist thinker to whom I have been indebted is Fred Moten, whose In the Break “wanders” in the ways of the black radical tradition (Moten 2003a; see also Cervenak 2014). We might read Moten’s use of the phrase “interinanimation” as a greeting, a response and a call, recycling the word as found in John Donne’s poem The Ecstasy. I go into that in some detail in Performing Remains, where “interinanimation” becomes a means to think about the ways in which cross-temporal

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reenactments allow the live and the no-longer-live to cohabitate, cross-interrogate, and pose old questions anew, or new questions of old. “Interinanimation” might also be a figure for gesture given that gesture jumps across bodies and across times to both reanimate (as I might step live into a footprint that appears to precede me) and render us in intimate, reiterable relation to the by-gone (the paradox of following what has gone before, as if, in the logic of “following,” the past lay before us in the future—as I explore in Performing Remains in the plays of Suzan-Lori Parks). That is, “interinanimation” is a word I use, in that book, recycling Moten recycling Donne (and though Moten does not cite Donne directly, there is, I think, gestural resonance in the term), for thinking about the ways the dead play across the bodies of the living, and the living replay the dead. This is manifested in Donne’s poem through the “interinanimation” of live lovers and sepulchral stone statuary. But in future work, I want to think about this in relationship to the “ecstatic,” or states of being beside oneself, written about provocatively by such radicals as Euripides and José Esteban Muñoz and Judith Butler and Sylvia Wynter, among others (see Wynter 1990 and McKitterick 2006). However, engaging that line of thinking here might find us wandering far afield, or carry us away with the twister as well as the demonic. I will look forward to that for another time.

Instead, let me try to briefly take up the part of your question that concerns the ways in which gestural relationality “activates ideology.” What I will say will probably open more problems and questions than neat answers, but perhaps an opening toward problems is itself in some ways a gestural response? That is, my comments may indicate some directions we might go into, out of, and around the fray that is historical repetition and gestural response.

In some ways, I have already posed a response to that question by addressing the way that greeting “also brings about a mark of gender and race” in our discussion of Ronell recycling Heidegger responding to Hölderlin. And Alexander Weheliye has reminded us in Habeas Viscus:

Relationality provides a productive model for critical inquiry and political action within the context of black and critical ethnic studies, because it reveals the global and systemic dimensions of racialized, sexualized, and gendered subjugation, while not losing sight of the many ways political violence has given rise to ongoing practices of freedom within various traditions of the oppressed. (2014,13)

Weheliye points to the “both/and” suggested by Collins—that history erupts in both violences and practices of freedom. We might see this illustrated in the BLM gesture of protest that arose in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown by white police officer Darren Wilson on August 9, 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri. That gesture, holding both hands up, was taken up by protesters across the United States and performed collectively as a gesture that is both a response and a call simultaneously. How so? The gesture is a response—a reenactment, or reiterative gesture, of the standard pose of surrender facing police, and a call to a different future. Both response and call. As we have already noted after Marcel Mauss, gesture is essentially reiterative. Gesture becomes gesture through and as repetition, recycling or resurgence. “Hands Up” indeed reenacts. But as a response, reenacted, it simultaneously becomes a call—a call to resist, to refuse to surrender, that is, to refuse the conventional signification of subjection the gesture simultaneously re-inhabits. Both

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response and call simultaneously—both, at once, or both/and. Here, the gesture arrests the arrest in the interval of interpellation and, through explicit reiteration jumping across hosts of bodies, it provokes the possibility for difference.

BLM Hands Up arrests, quite literally, the habitual drama of arrest that, as we know, plays differentially across black bodies in public space. For Arendt, the “right to have rights” is simultaneously bound to rights to appearance in public space (in a drama that must be called a drama of recognition), and yet in the U.S. this is drama of appearance is complicated when appearing to appear as black.6 Appearing while black can get you killed. The very real violence of the “little theoretical theatre” Louis Althusser outlined in “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” through the figure of the policeman’s hail “Hey, you there!” (1971, 163), is more likely to impact black bodies than white (who are, conversely, told to “move along, there’s nothing to see” (Rancière 2010, 37; see also Lepecki 2013). Appearing while black triggers the apparent rights of police to shoot and kill. To quote Christina Sharpe, in the wake of violence we encounter again and again “a past that is not past” but “reappears to rupture the present.” Black death is “a predictable and constituent aspect” of American so-called democracy in the wake of slavery and in the wake of the genocidal removals of indigenous Americans (2016, 7, 9). And in the wake we must commit to interrupting the againness of violence, turning it toward an alternative future by enabling, simultaneously, alternative pasts (or, pasts that might be resurgent, gesturing outside the capital/colonial frontier mentality of “development”). If the practice of colonial-capital white violence is reiterative, we have to take on reiteration differently, we have to engage with reiteration not deny it, but we must engage it with a difference. This is not the same as saying “never again.” This is instead to say that again and again we have the chance to respond differently. The terror of Black subjection is, in the wake of a past that is not past, an ongoing present subjection that is at once “deeply atemporal” (5) and, simultaneously, in relationship to historical time, as reiterative dramas of arrest and enforced recognition play out across moving/arrested bodies in repeating cycles of violence. Both/and.

Let’s look at it this way: Suzan-Lori Parks’ play The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World ends with the following line, spoken by “all”: “Hold it. Hold it. Hold it. Hold it. Hold it. Hold it. Hold it.” As Parks told Han Ong in an interview:

To me language is a physical act. […] Last Black Man is such a double-edged sword. The end of it is, ‘Hold it, hold it, hold it,’ which means “Embrace,” and “Wait a minute,” at the same time. It’s both of those motions at once. (Ong 1994)

Both at once, both refusal and embrace, both motion and arrest, “hold it” resists resolution into one or the other but stands as and in difference. More, it opens an interval offered for repetition with difference. This might resonate with the words of Benjamin who wrote, straddling the thresholds of fascism:

To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. ([1940] 1969, 255)

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Hold it. Hold it up. Moments of danger are everyday moments when black (when queer, when native, when female, when transgender, when immigrant sans papier, when young, when old, when poor when hungry when sick when disabled when Muslim when Jewish)—when straddling any number of the constituent, intersectional cracks that define and uphold white privilege. Seizing hold of memory—taking it in your hands and holding those hands up—hold it hold it hold it—asks something of the past and future that does not or will not resolve into conventional habits of “recognition.” Benjamin also wrote of the standstill, the hold it, as a “jump,” a “tiger’s leap”—hardly a standstill that stands still, but a standstill nonetheless. How can an act that “seizes hold of a memory” be simultaneously a standing still and a leap into motion? To my mind, here again gesture can help us think about the both/and in ways that refuse to sediment into simpler logics of representation.

If gesture activates ideology, as in Louis Althusser’s famous model in which a gestic hail by the police is the exemplary medium for subjection, then thinking through gesture becomes necessarily thinking through ideology and the possibilities for change in and through the play of relations in dominant and insurgent ideological struggles. In the interval always again opened by gesture, or recycled in the essentially reiterative relationality of gesture, might we “hold up” a moment for difference at the level of response-become-call-become-response? We can think of the hail explicitly as gesture, whether Althusser’s “Hey, you!” or Rancière’s “Move along!” Both “halt” and “move along” subject passers-by into the reiterative arrest/flow of dominant ideology. Thinking with gesture we might inquire, each as particular choreographers of our everyday, how engaging explicitly and corporeally in the intervals of our relations can open alternative opportunities in a moment of danger for a standstill tiger’s leap if we take it? This might be what Sharpe calls “wake work” (2016, 13). If we allow that gestures simultaneously reiterate the historical marks of dominance and oppression and open our hands to practices of freedom that usher forth alternatives, we would see the future as in our hands (see Morrison 1994, 30).

There is a great deal more to think about here than time allows. Let me just say that for Benjamin, the operation of “dialectics as a standstill” was still dialectic—the dialectic arrested in an interval. And yet the dialectic itself may hinder alternatives to the degree that it remains a model of “progress” and seeks to resolve contradictions—to synthesize thesis and antithesis into one. Coulthard has subtitled his book “Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition” (2014), as such politics play out a linear-time, development model of progress. Is the dialectic bound to a capital-colonial logic of recognition that continually resediments the privileges of the colonizing capitalist (Coulthard always couples the words colonial with the word capital and capital with colonial)? If so, when we “hold it”—when we enter the interval opened among us by any gesture, any greeting—we have to respond differently to the past that recurs. We have to find a different future for the reiterative violences of the irruptive past. If we think with/as gesture, as opposed to image or more generally representation, are we already thinking differently?

If we consider, with dance scholar Susan Foster, that protest actions are necessarily reenactments (2003)—as choreographies they are composed of both rehearsal and redo—then a protest is both a protest in the present, and a dragging of a past event into a temporally porous set of times where

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deliberately erased or forgotten pasts might re-irrupt, or pile up, like wave upon wave upon wave. This tracks with Jack Halberstam’s insights in The Queer Art of Failure (2011) and their reminder that so-called failed revolutionary actions are never wholly disappeared but lie in wait for re-response, re-call, or the again time of re-ignition. The logic of gesturing forth the past—reiterating—in the form of performative resurgence is the idea of making palpable the alternative futures that alternative responses to those so-called pasts might have realized, or, better, might yet realize. Coulthard has written movingly on this, recycling Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Simpson and calling for the “emergent theory and practice of Indigenous resurgence” (2014, 153). The performative resurgence of indigenous pasts into the capital-colonial present is not a failed past submitted to representation, but an alternative future making claims on us, greeting and refusing simultaneously, in again time. In this way, reiteration is not representation but resurgence. Not image, but gesture. Not likeness but is-ness, folded in the fabric of call and response, generative of intervals that are not just between (as between one past and one future) but intervals among, beside, and with hosts of alternatives. Coulthard writes of the performative appearance of the indigenous so-called past as one that “does not require us to dialectically transcend Indigenous practices of the past” (2014, 154). Instead, and arguably against the dialectic, decolonization/decapitalization requires us to hold it, fluidly—in order to, now in Leanne Simpson’s words, “reclaim the very best practices of our traditional cultures, knowledge systems and lifeways in the dynamic, fluid, compassionate, respectful context in which they were originally generated” (2011,18). 7 Performative acts that manifest the fluidity of gesture in/as resurgence often present themselves both “as if” and, simultaneously if paradoxically, “as is”—an ongoing “as is” of otherwise dismissed or violently erased alternatives to capital-colonial registers of the so-called real.

What we are discussing here, is perhaps actually in our hands. Again and again we encounter the ethical opportunity to respond to each other, across time, in time, and toward time (to come) differently through gestures that open the possibilities inherent in call and response. I would like, in future work, to think about what it means that in drawing on call and response, Ronell does not remark the recursive wake work of call and response as what Gonzalez and DeFrantz (and many others) rightly claim as a “manifestation of global black sensibilities” even as she admits that gestures carry and redistribute historical marks of gesture and race.8 I think it is important to acknowledge the diasporic tracks of culture ways, or lifeways of knowing that do not resediment empiric white cultural dyadic models, and I hope I have given a glimpse here of ways we might think of call and response as nondyadic but radically open to hosts of alternatives outside of or exterior to the “betweenness” of the rigid colonial model of recognition (Moten 2003b). To my mind, every moment of interpellation—like Althusser’s call of the policeman’s “Hey, you there!” opens an opportunity to turn response into call toward a different future. There is a lot more to think about here in thinking about gesture as hail, and hail as gesture. When we think about gesture as the intervals opened between us by calling and responding, how might we choose to move to the side, to let something other than the tired dramas of dominance and submission occur? When we think about gesture as the intervals opened between us, do we gain a different relationship to response-ability?

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1 This definition is taken from the translation of Michel Foucault, in Foucault (1977, 9).

2 On this “paradox” see Lacoue-Labarthe (1982). One can credit many theorists and artists with trenchant analyses of repetition and difference. Think of Luce Irigaray’s work on mimesis (and see my later essay on “remimesis” (2014) for further thought on this), think of post-colonial theorist Homi Bhaba on mimicry and the colonized, of Gilles Deleuze’s Repetition and Difference, and the many feminist engagements with psychoanalytic theories of repetition. After completing The Explicit Body, the work of playwright Suzan-Lori Parks was also extremely important to me in terms of drawing on African diasporic traditions of “repetition and revision,” and in the later 1990s I began to study African and African-American engagement with repetition in greater depth. My essay “Solo Solo Solo” (2001b) and my subsequent book Performing Remains continued to be deeply indebted to such genealogies.

3 The word “survivance” should sound with the genealogy from which I borrow the term: Gerald Vizenor on Native American “renunciations of dominance” (2008, 1).

4 In Performing Remains I question the durationality of “now” to suggest that “now” need not be the modernist idea of a disappearing instant. Benjamin’s idea of Jetztzeit in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ describes a time that is open with revolutionary possibility, detached from the homogenous continuum of history continually written from the perspective of the victors. The “tiger’s leap” that articulates Jetztzeit in Benjamin is figured as a physical act (a stepping out, in “A Small History of Photography” or a leap in “Theses on the Philosophy of History”) of suspension that might be thought of as a gesture, human and/or nonhuman, that is both reiterative and arrests us at the threshold of habit, opening a possibility for critical difference, or response-ability.

5 On the wind as “calling” to poets, see Heidegger (2000, 111). Heidegger allows the “mariners” of Andenken to be Germania’s future poets, called by the wind, but does not extend that same “promise” (verheisse) to the brown women who nevertheless are similarly summoned in the space of the poem. This may be more Heidegger’s problem than Hölderlin’s, but it has been recycled to us through Ronell and, now, through my rearticulation. For me “gesture” occurs as a “means of passage” (Derrida 1988, 1), hand to hand, as we pass texts (or sounds or bodily movements or words) between us and, together, recycle their songs. See Thomas F. DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez on approaching writing as that which “moves across the page” when we “experience the text at hand” (2014, 10, 14).

6 For a discussion of the dynamics of Arendt’s thought on the “rights to have rights” see Seyla Benhabib (2004, 41–70), and in relation to “appearance” see Schapp (2011).

7 On fluidity see Simpson on the Nishnaabeg word “Biskaabiiyang” which means to look back. Simpson makes clear that Biskaabiiyang does not mean “literally returning to the past.” And yet neither does the past congeal into an image. Rather “resurgence” can mean “reclaiming the fluidity around our traditions, not the rigidity of colonialism” (2011, 51).

8 Diane Davis tracks Ronell’s investment in call and response to Levinas, and while this is entirely appropriate, what would it mean to simultaneously hear, in the redeployment of the “ethics” of the modality, resurgent lifeways of the colonized/capitalized (2007, xxvi)? What would it be to explicitly extend the resonance of call and response by listening for the footsteps of black women who walk, listening and walking with the diasporic tracks of the flesh trade?

Notes

Works Cited

Althusser, Louis. 1971. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, translated by Ben Brewster, 127–86. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Anzaldúa, Gloria, and Cherrie Moraga, eds. 1981. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Watertown: Persephone Press.

Barba, Eugenio. 2011. A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology. New York: Taylor & Francis.

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Benhabib, Seyla. 2004. The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511790799

Benjamin, Andrew. 2015. Towards a Relational Ontology: Philosophy’s Other Possibility. New York: SUNY Press.

Benjamin, Walter. (1940) 1969. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn, 253–264. New York: Schocken Books.

Bernstein, Robin. 2009. “Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race.” Social Text 27 (4): 67–94. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-2009-055

Cervenak, Sarah Jane. 2014. Wandering: Philosophical Performances of Racial and Sexual Freedom. Durham: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822376347

Coulthard, Glen Sean. 2014. Red Skins, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816679645.001.0001

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 140: 139–67.

Davis, Diane. “Introduction.” In The ÜberReader: Selected Work of Avital Ronell, edited by Diane Davis, xv-xxxv. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. https://doi.org/10.1109/irps.1962.359978

DeFrantz, Thomas F., and Anita Gonzalez. 2014. “Introduction: From Negro Expression to Black Performance.” In Black Performance Theory, edited by Thomas F. DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez, 1–18. Durham: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822377016-001

Derrida, Jacques. 1988. “Signature, Event, Context.” In Limited Inc., translated by Samuel Webber, 1–24. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Foster, Susan Leigh. 2003. “Choreographies of Protest.” Theatre Journal 55 (3): 395–412. https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2003.0111

Halberstam, Jack. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822394358

Heidegger, Martin. 2000. Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry. Translated by Keith Hoeller. New York: Humanity Books.

Hill Collins, Patricia, and Sirma Bilge. 2016. Intersectionality. New York: Polity Press.

Lacoue-Labarthe, Phillipe. 1982. “Diderot: Paradox and Mimesis.” In Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, 248–66. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Lepecki, André. 2013. “Choreopolice and Choreopolitics: Or, The Task of the Dancer.” TDR: The Drama Review 57 (4): 13–27. https://doi.org/10.1162/DRAM_a_00300

McKittrick, Katherine. 2006. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Morrison, Toni. 1994. The Nobel Lecture in Literature, 1993. New York: Knopf.

Moten, Fred. 2003a. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

———. 2003b. “Not In Between: Lyric Painting, Visual History, and the Postcolonial Future.” TDR: The Drama Review 47 (1): 127–48. https://doi.org/10.1162/105420403321250053

Ong, Han. 1994. “Suzan-Lori Parks.” Bomb Magazine. http://bombmagazine.org/article/1769/suzan-lori-parks

Parks, Suzan-Lori. 1994. “Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World.” In The America Play and Other Works. New York: Theatre Communications Group.

Plato. 2003. Phaedrus. Translated by Stephen Scully. New York: Focus Books.

Rancière, Jacques. 2010. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. Translated by Steven Corcoran. New York: Continuum.

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Ronell, Avital. 2007. “The Sacred Alien: Heidegger’s Reading of Hölderlin’s ‘Andenken.’” In The ÜberReader: Selected Work of Avital Ronell, edited by Diane Davis, 205–26. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Schaap, Andrew. 2011. “Enacting the Right to Have Rights: Jacques Rancière’s Critique of Hannah Arendt.” Journal of European Political Theory 10 (1): 22–45. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474885110386004

Schneider, Rebecca. 1997. The Explicit Body in Performance. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203421079

———. 2001a. “Hello Dolly Well Hello Dolly: The Double and Its Theatre.” In Performance and Psychoanalysis, edited by Adrian Kear and Patrick Campbell, 94–114. New York: Routledge.

———. 2001b. “Solo Solo Solo.” In After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance, 23–47. Malden: Blackwell.

———. 2011. Performing Remains. Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. New York: Routledge.

———. 2014. “Remembering Feminist Remimesis. A Riddle in Three Parts.” TDR: The Drama Review 58 (2): 14–32. https://doi.org/10.1162/DRAM_a_00344

———. 2016. “Extending a Hand: Gesture, Duration and the (Non)Human Turn.” Unpublished Paper at the Symposium Towards an Ethics of Gesture. Emmanuel College, Cambridge, April 16.

Sharpe, Christina. 2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822373452

Simpson, Leanne. 2011. Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence, and a New Emergence. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Wing Publishing.

Vizenor, Gerald. 2008. Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Weheliye, Alexander. 2014. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822376491

Wynter, Sylvia. 1990. “Beyond Miranda’s Meaning: Un/Silencing the ‘Demonic Ground’ of Caliban’s Women.” In Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature, edited by Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido, 355–72. Trenton: Africa World Press.

Biographies

Rebecca Schneider is Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University. She is the author of The Explicit Body in Performance (1997), Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (2011), and Theatre and History (2014), as well as editor and author of numerous anthologies, essays, and journal special issues. She lectures widely on matters touching inter(in)animation.

Lucia Ruprecht is an affiliated Lecturer at the Department of German and Dutch, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Emmanuel College. Her Dances of the Self in Heinrich von Kleist, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Heinrich Heine (2006) was awarded Special Citation of the de la Torre Bueno Prize. She has co-edited Performance and Performativity in German Cultural Studies (with Carolin Duttlinger and Andrew Webber, 2003), Cultural Pleasure (with Michael Minden, 2009) and New German Dance Studies (with Susan Manning, 2012). From 2013 to 2015, she was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Institute of Theatre Studies, Free University Berlin. She is currently completing the manuscript of a book entitled Gestural Imaginaries: Dance and the Culture of Gestures at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century, under contract with Oxford University Press.

© 2017 Rebecca Schneider and Lucia Ruprecht

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY VOL 3, NO 1 (2017):126–145 DOI: https://doi.org/10.21476/PP.2017.3187

ISSN 2057-7176

PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY

‘ALIVE’ PERFORMANCE: TOWARD AN IMMERSIVE ACTIVIST PHILOSOPHY

ANNALAURA ALIFUOCO LIVERPOOL HOPE UNIVERSITY

This article addresses key issues in performance, live, and time-sensitive art to lay the ground for new modalities of making sense of the artistic event. The work presented here is an assembly—or assemblage—of philosophical methodologies from the perspective of performance as creative/creating act and event. In terms of the approach being developed, performance becomes constitutive of the domain of sensing, intuiting, and imagining that which cannot be seen, grasped, or represented fully. A better explanation could be that performance as art, and unlike plastic and visual arts, consists of ephemeral, creative outputs (affects, vibrations, rhythms), which set the event apart from the ‘ideal’ object of the arts and humanities—the work of art. Thus, its content becomes invisible and un-textualisable through a purely aesthetic lens, in a way that other artistic phenomena are not.

However, this sudden invisibility, probably also caused by its fugitive resistance to economic and cultural grasp, produces certain blind spots in the aesthetic frame, especially if exposed to a view trained in textual/visual analysis, as is often the case. These phenomena are sometimes treated as ‘objects’ of a study with tools that happen to be at hand, such as semiotics, hermeneutics, or (Aristotelian) narratology. Instead, here, I carefully and cautiously seek a new methodology, which is by its very nature inconsistent and incomplete since the approach is empirical, phenomenological, and not limited to any particular theoretical result or model. This paper seeks to outline and promote such a methodology for an immersive synaesthetic study of performance, which, given the speculative state of the field, gives way to an affective and sensible methodology that (if not declared) can become suspect. So, I shall here provide some context.

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Within the framework of affect, the present investigation situates performance as a relational—rather than representational—event that places things, bodies, environments, rhythms, and sensations beside each other, in forms of both appearance and abstraction.1 Emanating from such encounters are the immediate energies and recurrent vitalities that put ‘things’—bodies—in relation with one another through a kind of intra-matter contact, or contagion. Affect studies, in their plurality, describe these abstracted elements and autonomous forces as seeping from and out of the very forms and expressions that distil them. They can be thought to belong to the body-thing whilst existing detached from it. They are passed and returned, never the same. These traces inhabit the space of performance as a kind of sensuous technology that supersedes any mystifications of the text and fixations on the ‘matter’ of things.

With the faithful blindness of a critical method that seeks to reintegrate these incorporeal, invisible, and inconspicuous forces within worldly actuality, I here focus on the conception of performance as an ‘alive’ event that escapes and exceeds so-called common (and commonly human) sense. It does so by stirring the sensuous and synaesthetic capacities of bodies as they oscillate between the poles of animate and inanimate, apparent and invisible, inconsistent and emergent, extinguishable yet performable. These formulations aim to reconnect the paradoxes and tensions in the work of affective transmission with some deep questions around politics, aesthetics, and ethics. This model of affective contagion, I argue, can bring forth crucial shifts and changes in the contemporary understandings of natural, cultural, and performance events, where human and non-human bodies and subjectivities re-appear not as wholesome, finite entities, but as capacious and infectious realities always already expanded and extendable.

Hence, in what is to come, I will work at the intersection of the perceptive and the affective to articulate a syn-aesthetic-political philosophy of the event- performance. Intersecting the writings of Brian Massumi and Peggy Phelan, with a host of other contributors, I will be asking what is left of an embodied and creative event that moves toward its end without being (fully) exhausted. Tracing its intrinsic and extrinsic modes of vitality—or aliveness—and virtuality—or affect—I will seek to reveal how its exemplary processual forms of emergence and dissolution project an ontogenetic, rather than ontological force. Against the illusion of permanence, against the ecstasy of here-and-now, against the liquidation of time and the walling of space, these ideas cultivate a sense of performance re-emerging at the liminal points of interaction, in the grey areas of sound exchange, in the secreted atmospheres of the sensuous, in the fluidity of movement and the density of attunement. In this misty climate, I hope, the reader shall find the premise (promise?) of things yet to come in the study of performance.

1. Performance—After the Vanishing

As an experiential framework and artistic strategy performance has historically drawn much of its energy and intensity from the 1960s and 70s tendencies to dissolve the materiality of the art object and expose the ‘not-seen’ in the frame of a creative and creating event—or “happening.”2 Catching this page of history one could feel its heat, and for a moment grasp the fragments—the

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mo(ve)ments3—of a strange kind of negative impulse igniting sensibilities, until, as the fervour dissipated in the following decades, it burnt to ciphers in the hands of chaotic post-(modern)isms.

But it is through the dense atmosphere of these dissenting movements and transmissions that I seek to articulate a conceptual framework and a critical methodology to relay the empirical history of an event that critically dissolves under the conditions of its exposure. This form of appearance is the result of the sensible encounter between the contingencies of the situation and the corporeal registers—or archives—that recognise and activate the rhythms, temporalities, dispositions, and singularities of its defining mo(ve)ments. These archives are as errant and slippery as the forces that generate them—affects—as they can hardly be grasped or observed.

In fact, the event of performance can be said to enact the crisis of representing something fleeting and phantasmatic that persistently proliferates outside of its frame (I will return to these arguments later in this section). As an aesthetic project, it foregrounds the work of the (un)conscious on real and imaginary times and spaces, curating a sustained on-goingness that unfolds an affective experience in presence, and as present: in the ‘here and now.’ But also, it works on the present as ahistorical anachronism, communicating the you-are-thereness of any then present now already-past moment that Rebecca Schneider (2011) calls “fugitive.” Fugitive time regains the charge of past moments on the run in the present. These leaky, syncopated, errant moments playing in the crossfire of time can make things feel “a little uncanny, or dislocated, or unsettling, or queer” (180).4 It is these feelings, I suggest, that constitute the un-resting force of performance and the potential to generate alternatives to its ontological versions.

Performance, therefore, can become an exemplary laboratory for sensing, recognising and registering its present and passing mo(ve)ments as consistently dissolving recurring actualities. However, the question here emerges of how to attend to, and account for, the ever-vanishing reality of the being of/in this ‘particular’ event. Brian Massumi’s notion of the event as a “supplementarity”5—an excess rupturing linear notions of space and time—provides a key for tuning in to the dispersed yet incipient ontology registered here:

The event is superempirical: it is the crystallization, out the far side of quasi corporeality, of already actualized spatial perspectives and emplacements into a time-form from which the passing present is excluded and which, for that very reason, is as future as it is past, looping directly from one to the other. It is the immediate proximity of before and after. It is nonlinear, moving in two directions at once: out from the actual (as past) into the actual (as future). The actuality it leaves as past is the same actuality to which it no sooner comes as future: from being to becoming. (Massumi 2002, 58)

I would like to emphasise the elements of likeness between this definition and the assumed directions of the event—the happening—that performance actualises. Translating Massumi’s notion to the context of performance might yield something like: the event’s being is itself ‘becoming’ through the vanishing of the present into the past and/as the future. Now, let me replay these equations through a more familiar refrain: “[p]erformance’s being becomes itself through

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disappearance” (Phelan 1993, 146). And finally, allow me to rephrase it differently: the being of performance is itself a becoming-otherwise through the disappearance of its present presence into past and future actualities. To be sure, all these rhetoric articulations differ from each another, but they are nevertheless a semblance of one another in immediate, relational proximity. I will now attempt to reactivate their ‘semblematic’ value by turning to Massumi’s later work, in Semblance and Event, in the attempt to requalify the affective ways in which disappearance becomes something other(wise) than itself within the event of performance.

Massumi speaks of the event as something passing, its potential (for change) only fully defined at its culmination: “[a]n experience determinately knows what it’s been only as it peaks—which is also the instant of its ‘perishing’” (2011, 9). But what is effectively brought to pass by an occasion’s passing? For Massumi, this movement instils a “technique of existence” through which the nonsensuous6 form of the event can be “perceptually felt”,

not so much ‘in’ vision as with vision or through vision: as a vision effect. It is a lived abstraction: an effective virtual vision of the shape of the event, including in its arc the unseen dimensions of its immediate past and immediate future. (17, original emphasis)

This immersive abstraction occasions felt experience through what Massumi calls a “semblance:”7 “the form in which what does not appear effectively expresses itself, in a way that must be counted as real” (23). Detached from (ocularcentic) representation, this mode of objective extension projects a real sense of actual things.

Some twenty years before, Peggy Phelan wrote: “[w]ithout a copy, live performance plunges into visibility—in a maniacally charged present—and disappears into memory, in the realm of invisibility where it eludes regulation and control” (1993, 148). The event-performance here emerges as the visible of what cannot be seen, of something that does not appear (visually) but rather that recedes into embodied techniques and fugitive forms of indiscernibility. Phelan’s intent was to propose the move between matters of visibility and invisibility as the possibility to “value the immaterial”, of becoming “unmarked”, through an “active vanishing” that “refus[es] […] the pay-off of visibility” (6). In a conversation with Marquard Smith ten years later, she reprises her earlier, and since much debated, motif:

I was trying to delineate a possible ethics of the invisible […]. I wanted to talk about the failure to see oneself fully. This failure is optical, psychoanalytical, and ethical. […] I was suggesting that this central failure, instead of being constantly repressed by culture, might be something we could acknowledge and even embrace. If this were possible, I thought perhaps a different ethics, a richer encounter between self and other might become actual and actual-izable. (Phelan 2003, 296, original emphasis)

For Phelan, this alternative ethics always encroaches upon the folds of embodiment and disembodiment, appearance and (ultimate) disappearance: “I was trying to make clear that the ephemeral, indeed the mortal, is absolutely fundamental to the experience of embodiment, to the

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facticity of human history itself” (293, original emphasis). What I sense in both Phelan’s and Massumi’s insistence on events passing out of sight, on the abstract as real, is a concurrent call for the need to pragmatically attend to the process of re-actualising the nonvisible and the nonsensual, or what Massumi calls the virtual.

I would like to pursue the role of this discursive and intuitive likeness in disentangling some historical and disciplinary lines and directions in the categorical situation of performance as ‘live’ art. Since things are not (only) as they appear, my aim is not a clear extensive or intensive definition of what performance ‘is’ or ‘is not’. Rather, my interest attends to what is vital in the ‘live’ of performance. The ‘is’ of performance is its ‘being’, the progressive form of which is ‘becoming’—perpetually happening. This tense reality indicates how the aesthetic event is an ongoing genesis driven from the past and towards the future—really only a semblance that we sense through our stark contact with the extraordinary in the ordinary. Hence, I shall begin by returning briefly to Massumi’s earlier work to articulate the particular and singular operations through which the virtual extensions of settled situations can dislocate thought and bodily order beyond the boundaries of familiar experience.

2. Stranger Horizon

In Parables for the Virtual (2002), Massumi provides a key for approaching the ‘real abstraction’ of everyday life. This terminology requires that we extend but not abandon Marx’s mature social theory by dealing with the nodal concept of abstraction—and the revolution of everyday life—as the ability to extract (or indeed exploit) value from creative, embodied action. The terms of this critique, however, have been limited by the tendency to oppose the concrete to the immaterial, the lived to the abstract.8 In Massumi, however, actual abstraction constitutes a necessary element for understanding lived creativity in the making. So, if for Marx actual or real abstractions are constitutive of social worlds and exist prior to their conceptualisation, for Massumi abstraction must be understood as a realm of lived possibilities, of potentialities, prior to figuration, meaning, and indeed materialisation.

Massumi revisits the relation between abstraction and two points of empirical concern: perception and materiality. These matters are drawn together via one technology of abstraction, namely, the biogram: a diagram of the incarnate, perceptual dimension where the senses combine and meld.9 This dimension finds expression in synaesthesia, a neurological phenomenon of hypersensitivity where one sense triggers another sense—for examples, the experience of ‘seeing sounds’, ‘hearing colours’, and the like.10 To put it in lay terms, sensory information is transduced via two different systems of perceptual reference: the visual and the proprioceptive. In ‘normalised’ perception, the latter system of reference disappears behind the visual, cognitive regime. The case of synaesthesia, however, registers a moment in which the proprioceptive map comes to the foreground and ‘interrupts’ vision.

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Massumi describes this experience as the sensual awareness and direct experience of the way vision is always already enmeshed with the other senses. Hence, biograms are:

more-than-visual. They are event-perceptions combining senses, tenses, and dimensions on a single surface […] They are geometrically strange: a foreground-surround, like a trick center twisting into an all-encompassing periphery. They are uncontainable either in the present moment or in Euclidean space, which they instead encompass: strange horizon. (2002, 187)

Clinical studies treat synaesthesia as a rare and pathological condition to which only certain subjects are prone. Yet, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962) makes a case for the intertwining and blending of sensory modality to be inherent in the primordial, preconceptual lived experience of the world, he affirms:

Synaesthetic perception is the rule, and we are unaware of it only because scientific knowledge shifts the center of gravity of experience, so that we have unlearned how to see, hear, and generally speaking, feel, in order to deduce, from our bodily organization and the world as the physicist conceives it, what we are to see, hear, and feel. (229, original emphasis)

Synaesthesia is unusual only to the extent that the body has become estranged from direct experience and contact with the sensible, and entrenched in the objective (Cartesian) perspective of the world. Yet the biogram of the senses that overlap and blend is both an abstract and concrete way of being: not a tropological figure nor a cultural, historical, or artistic trend, not even a psycho-physiological dysfunction, but indeed an actual perceptual mode (or more precisely, an amodal perception) that generally recedes to the background of ocularcentrism (and logocentrism). These disorienting experiences of corporeality ‘hinge’ on the lived practice of an abstraction—an affectivity11—that situates the relationality of the event in the indiscernibility of sensory dimensions that allow embodiment to fold back on itself all the potential variations in itself (see Massumi 2002, 194).

There is here a co-functioning of the event and memory, Massumi explains: “[i]n synaesthesia, remembering is a perceptual event. It is a reactivation of a biogram for purposes of reaccess. If an event-perception is faced, then when a biogram is reaccessed isn’t the synesthete facing a previous facing?” (Massumi, 2002, 193). In response, I feel the biogram taking shape as the synaesthetic ‘spacing’ of affectivity that situates a ‘temporally’ re-mediated performance at the intuitive centre between the relationality of being in the event and the movement of continuous re-sur-facing. At this crux, we keep “looking forward to our own past and looking past into the future, in a seeing so intense that it falls out of sight” (194, original emphasis). Ultimately, “synaesthetic perception is always an event or performance” (190).

In (and out of) view of Phelan’s riff of performance plunging into visibility as it dissolves into memory, and in the gamut of Massumi’s synaesthetic reassembling of resurfacing events, I want to return (to) performance as a cross-modal perceptual field where sensory modes always come

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into and out of each other, interacting through processes of affective genesis. Hence, the event-performance reappears as an ontogenetic,12 rather than ontological, state of becoming through movement, intuition, transduction, composition, improvisation. It reoccurs as a form of distributed perspectives that considers complex, multimodal realities, that enacts the dislocation of space and time, and that reflects the interaction of unrelated elements. This creative process is accessible to anyone with access to affectivity, at any time, and again, through the gap of sensation.

The model of the virtual as actual, where the capacitated abstraction of bodies—read: things—is ubiquitous with the appearance of the event, can then help reframe what indeed remains of the ontology of performance: a perceptual ‘gap’ between experience and consciousness. In fact, if Benjamin Libet’s experiments prove that conscious awareness of stimuli from the environment lags actual perception by approximately half a second, Massumi’s search for lost time returns the full effect of this delay: “the half second is missed not because it is empty, but because it is overfull, in excess of the actually-performed action and of its ascribed meaning” (Massumi 2002, 29, my emphasis). What follows is a forcefully charged split mo(ve)ment that can then conduce to what is actually ‘happening’ in the event: the condition for deep affects/effects. This imperceptible yet intensely divaricate gap is perhaps the fullest form of the experience—its unedulcorated live potential, which I shall call aliveness.

Before proceeding, it is worth elaborating an outline of this ontogenetic process by attending to the specificity of an art work, and the specificity of the milieu in which the synaesthetic event operates. Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio’s Tragedia Endogonidia (2002–2004) is exemplary of a creative method that deals with affective forces drawing links between experience, perception, and materiality within a multimodal and multidirectional event. The company’s distinctive dramaturgy of image and sensation here interrogates the very ontology of theatre by both excavating and dismantling its representational systems (see Castellucci et al. 2007). The concrete overarching principle of this work pursues an existential oxymoron: if tragedia translates the epic drive towards inevitable endings, endogonidia implies the immortality of life forms that, possessing both sets of gonads (sexual organs), unceasingly replicate themselves anew. Essentially, things human and inhuman, and their blind cycles of death and (re)birth, exist side-by-side, wandering and roaming on and off stage.

The result is an open system that, like an “organism on the run” (Castellucci et al. 2007, 39), transmutes and transmigrates within itself with every changing season and shifting geography. In performance terms, this production spawned a cycle of eleven interconnected but discrete episodes in ten different European cities over three years. Likewise, actions, sounds, props, and other elements evolve and mutate as they are replicated and remodulated in different episodes. However, the graphic emblem, and one of the aesthetically consistent motifs of the cycle, is the (re)occurrence of “anonymous” acts of violence (see Castelluci et al. 2007, 14). All eleven episodes explicitly show signs of this ‘tragic’ impetus: in Brussels, a young police officer is beaten to a bloody pulp by his colleagues; in Paris, Carravaggio’s Sacrifice of Isaac is recreated over two washing machines; in London, a man cuts off his tongue and feeds it to a cat; in Marseille, a naked woman is exhibited, abused, and photographed in front of a group of gentlemen spectators; in Cesena, a

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motored machine feeds arrows into a mechanical bow which slams them with full force into the opposite wall; and on and on.

The arresting power of these events has an aesthetic function but also operates as a fissure in representation. At stake here are strategies that reveal both the abstraction and the material force that spills out of scenes where affects and images continually clash. These practices imaginatively and pragmatically switch the register of violence as a force emerging from the realm of the virtual. As Thomas Crombez affirms in his examination of cruelty in Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio’s work:

‘pure’ violence or ‘naked’ force is never visible to the human eye. Whenever we watch an act of violence, be it real or imagined, we are being subjected to powerful perceptive and conceptual mechanisms in order to be able to frame this event. […] And what Castellucci does in the Tragedia Endogonidia—amongst others—is to bring these mechanisms to light. (Hillaert and Crombez 2005, 7)

These mechanisms, I propose, are an affirmative expression of a synaesthetic impulse that precipitates the visible of the invisible; the perceptible of the imperceptible.

Tragedia Endogonidia’s open system aims to give an ‘actual’ multi-sensory experience that is not prompted by the function of cruelty, as both Hillaert and Crombez sustain, but by the making of excarnation incarnate. By that, I mean that the violence—the generative force of the mise en scène itself—extracts and transforms the forms, the colours, the rhythms, the volumes, the sensations into the experience of a real abstraction. That is, the apparatus at work reveals images, actions, and situations as products of finely tuned incidents of perception. For example, and with the help of Wouter Hillaert’s first-hand account, in the scene of the savage beating previously described:

Everybody could see that the torture was fake all the way. The blood had been poured out before the action took place and the police batons were made of soft rubber. And still, this scene was quite horrible to watch. Especially because of the amplified sound of every beat on the victim’s naked flesh, because of his spastic moves and his total silence afterwards. (Hillaert and Crombez 2005, 1)

Hence, the force-full effect of violence becomes isolated from habitual frames of perception. The making and witnessing of this action is enveloped by sound, vision, movement, and the lack thereof, creating an experience in which one sense does not override the other, but rather in which the senses and their organs split and reform, like the living organisms of the title. In suspenseful split seconds between expression and apprehension, this encounter pierces the membrane of representation only to demonstrate that the shield is always already broken. Such instances elicit a biogrammatic—or inorganic 13 —sense of sonority, 14 aurality, tonality, visuality, and even ‘hapticity’: each subtly unhinged from their organic system, and the system of representation; no sooner slipping out then to seek ingress and participation elsewhere.

These instances are enacted and replicated on the stage-world, and on different world-stages; they double and triple, and multiply as by mitosis. This world of affects, this universe of forces, passes beyond everything we can identify; it becomes actualised without the vision—or spectacles—of

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subjectivity, revealing instead ‘other sides’ to ourselves. Such eccentric position involves a kind of moving beyond the human; a kind of overcoming of the (molar) self that propels experience into a (molecular) world of becomings.15 In this sense, the mechanisms of affective forces are not the consequence of the material structures and actions onstage. Conversely, it is the expropriated, extricated, and exposed—the excarnate—system of affects that brings the latter into representation. The aesthetic, precisely, is activated by these invisible universes—the synaesthetic.

What is at stake in Tragedia Endogonidia is not a negative aesthetics of cruelty but an affirmative actualisation of virtual forces. These capacitated forms of (human and inhuman) life are the genuinely ontogenetic reincarnations—the being-becomings—of this performance work. Within the folds of situations at the limits of signification and interpretation, these creative acts demand us not to contemplate images but to harness sensations. Thus, the tragedy of violence here is less involved in the drive towards death, but indeed is absorbed in actualising the possibilities of life in transformation. Hence, the necessary passing of any present of the experience becomes irrevocably imbricated and inseparable from any past or future; a mutated incarnation of becoming anew. These notions of affective mutations engender a form of inquiry that travels across myriad temporalities, reaccessing and reassessing the social, relational space fostered through the practice of alive performance.

Finally, and returning to Massumi’s intuitions and Phelan’s implications at the point of a dissolve, I have here attempted to resituate the discourse on (the indeterminacy of) performance as the knowledge surging from an imperceptible affective force-fullness and suspense-fullness. Treading carefully its fugitive passages away from vision, one is easily led towards final extreme points. However, my interest in performance does not depend on an extreme account of the nonsensual smudge as the break and irruption of pure state; rather, it lies with the mutual transformation of co-affective events. Hence, in what comes next, I will move to the side of Massumi’s dialectic semblance and toward the ‘nonsensuous’ remodulations and remediations of the multiple and fluctuating latencies of performance. The resting point of these mo(ve)ments might indeed return a ‘stranger horizon.’

3. Sideshadowings

So far, I have argued for a conception of performance as an experiential loop, a recursive topology of a memory past and future, moving in non-Euclidean space and nonlinear time. This condition can recognise the quasi-corporeal dimensions both internal and external to its happening; it can acknowledge both the matter of ‘fact’ and the matter of ‘felt’ as they overlap and blend; it can posit itself in the in-between of affective relations, in the intervals that bleed through sensory dimensions. Through the split mo(ve)ments and open gaps of its eventfulness—aliveness—it can reappear, again and again, as a brimming virtuality emanating from multi-sensory bodies.

With these premises in mind, I now want to engage performance as a technique of affective modulation and sensory remediation. The creative processes it instigates can push beyond the scaffolding of the subjective/objective divide to embrace the production of singularities through

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affective and bodily mo(ve)ments that occur, in and out of sight, all appearing ‘beside themselves’. Suspended from what appears to be the sheer fabric of the material and the visual, its vibrating and quivering force—which I have called aliveness—reconstitutes its fugitive image. This ‘semblematic’ 16 mode of sensing the perception of something happening—of seeing with and through actual form in visually imperceptible ways—foregrounds not only the appearance of the event but its side-shadows—its perceptual ghost doubling.

Here I use this composite term in relation to Gary Saul Morson’s concept of “time shadows”. Morson (1998) explains how in narrative “[t]he term foreshadowing indicates backward causation. A spatial metaphor for a temporal phenomenon, it is a shadow cast in front of an object; the temporal analog is an event that indicates (is the ‘shadow’ of) another event to come” (601). This shady figuration throws into evidence a predestined event where time becomes foreclosed:

When a storm foreshadows a catastrophe, the storm is there because the catastrophe follows; it is an effect of that future catastrophe visible in temporal advance much as the shadow of an object may be visible in spatial advance. Because the future is already there—is substantial enough to cause earlier events and to send signs backwards—foreshadowing ensures a temporality of inevitability. (Ibid., original emphasis)

However, Morson recognises how the genuinely eventful time of life does not indulge in this narrative symmetry but is instead set in open time with “loose ends”. These more capacious and expandable endings consist of alternative courses of events and possibilities foregrounded by what Morson calls “sideshadowing”—the co-emergence of shadows cast on the present from the sides, adding an excess to the story that causes time to divaricate:

Alternatives always abound, and, more often than not, what exists need not have existed. Something else was possible, and sideshadowing is used to create a sense of that ‘something else’. Instead of casting a shadow from the future, it casts a shadow ‘from the side’, that is, from the other possibilities. Along with an event, we see its alternatives; with each present, another possible present. Sideshadows conjure the ghostly presence of might-have-beens or might-bes. (601–602)

Sideshadowing conveys the sense of something more: the intensity and pressure of temporalities continually competing for actuality. In this figuration, the present ‘here and now’ splits to the sides of unrealised past potentials and realisable future occasions. The consequences for time are concrete:

[i]n sideshadowing […] the actual and the possible, are made simultaneously visible. This is not a simultaneity in time but of times; we do not see contradictory actualities, but one possibility that was actualized and another that could have been but was not. Time itself acquires a double and, often, many doubles. A haze of possibilities surrounds each actuality. (602, original emphasis)

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Hence, whereas the foreshadowing reveals the figure of an impending (no)future, sideshadowing conjures the weather, the atmosphere of actual events that might indeed have happened differently, that are ‘present’ as other possibilities, or that are yet to be/come possible alternatives.

These time shadows gain significance in the narrative of performance in the way their emergence can make its temporalities (be)come open and loose in the space of experience. By letting these registers exist ‘together’ and ‘beside’ each other, I intend to propose an ecstatic model of reaccessing, relaying, and relating the event whose “foreshadowings” convey a sense of the on-going experience of being alive in the cut opened by sensory experience, and whose “sideshadowing” cast its possibilities beside themselves, dragging it toward and away from its end, and beyond our foresight or foreshadow of it. These com-possibilities are invested with affects expressed as the virtual, ghostly co-presence of potentials emerging from a suspenseful gap.

To sketch something of a context for the collateral effects of these shadow projections, I shall briefly return to the emblematic workings of Tragedia Endogonidia. Starting from where we left off, the temporal experience of this open cycle implies human and inhuman mutability where any present is a passing experience. Within the malleable format of its multiple stagings, fragments, images, and echoes are organised, modulated, and rearranged both within episodes and throughout the cycle. They are meticulously sequenced and patterned, like chemical and biological elements, in a multitude of ways; working and tuning their coefficient expressions to reach maximum side-effects. Like the organisms on which they speculate, they meld and evolve across time and geography, as well as within each separate phase of transformation; every conception becomes inside itself a plan for the suspension and actualisation of other, separate realities. In his review of Tragedia and its multifarious proliferations—book, video, pamphlet, soundtrack—Daniel Sack notes:

Each episode presented a mutated incarnation of the same constellation of images and ideas, becoming itself anew in relation to each host city. […] As director Romeo Castellucci describes the cycle’s process: “It is not a finished show that is moved from city to city. Its moving around is the show; a rhythm that strikes; a transformed organism, like the different phases in the life of an animal or vegetable” […]. In other words, this is a theatre that attends to the “passing moment” not so much in terms of its loss or disappearance, but as an organism’s move elsewhere, a step aside or a perversion; the performance becomes other than itself. (2009, 147, my emphasis)

This process, according to Sack, permeates the further transmutations of these performative structures into textual, video, and sound media. These living remains proliferate like spores, outgrowing the system that originated them. Distended and stretched, they spread across indiscrete temporal zones, all beside themselves—formal approaches, theoretical underpinnings, the experience of witnessing, the doubling of memory:

the video memory takes seriously the claims of philosophers of process, such as Henri Bergson and Alfred Whitehead, that temporality does not operate in a uniform and measurable manner but is entirely elastic and malleable. In the same

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move, the video transposes the cycle into the register of memory, into our own rearrangements of experience after the fact. (149)

The ensuing actualities of the experience escape from re-presentation by creating new performances that play against the internal logic of the event. These ongoing transformations deliver a model for thinking of performance remains as happening both inside and outside, transformed beyond and beside the fixed structures (of capture) that yet exist. In the writing of Joe Kelleher and Nicholas Ridout: “The afterlife of the work […] is already to be built in, as it were, to the life of the work. But then to call it a life, and to conceive this life as a life that remains, is also to conceive a mutation, beyond the will or craft of the maker” (Castellucci et al. 2007, 6).

Tragedia Endogonidia originates a process that is processual and divergent in its forms of affective expressions. But also, it creates an ‘ecology’ of occurrences coming-together and beside one another. Moving across thresholds and propelling their force into and out of different vibrations—virtualisations—they make apparent both their coming into being and the imminent compossibilities of existing otherwise. These knotted events enact both the realisation of the possible, that is the “foreshadows” that always already resemble incarnate reality, and the actualisation of the com-possibilities of the event; the “sideshadows” of its excarnate potentials.

These multiple and simultaneous directionalities, I suggest, are expressed in performance as the technological and synaesthetic site of a reemergent and remodulated dispersal. Its pragmatic, generative strategies attend to the purposive disposition of elements constituted relationally, collectively and transductively—objects, people, environs, rhythms, sensations—in (col)lateral spread. It occurs as a particular and singular operational ecology of relational happenings. Thus, this event of contact and transformation decenters the human subject into a broader distribution that breaks the linearity of object/subject relations. Lastly, as a sphere of interaction (at least partly) distinct and separate from human activity and ordinary life at large, it presents a recognisable set-up for unpredictable and unimagined collaborations between different forms of life.

The result is an affective economy grounded in the processes of adaptation and disarticulation of the virtual mo(ve)ments connecting more- and less-than-human entities, exposing to view the inhuman aspect of the historical and material dimension of processual meaning and relational becoming. This very empirical experience arises in the ‘present’ of an existent world; that is, in the ‘socialised’ scene of historically, culturally, and politically embodied matter calling for the emergence of an abstract-virtual spatiotemporal sphere of the ‘sensible’—and ethical—that can only be conceived as a non-consecutive re-enactment. In other words, experiencing visually and comprehending conceptually that which is visually imperceptible and conceptually incomprehensible constitutes the eventfulness of performance as an immanent force of becoming-human, becoming-otherwise, becoming-political; a moment of ontological unbinding that can disrupt, disarticulate, and deface the ‘present’ state of the body politic.

Hence, I reiterate the practice of performance to be a technology that redistributes the aliveness of relationality and contingency in the production of an synaesthetic event of being becoming—of perpetual happening. Its intensive duration casts aside whirling sensations, affects, and

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mo(ve)ments as swarming spatial and temporal fragments—or sideshadows. This abstracted potential somehow just remains off to the side, as a perpetual remainder, as a not-yet-exhausted excess, a third or a fourth body; a more-to-come preempting what is yet to become. These recursive virtual counterpoints make things literally and metaphorically ‘beside themselves’ with the presence of their exteriorised potential.

In the introductory remarks to Touching Feeling (2003), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick advances the concept of the “beside.” “Beside,” she writes, “permits a spacious agnosticism about several of the linear logics that enforce dualistic thinking: noncontradiction or the law of the excluded middle, cause versus effect, subject versus object” (8, original emphasis). Beside (not beneath, behind, or beyond) is a spatial determinant that eschews the flat line of opposition and duality. Taking a “distinct step to the side” of any constitutive project of subjectivity invokes a logic that suggests multiple (Deleuzian) assemblages, wherein any “number of elements” may lie and operate “alongside one another” (6). Moving in this trajectory, I will next expand on the creative life forms of performance, human or otherwise than human, that share a spatiotemporal co-presence, which is also a spatiotemporal co-difference in which they exist all ‘beside themselves’.

In what follows, I recognise how similar affective movements and potentials find their ‘ends’, without finalisation, in particular bodily experiences that surge within the frame of artistic, critical and aesthetic events that I here gather under the loose and slippery term performance. I argue that this technology of synaesthetic ‘spacing’ and ‘timing’ of affectivity situates a remediated encounter that places its intuitive fulcrum in the relationality of its eventfulness—in the mo(ve)ments of feeling-with the others, the many others, beside the self.

4. Catchy Feelings

In performance, the passage from event to experience, from experience to knowledge, and back, occurs in the affective co-presence (and co-attendance) of being beside-our-selves, despite and because of our singularities. In this context, Brian Massumi’s notion of “affective attunement,” or “feeling-with” (see 2011, 111–116) becomes useful. Drawing on Daniel Stern, Massumi articulates this experience as a dynamic mode of corporeal interaction that generates a sphere of “shared” affectivity. Like contagion, affective attunements reflect the complexity of collective situations where separate forms of life emerge together finding difference in unison and unison in difference. Crucially, processual forms of being-with-others are always at play in the relational milieu of performance in the conscious and unconscious ways in which individuals differently partake in the event, and by the forms through which typical and non-habitual responses emerge and are transmitted and caught.

I want to draw an analogy here between these ideas and philosopher Teresa Brennan’s theories on affective transmission. Brennan (2004) similarly relays affect as an ever-present circuit of life energies that travel between people through a “process that is social in origin but biological and physical in effect”, which she calls “entrainment” (3). Brennan mobilises this term from biochemistry and neurology to articulate the process “whereby one person’s or one group’s

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nervous and hormonal systems are brought into alignment with another’s” (9). The philosopher brings together evidence on molecular flux, body language, and shared rhythms in order to trace the transmissions between bodies—understood in a broad sense—through the ways they “feel the atmosphere” or pick up on the “mood” in the room. This affective climate is not simply ‘caught’ or transmitted between subjects; rather, “[t]he ‘atmosphere’ or the environment literally gets into the individual” (1).

Brennan’s work pays close attention to both biological and cultural factors that contribute to such disseminations; however, she emphasises that affect is a “profoundly social thing” (68). She carefully maps the power relationships that subtend energetic exchanges through which certain rhythms are subsumed by some-body, or blocked by others. Since affects evoke thoughts, individuals may become emotionally “entrained”, or attuned, even though the particular meanings one attaches to those affects will vary: “[t]he point is that even if I am picking upon your affect, the linguistic and visual content, meaning the thoughts I attach to that affect, remain my own: they remain the product of the particular historical conjunction of words and experiences I represent” (7).

Hence, affect is impersonal (and transpersonal) in infection, but personal in situated, individual effect—that is, in the movement to emotion, thought, and action. The transmission and escalation of energetic blueprints depends on a shared focus of “living attention” sensible to physical proximity, distance, or contact. Brennan likens bodies to transducers or conversion channels: far from being self-contained, they are porous and permeable; they are affected and affecting: “understanding the influences to which we are subject in terms of passions and emotions, as well as living attention, means lifting off the burden of the ego’s belief that it is self-contained in terms of the affects it experiences” (95). In the choreography of the I-Other relation, and in the concrete, experiential forms of non-conscious and proprioceptive transfers that take place through touch, smell, sight, movement, sound, taste occurring directly between bodies, the sensed tacit knowledge of oneself—and the relational milieu (the world)—doubles as an embodied way of being-with-others. Along such vectors and intensities, assimilations and blockages, contacts and separations, affects come to change the body’s biology through a kind of “social contagion” (53).

This metaphorical model of contagion is something I would like to reprise here in relation to the conception I have expressed of performance as a technology of aliveness; the shadow-play of a semblance that tunes in the affective force-field of events and resonates with the possibility of vir(tu)al transmission. This situation can express a form of practiced share-ability that Massumi calls relational “architecture”:

I’m talking about […] the technical staging of aesthetic events that speculate on life, emanating a lived quality that might resonate elsewhere, to unpredictable affect and effect. Stagings that might lend themselves to analogical encounter and contagion. That might get involved in inventive accidents of history. I’m talking about architectures of the social and political unforeseen that enact a relation of non-relation with an absolute outside, in a way that is carefully, technically limited and unbounded. (Massumi 2011, 80)

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Through mimesis or a ‘contagion’ of sorts, the techné of performance can express a sensuous rather than representational—an ontogenetic rather than ontological—activity by producing a reality in excess of its materiality. These accidents of histories, or sideshadows, conceive and generate responses; new perceptual events that echo the potential to affect the social and the political body. This, dare I say, is the alive—not the same as ‘live’—condition of performance: not the “immediate” and “transitory present moment” (see Auslander 1999), not the ‘here and now’ of being ‘there and then’, not the image without a cut, not the record without a trace, not the memory without the flesh. But say, the brooding sense of a practice of living attention (living-a-tension), the durational intensity of the fore-echo of a return (see Massumi 2011, 113), the ungrasped pulse of a past yet to come, the hiccup of a sound reaching up to the cusp of silence; the ecstasy of feeling always “more-than-one”,17 except, once again, not-one time, not even-space, already suspended—pure “aliveness” (see Massumi 2011, 146).

Out of this suspenseful state emerges an impulse to move toward recognizing an infectious quality, some perilous potency, or just an un-common feeling—that, arising from sensible disarticulations, begs for cultural, social, and political attention. Approaching these concepts from what feels to be their ‘side effects’, I will follow the metaphor of carnal contagion into the material(ist) impulse to move toward refiguring an syn-aesth-ethic politics of ‘uncommon-sense’.

5. Uncommon Sense

The incipient and recursive practice of performance can make manifest the ‘likeness’ of a politics of imperceptible socialisation that has at its heart a revi(r)t(u)alisation—that is, a re-transmission of the affective force of the event away from territorialising pulls and apprehensive logics of arrest. We might put these affective transmissions in relation to that potential described by Jacques Ranciére (2010) for an event to disrupt, disarticulate, and disfigure the ‘present’ state of affairs of a body politic with an ‘uncommon’ aesthetic sense of partaking, enabling seeing and knowing in ways that are yet unseen and unknown: “[f]or critical art is not so much a type of art that reveals the forms and contradictions of domination as it is an art that questions its own limits and powers, that refuses to anticipate its own effects” (149).

Ranciére refers to this agonistic process of art as dissensus, the relation-of-nonrelation that is experienced in-between the artwork’s dynamic form and its re-presentation. This disjunctive quality, I suggest, constitutes the making of a semblematic event whose substance is involved in nonsensual and dissensual ways of ‘being-with’, in relational co-presence—with intimate others and extimate selves—without coalescence. This ‘unassuming’ relationality can disarticulate the power of stringent forms and aggregational norms via a synaesthetic politics of aliveness that sets off the self-differing and self-perpetuating momentum of unforeseen potential. This dissonant charge, I argue, becomes expressed in the event-performance through the affective resonance of its dynamic entanglements; that is, the concrete relational and situational configuration of feeling-with and beside others, in dissensual ways.

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The galvanisation of these processes of sensory disruption is the being becoming of performance; the sensible fibre of the event that cannot be found in the maelstrom of everyday life. If performance bears a semblance to life, often pressing onto it from all sides, in the meantime, it remains somehow removed—or abstracted—from it in terms of intentionality and directness. The kind of mo(ve)ments of disorientation that it invokes are hard to experience aside from situations that operate as a breach in the mundane. Yet the nonsensuous compositions or co-movements of performance are singular and not common. They gain their force, not from 'cleaving things asunder', as Deleuze would have it (see Massumi 2011, 49), but from attending to nonsensuous virtual effects emerging from mutual contact, interaction, and transformation, with no need for extreme and violent rupture to turn everything into tacit, senseless matter.

But what forms does this technique of aliveness have to take to produce actual novelty rather than its reified form? In what way can this synaesthetic practice pragmatically diagram its procedures of abstraction to eventuate effective revitalisations that expose (if not resist) the regimes of power? Massumi’s condition for occurrent arts is: “you have to leave creative outs. You have to build in escapes. Drop sinkholes. And I mean build them in—make them immanent to the experience. […] Make a vanishing point appear, where the interaction turns back in on its own potential, and where that potential appears for itself. That could be a definition of producing an aesthetic effect” (2011, 49, original emphasis). The occurrent artist might offer a sonic reply: “Ring the bells that still can ring / Forget your perfect offering / There is a crack, a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in / That’s how the light gets in / That’s how the light gets in” (Cohen 1992).

An affective performance philosophy might conceptualise and mobilise the ‘aesthetic affect’ of a creative blind spot in and around the research and practice of performance. It would seek to return, again and again, to what might appear as the least hospitable place, but one that might offer the most critical and vital access route to the inventive charge of the event: the middle of the cut—the crack, the opening—as a fathomless aperture governed by a radically different logic than that of the representational norm of visibility—ocular-centrism. Cracks abound on the maps of existence, in the exploration of space and the reconstruction of time. Pursuing the incipient gaps in knowledge and experience in the folds of the aesthetic, I approach the event-performance as an actual and abstract device for thinking about, generating and re-imagining relational and ethical practices. Unlike the direct images we obtain from more obvious vantage points, breaks and holes offer an inflected sense of something unanticipated, something that broods from under the grounds of our cognition, eliciting further attention.

These zones of divarication and deformation are generative of variations that extract from the realm of the aesthetic the very abstraction that allows the cut to be open, elastic and resonant across practices and modalities of perceiving, and perceiving differently. From this sundering of experience a making sense of events emerges as the residual force of the semblance, whose unpredictable appearance disrupts, challenges, and resists attempts at representational capture; that is, it ‘appears’ in the suspension of all preconceived logics of (explicit) representation. This residue potential is what Roland Barthes ([1979] 1981) called the punctum: “the punctum is the appearance through the photo of an affective after-life. It is the strike of a life as a force, beyond

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an actual life. In other words, as abstracted from it, as a real but abstract force of life-likeness” (Massumi 2011, 57).

The (biogrammatic) topography of performance, I propose, actualises the likeness of the striking force that cuts across the unique figure of an event of sensations where/when it wells on the cusp of its perishing. I have drawn attention here to this diagrammatic emblem as the indiscrete, indefinite singularity that relates to the apparent monadicity of the line between the virtual and the actual. The deep cuts and interruptions within this inorganic experience connects in affective ways to the folding and unfolding of “bare life”18—the incipient traces of embodied difference. This figurative element is the differenciator—the “dark precursor,” to say it with Deleuze (1993, 119)—which makes ‘different’ more apparent, the space between dissimilars that connects them through their difference. Its inherent abstraction—virtuality—is here posed as the semblematic value within the operative systems of artistic performance as the invisible, affective force that puts bodies into immediate relation to one another. It is, in other words, the visceral, suspenseful act that designates nothing less than a lure for thinking- and feeling-with others.

This diagrammatic configuration becomes fleshed out beside any phenomenological or psychoanalytical, embodied or immersive, wholly specular body experience. Specifically, what takes place in the gap of the disappearance of the imagistic body of the self-possessed subject is the range of relative perspectives in which the body is subject, object, and in-between; its emergent qualities interlocking, distributed, contingent, and multiple. What is left is a continuous process transposed on a temporal scale of interstitial nodes where empirical space is distantiated and the relational engendered by the distribution of affective architectures and topographies. This is a manifestation of the virtual: it belongs to the virtual. It is real but also abstract, with a potentiality of mediations and transformations that actualises the event-full process of being-becoming, becoming-intense, becoming-other, and now, becoming-with-others. I have called this alive performance.

In this sense, performance indeed reappears as a sensuous experience of nonsensuous relations, as a form—or technique—of life fundamentally shared. Its affective currents arise spontaneously and often come to pass ‘unrecognised’, falling outside of consciousness. They are activated and disseminated; kinetically and synaesthetically yoked together across sensory, spatial, and temporal disparities. They operate through vision but are not contained in or by it. By manipulating rhythm, movement, scale, and light differentials, this practice of abstraction makes its subject appear and disappear with the mimesis and artifice necessary for the event to return its repeated invocations and re-orientations. It can produce a visual experience of essentially invisible realms: shared phantoms or shadows that “might be better off called a fictive relational reality” (Massumi 2003, 12); incorporeal interactions of separate forms of life that emerge together in occurrent affective attunement. From this perspective, alive performance can envelop a universe of felt relations and constitute a “tacit archive of shared and shareable experience” (Massumi 2003, 9); a register of semblances in which no-thing consistently reappears. An affective archive that is returned in the flesh-and-blood of things burning with, always with, the many others, in intensified contact.

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What we experience in this archive is an intensity mobilised through proprioceptivity and viscerality; a folding in and out of subject-object relationality in a ‘sensitive’ time-form. The cellular structures of this inorganic semblance of bare life can be articulated as the critical practice of a vital and virtual archive of experience: the visceral sensibility of the temporalities of the flesh; all flesh, human and inhuman. These incorporeal registers are here activated as a temporality of habit and memory that recognises the excitations of life that reappear—remediated, remodulated, recirculated—across possible futures of opened-up pasts, hence remaking the historical present of performance as something lived, alive, still happening, and more. The pragmatic implication of such interpretive gestures is an syn/aesth/ethic theory of performance and research that traverses the alive bodies and matters with an immersive activist philosophy.

1 For Patricia Clough and her co-authors (2007) affect itself is a physical energy that unites a variety of human subjects through and with nonhuman objects, helping to constitute social relations separate from and prior to our ability to decipher meaning (65). The particular inflections that this writing takes will bypass this subject/object division in favour of a more ubiquitous relation of elements existing alongside one another in perspectival turns.

2 I do not intend to begin, or end, with the naiveté of origins or telos, but rather right in the middle of a raw topography in which we can collocate some critical moments and movements in the arts.

3 I will be using this bracketed form throughout to figure the continuous encroachment of the space of the moment with the time of movement.

4 Notably, Schneider follows on: “[t]hey can also feel like downright bad art,” but what matters perhaps is that they feel differently.

5 Massumi (2002) writes:

call the perpetual future-past doubling ordinary events supplementarity. The exemplary event is the transposition of supplementarity into the lure of unity. Transposed supplementarity in the mode of being of the pure event. (64, original emphasis)

6 That is, a perceptual feeling or sensibility delocalised from any specific object and subject as if it were a detached emergence.

7 Massumi draws this concept in large part from Walter Benjamin’s concepts of “mimesis” and “nonsensuous similarity” and Susanne Langer’s theories of perceptual movement in art.

8 As Marx and various interpreters remind us, abstraction is taken to divorce the subject from the product of their own performance. See Marx (1990), but also Lefebvre (1972); Horvath and Gibson (1984); Toscano (2008). 9 The biogrammatic concept is extension of Massumi’s notion of a diagram, evocative of the double articulations between forms of content and forms of expression.

10 Notably, synaesthetic conjunctions involve all the senses in various combinations, including smell and touch. How can we forget here Proust’s cookie taste for soggy crumbs reactivating the forgotten sight of a little madeleine? Or what about the multi-modal sensory maps of Camillo’s legendary “Theatre of Memory”?

11 For, Massumi writes: “affect is synaesthetic, implying a participation of the senses in each other: the measure of a living thing’s potential interactions is its ability to transform the effects of one sensory mode into those of another” (2002, 35).

Notes

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12 Ontogenesis is a concept that fuses together the thought of Massumi, Gilles Deleuze, Baruch Spinoza, Gilbert Simondon and Henri Bergson.

13 The incorporeal dimension of the biogram resonates with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the Body-without-Organs or ‘BwO’—an extensive form of becoming that exceeds the organic form (see 1987, 153).

14 The syneastetic sonority of this work deserves better and greater attention that I can grant here. I remand the reader to the reading of Alan Read’s analysis in Theatre, Intimacy and Engagement: The Last Human Venue (2009), especially pp.165–170, and Daniel Sack’s (2009) review of this work.

15 Molar and molecular are Deleuzo-Guattarian terms that switch the register from subjectivities to assemblages; from being to becomings; from the human to the inhuman: “[t]here is no becoming-man because man is the molar entity par excellence, whereas becomings are molecular” (1987, 292).

16 This is a term that I coin to address performance as emblematic of the workings of the “semblance.”

17 Massumi draws this definition of being from Gilbert Simondon. See also Erin Manning’s Always More than One (2013).

18 I am mobilising this term from Giorgio Agamben’s controversial work Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1988). Briefly here, “bare life” can be defined as "life exposed to death”, especially in the form of sovereign violence (88).

Works Cited

Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Auslander, Philip. 1999. Liveness. London: Routledge.

Barthes, Roland. (1979) 1981. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Brennan, Teresa. 2004. The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Castellucci, Claudia, et al. 2007. The Theatre of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio. London: Routledge.

Clough, Patricia, et al. 2007. ‘Notes towards a theory of affect-itself.’ Ephemera 7: 60–77.

Cohen, Leonard. 1992. Anthem. CD. New York: Columbia Records.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1993. Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Hillaert, Wouter and Thomas Crombez. 2005. ‘Cruelty in the Theatre of The Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio.’ Accessed 25 May 2017. http://homepages.ulb.ac.be/~rgeerts/inlthewet/castelluci.pdf

Horvath, R.J., and K.D. Gibson. 1984. ‘Abstraction in Marx’s method.’ Antipode 16 (1): 12–25. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.1984.tb00060.x

Lefebvre, Henri. 1972. The Sociology of Marx. London: Penguin.

Manning, Erin. 2013. Always More than One. Durham: Duke University Press.

Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital, Volume I. Translated by B. Fowkes. New York: Penguin.

Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for The Virtual. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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———. 2003. ‘The Archive of Experience.’ http://www.brianmassumi.com/textes/Archive%20of%20Experience.pdf

———. 2011. Semblance and Event. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomonology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge.

Morson, Gary Saul. 1998. ‘Sideshadowing and Tempics.’ New Literary History 29 (4): 599–624. https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.1998.0043

Phelan, Peggy. 1993. Unmarked. London: Routledge.

———. 2003. ‘Performance, Live Culture and Things of The Heart.’ Journal of Visual Culture 2 (3): 291–302. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412903002003002

Rancière, Jacques. 2010. Dissensus. Translated by Steve Corcoran. London: Continuum.

Read, Alan. 2009. Theatre, Intimacy and Engagement: The Last Human Venue. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Sack, Daniel. 2009. ‘Tragedia Endogonidia, and The Theatre of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio (Review).’ TDR: The Drama Review 53 (1): 147–51. https://doi.org/10.1162/dram.2009.53.1.147

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2003. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Seltzer, Mark. 1997. ‘Wound Culture: Trauma in The Pathological Public Sphere.’ October 80: 3–26. https://doi.org/10.2307/778805

Schneider, Rebecca. 2011. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. London: Routledge.

Toscano, Alberto. 2008. ‘The open secret of real abstraction.’ Rethinking Marxism 20 (2): 273–287. https://doi.org/10.1080/08935690801917304

Biography

Annalaura works across performance and academia, and between London and Liverpool. Since 2015, she holds a lectureship post at Liverpool Hope University in Drama and Performance Studies. Her current practice explores performance as a frame that renders interesting collaborations between the so-called human, nonhuman life and immaterial agencies. The ensuing critical and physical forms focus on anomalous or fragmented bodies in relation to affective politics, radical activism and cosmopolitics. Always passionately seeking meaningful collaborations and participations to further these concerns, together with others.

© 2017 Annalaura Alifuoco

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY VOL 3, NO 1 (2017):146–161 DOI: https://doi.org/10.21476/PP.2017.3173

ISSN 2057-7176

PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY

BEUYS’ CHAIR AND THE VIOLENCE OF THE OTHER: TOWARD A THEORY OF AESTH-ETHICS

DROR PIMENTEL BEZALEL ACADEMY OF ART & DESIGN JERUSALEM

It would seem that no other artist has succeeded in harnessing his art to social and political engagement better than Joseph Beuys. This mainly holds true for Beuys’ performance art (Aktion) of the 1960s and 70s that contributed greatly to the institutionalization of performance as a legitimate form of artistic expression. Beuys was not the first artist to practice performance: he was preceded by artists from the beginning of the 20th century such as Hugo Ball, Filippo Marinetti, and Tristan Tzara. However, while these artists viewed performance as an experimental form of art that addressed a limited and elitist audience and generated enigmatic meaning, Beuys turned performance into a form of art that addressed a much wider audience and generated a much more accessible and communicative meaning.

Beuys’ performance art is also distinguished by its engagement with pedagogy and politics. As shown by Cornelia Lauf, Beuys does not differentiate between his teaching and his artistic work, often mixing them together in various ways. For example, he includes relics of his teaching practice, such as a drawing board, in his performances (Lauf 1992, 16). Similarly, as illustrated by Caroline Tisdall, Beuys does not differentiate between an act of performance and a political act. His performances practice the politics of disseminated power, and in this way, they continually challenge the common notion of democracy, while transporting it to radical democracy (Tisdall 1998).

As Beuys’ performance art—which resists fixed definition by constantly oscillating between artistic, pedagogic, and political action—has already been widely addressed in academic literature, this article does not attempt to contribute to this discussion. Rather, it aims to reflect on Beuys’ art

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from another perspective, one that is phenomenological rather than socio-political. To this aim, the article will forgo reflection on Beuys’ performance art and will instead focus on his sculpture, mainly the sculpture Fat Chair, dated 1964, which has a performativity of its own.

This performativity—so the article wishes to argue—manifests brilliantly the tension between the violence of culture and the violence of the primordial Other which culture negates via the processes of limitation and economy, thought in their broad sense. Thus it could be argued that Beuys’ artistic practice gives a visual manifestation of the aporia of culture and nature in a way that is other than that of the theoretical academic discourse. By so doing, it could be further argued that Beuys’ art subverts the traditional categorical distinction separating art from philosophy. Just as Nietzsche could be viewed as an artist-philosopher, so Beuys could be viewed as a philosopher-artist. This deconstructive gesture of thought brings to light the hidden affinity between art and philosophy, which may also be dealing with the same problematic of the human condition, only with different procedures of meaning production.

Beuys’ Chair

The rarest works of art are those that seem as if destiny has allotted them the task of summarizing, in a single material stroke, a dilemma that occupies culture as a whole. This is precisely the origin of their immortality, and such is the artwork of Beuys entitled Fat Chair. The first thing that strikes the eye in this work is the binary structure to which its name testifies: a chair on the one hand, and a lump of fat placed on top of it on the other. These two elements hold a tension, and the question arises as to what precisely is the source of this tension.

To address this, it is necessary to deepen our inquiry into the two elements that comprise the work. First and foremost, we should consider the chair. In some cases, rather than create new objects, art appropriates objects from daily life. In so doing, it alienates them and makes them appear strange, as if they are being seen for the first time. This is precisely what happens with Beuys’ chair.

Just as Marcel Duchamp posits a bicycle wheel on a stool, Beuys posits a lump of fat on a chair. In our being in the world, we are constantly surrounded by chairs. Chairs are to be found in the public sphere—in cars, cafes, streets and parks. Chairs are also to be found in the workplace—the manager’s chair, the student’s chair, the clerk’s chair, the patient’s chair and so forth. Chairs are also to be found in our homes, usually outnumbering the inhabitants: there is the chair in the kitchen, the chair on the terrace, and so forth. As we go from chair to chair during the day—from the kitchen chair to the car seat to the work chair—we tend to forget what chairs are for in the first place. It is as if Beuys wrests us out of this game of chairs and invites us to ponder the essence of the chair for the first time.

And indeed, following Beuys, a number of questions arise. What are chairs for? Of course, they are for sitting on. But what is sitting for? One needs to sit, sometimes desperately, since it can be hard to stand up for long periods. Sitting should be viewed as an intermediate solution between lying down on a bed, so natural to our bodies, and standing upright, which our bodies can find hard to

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maintain. This intermediate solution enables us to remain engaged in the world, to write and to eat for example, with a significant decrease in the effort it requires.

In this sense, a chair is a human-made object which perhaps defines the human as-such. A chair is a human object, since only humans can sit. Only humans can sit, since only humans can stand. By way of negation, the chair therefore testifies to the uprightness of humans; to the fact that, at some time in the course of their history, they began to stand on their feet. As such, the chair is deeply connected to the ethos of the uprightness of humans, and along with this, to their essential difference from other animals. Animals do not sit—in the human sense of the word—since animals do not stand in the first place.

According to Bataille, this creates a hierarchy of organs: in animals, the head and buttocks are at the same height, while in humans, the head is higher than the buttocks, and is thus considered to be a more valuable organ. Bataille’s aim—most apparent in Story of the Eye—is to deconstruct this hierarchy and restore equilibrium in terms of height, and so equality, of the head and the buttocks, as is the case with animals (Bataille 2013).1

After this general reflection on the essence of chairs, we now turn our attention to Beuys’ chair in particular. The first question that arises is why Beuys chooses this particular chair. The answer is clear: the chair he chooses is the most functional one, aspiring to a zero degree of comfort and verging on asceticism. What is immediately striking is the chair’s minimalism, intended to avoid any feature that is not related to function.

In passing, it is worth mentioning similarities with Freud’s chair. 2 In Freud’s chair, the framework only supports the body where it is most needed, along the arms and the back; any trace of excessive comfort is absent from the chair, giving rise to a skeleton of a chair. The weird design was intended to support the rather eccentric sitting position in which Freud used to read. The chair generates a distinct uncanny feeling in its beholder. Besides being due to its weird design, this uncanny feeling most likely arises from the resemblance of the backrest feature to the shape of a

Fig.2: The chair in Freud’s work room. Freud Museum, London.

Fig.1: Joseph Beuys, Fat Chair (1964). Fat, wax, barbed wire, wooden chair,

41.6x94.5 cm.

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human figure, bringing to mind the anorectic human figure apparent in Giacometti’s sculptures. The uncanny feeling probably stems from the fact that, even when no one is sitting on the chair, it seems as if someone still occupies it—that is, the backrest itself.

In the words of Le Corbusier, the chair—whether Beuys’ or Freud’s—is thus turned into a “sitting machine,” destined to fulfil its function and nothing more. Comfort is therefore sacrificed for the sake of functionality. What is important is that this functionality contributes to the policing of ways of sitting on the chair. This policing minimizes the range of sitting postures and positions available to the body. In fact, it would appear that this policing is precisely what interests Beuys about this chair; that this policing is precisely what justifies his choice; and this choice reveals the violence of the chair. Here we come to what could be seen as a paradox: on the one hand the chair is a product of culture, symbolizing the difference between the human and the animal; while one the other hand, it is a violent object, executing forceful and coercive practices of limitation and regulation on the living body. But is this really a paradox? Perhaps culture is violent in its very nature, no less than nature itself. Beuys’ chair therefore invites us to reflect on the relation between violence and culture, and hence on the nature of violence as such.

The Violence of the Other (ha-Rav)

Indeed, what does culture have to do with violence? The usual answer to this question is that culture is aimed at reducing violence in order to guarantee coexistence. But as we have seen, this product of culture called chair turns out to be a violent machine. How can this be? To answer this, we clearly need to further deepen our inquiry into the essence of violence.

To this aim we must be violent with violence by making a distinction within violence itself. It can be argued that the violence of culture, as manifested in the chair, is not the first violence; that it is in fact preceded by another violence: the violence of the Other. Following Benjamin, the violence of culture—as it is manifested in the chair for example—can be termed secondary violence (Benjamin calls this law-preserving violence). This violence is preceded by another violence, the violence of the Other, that can be termed primal violence (Benjamin calls this law-making violence) (Benjamin 1986, 277–300). In the beginning, then, there was violence.

But what precisely is the nature of this primal violence? Any attempt to define it will miss the mark, since the violent nature of this kind of violence is manifested precisely in its fierce resistance to definition. This resistance is the origin of its violent nature; it is violence itself. Nevertheless, the resistance to definition can provide us with an initial definition by way of negation: primal violence is concerned with resistance to any attempt at definition. Definition is the first step towards identity, and in this sense, primal violence can be viewed as an all-out war on the first principle of philosophy: the principle of identity.

Primal violence can be viewed as an arch-war, a war at the arche (“origin”). This is a state of war of every one against every other; of the one invading the other up to the point where there is no one and no other. This involves the blurring of any border or identity, and hence any definition. This is

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why primal violence can also be termed the violence of difference, when thought in line with Derrida (1982, 1–27), or the violence of the Thing when thought in line with Lacan (1992, 43–57). I myself wish to call it the violence of ha-Rav.3

The introduction of this Hebrew neologism can be justified in several ways: Firstly, one should always aspire to philosophize in one’s own mother tongue in order to retain in the discourse the pre-Oedipal, and hence pre-logical, reverberations of language, i.e., the semiotic, as Kristeva would have it.

Secondly, the Hebrew language in particular, as with the Greek language, can be counted among the primordial philosophical languages, in which the fundamental philosophical terms such as Being (“Havaya” in Hebrew, which stems from the very same root as the unspoken word “Yehova,” i.e., “God”) were first spelled out. This testifies to an inner connection between philosophy and the Hebrew language.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, this Hebrew neologism achieves what is practically unachievable in other languages, i.e., it captures in a single word both the Thing and its innate violence. How is this so? It just happens, by pure chance (or not?), that this Hebrew word—ha-Rav—carries three distinct yet connected meanings: “manifold” (ribui); “quarrel” or “dispute” (riv); and “sovereignty” (ribonut), from which the word Rabbi is derived and with which the English reader is perhaps better acquainted. These three meanings incessantly contaminate each other: it could therefore be argued that the irreducible manifold of ha-Rav is in constant quarrel and dispute; and that this disputed manifold should be viewed as the first sovereign, since all other sovereigns—whether the super ego or the state—as Freud and Benjamin show us, draw their sovereignty from it.

The violence of the Other (Rav) does not necessarily carry a negative sense, being both beyond good and evil, and before there is even any difference between the two. It does not resemble human violence since human violence is mostly engaged with intention, and even pleasure. The Violence of the Other (Rav) is instead violent in the sense that it devours any gesture on behalf of any being, whether object or subject, to constitute an identity of its own. Any gesture of this kind immediately crumbles into the beaten being of the Other (Rav), in which there is only room for manifold, and not for identity; and which devours anything that wishes to differentiate itself as a being from Being or as thing from the Thing. Just as the Other (Rav) is indifferent to the difference between good and evil, so it is indifferent to the difference between object and subject. The violence of the Other (Rav) could therefore be considered as preobjective and presubjective.

From the side of the object, so phenomenology teaches us, the violence of the Other (Rav) is embodied in excess, prior to any determination. Out of this excessive excess, with the help of categorical reductive and formative procedures, the thing called “object” will eventually unfold. From the side of the subject, so psychoanalysis teaches us, it is manifested in the bunch of drives called “Id,” and from this bunch of drives, with the help of the procedures of repression and denial, the thing that calls itself “I” will eventually unfold; it “must” unfold, so Freud teaches.

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The concept that is not a concept of ha-Rav, therefore, violates the distinction between object and subject as it resides on both sides of this difference; it is “outside” as well as “inside.”

The Violence of the Father

The discussion of the limitation procedures taking place from the side of the object, as well as from the side of the subject, enables us to trace the initial contours of secondary violence. From the side of the object, it could be termed violence of the category. As is well known, Kant supposes the sensuous giveness (Gegebenheit), that spontaneously comes from outside, to be chaotic, and hence un-understandable. The main thrust of his Copernican revolution resides in his claim that the constitution of the sensuous giveness (or sensual Rav) into a meaningful world occurs with the help of twelve a priori concepts—the categories—whether unity, manifold, cause, substance, and so forth. The apprehension of the sensuous Rav through the categories constitutes it into a distinct object which Kant designates as “phenomenon.” In this way, the categorical constitution creates an understandable world that is subject to the laws of science which stem from the structure of reason itself (Kant 2004). But this constitution of a meaningful world is essentially violent since it entails the reduction of ha-Rav. The secondary violence of the category could therefore be thought of as situated in an opposition to the primal violence of ha-Rav.

From the side of the subject, we shall refer to the secondary violence as the violence of the Father. Of course, this does not refer to the biological father of flesh and blood, but rather, the symbolic father in the language of Lacan. According to Lacan’s critique of Freud, the pivotal figure of the father should be stripped of its concrete physiological traits and instead be thought in structural terms as a function of signification. Lacan’s symbolic father functions first and foremost as an agent of the law, an agent that enforces this law coercively and violently on the newly-born subject, and ushers her/him into the Symbolic Order.

However, before the newly-born subject can turn into a speaking-being (parlêtre) and be assimilated into the Symbolic Order, she/he must go through a process of figuration and identification that is achieved in what Lacan terms “the mirror stage.” By going through this mirror stage—in which the reflection of the holistic figure of the body as it appears in the mirror is projected onto the chaotic and formless primal self—the subject acquires an ideal and hence imaginary identity of her/his own (Lacan 1993, 107–142).

Ha-Rav, in its subjective context—that unbridled bunch of drives of the primal self, more of an “It” than an “I”—discovers in front of the mirror the joy of gazing at the whole and harmonious figure of the body. This is the first time, so Lacan’s myth of the mirror stage tells us, that ha-Rav in its subjective context encounters identity; that is, something whole, ideal by nature, which is nothing other than the figure of the body. From here on, ha-Rav will undergo an idealization process: in aspiring to identity, it will peel off its instinctual excess and dress itself in the ideal but imaginary figure of the thing called “I.”

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The imaginary I will then be ushered into language by its trembling symbolic father, as Isaac led by Abraham to Mount Moriah. This sacrifice of the first-born, violent in itself, is embodied in the Lacanian term the Name of the Father (nom du père). This term connotes, not only the name, but also the law, since the name and the law are linguistically affiliated due to the fact that the origin of the name of the name (nom) is the name of the law in Greek (nomos). So we are dealing here with a double sacrifice: the symbolic father not only enforces on the subject the name in particular and language in general, but also the law (Lacan 2006, 67).

How should this duplicity of the name and the law be understood? By ushering the subject into language, the symbolic father enforces the exchange of the lively thing with its ossifying name. This is a violent exchange involving the murder of the thing by the word, as Lacan puts it (Lacan 1993, 174). The name stands, of course, for the signifiers in their entirety, first and foremost linguistic signifiers. At the same time, the father also enforces the law forbidding incest which, as shown by Kristeva, is the origin of all laws (Kristeva 1982, 90–112). The ban on incest enforces the exchange of the first object of desire (the Mother) with secondary objects, and hence the exchange of enjoinment (jouissance), i.e., sexuality without restriction, with pleasure (plaisir), i.e., sexuality under the restriction of the law. The subject is thus ushered into the unpromised land of the Oedipal universe, that penal colony of the castrated, created by the simultaneous harsh reduction of the thing (signified) to the word (signifier) and enjoinment (sexuality without restriction) to pleasure (sexuality under the law’s restriction).

These two—the name and the law—are secretly bound together: the violence of the law that enforces castration is precisely that which generates the signifier, which brings about the exchange of the thing with the name. The name is thus acquired by the sacrifice of the most precious, enjoinment; but at the same time, the name is also a gift as it enables language, and hence culture as a whole.

This bond between the name and the law is most apparent in the act of circumcision. This can perhaps only be properly articulated in Hebrew, due to the rather surprising fact that the Hebrew term for circumcision (Brit Mila) binds together the values of “castration” and “word” by rendering them in the same notion (Mila). In this sense, the term literally says “the pact of circumcision/word.” This is, then, the essence of the pact: in being circumcized (Mila), that is, in the inscription of the law on the body, the subject is given the word (Mila), that is, language and culture as a whole. The gift of language is therefore connected to circumcision.4 In other words, circumcision subtracts the Thing from the body while giving it the name. The pact of circumcision/word (Brit Mila) ushers the subject into what can be termed the Order of Circumcision/Word (Seder ha-Mila).

The above is further reinforced in Freud’s “Totem and Taboo,” which tells the story of the birth of humanity (Freud 1950). Freud posits a paradox: the law forbidding murder is itself won by an act of murder. The murder of the primordial father by his sons is precisely that which guarantees the ban on murder. In that, it paves the way for the first social contract. The primordial father has an infinite amount of violence and enjoinment at his disposal, which he exerts mercilessly on the members of his pact: his sons and daughters. The only way to escape his tyranny is to murder him.

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In the horrific act of murdering their father, the sons constitute the law, so guaranteeing that neither of them will possess full ownership over violence and enjoinment, and leaving each of them with only a leftover of it. The murder of the father should be thought of as an unwanted necessity, since it prevents violence of a more horrific kind—the violence of the first father, the biggest assassin of them all.

It is important to differentiate between two categories of fatherhood: the primordial father, who precedes castration and is hence placed outside the Order of Circumcision/Word (Seder ha-Mila); and the secondary father, i.e., the Oedipal Father, who is castrated and hence situated within the Order of Circumcision/Word (Seder ha-Mila). In this sense, the murder of the primordial father belongs to the secondary violence; that is, the violence of the (Oedipal) Father emplaced over against primal violence, that of the primordial father.

This secondary violence—the violence of the (Oedipal) Father—can be recognized as the violence of economy in all its various manifestations. In this sense, it should also be considered as the violence of identity. The violence of the Father is emplaced over and against the violence of the Other (ha-Rav). Between these two kinds of violence, violent strife rages. Despite its injustice and wrong doing, the violence of the Father should be considered a necessary one, defending us from a more horrific kind of violence. The choice to be made is not between violence and nonviolence, but rather between two kinds of violence, the second being the lesser one.

Beuys’ Fat

We can now say that the murder of the Thing by the category in Kantian terms, or by the word in Lacanian terms, and the murder of the (primordial) father by his sons in Freudian terms, is also present in the chair. If the category and the word murder the Thing, so the chair murders the body. In its form, the chair embodies the presence of law in space; as such, it serves as the delegate of the violence of the Father turned against the living body. The chair, as we have seen above, violently denies the body a whole array of postures—such as lounging, stretching, and so on—in which the body feels comfortable and at ease. It tears the body away from the comfort of lounging, and it deports it to the exile of sitting.

If the subject of the violence of the chair in general is the living body, the subject of the violence of Beuys’ chair is fat. When Beuys loads the lump of fat onto the chair, he confronts it with it’s entirely other. The chair is an object of culture, while fat is an object of nature. The chair possesses a stiff and ascetic form. Fat, on the other hand, is formless and excessive, and it assumes the form of the vessel in which it is contained. The chair is structured, while fat is a-structural.

Fat should be viewed as surplus energy, extracted from the economy of metabolism and accumulated in reserve for future consumption. In this sense, not only does fat slip from structure, it also slips from economy in general, and in particular from the economy of life preservation. This is why—as already acknowledged by Mark Taylor (Taylor 2012, 16–19)—it is considered to be an abject material, repressed and extracted from the economy of the body as well as from the

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economy of cultural representations. What is fat, then, if not a materialistic embodiment of that violent Other (ha-Rav), alien to structure and economy. Against this abject, excessive, and violent Other (ha-Rav), the violence of the chair comes forth and enforces form on it.

As is well known, fat also carries a personal significance for Beuys, stemming from the trauma he suffered during World War Two when his Stuka dive bomber was shot down over the Crimea Peninsula. Beuys survived the crash and was taken care of by a local Tatarian tribe who applied animal fat to his body and wrapped it with felt. This healing procedure preserved his body heat and prevented him from freezing to death. After the war, Beuys would turn this story—which was never properly verified—into his formative myth as an artist, echoing the myth of Christ: only he who has dwelt near death; only he who has lost his life and then been reborn, can create art. The creation of meaning must undergo the utter loss of meaning.

Moreover, only he who has gone through such an experience understands that life is constantly under threat and subject to extinction at any moment. This is why Beuys lives in a constant state of emergency: at any moment he is ready for catastrophe to befall him, and because of this, he is equipped with appropriate means of survival, such as his trademark, the multipocketed vest. The experience he has undergone also accords him the privileged status of the shaman, which he declares by wearing his hat, also his trademark. In this way, art and life are intermixed: art employs living materials, and the artist becomes a walking piece of art.

This myth gives fat a personal significance on top of those already mentioned. As a material that saved his life, fat—along with felt, copper, honey, and gold—turns into a life conducting material in Beuys’ sculptural vocabulary, a material that is able to preserve life energy and conduct it to wherever it is most needed.

And indeed, it is most needed: it is not only Beuys that is in a state of emergency, but also the society in which he lives. This holds true mainly for the 1960s and 70s in which Beuys was active. The mission Beuys undertakes in these years, performed in a sense of unprecedented emergency, is that of primarily healing post-war Germany, in which death had become a thriving industry, by reconnecting it to the life energies of ha-Rav through life preserving materials, primarily fat.

This holds true, not only for Germany, but also for society as a whole, especially American society as the main force driving capitalism. As his work I Like America and America Likes Me indicates, Beuys is also concerned with America. To heal America he recruits the coyote, the wild wolf that used to roam its prairies. For him, the coyote is just another embodiment of the vital energies of ha-Rav, which, like fat, is employed by him to heal America that has detached itself almost completely from Nature by an ever-growing capitalist entrepreneurism. This holds true, not only in the 20th century, but also in the 21st century. In early capitalism, the merchandise that emerged from the production lines exchanged natural matter. In the late capitalism of our age, the simulacratic representation seen on our TVs, computers, and iPhones replaces merchandise itself. This is a state of emergency since this age of accelerated capitalism in America, and worldwide, alienates us from being before the signifier.

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The Aporia of Fat

After explicating the significance of the chair and the fat, we can now make sense of Beuys’ work as a whole. Beuys brilliantly articulates the aporetic tension between the violence of the Father and the violence of the Other (ha-Rav). As we have seen, the chair stands for the violence of the Father, while the fat stands for the violence of the Other (ha-Rav).

Between these two, a pact is made—the pact of the chair and the fat—which could be viewed as a material manifestation of the pact of the Order of Circumcision/Word (Seder ha-Mila) mentioned earlier. As such, Beuys’ work serves as a materialistic embodiment of the fissure between the violence of the Father and the violence of the Other (ha-Rav), and in this way, it articulates the aporia occupying culture as a whole.

But precisely in what way is this aporia articulated in Beuys’ work? To answer this, we must come back to the fat. As already mentioned, fat should be considered as a reservoir of excessive energy extracted from the life preservation economy of the living body. As such, it should be considered as belonging to the violence of the Other (ha-Rav). But what has eluded our attention so far is that the real living fat—that which embodies body tissue—is not the fat appearing in Beuys’ work.

This is for three reasons: firstly, Beuys’ fat is industrialized, having undergone complex production procedures. This is precisely what motivated Beuys’ critics, who found it hard to notice the difference between his use of fat and the way it is used in the food industry. The amount of fat used in the discussed work is nothing compared to that used in another work of Beuys, dated 1977, and taking place in the city of Münster. In this work, Beuys filled up an entire underground pedestrian passage with animal fat. This was later cast into gigantic lumps and displayed under the title “Tallow.” This monstrous amount of fat—the monster of Münster—raises the question of human’s carnivorous violence against animals. It points to the fact that the Treblinka concentration camp is a mundane reality and part of the daily life of animals. This monstrous amount of fat also raises other monstrosities from the dead, such as the fat of the exterminated Jews nourishing the soil of Auschwitz.

Secondly, the fat appearing in the work is not shown in its crude, natural state, but is rather formalized into a geometrical shape of a triangular prism. It is true that this shape escapes strict precision, given the fact that its flanks still reveal the somewhat rough un-linear texture of the fat of which it is made. But nevertheless, it is still a form, perhaps the zero-degree of form.

Thirdly, the fat is torn out of its environment and placed on a chair, which serves as the stage of its appearance. Not only the chair itself serves as a stage of appearance, but also the museum in which the chair is situated, and hence, the entire cultural array which enables the visibility of art.

The living fat has therefore undergone reduction through three distinct but related procedures: its industrialization, its formalization into a triangle, and its appearance on the stage of art. Having undergone these three reductions, it could be said—contrary to Taylor’s approach which identifies Beuys’ fat as being real fat (Taytlor 2012, 16)—that, in line with Derrida’s spectrology as formulated

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in his later writings (Derrida 1994, 1–60), Beuys’ fat is therefore not real fat, but rather a specter of fat.

This, then, is the aporia of fat: its significance as an excessive, violent, abject material, pertaining to the violence of the Other (ha-Rav), must be lost in advance in order for it to appear in art. Fat “itself,” as it is to be found in animal flesh prior to its industrial processing for example, is practically meaningless. Fat only comes to acquire its meaning when, having been utterly lost in its formation processes, the cultural process enables its appearance in art. The appearance of fat in art is therefore conditioned by the loss of its being.

We are dealing here with an argument of a much greater scale: the noneconomical violence of the Other (ha-Rav) can only appear through the economy of the violence of the Father. It should be stressed that—drawing mainly on Levinas and Derrida—the notion of economy is employed here in its broad sense, as pertaining to any procedure of measuring, numbering, reckoning, calculating, and so forth, and hence of limitation and reduction,5 whether it be executed in economy in the strict sense or in the fields of culture and society, as well as in those of epistemology and ontology.

Thus the precultural and presymbolic excess and violence only acquire meaning from within culture, that is, within the economy. But in order to appear in culture, it must lose its being. This aporia was probably articulated for the first time in the later stages of Heidegger’s thought: the primordial meaning of Being can only appear through the misleading interpretations of Being which constitute the history of metaphysics. This aporia is further articulated by Derrida in the concept that is not a concept of différance.

This is precisely the place to host the notion of hospitality to which this path of thinking has led us so far. The notion of hospitality goes hand in hand with that of the aporia since the aporetic manifestation of one element within the other, justice within law for example in Derrida’s case (Derrida 1992) or the violence of the Other (i.e., the fat) within the violence of the Father (i.e., the chair) in Beuys’ case, is none other than the hospitality of the entirely Other within any given economy, be it the economy of law in Derrida’s case, or the economy of culture in Beuys’ case. These economies should be viewed as different names for what is termed here the violence of the Father.

This claim enables us to shift the discourse of hospitality originating in Levinas from the social sphere to the aesthetic sphere. Levinas situates hospitality within the other human’s face. The hospitality at stake is that of the other confronting the self face-to-face. The hospitable self must relinquish his desire to kill the other, and in so doing make way for the other to traumatically breach the economy of his solipsistic world. For hospitality in this sense Levinas reserves the term “Ethics,” which is identified with Justice, and so resists translation into a system of laws , that is, what can be termed “morality” (Levinas 1979, 194–211). The entire force of Levinas’ argument rests on his insistence on regarding the social sphere—where the encounter with the other takes place—as the sole sphere in which the event of hospitality takes place. In doing so, he denies art the possibility of acting as a sphere of hospitality (Levinas 1987). Contrary to Levinas, what is stated here insists on identifying art as a sphere of hospitality of the entirely Other, who is not to be identified

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with a benevolent God, as in Levinas’ case, but rather, with the violent Rav. This approach to art as a sphere of hospitality of the entirely Other could therefore be termed “Aesth-ethics.” That is, art as the hospitable event of the coming of the Other.

As we have seen, Beuys’ chair is a hospitable place, and as such, it can serve as a paradigm for Aesth-ethics, that is, of the event of hospitality of art. What is hosted in Beuys’ chair is precisely ha-Rav, this excessive violence and violent excess in the form of a lump of fat. Just as in the case of the prophet Elijah—hosted on an empty chair during the Passover feast—so ha-Rav does not appear on Beuys’ chair in itself, in its flesh and blood so to speak, but only as a specter. Ha-Rav does not appear in itself since Beuys’ fat is an industrialized fat, a cultivated fat, which has been through a long process of production before appearing on the stage of art. The real fat—if such a thing exists at all—has been lost in the processes of its production and appearance, that is, in the violence the Father. In this sense, the hospitality of art is aporetic. The thing that is not a thing called ha-Rav appears and does not appear in art; is present and not-present in it. It presents itself as a ghostly guest while departing, leaving behind a trail of that spectral scent preserved for festive events only.

According to Derrida, the notion of aporia is in fact disseminated into an infinity of aporias since it is of its nature never to be one (Derrida 1992, 3–67). To formulate a phrase like this means to do wrong to the aporia since the notion of aporia constantly undermines anything that declares itself to possess a “nature,” or an “essence,” of its own, anything which is pure and self-identical. This failure resides at the core of the traditional philosophical procedure of knowledge production which Derrida himself wishes to deconstruct. Precisely herein resides the power of Beuys’ art in particular and art in general: its ability to make manifest, in a single material stroke, the aporetic tension that constantly escapes traditional philosophical conceptualization.

It could further be argued that the aporia of the hospitable work of art is also the aporia of the hospitable work of art interpretation. As the work of art itself, it labors to capture the uncapturable. With its network of signifiers, the work of interpretation labors to capture that elusive thing—the Saying of art—which constantly resists formulation and evades discourse. In attempting to say that which is fated to remain unsaid—which is probably left unsaid in this article as well—the work of interpretation finds itself captured within an infinite hermeneutics.

From Fat to Ice: The Israeli Condition

Contrary to the banal conviction, adopted almost blindly by so many without further questioning, that philosophy deals with the most abstract and universal, I wish to uphold the contrary view according to which philosophy grows out of daily life and the concrete place in which this life is enfolded. This view has its roots already in Greek philosophy, as is attested by so many Greek philosophical terms originating in daily life. This is the case, for example, with the Greek word ousia, which, prior to its appropriation by philosophy, simply meant “household.” This is also the case with the Greek word idea, which in its un-philosophical use simply means “the visual aspect of things.”

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In this regard, it can be further argued that one cannot philosophize without taking into account one’s own personal circumstances stemming from one’s own bedrock of existence. As such, I would like to proceed with an analysis of a local work of art, made under the harsh light of the Israeli sun. As we shall see, this artwork bears a striking resemblance to Beuys’ Fat Chair. It is further argued that this artwork—just as Beuys’—also bears heavy political implications ensuing from the Israeli condition, which cannot be ignored.

The same aporetic hospitality residing in Beuys’ Fat Chair could also be found in David Brailovsky’s artwork entitled The Ice Keeper. While Beuys’ work is comprised of a chair holding a lump of fat, Brailovsky’s work is comprised of a pair of hands holding a lump of ice. As such, the lump of fat is replaced with a lump of ice, and the holding capacity is transferred from the chair to the hands. But despite this exchange and transference, the tension between a human element (chair/hand) placed below, and a nonhuman element (fat/ice) placed above, still exists.

Although the chair and the hand seem at first to be essentially different, even on the verge of opposition—since the chair is adjunct to the body while the hand belongs to the body—their juxtaposition reveals a purpose common to them both, that of holding: the chair holds the body while the hand holds the object. The hand, so to speak, is the chair of the body.

The chair and the hand also resemble each other in the sense that both host the humanity of humans. As mentioned above, the object called chair attests to the ethos of the uprightness of humans, distinguishing them from other animals. Following Heidegger, it could be said that the hand also attests to the humanity of the human: as part of his effort to embody thought, Heidegger locates the humanity of the human in the hands rather than in the mind since the hand is envisaged as a phenomenological appearing locus of Being. Since the humanity of humans is determined according to their relation to Being, and since the hand serves as an appearing locus of Being, the humanity of humans reside in their hands (Heidegger 1982, 117–124). This argument can be further reinforced from a linguistic perspective: in German, the word articulating the holding capacity of the mind (Begriff) is derived from the verb articulating the holding capacity of the hand (greifen). In English, these holding capacities of the mind and the hand are articulated by the same word—grasp—which can be used either literally, in the sense of grasping by the hand, or metaphorically, in the sense of grasping by the mind.

The chair and the hand are also similar in the sense that both are given the task of grasping the ungraspable: fat and ice. Both materials are flexible, constantly shifting between liquid and solid.

Fig. 3: David Brailovsky, A still picture from the video work The Ice Keeper (2010), 24x37cm. The artist’s

collection.

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This is why they both possess a zero degree of form which could evaporate in an instant. This is also the reason for their smoothness as well as their violence. As a reservoir of surplus energy, fat manifests the violence of devouring. Ice is the manifestation of the violence of the elemental—water in this case—inflicted on the hand as it tries to take hold of it. The holding of ice can only subsist for a few seconds due both to its smooth elusiveness and the frostbite it inflicts on the skin. In this way, just like fat, ice can be viewed as material embodiment of the violence of ha-Rav.

Similarly, just like the fat in Beuys’ work, the ice in Brailovsky’s work does not appear in its crude materiality. From the elemental ice of the mountain peaks in Antarctica and Himalaya, only a truncated leftover remains, shaped in the form of a plastic funnel that is filled up with tap water and placed in the freezer on the evening prior to the shooting of the picture. Like the fat, ice was torn out of its natural environment and placed in the hands that serve as the stage of its appearance. This is the aporia of ice: its violent nature must be lost in advance in order for it to appear in art. It only acquires its meaning as primal violence when its being is lost in its appearance in art. Art, then, serves as the “ice keeper,” in which ice “itself” only appears as a trace and a specter, as erased appearance, and as domesticated violence.

The political context of Brailovsky’s ice should not be ignored: the picture discussed is only part of a larger video work which bears the same title.6 The hands holding the ice and disappearing in the background darkness belong to a Palestinian teenager from Jaffa. The depicted ice does not originate in Antarctica or Himalaya, but rather in an ice cart that used to roam the streets of Jaffa. This ice cart—around which the video’s narrative is woven—serves as a reminder of the beauty of Jaffa before its occupation during the Israeli War of Independence, that is, before it was appropriated by Zionism.

Spectral remains of this bygone world can be found to this day along the Tel Aviv beach, mainly near the Hasan Beck mosque. Most of those who visit this place are unaware of the fact that the mosque is the sole building that remains of the Manshie neighborhood, which served as the border separating Jaffa from Tel Aviv, and of which only tile fragments glittering in the beach sands remain. Art, therefore, is the keeper, not only of ice, but also of the politically repressed, of that lost world of the city of Jaffa before it was violently erased by the Zionist occupation.

As suggested above, this is the case, not only of Brailovsky’s ice, but also of Beuys’ fat. Indeed, Beuys’ fat serves as a spectral reminder of that monstrous nature which is termed here ha-Rav. However, by the same token, it might just as well serve as a spectral reminder for the monstrosities of Auschwitz, that is, for the Jews’ body fat that was deposited in huge pits dug out in the fertile fields surrounding the death camp.

In conclusion, as we saw, the ice and the fat are both abject materials; are both aporetic specters of ha-Rav. At the same time, they both serve as a trace of a violence directed against the other, be it the Jews in Beuys’ case or the Palestinians in Brailovsky’s case. The fat and the ice—as spectral bearers of that violence against the other—find themselves opposed one against the other in an antithetical fashion. By doing so, they form a kind of an unresolved deadlock—a deadlock of violence—within which the Israeli condition resides.

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1 Towards the end of Story of the Eye, the heroine pulls out one of the priest’s eyeballs, and shoves it into her vagina. In so doing, she wishes to equalize the value of the organ of sight (symbolizing reason), with that of the sex organ (symbolizing corporeality).

2 This is to be found in the Freud Museum in London. It was especially designed for Freud as a birthday gift by the architect Felix Augenfeld in 1930 at the request of Freud’s daughter, Mathilda.

3 The syllable “ha” serves as the Hebrew prefix for articulation.

4 It is true that the phenomenon of circumcision is discussed in the psychoanalytic literature mainly from the perspective of the male sex. This can attest to a theoretical lacuna to be found in Freud, who devotes his argumentative thrust mainly to male sexuality while neglecting female sexuality. However, in an attempt to complement this lacuna, it could be argued that female circumcision practices do exist, and can be found to this day in native tribes in Africa, as well as in the Middle-east and Asia. With migration, however, it is now spreading to Western countries, and there are instances of it being carried out in Europe and America, even though it is illegal there.

5 The term “economy” is derived from the juxtaposition of two Greek words: oikos, which means “home”, “house”, and “household”, and nomos, meaning “law.” The literal translation of “economy” is thus “house laws.” 6 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4TbYf7U248

Notes

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———. 1993. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954, Book I, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by John Forrester. New York and London: W. W. Norton.

———. 2006. Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Translated by Bruce Fink, Héloįse Fink and Russell Grigg. New York: W.W. Norton.

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Lauf, Cornelia. 1992. Joseph Beuys: The Pedagogue as Persona. Ph D diss., Columbia University.

Levinas, Emmanuel. 1979. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. The Hague, Boston, London: Martinus Nijhoff. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-9342-6

———. 1987. “Reality and its Shadow.” Translated by Alphonso Lingis. In Collected philosophical papers, 1–15. Dordrecht, Boston, Lancaster: Martinus Nijhoff. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-4364-3_1

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Biography

Dr. Dror Pimentel teaches at the Bezalel Academy of Art & Design Jerusalem, both in the History & Theory Dept. and in the M.A. Program for Policy and Theory of Arts. Among his areas of interest are phenomenology, semiotics and aesthetics. Among his books: The Dream of Purity: Heidegger with Derrida (Magnes Press, 2009 [Hebrew]); Aesthetics (Bialik Institute, 2014 [Hebrew]); Being Written: Heidegger and Derrida (Palgrave NY [forthcoming]).

© 2017 Dror Pimentel

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY VOL 3, NO 1 (2017):162–177 DOI: https://doi.org/10.21476/PP.2017.3135

ISSN 2057-7176

PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY

ROBOTIC PERFORMANCE: AN ECOLOGY OF RESPONSE

ZORNITSA DIMITROVA

This article looks into regions of inter-robotic and human-robotic relations in performance. It defines robotic performance as a staged robotic interaction witnessed by a human audience or taking place irrespective of human presence. Works presenting such robotic creatures and their worlds address recent concerns with the crisis of ‘the obsolete body’ (as diagnosed by Stelarc).1 Yet they also attest to a certain level of participation that involves not so much ‘human’ entities than the intricate intra-cosmos of robotic artifacts. Rather than resorting to negativity (‘the body should be overcome’), robotic performance simultaneously reinstates the status of automata as counterparts to ‘humans’ and invites biological bodies to reassess their place in a world wherein entities formerly known as ‘human’ become part of an incessant exercise in inter-translational and co-determinative practices.

For this purpose, attention is paid to performances whereby mobile automata are involved in a variety of doings seemingly irrespective of human intervention. Such performances invite us to think of new, not restrictively human, models of participation. According to the present article, robotic performance drafts out an immersive ontology of interlacing bodies. This immersive ontology becomes a starting point for a revision of knowledge production patterns related to notions of participation as a human communal activity, as something inextricably related to concepts such as ‘life’ and ‘the living’. Rather than thinking in terms of ‘participation’ or ‘interaction’, here we can begin to think in terms of a practice that could be best described as ‘response’.

The ontological portrait of robotic performance can be said to revolve around recent interest in the generative force of matter itself and the clearing of a space of radical relationality within this genesis that allows levels of being to realign and open to one another. In the performances we

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witness an encounter between degrees of matter across the organic-artifactual divide, cutting across notions such as consciousness and intentionality to appeal to the very ontological processes that organise the given. Here nonorganic matter is perceived as an active participant in an ongoing ontogenesis, capable of altering its surroundings and bringing forth change in a world. In this way, artifactual entities open to one another and to a world of relations as they co-create a space of togetherness. This, however, is not achieved by putting on display an appealing and harmoniously constructed artifactual world. Rather, we are exposed to artifactual beings that mimetically render some most unsettling human features.

The present article dedicates a short excursus to each of these points. It aims to demarcate a field of vision and a set of lenses through which robotic performance can be encountered. These pages continually switch back and forth from the ‘reality’ of performance to the reality of what we have been accustomed to call ‘life’. By doing so, I show how performance can inform our ways of perceiving automata afresh and invest these interactions with onto-ecological value. Finally, the aim of this article is to propose an ecological vantage point that does justice to non-organic artifactual existence yet also looks at the concept of the human to allow for a positive refiguration of the term.

When Do We Speak of Robotic Performance?

This article defines robotic performance as a staging that foregrounds the primacy of robotic agency over that of humans. A ‘robot’ is understood broadly to mean an artifactual creature designed in such a way as to become capable of complex automated performance with a minimum of human intervention. Further still, such creatures perform in such a way as to co-create an ‘atmosphere’ or a ‘world’. Interaction takes place between seemingly autonomous robotic agents absorbed in the doings of their ‘worlds’. The robotic art culture of the San Francisco Bay Area offers some examples in this respect; the hobo robots of Frank Garvey’s OmniCircus Theatre and the military animalesque creatures of Survival Research Labs (SRL) come to mind. Further still, the definition of robotic performance can incorporate kinetic sculptures that generate their own performance space when in a regime of responsive immersion within an environment or with a spectatorship.

In these cases we witness automata entering various states of what we would habitually describe as participatory practice, of partaking in a world. That is to say, the perceived suspension of human primacy within a theatrically enhanced show space carries with it a perceived capacity of artifactual agents to rearrange worlds on their own terms. In this way, robotic performance is shown to stage quasi-autonomous machine worlds and to offer extra-human ways of organising space and time. Whereas one cannot claim that the dramaturgy of the robotic shows is entirely non-human (a certain ‘suspension of disbelief’ is invariably called for), we are immersed in a scenic environment that invites us to open a door toward an artifactual universe. The robotic spectacles remain anthropomorphic, and this subdued anthropomorphism is witnessed even in the way the robotic agents are constructed—as organisms operating within an environment and in perpetual clash with it, mimetically enacting the survival effort of organic beings. At the same time, robotic

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performance works with forms of organisation that follow a logic not immediately available to human understanding. For instance, the performance sequences are not necessarily narrational, reminding us of the quasi-causal and gestural character of postdramatic theatre. Most of the time, robotic performances present us with non-narrative sequences that are not actional but evental; that is, they do not adhere to a plot and do not tell a story. Also, the robotic spectacles do not offer much help when it comes to our human effort to glean meaning or attribute some larger significance to the landscapes of machine exuberance they so laboriously construct.

Perhaps because of this evocation of the human-nonhuman, theatrical-nontheatrical divide, and ongoing fascination with the anthropomorphic, one could side with Lehmann in stating that robotic performance is more of an engagement with the postanthropocentric stage:

postanthropocentric theatre would be a suitable name for an important (though not the only) form that postdramatic theatre can take. Under this heading one could assemble the theatre of objects entirely without human actors, theatre of technology and machinery (e.g. in the mechanized presentations by Survival Research Laboratories), and theatre that integrates the human form mostly as an element in landscape-like spatial structures. […] When human bodies join with objects, animals and energy lines into a single reality […] theatre makes it possible to imagine a reality other than that of man dominating nature. (Lehmann 2006, 81)

And rather than engaging in classificatory zeal—asking to what extent robotic performances can be said to be postdramatic, and what their relationship to object theatre would be—we can look at these robotic spectacles as practices of openness. The immersive ontology they draft out allows us to look at models of participation that are extra-human. Also, this model is tied to a concept of ecological attunement that does not have a particular (human) species at its centre but rather is entirely composed of co-determinative networks that co-create entities in an ongoing ontogenesis.

Apart from a focus on immersive participation in nonhuman worlds, robotic performances display a prevalence of non-organic materials. Most robotic creatures are synthetic or metallic, crafted out of found industrial objects. When exposed to the site of performance, organic human flesh encounters a creaturely form that is non-biological and yet capable of altering the ontological texture of its surroundings. Human beings only feature as audience within these artifactual worlds. Complex machines respond to them at times with empathetic gestures, as is the case with ARW’s Chrysalis and Theo Jansen’s Strandbeest; jokingly, as is the case with OmniCircus Theatre’s robot beggar Humper and One-legged Man; or threateningly, as in the case of Survival Research Labs’ metallic beasts. Most of the time, they may not respond at all. Robotic performance does not necessarily need its human spectatorship.

The beginnings of robotic performance can be traced to the group Survival Research Labs (SRL). SRL is an organisation that took shape in 1979 as what they alternately call ‘mechanised presentations’, ‘full robotic shows’, or ‘robotic spectacles’ were first staged in the San Francisco Bay Area. Set against the larger backdrop of urban environments, the shows feature a concoction of mechanical creatures and artifacts. These enhanced quasi-military machines are installed on open

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grounds within residential areas. The only humans to be seen during the shows are audience members. The performance space is taken by the quasi-ritualised interactions of machines and special effects equipment.

Most of the mechanical creatures are of gigantic proportions; they are constructed out of industrial and military debris. Hence the arbitrary shape of SRL’s creatures—their form is dictated by the materials that could be found and scrambled together at a time. Here the materials disentangle themselves from their status as objects to be used in military operations or in industrial settings. They are, instead, crafted into animated mobile automata with names and personalities. Some of the robots start off as discarded industrial machinery to assume the shape of animalesque creatures. Others end up as bird-like cranes such as Big Arm, Little Arm, and Inchworm.

ARW’s Robotic Church with its computer-operated pneumatic sculptures and Frank Garvey’s troupe of outcast robots come closer to SRL’s ideal of a non-artistic presentation of artifactual life. Their mechanical creatures are similarly constructed out of used objects; some metallic parts appear rusty. Cables and pneumatic tubes remind us of the messiness of internal organs. The robotic performers uniformly address notions of embodied participation, that is, the possibility of relating to an environment or to other beings, and the question of artifactual autonomy. At the same time, we also witness a critique of these very same notions and their investment in anthropomorphic complacency. They spell out the very problem of being ‘alive’ and constituting an ‘organism’. SRL’s shows achieve this by displaying the cost of this ‘aliveness’ in the variety of beings destroyed in a battle for resources.

SRL’s artifactual creatures are uniformly anthropomorphic and organismic. They are fed fuel in order to function and find themselves in continual strife to remain intact while warding off other machines. The mechanical creatures adhere to the notion of an organism with a digestive system, in need to persevere in its being, and preserve a territory. Almost all of the mechanical creations feature—and are at times entirely defined by the presence of—a defense system. One could mention Big Arm’s gripping capacity, Hovercraft’s loudness of sound (at 150 dB), and Large Flame Blower’s fire-throwing power. SRL’s machines are very much true to their name—they have been best equipped for survival.

These machines can perhaps be best described as robotic. Their movements are somewhat convoluted; their constructedness—mobile giants crafted out of random body parts—is very much palpable. The metallic bodies are deliberately inelegant and do not conform to notions of physical appeal. This extremity is underlined by the machines’ seeming self-sufficiency. SRL members working with remote controls behind the scenes make the creatures appear fully autonomous, residing in a non-human world of perpetual war that they define on their own terms. The robots present themselves as menacing, not necessarily agreeable, and willfully contradicting all effort to be seen as ‘art’ or as ‘artistic objects’. The stretch of reality that they inhabit—the temporary enclosure of the show space—is very different from the show’s urban surroundings. One is engulfed by a cacophony of sound, fire, vibration, events taking place without seeming organisation, and at an extreme speed. Within this spectacle, audience members approach a zone

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belonging to a creaturely form to which one can barely relate. At the same time, the war zones that the machines draft out in their interactions are pointedly ‘human’. Despite the multi-layered formation of a human co-habitat called ‘society’ and the various safety nets of affection it produces, the shows remind us that the underlying tone of one’s conditio humana appears to be one of strife.

Within these spectacles, humans are led to discover that they have never been exactly human and that their resemblance with the mechanical creations is more than a coincidence. Self-preservation, perseverance, the securing of territory, the handling of others in a competition for resources, and the protection of these resources are all sketchily present in the robotic shows. If one chose to be optimistic, one could say that in these interactions with mobile automata in a temporarily conjured world human bodies are exposed to the most grotesque dimensions of what constitutes ‘a human’ in order to re-organise the concept itself and ultimately define their condition positively. The present article, however, departs from one such possible optimism to address something else: the ecological critique staged in these extra-human encounters. Let us look at a number of shows and see how this is fleshed out in them.

Illusions of Shameless Abundance

Illusions of Shameless Abundance, subtitled Degenerating into an Uninterrupted Sequence of Hostile Encounters, is part of a machine-performance triptych. The three shows took place in San Francisco in 1989–90 and bear the joint name The Pleasures of Uninhibited Excess. Illusions is similar to SLR full robotic shows such as The Wall (2009), The Fish Boy’s Dream (2006), A Million Inconsiderate Experiments (1996), The Deliberate Evolution of a War Zone (1993), Infestation of Peculiar Irregularities (1992), and Careless Abuse of Premediated Uncertainty (1991). What they have in common is the exposure of human audiences to extremely agile robotic entities and extremely inert organic matter. Illusions begins at about 4 pm on May 28, 1989. It is an open-air performance that includes four mobile machines engineered by SRL: Big Arm, Big Walker, Inspector, Inchworm with a mechanical Finger attached, as well as a tower of pianos. Big Arm moves in slow motion, almost as if self-propelled. Its front ends in a jaw-like metallic structure. With the help of this sole hydraulic limb, the creature moves forward and grasps objects. The show’s other machine giant, Inchworm, is a wheeled structure that has a jaw installed on the front. With this, it gropes at organic materials in various stages of decomposition. Another fixture is an enormous coil of biological domestic waste. Pianos and organic waste are to be incinerated in the course of the performance—each machine circles around the piano pile, the Finger ploughs into the decomposing matter, and SRL’s six-barrel shockwave cannon with a pan-tilt system emits a glowing substance that looks very much like fire. This open-air performance takes place in a blue-lit space. Black smoke and industrial sounds supplement what looks like pyrotechnical effects.

Nothing but machines occupies the show space; SRL members with sound-proof headphones have moved to the background. Audience members press hands to their heads and wipe sweat off. It seems uncomfortable to be where they are. Footages of SRL shows invariably reveal this loss of comfort as some audience members on the front rows are seen to protect their heads with pieces of clothing. This is not the voyeuristic sensationalism of performances whereby an artist puts

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herself in danger yet audiences can choose to react, walk away or intervene—yet all the while remaining inertly uninvolved. This performance puts its spectatorship at physical risk. One is aware that a flying object or any sort of a temporary technical glitch may result in an injury. The shows do not play an abstract game with one’s sense of safety but disturb it in actual fact. Here a space of encounter for two fundamentally divergent modes of existence is cleared within what appears to be nothing but a war zone. Within this extreme space, living human organisms and mechanical artifacts become exposed to one another. This exposure drafts out a stage wherein ‘vulnerability is at its most palpable’ and no safety net protects one against the profound ontological discomfort the show space engenders: ‘The stage is no longer a surface of representation, of epistemological perspective, of dispassionate analysis, but one of ontological brutality: this is it’ (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2011, 6).

The theme of war continues to take shape in other SRL shows. A Bitter Message of Hopeless Grief premiered in 1988 in LA and resulted in a thirteen-minute short film by the same name directed by Jon Reiss. The film was first shown at the LA Contemporary Exhibitions on February 26, 1988, and is a joint project of Reiss, Mark Pauline, SRL’s director, and sound artist Matt Heckert. The machines featured here are Inchworm and Inspector. The mechanical creatures are shown to inhabit a cavern-like world where they are involved in a perpetual struggle for dominance. Plaster casts of smallish animals cover the walls. Other fixtures are the so-called ‘panimals’—mechanised structures composed of what seem to be bone fossils and organic remains. In the sequences that the short film offers, the ‘panimals’ guard their cave nervously as Inchworm breaks through a wall and invades their territory. The Inspector intervenes, getting hold of some of the mechanised ‘organic’ beings and thrusting their spine-like bodies under a metallic steamroller. A well brimming with an indefinite liquid is seen in another cavern—one could evoke the image of a ‘well of life’, a generative source out of which biological existence comes to be. Inchworm is shown to extract a mobile skeletal structure out of that well, and to destroy it. The thirst for unmotivated demolition enacted in Illusions teams with a certain exhibition of supremacy: here the most robust machines prevail, and yet it is unclear as to why the razing takes place. The cavern collapses, the panimals find their end under the steamroller, and the only thing to be gleaned out of the spectacle is the gesture of superiority as such. The display of ‘ontological vulnerability’ (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2011) in this case invites a closer look at the divide between the ‘living’ and the ‘nonliving’, making us question that border and grope for other ways of conceptualising it.

Such scenarios pervade SRL’s work. These ‘electronic playgrounds with military pedigrees’ (Dery 1994, 58) put on display a certain withdrawal of the organic. Biological matter within the show space is almost exclusively reduced to piles of undifferentiated debris. Organic materials are either inert or incapable of resistance as they are consumed by advancing mechanical creatures. Human presence is suspended as here it is only machines that move and act. One begins to question one’s place in the world as a ‘living’ aggregate of biological features. The question here, however, is not whether one should turn to a scenario wherein hostility toward biological existence is the norm. Nor are we invited to celebrate an imagined machine domination over an all-too-primitive and insufficiently agile organic form. Rather, as one shifts between the vignettes mimetically reenacting ‘human’ activity within nonhuman worlds, one becomes exposed to something that can be called

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‘response’. This response can be found in the co-alignment of thresholds of matter that jointly partake in the creation of a form not necessarily ‘human’ and not necessarily ‘lively’.

A Somewhat Troubled Body: Robotic Performance and Ecology

The proposed concept of response has its theoretical basis in twentieth-century critiques of hylemorphism, that is, the recent revision of the relationship between form and matter, and a certain interest in the generative force of matter itself taken on in new materialist debates. Aristotle’s theory of hylemorphism breaks down to the proposition that the universe is composed of finite beings, and that each such being itself is composed of matter, hyle- and form, morphē. Matter in Aristotle’s De Anima is defined in the following terms: ‘matter is potentiality’, ‘that which is changeable’, and ‘that which underlies’ (412a9). At the same time, there is an underlying statement that matter is not infinitely alterable and that not anything can turn into anything else. Matter is an inert receptacle that becomes ‘lively’ because of the organising principle of form. Hylemorphism sustains that changes in substance—that is to say, the conversion from one state into another—can be defined in terms of the intermingling of form and matter. Here we have a type of cosmology which suggests that a being that has undergone a transformation has only changed its form, whereas the matter has remained unaltered. It is form that defines the being of existent entities as well as their qualia, and form operates on matter to shape individuals. When it comes to determining how one being can become another, hylemorphism relies on the active principle of form and maintains that matter as such does not possess an active force of its own and cannot generate a being out of its own resources. Matter can be transformed but this can only take place because of the determining function of form.

The restoration of the generative zest of matter can be traced back to debates in the twentieth century and specifically to the work of Gilbert Simondon. Simondon’s theory of individuation refigures hylemorphism in stating that matter in and for itself is not incabable of genesis. In a way, matter is already formed and form has already been made indeterminate, can itself be seen as matter that undergoes a variety of transmorphoses. Simondon does not gloss over the fact that we cannot know that which takes place in the co-mingling of matter and form and what potentials cause things to coagulate and present us with a novel entity. He makes this very encounter the object of his inquiry (Chabot 2013, 75–8). The process offered here can be described as a dynamic individuation. Dynamic individuation involves various practices of co-alignment among disparate systems whereby the very act of relating comes to the fore to the extent that it becomes primary to the systems.

The idea of a radical relationality of things is part of this process and is often described in terms of a ‘re-ontologised realism’ (Scott 2014, 202) of relations because of the stance one adopts here: a shift of focus toward the forming of a relation as such, and the position that the act of relating also engenders a type of being. Relations are ‘entities’ in their own right and have the status of existents. The act of relating does not coincide with a mechanical connection between two points that have already been established. Nor do we reside within a hylemorphic universe composed of solid finite objects and some sort of relational vacuity between them. Instead, a relation has an operative

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function and participates in the very genesis of things. It is not secondary to the substance and is not simply one of the qualities of a substance. According to Simondon, substance cannot acquire any properties without the act of relating to a milieu populated by other substances. A being, with its very positing, already presupposes a fundamental relationality. This stance feeds into a larger agenda: rather than replacing being with becoming, the aim is to seek a productive alignment between two reality regimes, showing the various ways in which the two determine each other and make each other possible. A relation is the articulation of becoming and the entity which carries the process of the individuation of a being, yet relation and being cannot be thought as separate realities. One can speak of a certain co-determination of being and becoming whereby being is informed by a process of ongoing ontological constitution and becoming participates in being. The dynamics of transformation and rest are thus interdependent. And this is what becomes very much palpable when seen through the work of robotic performance. On the one hand, we see an organism perpetuating mimetic scenarios of survival, and on the other hand, we become aware of entire dissipative and co-immersive systems of response interlinked within and without—maximally exposed to one another in their interconnectedness and moulded out of myriad tangible and intangible co-determinative practices.

A similar stance is adopted when we look at the revived definition of matter. Substance or matter is traditionally described as a primordial mush in a more or less amorphous state that requires the ordering function of form. New materialisms take on Simondon’s revision of the individuating zest of matter to imbue it with a generative power of its own. And whereas such debates still concentrate on organic matter, one could extend this generative zest toward systems not necessarily capable of organic growth but ‘growing’ in different ways: through the networks of response that they co-create.

This brings us to another Aristotelian dyad, that of life and the living, zoē and bios in De Anima. This early engagement with the ontology of life thrives on the distinction between the impersonal pervasive living force, a naturalistic principle as such, zoē, and concrete living beings confined in temporality (but also confined in the variety of manners of life which they engender), bios. Whereas bios operates strictly within the domain of the given, zoē appears to waver between a naturalistic and an ontological concept of life: ‘The De Anima thus conceptualizes a life that is at once abstract and real, a life-forming principle that is at once inseparable from the types of life-forms in which it is manifest, while not being reducible to them’ (Thacker 2010, 99). Here zoē, a principle that operates within living beings, also becomes a concept that allows us to account for a being’s self-organising and internally caused capacities for motion and action. Zoē stands for a certain auto-generative capacity in beings: Aristotle defines the living as a natural being that has within itself a source (archē) of movement and rest (412b15–17).2 So here we have a restrictive definition of the living being as that which is ‘natural’ and capable of generating action out of its own resources. At the same time, the concept of zoē allows for a certain ontological openness, a maximum of virtuality that can ultimately make the divide between the living and the non-living irrelevant.

Zoē, postulated as ‘mere’ life in Aristotle’s De Anima, is an impersonal, supra-subjective force that ‘animates’ bodies. Yet it is always a surplus, a plus one—an impassive extra for impassioned

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organic existences. In Braidotti’s (2013) interpretation, zoē is also an absolute singularity poised between structural stability and chaos, extreme speed and extreme slowness, a radical otherness within a body that at the same time constitutes bodies qua such. Also, zoē is a phenomenon of extreme intensity, closer to the virtual than to the body, a composition of lesser thickness and of enhanced vibration. Zoē can be described as the very interface wherein a body becomes the ‘living’ composition that it is but also where a body reopens toward virtuality, toward the possibility to become afresh.

There seem to be two things that appear fundamentally traumatic to beings: the very fact of this biological given—powered by a supra-subjective force that does not seem to be in our possession—and the realisation that it is a radical practice of perpetual co-immersion that constitutes the living as such. On the one hand, we have a flesh infinitely open to an environment. On the other hand, there is the insistence on a more impersonal constituent, a generative force grounded in bios yet of a different ontological texture. Betwixt, there rests the empty middle of what is habitually know as ‘a body’, a groundlessness continually stretched between these two domains and receiving infusions from both. Herewith a body becomes a disappearing act, ‘an abstract machine, which captures, transforms, and produces connections’ (Braidotti 2002, 226). Yet even this non-centralist vision remains within the privileged domain of the biological given. It favours a mode of existence that engenders an organism, that which is of a nature. Artifactual entities remain a reality separate from that of the organic body.

If one is to accept this vantage point, robotic entities can only be seen to allude to primitive re-enactments of creation myths. Here automata reside within a mimetic regime. As the recreated resemblance of human activity and thought, they obligingly point back to the activity of humans. Artifactual agents are fundamentally, by definition, derivative. Technology is constitutively inferior to the force of life. A strange imbalance is created with the assertion that there is a certain primacy of ‘life’ over ‘artifact’. Notwithstanding the empty-signifier quality of a category such as ‘life’, it persists in the cultural imagination as the highest good, a good to be preserved at any cost, and more significantly, as something that necessarily entails organic growth and a certain self-organising capacity that is ultimately biological. Robotic performance puts on display exactly this: the misrecognition of machines as entities merely capable of mimetic re-enactment and enhancement of human behaviour.

Such scenarios involving anthropomorphic artifactual entities appear as early as in Greek mythology—here one is reminded of the bronze giant Talos, Hephaestus’ mechanical creations, and Diomedes’ mobile statues. Other examples include the curiosity of Pandora, ‘the first woman’ built by Athena and Hephaestus or the sixteenth-century tale of the Prague Golem constructed by Rabbi Löw. The twentieth century has witnessed the formation of an entire culture surrounding Asimov’s I, Robot (1950), but also Capek’s futuristic play R.U.R. (1920) which first introduced the term ‘robot’ and can even be said to have marked the birth of robots in performance.3 Such examples attest to an ongoing fascination with anthropomorphic artifacts that manifest a certain level of autonomy and (perceived) sapience yet ultimately serve human convenience. At the same time, there is an emphasis on the constitutive clash between them and biological existence; an inimical

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potential almost invariably comes to the fore. As if in response to this anxiety, the cultural imagination has systematically depicted embodied automata as anthropomorphic, yet only sketchily so. Automation sapience is limited, robots are physically unappealing, and very few instrumentalised creatures can speak. Participation is one-way and takes place at human will.

Robotic performance, on the other hand, evokes a scenic landscape that entirely belongs to artifacts. One such robotic world is rendered tangible within the theatrically enhanced show space. Robotic performance invites us to restructure our patterns of what constitutes response to begin to think in terms of a universe of artifacts. Within this shift, the human-artifact dyad does not demarcate a relation of unilateral dependence. Instead, it speaks for the possibility of a companionship of allies. Robotic performance shows us modes of being and becoming that are not only non-organic but also artifactual. We are invited to construct conceptual regions that would enable ontological openness to zoē. The challenge here is to incorporate these forms into our habitual field of vision, form productive alliances with them, and co-create an environment that re-creates the concept of the human in positive terms. Robotic performance thus raises questions that are mostly ecological as it allows us to look into practices that put on display the border between organism and environment, but also ultimately invites us to think toward the dissolution of that border into a network of co-determinative systems.

Artistic, or artisan (SRL members would disagree with any allusion to matters of ‘art’) practice questions our need to perform and reinstate the accessory character of automata. Robotic performances put on display our capacity to create artifacts and recognise ourselves in these creations, yet also stage an encounter with an impersonal force that is extra-biological and yet projecting the auto-generative zest of organic materials. An inquiry into this take on matter is inseparable from the question of robotic performance. Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter (2009) illustrates some of these concerns when it speaks of nonhuman objects as ‘interveners’—partly reminiscent of Latour’s ‘actants’ and of Deleuze’s ‘quasi-causal operators’—imbued with a ‘thing-power’ (Bennett 2009, 20). This property aligns with ‘an efficacy of objects in excess of the human meanings … they express or serve’ (20). Such new materialist debates circulate around the idea of ‘liveliness’ (even if this is a rhetorical gesture), choosing to attach the notion of the ‘lively’ to that which is habitually perceived as non-living instead of seeking new ways of looking at these conceptual regions—ways that bypass the mere inclusion of artifacts into the privileged domain of things ‘alive’. At the same time, the concept of zoē with its emphasis on impersonal zest carries the potential to open toward a virtual zone of ontological constitution entirely indifferent to questions of the living and the nonliving but more attuned to an engagement with the collective entanglements of things. From this vantage point, we could begin to think the artifactual as something that possesses an intrinsic generative capacity regardless of human intervention and regardless of its relation to ‘the living’.

It is in this disappearance of discrete organismic bodies that one begins to conceive of a new type of ecology. This new ecology aligns not so much with inter-human or human-habitat relations but incorporates the larger concept of a terrestrial biome. Within this expansive habitat, humans and artifacts co-create their environments and co-alter the established conceptual frames within which

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they operate. The artifactual agent is inorganic but correlational with organic beings. The show space in robotic performance dispenses with notions of functionality and productivity. What remains is exactly this—a mechanical creature in its capacity to respond to and leave traces on its surroundings. This is where the concepts of ‘life’ and ‘the living’ could also be redefined in terms of response and the formation of a radical relationality. This regime of co-immersion clears a territory for a co-existence of things, be they biological entities or artifacts. Interlacing networks precipitate a transition between thresholds of being. This transition takes place beyond the epistemological given and the frame within which finite objects operate in a world. Within this participatory space, each entity becomes. This, however, is a becoming without entelechy and without intentionality, that is, a becoming that does not become anything in particular. A participatory becoming takes place exclusively in the open togetherness of two networks exposed to one another in such a way that a singular confluence becomes palpable in their co-alignment. It is impossible to speak of entelechy here since nothing is prefigured; becoming takes place in the mutuality of the exposure. There is no striving toward a particular outcome; the particularity derives from each milieu’s individual intensities and the very ways in which given systems respond to one another. Ultimately, what was formerly perceived as a ‘body’ begins to dissolve into aggregates of response.

Robotic performances invite us to construct extended, non-bodily concepts of response within perpetually co-aligning networks. Rather than bodies, we have permeable milieus, and rather than organic-nonorganic, we have thresholds of matter. These networks incorporate a relationality of space, spectatorship, and performing system—one that is not necessarily or strictly human. Particular beings—be they human or artifactual—do not strictly dissolve but undergo an expansion. What was previously (epistemologically speaking) a subject or an object now becomes ‘an expanded relational self’ (Braidotti 2013, 60). For these expanded selves the notion of species is just as obsolete as the divide between the organic and the non-organic, organism and artifact. Instead of species formations, one turns to a state of creative interdependence. Herein ‘life’ does not merely designate self-organising organic matter capable of reproduction but shifts across the organic-artifactual divide to encompass whole participatory networks capable of response.

Here one becomes capable of envisioning entities that extend beyond any boundary to become equivalent with a biome in its entirety. Such expansive co-immersive bodies can be conceptualised in terms of what Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos calls an ‘open ecology’ (2011, 9), an amalgamation of social, biological, and ecological processes that calls for maximal disciplinary openness. Robotic performance shows this practice of co-alignment in constructing such relational milieus, and in inviting us to think of the possibility of an eco-philosophical infra-body across the continuum of what is nominally present as the ‘living’ and the ‘non-living’. Within this scenario, it is no longer the organism that determines the formation of a biome but one’s partaking in practices of perpetual co-alignment of thresholds of matter as well as the responsive potential inherent in such participatory work. This is a type of expansion that first becomes available through the visionary medium of artistic practice. It recasts artifactual utility into newer forms of living. And this is also, it seems, what Guattari envisions with his term ‘virtual ecology’:

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An ecology of the virtual is just as pressing as ecologies of the visible world. And in this regard, poetry, music, the plastic arts, the cinema—particularly in their performance or performative modalities—have an important role to play, with their specific contribution and as a paradigm of reference in new social and analytical practices … Beyond the relations of actualised forces, virtual ecology will not simply attempt to preserve the endangered species of cultural life but equally to engender conditions for the creation and development of unprecedented formations of subjectivity that have never been seen and never felt. That is to say that generalised ecology—or ecosophy—will work as a science of ecosystems, as a bid for political regeneration, and as an ethical, aesthetic, and analytic engagement. It will tend to create new systems of valorisaion, a new taste for life, a new gentleness … (Guattari 1995, 91–2)

This ‘ecology of the virtual’ speaks to an infra-bodily and infra-human level of response that operates across individuals and relates us to pre-personal ways of partaking in a world. Here Guattari prompts us to turn to the generative force of the arts so as to envision forms of co-habitation that surpass actual states of affairs. His concept begins as an ontological proposition to bring forth reformed notions of ethics, aesthetics, and politics within an expansive milieu that encompasses ‘a mental, a natural, and a cultural ecology’ (2000, 20). Something very similar takes place in robotic performance as the space of response that is cleared therein offers ways of refiguring notions of personhood, life, and the human positively and inclusively. Here a ‘generalised ecology’ works as a system of response-making that incorporates forms of inorganic living, becomes capable of thinking artifactual personhood, and precipitates a positive re-appropriation of ‘the human’.

The Response

In the article “Insensible Worlds: Postrelational Ethics, Indeterminacy and the Knots of Relating” (2013), Kathryn Yussof poses the question of what constitutes a response. In concluding that the question of response takes us to an expanded realm beyond regions of intelligibility, the article forces us to think ‘between natures’. Here we reach toward a conceptual region that can be perceived as matter-forming and as allowing for a co-habitation of incongruent worlds. Similar to what Simondon seeks to articulate through the concept of ‘individuation’, what Merleau-Ponty makes palpable through the metaphysical notion of ‘the flesh’, and what this article seeks to establish as a practice of co-alignment of thresholds of matter, ‘the response’ engages the question of relating (be it in terms of nonhuman worlds, artifactual life, or simply in terms of a lack of epistemological access) as a value in and for itself. We do not have a universe composed of solid entities and some sort of vacuity between them, whereby the act of relating would be one possible scenario in which entities can choose to engage. Rather, we have networks that are continually co-constituted through the act of relating itself and the responsive receiving within a relation.

Here one can take up the question of ‘enabling responsiveness’ (Barad 2010, 256) as an onto-ecological question. The argument here is that the question of artifactual agency needs to be reworked in relation to the virtual and ecological dimensions of matter—if the goal is to be

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responsive toward a world: ‘To put it another way: there exists an urgent need to find modes of recognition beyond “our” abilities to make nonhuman worlds intelligible’ (Yussof 2013, 209). So here we could have the ecology of the virtual as a form of co-habitation that opens up entities not only to their own potentiality but also to the forms of relatedness they co-shape with an expansive environment. The ecology of the virtual becomes a radical ‘being toward’ which brings new modes of response allowing us peer into regions that were previously unintelligible, and to partake in the very gesture that takes place between definitive states. Just as Guattari states that ‘an ecology of the virtual is just as pressing as ecologies of the visible world’ (1995, 91), a practice of response recomposes existing ecological arrangements bringing forth new spheres of attention, and a new gentleness toward a same old world. As Guattari notes, ‘It is less a questions of having access to novel cognitive spheres than of apprehending and creating, in pathic modes, mutant existential virtualities’ (1995, 120). So this attunement toward the response also signals an expansion of modes of ontological and a new orientation toward worlds. This orientation allows us to think not in terms of the intelligible but in terms of that which is ‘between natures’, ‘not just about more-than-human natures, or posthumanist, or material and virtual, or inhuman and organic, alive and dead natures, but rather that we begin to think the space between these sensible entities, as a spacing’ (Yussof 2013, 216) where a being becomes gestural as it opens beyond itself to become ‘a toward-something’ (Nancy 1997, 8). Here we encounter the space of response, and this space becomes the articulation of the very threshold between a body and a world.

This ecological alignment does not strictly entail beings but rather aggregates of response that continually engage in a mutual genesis. The concept of response thus draws together such infra-bodies interwoven with their worlds and perpetually generating even more elaborate worlds. Within robotic performance, this relationality gains an extra dimension. Here it even more forcefully reveals a level of participatory ontogenesis—insofar as the latter designates ‘the character of becoming of being’ (Simondon 2009, 5)—not necessarily linked to human intervention, indifferent to human presence, and yet having an impact on the entirety of a(n human) environment by altering the texture of the given.

In robotic performance, on the one hand, machines pose as ‘figures of complexity, mixture, hybridity and interconnectivity’ (Braidotti 2006, 49). On the other hand, there is a countermovement that pulls toward a pre-personal zone wherein one becomes not this particular being but a being. The pre-formative zone is the domain of zoē. ‘Life’ is inextricable from ‘the living’ (Aristotle, De Anima) yet inherent in and constitutive of living creatures. In providing a ground for the connection of these two forces, interconnected complexity and élan, a body becomes a diffuse intermediary. A ‘body’ ceases to be something finite, an entity, but is understood broadly to mean an aggregate of responsive features capable of forming relations. This constitutive connectivity allows bodies to become dissipative structures, successions of indefinite states but rarely entities as such. One such state of expansion enables them to participate in a terrestrial biome affirmatively. A body is no longer contained within its provisional outlines but incorporates the entirety of the networks it builds in interaction. Maximally open bodies thus become capable of ecological attunement. Here a body is an imaginary ground that is groundless, a nothing in-between. In this openness, such infra-bodies begin to gesture toward virtuality. Their becoming is

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grounded in the mutuality of the very particular ‘style of being’ (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 139–40) that they co-create with their networks of response. Robotic performance addresses this perceived disappearance of the body whereby a body undergoes an expansion. A body stretches out toward its counterparts to foreground the responsive middle ground occurring amidst the systems that it co-creates.

A new ecology takes shape in these re-appropriations of the living. This re-appropriated being ‘implies a new way of combining ethical values with the well-being of an enlarged sense of community, which includes one’s territorial and environmental connections. This is an ethical bond of an altogether different sort from the self-interests of an individual subject’ (Braidotti 2013, 190). Robotic performance is always transsubjective or, better still, transobjective. It connects us with a timeless virtual present whereby ‘life’ extends beyond biological determination and stretches toward the realm of the artifactual. But even more so, robotic performance opens up to a conceptual region where both terms become obsolete as one begins to look at the possibility of expansive regions of co-alignment.

Conclusion

This article looked at the possibility of an ontology of robotic performance informed by a notion of radical responsiveness as the basic constitutive principle of bodies. It focused on a re-definition of inter-robotic and human-robotic encounters with the help of an extended notion of response that operates across the organic-artifactual divide. Here response was not restricted to empathetic immersion taking place between organic life forms but incorporated involvement with that which is non-animalesque and not even organic—namely, artifactual automata. What was foregrounded here is the relative autonomy of automata and the possibility of self-sufficient environments defined entirely by the presence of nonhuman artifactual agents. At the same time, robotic performance was shown to undermine the static, finite concept of a body and to work in favour of expansive milieus of co-habitation. Robotic performance thus puts on display a withdrawal of the organism as a locale of borders and strife. A body, no longer a solid entity but a virtual bundle of relations, becomes a bundle of diffuse responsive states opening up toward the entirety of an environment.

1 The performance artist declared that the human body is obsolete in the early 1980s; an account of the artwork that emerged out of these views can be found in Paffrath (1984), compiled in collaboration with Stelarc.

2 Aristotle defines living beings by combining two contrasts. Artificial entities have a functional organisation but cannot generate their own functional motions. The inanimate natural beings can determine their motion but have no functional organisation. Only what he sees as ‘living’ beings have both functional organisation and can generate their own functional motions.

3 I thank one of my anonymous reviewers for introducing this suggestion.

Notes

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Works Cited

Footages of SRL shows extracted from http://srl.org/shows/archive (last accessed 16 April 2017).

Aristotle. De Anima. 1993. Translated by David W. Hamlyn. Oxford: Clarendon.

Barad, Karen. 2010. “Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/continuities, Spacetime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come.” Derrida Today 3: 240–268. https://doi.org/10.3366/drt.2010.0206

Bennett, Jane. 2009. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham and London: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822391623

Braidotti, Rosi. 2002. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Cambridge: Polity.

———. 2006. Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics. Cambridge: Polity Press.

———. 2013. Posthumanism. Cambridge: Polity.

Chabot, Pascal. 2013. The Philosophy of Simondon: Between Technology and Individuation. Translated by Graeme Kirkpatrick and Aliza Krefetz. London: Bloomsbury.

Dery, Mark. 1994. “Simulator Sickness and Spectacular Destruction: Survival Research Laboratories’ Theater of Operations.” Oz 16: 58–61.

Guattari, Felix. 1995. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Translated by Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press.

———. 2000. The Three Ecologies. 1989. Translated by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton. New Brunswick, NJ: Athlone.

Latour, Bruno. 1999. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Lehmann, Hans-Thies. 2006. Postdramatic Theatre. 1999. London: Routledge.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1969. The Visible and the Invisible. 1964. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1997. The Sense of the World. Translated by Jeffrey S. Librett. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Paffrath, James D., ed. 1984. Obsolete Body / Suspensions / Stelarc. Davis, CA: JP Publications.

Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Andreas. 2011. “‘…The Sound of a Breaking String’ - Critical Environmental Law and Ontological Vulnerability.” Journal of Human Rights and the Environment 2 (1): 5–22. https://doi.org/10.4337/jhre.2011.01.01

Scott, David. 2014. Gilbert Simondon’s Psychic and Collective Individuation: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Simondon, Gilbert. 2009. “The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis.” Translated by Gregory Flanders. Parrhesia 7: 4–16.

Thacker, Eugene. 2010. After Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226793733.001.0001

Yussof, Kathryn. 2013. “Insensible Worlds: Postrelational Ethics, Indeterminacy and the Knots of Relating.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31 (2): 208–26. https://doi.org/10.1068/d17411

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Biography

Zornitsa holds a doctorate in English Literature from the University of Münster. She is the author of Literary Worlds and Deleuze (2016); her work on theatre has appeared in Deleuze Studies, New Theatre Quarterly, The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, and Skenè.

© 2017 Zornitsa Dimitrova

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY VOL 3, NO 1 (2017):178–198 DOI: https://doi.org/10.21476/PP.2017.3139

ISSN 2057-7176

PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY

‘VISIBILITY BRINGS WITH IT RESPONSIBILITY’: USING A PRAGMATIC PERFORMANCE APPROACH TO

EXPLORE A POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF TECHNOLOGY

GERAINT D’ARCY UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH WALES

Introduction

The philosophy of technology is necessarily through its practice, an inter-disciplinary study, with many areas and disciplines contributing to its expansion and exploration, and those same areas borrowing widely from the field to prop up their own disciplines. In ‘Has the Philosophy of Technology Arrived?’, Don Idhe suggests that there has not been enough of an internal debate within the field of philosophy of technology as a separate discipline from the slightly older philosophy of science, to allow it to ‘arrive’ (Idhe 2004, 124). Andrew Feenberg considers the field to be ‘largely unmapped territory’ (Feenberg 1999, 1) which has only recently attracted the attention of the ‘currently dominant social theory’ which ‘seems to have no grasp of the political conditions of its own credibility’ (12) and thus lacks social pertinence. If, as Idhe suggests, this debate is as internal as its arrival is immanent, then the identification of a philosophies of technology which are also political and an arena in which to observe them in action would allow that internal debate to take place.

The argument in this area seems currently to be between the “black-box” social constructivists who are too ‘socially reflexive’ (Winner 1993) and the more Marxist philosophers who are keen to apply the structures of capitalism to the creation of technology (Winner 1993, and Sørenson 2004). The black-box in this case is a technological device or system reduced to its most instrumental function.

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The social constructivists are philosophers of science, such as Bruno Latour or Michel Callon, who shrug off political meaning in their analyses and who effectively support the neo-liberal western hegemony through their refusal to identify specific meaning behind readings of technological developments; pitted against them are those philosophers who side with the left-leaning post-phenomenological work of Don Idhe and Langdon Winner, who are concerned with ‘the isomorphism of technology and capitalism and the resulting democratic deficit’ (Sørenson 2003, 187).

The particular approach that this paper would like to explore is that of productive pragmatism, or instrumentalism, a philosophical approach that aims to experience the use of a technology and discover the relationships associated with its use not merely speculate upon what they might be through thought experiment. This approach offers a philosophical tool for reasoning and considering concepts and issues that are not restricted to reflexive thought experiments or to intellectual reasoning but take place ‘as features of a fully fleshed out involvement of the organism within its environment’ (Hickman 2001, 47). This approach avoids the issues of essentialism usually levelled at Heidegger and Habermas (Feenberg 1999, 17), which is an approach that reduces a technology to its most basic (or least complex) form and makes observations based on that limited abstraction. Instead, productive pragmatism widens the frame of observation through practical use. Its application in a frame of theatre and performance consequently means applying some of the techniques of social constructivism: a contextualization that avoids a determinist historical approach in order to establish a technology as a semiotic element of performance. As this combination of methods could be considered part of the post-phenomenological approaches to the philosophy of technology, it must refrain from identifying a politics which is exclusively left-leaning and instead identify more widely but positively the political and cultural concepts revealed by such an approach.

This paper hopes to bring instrumentalism to bear upon an example of performance that utilizes technology in an apparently simple way. The performance example used in this paper is small, but it provides access thematically to a number of political questions about power and visibility that can also be applied to the scenographic choices the production made regarding the use of technology in performance. By exploring what implications this could have in terms of a political philosophy of technology, and by expanding the exploration to talk about performance technology and domestic technology more widely, this paper hopes to expand the current discussions of technology both in and outside of a performance frame.

To begin with, this paper will look at the connections between the philosophy of technology and theatre and performance, before moving onto the case study that inspired this exploration, and a discussion of visibility in performance and its relationship to the semiotic significance of performance technologies. The case study is a modest example in itself, but one that serves ultimately as a synecdoche for the final discussion: an exploration of the political relationship between the visibility and usability of technology, and how such a relationship here examined within a performative frame has wider political and social implications.

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Theatre and Performance, and the Philosophy of Technology

As Andrew Bowie has argued, in its way the artificial environment of a theatre or performance can provide a space for organisms to explore ‘horizons of sense that can be obscured by dominant cultural forms of attention’ (Bowie 2015, 53). Although it could be argued that our society has become thoroughly technologized, the philosophy of technology remains an under-explored area, which this paper aims to contribute to in a small way through an examination of theatre and performance technology by acknowledging the marriage of philosophy and performance as a field of new academic study (Kirkkopelto 2015, 4). This would seem to provide an ideal experimental situation ‘in order to effect forward-looking adjustment to environing conditions by means of practical effects’ (Hickman 2001, 47).

The concept of the black-box in theatre is usually one associated with the black-box studio, a performance space that is supposedly “neutral” because it is painted black and is essentially box-shaped. In the philosophy of technology, a black-box is a metonym used to describe a technological artefact in an empirical social-constructivist analysis described solely in terms of its ‘inputs and outputs’ (Winner 1993, 365). In theatre and performance, we often have the experience of witnessing, as audience members, interactive black-box artefacts inside black-box rooms, but just as we are supposed to understand that the black-box studio has no significance in the social-constructivist approach to technology, we are also supposed to think that the technological artefact has no significance beyond the socially-reflexive but often inconclusive readings given to these artefacts by contemporary thinkers and often by theatre scholars. For some philosophers of technology, the concept of the black-box is dissatisfying and the slowly evolving contention in the field hinges upon two arguments: either that a technology can be “read” like a text in multiple ways, but only noting the diversity and flexibility of interpretations; or using those readings to identify a meaning and say why that reading matters (Winner 1993, 373). Not knowing what is inside the black-box has its own thrill in theatre, its own magic, and the theatre utilizes a great many different black-boxes in performance and theatre conceived as a technological artefact, as a black-box itself, relying upon the mystery of what is inside to create meaning or make spectacle, and having done so for some time (D’Arcy, 2013). What is often forgotten when discussing technology in theatre is that these are not technologies in domestic or industrial spheres but technologies in a frame that represents those spheres of life. The domestic and the industrial are places of politics, and the theatre is a political form that produces art that is always political even when it is not overtly political in content (Sinfield 1990, 475). When discussed at length by theatre scholars and academics such as Philip Auslander (1999), Steve Dixon (2003), Matthew Causey (2003), Peggy Phelan ([1993] 2001) and Susan Kozel (2004), and by those who discuss the use of media technologies such as Sarah Bay-Cheung et al. (2010), technologies seem to be only ever apolitical black-boxes of inputs and outputs, or at most as texts of multiple indefinite meanings. It would seem that the contentions found in the philosophy of technology have not yet made it to discussions of technology in theatre and performance. This seems a little odd given that the political forms of theatre and performance should provide very fertile ground for exploration into the increasingly contentious construction of a political philosophy of technology.

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Andrew Feenberg and Larry A. Hickman have been technology philosophers at the forefront of discussions that underpin the wider approaches to technology in society, and instrumental in establishing a modern philosophy of technology. What they are seeking in these discussions is a political philosophy of technology, one that can explain the power structures of society as well as the effects ‘technology—as our culture’ (Hickmann 2001, 4) has upon them. In particular, their work seeks to dismantle the paradox of essentialism, which sees those who try to understand or design technologies and technological systems ultimately ‘agreeing implicitly with technocrats that the actual struggles in which people attempt to influence technology can accomplish nothing of importance’ (Feenberg 1999, xiv). This creates a situation where as our society becomes more technologized, it also becomes more estranged from both our understanding and our physical being. This paradox of essentialism becomes the main restraint to wresting the power away from the hegemony of late-capitalist governance and giving it to the communities who utilise it (Hickman 2001, 171). Feenberg in particular thinks that change in the status quo will not come about until ‘we recognize the nature of our subordinate position in the technical systems that enrol us’ (Feenberg 1999, xiv) and begin to intervene in the design and construction of those systems in a democratic way, and to do so requires an effective political philosophy of technology. Hickman believes the way to achieve this goal is through instrumentalist experimentation reasoned through ‘the literary and plastic arts […] and wherever else systematic, self-conscious, creative, forward-looking adjustment occurs’ (Hickman 2001, 47).

Hickman and Feenberg use philosophy as a tool to examine technology as culture in political terms, and this paper would like to offer the political tool of theatre and performance to examine technology in culture. By applying the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Michel Foucault on visibility and power to a reading of a recent adaptation of Jean Genet’s The Maids, this paper aims to establish briefly an instrumentalist (Hickman 2001, 44–55) approach to considering theatre technology in performance and technology in culture, and it considers what that approach has to offer to a political philosophy of technology.

Before this paper can continue, though, it needs to establish the dual position of an instrumentalist approach as one that apparently divorces technology from culture, despite the obviousness that it should be a ‘seamless part’ (Sørenson 2003, 187). The public perception of technology-as-artefact, and one reinforced by the essentialism of the constructivists, is that technology is somehow as separate from culture as it is physically distinguishable from ourselves and therefore apparently also from nature. The irony being that this is because of the methodologies inherent in the essentialist approach, and, in order to be counteracted, this instrumentalism must also work in a similar manner and acknowledge the still deeper irony that nature and culture are artificially separated by such an approach—despite the modern thinking that these things are not separate at all but thoroughly entangled (Braun, 2004). Consequently, essentialist approaches such as the actor-centred methodologies created by Bruno Latour (Kennedy 2010) and utilised by those working in the active public fields of user-centred design (Garrety and Badham 2004) aim to decrease the visibility of this entanglement and deliberately position technology as separate from the user/human. Such an approach is a deliberate “de-politicising” of the technology by artificial means, not least because it artificially separates technology from culture and human/nature from

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culture. It is the eventual aim of this work to show using ‘the literary and plastic arts’ (Hickman 2015, 47) that such a “de-politicization” is not at all apolitical but a deliberate obfuscation of the neo-liberal hegemony, and key to this discussion is the concept that relates directly to “what is inside the black-box”: namely, to show how to identify the visibility of its entanglements.

Playing ‘The Maids’

At the centre of this exploration is Phillip Zarrilli and Kaite O’Reilly’s interpretation of Jean Genet’s The Maids (Les Bonnes, 1947), in their 2015 performance Playing ‘The Maids’ (Kim 2015). This collaborative and intercultural exploration of the themes of Genet’s play by the Llanarth Group (Wales), Gaitkrash (Ireland), and Theatre P’yut (Korea), foregrounds the relationship between an omnipresent Madame (Jing Hong Okorn-Kuo) and two sets of servile sisters, played by two Irish actresses (Bernadette Kronin and Regina Crowley) and by two Korean actresses (Jeungsook Yoo and Sunhee Kim). In this examination of Genet’s text the international doubling is an extension of Zarrilli’s long-running international and cross-cultural theatre practice and of his theatre anthropological research, which, according to the programme notes, ‘uses Genet’s text as creative inspiration, focussing on its relationships and power dynamics as part of an oblique investigation of modern servitude, wealth-as-privilege, cultural notions of guilt and oppression, phantasms, and the politics of intimacy’ (Playing ‘The Maids’ Programme Notes 2015).

This is a long-term project for Zarrilli in particular as it explores aspects and parts of an old disagreement with the practices of Eugenio Barba about cultural visibility from 1988: ‘For whom is the “Invisible” not “visible”? Reflections on Representation in the Work of Eugenio Barba’ (Zarrilli 1988). Playing ‘The Maids’ reflexively incorporates all the explorations they intended, in a balanced multi-lingual and pan-cultural post-modern performance piece, without doing what Zarrilli once accused Barba of doing when he said his work at that time tended to ‘mystify the Other and essentialize the performance process’ (Zarrilli 1988, 102). In Playing ‘The Maids’ the collaborative nature of the work produces a text where no one voice or language or performance practice is dominant in its exploration, but instead each practice is made manifest in the work throughout the ‘psychophysical scores, choreography, and sound compositions’ (Notes 2015); and, as if to directly reference the old argument about cultural visibility, there is a line of dialogue in the performance which seems to echo this argument. At the mid-point of the piece Madame is being dressed to go out and is pampered by both sets of sisters as she gets ready to leave for her function. ‘Visibility,’ she declares, ‘brings with it responsibility.’ This is particularly resonant within the play not just because of the academic note it sounds, recalling Zarrilli’s earlier contestation of Barba’s work, but it also has a particularly French flavour, summoning the work of Genet’s contemporary, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and his work The Visible and the Invisible (1948), and also Michel Foucault and the concept of panopticon from Discipline and Punish (1975). Given the subject matter of the original Genet text and the ensemble’s intention to make a work that ‘interrogates who creates and controls whom’ (O’Reilly and Curtin 2015) and that explores ‘modern servitude, wealth-as-privilege, cultural notions of guilt and oppression, phantasms, and the politics of intimacy’ (Notes 2015), it is likely that this line was included to evoke Foucault’s panopticon rather than Merleau-Ponty’s dense

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and incomplete philosophical work on the nature of nothingness. A study of the performance in relation to this and the ensemble’s international and cross-cultural aims would certainly be interesting, but this paper is focussed on the provocation of thoughts inspired by the scenography of the work and by the inclusion of the sound composition as part of the ensemble’s process. A modest example, and one of narrow theatrical significance in the larger field of theatre and performance studies, Playing ‘The Maids’ is merely a launching point to talk about performance technologies through its thematic access to a discussion about the politics of visibility.

The politics of visibility

In terms of artistic perception, performance is like a painting, but despite the persistence of the nineteenth-century hangover of pictorial realism in dominating our understanding of visual language in the cinema and (often) on stage, we cannot say our experience of performance is anything like how a painter creates a painting as ‘a flat surface of perpetual simultaneity’ (Foucault 1973, 6). Our experience of performance is dynamic, has real depth and surrounds us; however, the function of the gaze, to which Foucault alludes, is comparable. In painting there is represented every detail painted upon a single plane, and to perceive the painting in the way that it was painted with equal attention to each detail is impossible, as our focus shifts and our attention is drawn from one detail to another as we perceive the details over the duration of our gaze. This also happens in performance: everything within the performance frame is part of the scenography and therefore contributes to the semiological sense of the performance—it is all there to be “read” by an audience. Every detail is deliberate, but that is not to say that all of the detail is recognized, understood, or acknowledged by us as we look at it. There is, as Jacques Lacan observes in his lectures ‘The line and Light’ and ‘What is a Picture?’, a ‘certain dompte-regard, a taming of the gaze, […]. [H]e who looks is always led by the painting to lay down his gaze’ and to look instead at that which the painter wishes them to see (Lacan 1994, 109). The painter for Lacan draws attention and directs the viewer’s gaze, and therefore creates meaning in their art by indicating which aspects to look at. The artist can direct the gaze. Foucault’s forensic painter, observing and detailing everything in their work, has produced a painting in which everything represented is visible—it can be optically perceived by the viewer, but it may not be objectively perceived or acknowledged by the viewer.

There are therefore two levels of visibility: the optical—that which is physically able to be seen; and the perceptual—that which we look at and acknowledge. These two positions would appear to be separate: one, the optically visible, a physical fact; and the other, the perceptually visible, governed by cultural conditioning. As we gaze at a work of art, painted or performed, these two positions constantly oscillate, and for Maurice Merleau-Ponty they are not separate but constantly intertwined: an object is ‘neither thing seen only nor seer only, it is Visibility sometimes wandering sometimes reassembled’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 139–140)—but always ultimately subjective and relative to the viewer, because as compelling as Lacan’s argument is for surrendering what to look at to the artist, it assumes a homogenous and compliant audience who all possess the same cultural knowledge and no independent curiosity.

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It is this extreme point of perception that we can call “invisible”: that which is physically present, tangible, and optically visible, but is not perceived by the viewer—or, importantly, is not perceived by the viewer yet. This does not presuppose, however, that such a position will be the same at each moment of a performance, or at an art “viewing” for every viewer, but it does rely on the idea that it can be a possible position for every viewer to experience at a point within the duration of their gaze. It also does not presuppose that a viewer will have their gaze successfully directed by an artist’s dompte-regard, their attempt to “tame” the gaze and guide it plaintively to where the artist requires it, but it does suggest that this experience is not out of the question entirely and that this surrender may even be voluntary. If an artist were to persuade a viewer into “seeing” what the artist wanted them to see, with the conventions and cleverness of their painting or performance, that would be politically interesting.

The visibility of a subject in performance has been used since Peggy Phelan and Jill Dolan’s work in the 1990s as a ‘representational problematic’ (Reinelt 1994, 97) to demonstrate in differing ways how a subject/object relationship within a theatrical or performative frame can be a political relationship. Various commentators and critics since that time have reinforced these notions and used them to demonstrate how a body’s visibility or invisibility can be a strong political metaphor when the relationship becomes central to the dramatic or performative work. Phelan and Dolan used this theme to effectively analyse gender relationships: for Dolan, it is used to refuse the stability and definition of gender and sex, whilst for Phelan visibility remains a panoptic trap (Reinelt 1994, 98). As Zarrilli’s early work and Barba’s subsequent response (Barba 1988) to Zarrilli’s previously addressed criticism of him indicate, visibility is just as effective in dealing with cross-cultural issues as it is with gender issues. As Phelan states in her seminal work Unmarked: ‘Performance implicates the real through the presence of living bodies’, and as the spectator consumes visually every scrap of the scene presented to them, ‘[w]ithout a copy, live performance plunges into visibility’ due to its ephemerality (Phelan 2001, 148). Phelan assumes that her example performance has been successful in taming the gaze of the entire audience, that they do see everything that is optically evident, and that, being left with only the live body of a woman, they cannot avoid seeing that too: the optically visible here meets the perceptually. With the ‘plunge’ of a body in live performance into visibility comes the acknowledgement of bodies associated with the performance and those bodies inevitably possess gender, sex and race. Along these lines Phelan makes her argument for the emergence of the female body in performance and the political consequences of being visible. In particular, she picks up on the presence of mediatizing technologies in relation to the body in order to resist the reproduction of metaphor, specifically the metaphor of gender, in order to approach and comment on the ‘real’ issues of quotidian gender inequality (Phelan 2001, 150).

The oscillation between bodies that plunge into and out of perceptual visibility prove dramatic in their own right as they “appear” and “disappear” on stage for a deliberately and sometimes unavoidable political effect. The politics of the visible and invisible body has become a mainstay of theatrical and performance criticism over the last twenty years, in particular with relation to the body in performance on stage with technologies. The work of Philip Auslander (1999), Susan Kozel (2007), and Mathew Causey (2004) all utilize Phelan’s observations to make their own comments

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on the subject matter. With the digital shift gathering pace during the same timeframe, and since the increase in ubiquity of mobile technologies, the borderlands and boundaries between the subject and object and the body and the space have become blurred, extended, or even suspended altogether. Also plunging into visibility has been the material technology, often in the way, interrupting, or obscuring the performance, frequently supporting or extending the action, but always critically, problematically.

Staging ‘The Maids’

‘Visibility brings with it responsibility’ is a line of dialogue added to Playing ‘The Maids’ by the ensemble and is not present in the original Genet text. What is resonant with this particular line for this paper is its direct association of something powerful to something that is also perceptually visible. Madame is framed on either side by her four maids as they clamber around on the floor fawning and primping her garments. The tableau is triangular, with Madam at the apex and the maids either side at her feet. Her declaration is a paraphrasing of Foucault’s statement regarding the panopticon and the power structures inherent in the object’s visibility: ‘He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power’ (Foucault 1991, 202). That subject is optically and perceptually visible and is aware of their visibility to viewers who may not be visible either optically (to the subject) or perceptually (again to the subject). This would have resonance in any normal production of Genet’s The Maids, as the 1947 play continually evokes a character who is often not physically present but is made omni-present by the sister-maids’ performance of the character in different situations and in repetitions of play-acting games which they perform throughout the course of the play. Madame is not present (optically invisible) but is evoked to be perceptually visible through representation of her character. This was a deliberate attempt by Genet, according to Oreste Pucciani, to invert the ‘normal relationship of world and theatre and by a magic of his own turn[s] the theatre into the world’ (Pucciani 1963, 44). It would seem that Genet was very much aware of the potential of the stage as a philosophical crucible for political and social experimentation.

In the context of Playing ‘The Maids’, however, the character of Madame is not merely artificially or theatrically evoked in the space, but is physically present, lurking at the periphery of the black box studio whilst both sets of maids evoke her theatrical presence in their story-telling games. Here Madame is optically visible at almost all times, trailing silk scarves or merely slowly, exactingly moving through and round the space, strolling and reclining in luxuriating positions on the flower festooned stage. Often she is perceptually present to the other characters on the stage, and at times she becomes less perceptually visible for the audience as we lay down our gaze and are directed to view other stage actions through the conventions of the performance, such as when she walks into the darkness and the Maids perform in the light. Her declaration—or rather her acknowledgement—of her own visibility optically, perceptually, and, in terms of the adaptation, theatrically, is particularly interesting considering what other else is visible in the space ‘when we mark the smallest signs and natural things that are to be found’ (Foucault 1973, 6) in the scenographic frame of the performance.

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The studio space at Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, is a small black-box space with end-on audience measuring roughly eight metres to a side of a square playing area. In this space, the ensemble describe two squares, one on the floor with white tape and the other directly above this boundary through the suspension of inverted bunches of flowers. These bunches hang at varying heights above the eye-line of the performers and most of the audience so that they dangle down like drying branches. Within this space are several chairs and two cleaning carts that serve as personal props for the Maids. Upstage-left, hanging amongst the flowers is a white gown on a hanger. At the rear at centre is suspended a video projection screen, and the projector is hidden away in the lighting rig centre-stage. The sole entrance and exit to the space is upstage-right, a doorway leading backstage. Masking that portal and occupying an entire corner of the space is a trestle table covered in sound equipment, consisting of several strange-looking electronic noise makers, Theremins, small keyboards, and mixing desks, as well as a host of decorative props such as a standing porcelain Buddha and several dolls in East-Asian dress. Above this area is a large clock with Roman numerals and hands that do not move. A sound engineer is present (Mick O’Shea). Stage-right of this paraphernalia is a musician (Adrian Curtin) with a cello and a set of microphones and other musical objects. This pair of technician performers are part of the scenography. They are there to welcome us into the space, and they are there when the show finally ends. They never move from this space, nor are they ever plunged into darkness, but instead remain lit throughout the performance. Curtin (listed as a musician, theatre artist and academic in the programme notes) plays the cello, narrates the action and operates small sets of his own equipment or reuses his cello in a percussive or radiophonic way, moving, tapping, and scraping the body to contribute to the soundscape; O’Shea (sound artist) operates a variety of Theremins, keyboards, synthesizers, and sound makers and sound mixers in a similarly diverse and contributively creative way. Their presence is both optically visible and essential to the work.

Despite the variety and technical and creative complexity of their tools, they contribute to the same artistic element: through scoring and punctuating the performance—sometimes cinematically, sometimes radiophonically—they hold together the dramatic tension, play out our genre expectations, and reinforce the fictional world that is evoked. They are performers in that they contribute directly and creatively to the action of the performance, and they are technicians in that they operate a wide variety of technical objects in order to perform this function. Each of those objects have different semiotic meanings, and, depending on how they are used, they are both “black-box technological artefacts” and instruments contributing to the aesthetic of the performance. Their presence is semiotically more significant than that of the video projection and its associated paraphernalia. Their roles in performance are not simply defined as musician and technician as their roles overlap: Curtin would appear to be a musician, holding a cello, but he operates it as a Foley sound artefact at several points, and he takes responsibility for the equipment that controls the levels and tonality of the microphone that he and the Actress playing Madame use. Similarly, O’Shea operates sets of different sound equipment, but consider a synthesizer or a Theremin as “just equipment” at your own peril: they are technologically differently complex to a cello, but no less complex, and no less musical.

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Curtin and O’Shea’s core purpose seems to be a bridge between the anti-narrative of the physical performance and the audience’s expectations of the source material. Welcoming us into the dimly lit space, Curtin stretches some notes upon his cello while O’Shea mixes soft abstract loops of sound. Into one of several microphones Curtin intones broken half verses of poetry and offers steganographic messages of theatrical welcome (‘please remember… all… turn off… thank you’). In his hand is an old dog-eared copy of Genet’s text in Faber paperback, presumably covered in notes, from which Curtin reads during the show. He reads sections of stage directions, some real and some extended by the ensemble, and as the action progresses Curtin and O’Shea’s verbal and sonic soundscapes shape the mood and the space of the work. After welcoming us and accompanying radiophonically and musically the movement of everything on stage, ‘Visibility brings with it responsibility’ takes on a particularly interesting flavour. Sound technology is so central to the drama presented, and is perceptually as well as optically visible on stage throughout the performance, as are the two technician-performers and all their technological equipment, taking on a dramatic performative role as well as that of their technical musical one. They are figuratively and literally the cornerstone of the collaboration and the scenography. Madam’s truism develops a peculiarly rich harmony with the ideas of Foucault’s panopticism: if you can be seen, then you can be responsible. Your visibility can be afforded political weight. If you assume power you also assume punitive responsibility for what is shown: if it goes wrong, it’s your fault.

Technology and Visibility

To begin understanding the import of Madame’s statement in relation to the politics of theatre technology beyond Playing ‘The Maids’, we must first return to Peggy Phelan and one of the central arguments articulating the role or position of technology in live performance from the 1990s. This argument, which has dominated the debate in one way or another for the last twenty years, comes from Philip Auslander and his work Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (1999), in which Auslander takes specific interest in a case study by Phelan.

In Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (first published 1993) Phelan describes and discusses a work of performance art by the artist Angelika Festa entitled Untitled dance (with fish and others). In this work, the artist is suspended from a pole with her eyes taped shut and her body entirely bound, while a live video feed displays an image of her feet on a screen in the same room as the artist, and an opposing video monitor shows a looped video tape of a fish swimming around. The presence of these mediatized images ‘forces the spectator constantly to look away from Festa’s suspended body’ (Phelan 2001, 156). The spectator is instead invited to consume ‘a “blind” image’, suggesting that it is ‘only through the second-order of a re/presentation that we “see” anything’ (Phelan 2001, 156). Phelan provides an accompanying production photograph: to the left of the frame is Festa, her face bound up with scarves and her body apparently suspended by some rig that is out of frame. She is mostly out of photograph’s frame, her body obscuring the free-standing projection screen which Phelan described as the “feet-screen”, as there is a blurry close-up of her feet on the screen (Phelan 2001, 157). Auslander, in his critique of this work, makes reference to Phelan’s observation of this technologically based performance and suggests that her conclusions

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are tautological, finding it interesting that Phelan ‘does not specifically address the encroachment of technologies of reproduction’ in her analysis of Festa’s artwork (2001, 40). He goes on to point out that ‘[i]t is ironic that the video camera, perhaps the sine qua non of the pressures that Phelan sees as compromising the ontological integrity of the performance, is itself integral to the performance in question’ (Auslander 1999, 40). Auslander chooses to observe something that is optically visible in Phelan’s example but that Phelan has not observed.

Optically visible in Phelan’s photograph, but absent in her analysis, are the two objects that Auslander is clearly referring to when he describes the ‘encroachment’ of technologies: down-frame-centre and slightly out of focus is a large RGB projector, and down-frame-right and the most in-focus element of the whole image, a JVC video camera mounted on a tripod. Auslander mentions the camera as being absent in Phelan’s analysis, ‘the sine qua non’ of the encroachment—but he himself neglects to mention the projector and the video monitor with the looped image of the fish swimming. Present in this academic exchange is not two levels of blindness as Phelan suggests, but three: the aversion of the spectators described by Phelan, her omission of anything technological beyond the images viewed, and thirdly Auslander’s conflation of the technological system used in the production. Each level of blindness indicates another tier of technological occlusion. Whether these aversions are deliberate or unconscious is interesting because it indicates a lacuna in their production-based critical thinking. These items of technology are responsible for the production of the artwork, and yet Phelan does not see anything but the images they produce. Auslander sees the main technological actant (the video camera) but not the video monitor or the projector. These observations are based on tiers of perception which have governed their visibility and emphasise the subjective cultural differences between Festa, Phelan, and Auslander: Festa presents everything but tries to directs the attention of her audience; Phelan, observes one level of technological visibility in the image the technology produces; Auslander actively looks for another level and observes the encroaching technologies. None of them see each of ‘the smallest signs […] that are to be found’ of all of the optically visible technological artefacts (the cables, the tripod, the tape that binds Festa etc.), which detail ‘the surface of perpetual simultaneity’ (Foucault, 1973. 6). In this case Festa has succeeded in finding her political audience in the tamed gaze of Phelan, but Auslander’s subjectivity has affected what he sees in the same performance.

Technology that is seen on stage, as in this instance, is usually the finished product: it is static and unavoidably past, and it is perceptually visible, in the sense that it is no longer perceptually invisible. This is not to say, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty takes pains to point out, that it was not previously non-visible, optically invisible or absent, but that it had been actually present but not perceived (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 66, 89–98, 138–139). If it is seen on stage then it has been perceived to be part of the mise-en-scène of the show; its visual presence in the space must be acknowledged for it to be part of the mise-en-scène, otherwise it is simply ignored or invisible. ‘We do not see,’ says Merleau-Ponty of the invisible things, ‘do not hear the ideas, and even with the mind’s eye or with the third ear: and yet they are there, behind the sounds or between them, behind the lights, or between them’ (138–139). They are ready to become perceptually visible, not just because they are revealed to us by necessarily physical means to become optically visible—unveiled or un-obscured,

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or in a theatrical sense pushed onto the stage—but simply that they are ready to be perceived when indicated that we should perceive them through the conventions of performance, because the states of perceptual visibility and invisibility are ‘the obverse and the reverse of each other’ (152). This then is bound up within a performative frame with the semiological significance of the technological: they are black-boxes of inputs and outputs when they are perceptually invisible, but semiologically significant when also perceptually visible. Any technological artefact that is used on stage should have performative semiological significance, but it seems that we are too governed by our everyday conceptualisation of technology as an apolitical, semiotically null black-box, ‘where one need understand anything about what goes on inside such black boxes. One simply brackets them as instruments that perform certain valuable functions’ (Winner 1993, 365).

In this case, the technology Auslander and Phelan are familiar with can plunge the body into perceptual and political visibility in performance at the sacrifice of its own semiotic visibility. What is offered by Curtin and O’Shea as they guide us through the world of Playing ‘The Maids’ is very different. They instead present aesthetic questions: What are they there for aesthetically? Are they there to perform or to serve? And that, it would seem, is a political conundrum: are they part of the apolitical black-box of technology or the semiotically “neutral” black-box of the theatre performance? Dominating the upstage-right corner of a small playing space for the entirety of a performance, they are optically and perceptually visible, and they are not allowed to become optically invisible on the stage: they are lit at all times, and even though they may drift out of an audience’s gaze at points in the performance—or may even be actively ignored by some members of the audience who are used to ignoring such things—they do not leave the space they occupy and constantly draw attention to themselves dramatically and technically. They cannot become optically, perceptually, or semiotically invisible because they are responsible for the action. The technician-performers and their technologies do not lose their visibility in performance; they are part of the performance, and even if attention can be moved elsewhere (should we allow our gaze to be tamed), they are never entirely invisible.

Technological Aesthetics

The key to this political and aesthetic conundrum lies with understanding what types of technology we can have on stage, not in terms of product or brand, but in terms of their aesthetic. A social constructivist approach may be suitable to identify and explore ahistorically the creation and use of a technological device or system, but the concept of a black-box described ‘solely in terms of its inputs and outputs’ (Winner 1993, 365) will not wash scenographically.

Let us take a commonly held assumption that there is technology that is performative and highly visible to an audience and technology that is invisible and in service of the show. Arguments that are less reductive than this assumption are also less pragmatic for our purposes, especially as what we are trying to explore here are common perceptions of technology in quotidian relationships and not a technologist’s perception, for reasons that will hopefully become clear. This assumption treats the technology on one level as something which is functional—the magic black box has done something—and on another level, as something of significance—we are witnessing a black box do

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something magical. Everyday technology can be read in a social constructivist manner, but in a frame of performance, the differences and the exchange of positions that a technology undergoes when it is being perceived as technology and when it is not perceived is something that requires careful mapping. For this purpose, two semiotic functions can be proposed as positions that a technology can occupy: specific and psycho-plastic. As with the other distinct positions this paper has been dealing with—visible and invisible, culture and nature—these too are intertwined and entangled and can be viewed subjectively so that they are never quite fixed.

Performative technologies could be referred to as specific theatre technologies, and a theatre technology invented for a special purpose could be said to have a certain specificity. A specific theatre technology, or a technology which has specificity, is a “one trick pony”, usually something spectacular designed exclusively for one event or one theatrical effect. It therefore has unique signification within the performative frame it is presented in. A specific technology is singular in its use and in its meaning, and it is used for one aesthetic purpose. An example of a specific theatre technology would be something like the nineteenth-century wood stage device the Corsican Trap, used to facilitate the entrance of a ghost onto stage, or its (spiritual) successor, the Pepper’s ghost illusion.

In opposition to specific technologies are technologies that fulfill many roles and that are used to serve the action of the stage. These service technologies are invisible and non-performative, and do not distract from the action of the stage or performance. These service devices can be referred to as psycho-plastic, a term first used in the 1920s by a group of New York artists called the Invisibilists, who hung empty frames in galleries and asked their patrons to fill in the images with their imaginations. Later it was used theatrically by Josef Svoboda to describe his stage designs. These technologies are versatile, adaptable, and have many layers of meaning imposed or read into them by the audience, usually unconsciously. They help complete the illusion of theatre by supporting the scenic action, invisibly maintaining the illusion of the staged action. These are technologies which are not noticed and do not stand out as something specific. These technologies that support the theatrical production arguably maintain the psycho-plastic nature of the performance space. An example would be the digital multiplexing (DMX) protocol technology utilized to control lighting consoles and banks of dimmers, making scenographic lighting remarkably versatile.

It is easy to think of these things as merely one thing or the other: that psycho-plastic only refers to the perceptually invisible service theatre technologies; and that anything specific is only visibly spectacular. If we are in a system of opposition then we are pitting the invisible against the visible; however, these are concepts that do not settle so easily into opposition, as they are both the ‘the obverse and the reverse of each other’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 152). Like invisibility and visibility, they are intertwined, and indeed there are many technologies that could be considered to function aesthetically as both specific and psycho-plastic, and there are some technologies that are partially both, but neither one nor the other, or frequently shifting across different performances and sometimes within a performance. A good example of this is the very problematic and common use of video projection in performance. The projected image—highly visible spectacle, semiotically

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important, and aesthetically specific—is often privileged to the detriment of the projection technologies involved—invisible service technology, semiotically just as important, aesthetically psycho-plastic. Hence the conflicting readings Auslander and Phelan give in the earlier example of Festa’s work: Festa’s body is aesthetically more important to Phelan; Auslander’s gaze is drawn to the technology. Ultimately, theatre technologies can be psycho-plastic and specific at once, the relationship between these two states being fluid and constantly moving, and also relative to what they are being used. Consequently their visibility is dynamic and perspectivally relative to the context used. The Corsican Trap used in a production of Dion Boucicault’s The Corsican Brothers, for example, would have been specific, but used in another performance for the entrance of something other than a ghost would find the aesthetic shifting towards a psycho-plastic reading.

The dynamic of this relationship between what becomes visible on stage and what is pushed into invisibility is not things moving “on and “off” stage, being optically revealed or removed, but our attention focussing upon already optically visible and present things. The shift between levels of perception regarding technology in performance also suggests a shift in aesthetics, and can explain the relationships of specific and psycho-plastic technologies not as oppositions but as dynamic, subjectively interchangeable differences. Such a relationship allows us to consider the other beings that our relationship with technology may reveal to us, and can reveal the politics that are manifest within such an interaction.

The instance of Curtin and O’Shea’s presence on the stage of Playing ‘The Maids’ should be psycho-plastic: they support the action of the stage as well as adding dramatic texture. If they were positioned in the location hitherto provided for technicians and musicians—for example, off-stage, in a technical box, or half obscured beneath the stage in the orchestra pit—this may well remain the case: their technology could serve to enhance and support the psycho-plastic effect of the production almost exclusively. However, their deliberate scenographic optical visibility gives them not only a dramatic responsibility to the performance, but it binds all their technologies together into one observable/noticeable (perceptually visible) unit and awards them an aesthetic specificity within the performative frame.

Performance Technology in Use

In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty extends his philosophy of vision into the sense of touch, which is important to this discussion because that which is tangible ‘is not a nothingness of visibility, it is not without visual existence’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 134). There can therefore be a situation where a viewer can be in direct physical contact with an object, but still not acknowledge that contact and not acknowledge that the object is in physical terms “visible” or “tangible”. Tangibility is not really an applicable extension to use, as the implication of an optically visible object is that it can-be-touched; rather, in technological terms the question that it provokes is “can it be used?” This question raises other questions: is it being applied correctly? is it broken? do I know how to use it? Essentially they key question becomes: what is its usability? The context of the answer will provide the detail, but the answer must occupy a point between usable or unusable depending on the function. If an audience member was to stroll across the stage and pick up

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Curtin’s cello, for instance, they would be able to “use” it at a base tangible level—strum it to make a sound—or they may be virtuosic and be able to use it to a high degree. Either way, with imagination, that instrument can have a number of uses beyond its intended function as a musical instrument: it could be wielded as a weapon, or used as a paperweight or doorstop, or, as Curtin does in the performance, turned into a Foley sound effect. If they broke it, they would not be able to use it as a cello instrumentally (in technological terms not just musical); it would be broken and less usable. If they still used it as a weapon or as a paperweight, however, the function would obviously be different, and so the usability would also be different. In the context of the performance in which Curtin used the instrument as a cello, a Foley effect, and a percussive instrument, it had multiple uses but an alterable aesthetic function, becoming more psycho-plastic, or becoming more specific as the action shifted.

In performance it is not usual for an audience member to have direct contact with technological elements of the performance. We can have no experience of using the technologies that Curtin and O’Shea do within the contexts of the performance, and therefore we have no domestic access to the technologies. They are not usable to us as audience; however, in this instance they are perceptually visible. The performance frame makes obvious to us a set of relationships between user and technology by affording them textual significance within a theatrical frame. To the audience, the cello is unusable, as it is unreachable, but we can perceive it in use when our attention is directed at it. From Curtin’s perspective the visibility of the instrument would be different: virtuosity in using an instrument is a movement towards an embodied knowledge, and therefore to a reduced perceptual visibility, but a shift in the function in which one uses the instrument in a different way is irregular, less embodied, more visible. The issue of the embodiment of technology, or of technology extending the body, and its relationship to perceptual visibility and a technology’s usability is one that requires further unpicking.

Embodiment and visibility

Theatrical space has always been inextricably technological, as theatre is cultural and the two are ‘seamless’ (Sørenson 2003, 187), so it is strange that the technologization of theatre seems only evident now. Perhaps it is because technology in society has become more perceptually visible to the public that theatre technologies have also become more visible and have found themselves a more central position in theatre and performance studies. Digital technology and new media technologies allow us to stage the urbanity of our lives (Birringer 1998, 258–353; Giannachi, 2007; Jensen 2007 61–66), allowing us to heighten and publicize our lives in ways previously only familiar in a theatrical frame. According to Erving Goffman, in an everyday strip of life there are many social frames (Goffman 1986, 561), and according to Erika Fischer-Lichte one of those everyday frames is theatrical because technology allows us to theatricalise what is “everyday” and not just our performances:

The simulacrum has become ‘experience’ […], and appearance in the media […] turns out to be one in which reality—traditionally experienced and defined in opposition to appearance—has dissolved entirely. Thus the new media contribute

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considerably to the theatricalization of everyday life and only allow access to a staged/fabricated reality. (Fisher-Lichte 1997, 219)

The modern theatre space is therefore a visibly technologized one because the fringes of the frame bleed across one another and the everyday is visibly technologized. We find our bodies extended by technologies in the performance space. For Susan Kozel, technology and the human body have to be interchangeable in performance; they reveal each other, and their relationship has the ‘dynamic, shifting ever-changing quality of what makes us who we are’ (Kozel 2007, 76). It is ‘not out of the question for technologies to reveal aspects of embodiment’ (75), becoming an extension of our being. Kozel suggests that working with technology in performance reveals deeper aspects to a performer: ‘layers of physical, conceptual and social knowledge that are revealed through digital/physical interfaces’ (75), layers that are only uncovered by using technology in performance. Merleau-Ponty argues that when observing things in relation to ourselves ‘there is an overlapping or encroachment, so that we must say that the things pass into us as well as we into the things’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 123). He is careful to point out, however, that this is an encroachment and not a blending of our bodies with that which we observe, ‘for then the vision would vanish at the moment of formation, by disappearance of the seer or of the visible’ (131). So a movement towards embodiment is a movement towards further invisibility up to the impossible limit of vanishing altogether. When a musician is virtuoso, or a programmer is expert, or for anyone who drives a daily commute, their use of an associated technological device becomes to a large extent embodied. The perceptual visibility of those devices decreases and moves towards the perceptually invisible. They are not thought of as perceptually separate to us; they are only used. There is a correlation between a technology’s functional usability and its perceptual visibility as a technology. The use of technology in performance frames this correlation.

The use of psycho-plastic technologies to support performative action through means of the audience’s imagination could be said to be embodied, with parts of the theatre as a machine or arguably extensions of the theatre’s body, so that outside a performative frame, in the everyday, it would be more properly considered that these technologies are potentially embodied extensions of one’s being. The corollary may therefore follow that as everyday technologies become extensions of our being—the ubiquitous mobile phone, for example—because they are unable to become actually part of our being, they must vanish to our perception. A further relationship this paper suggests, therefore, is that there is a correlation between a technology’s usability and its visibility to the effect that a technology that can be used in so easy a manner that it becomes an embodied extension of ourselves will lose its visibility to us as a technology. Functionally they may no longer be aesthetic objects in the everyday, but they can still be “read” as texts. They may retain their functional plasticity, but in this paper’s argument, beyond advocating for its use in theatre and performance, the ‘psycho’ prefix, is one that should remain in the performative frame; while perhaps plastic is an adequate quotidian and pragmatic partner term for specific to be used when applying these relationships to examples in the everyday.

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Visible Through Failure: A political philosophy of technology

Andrew Feenberg observes that technology seems to affect democratic processes, but the development of technology seems to have little democratic input beyond those associated with capitalist processes. He argues that ‘since technology embraces more and more social life, these struggles promise to become more frequent and more significant. Can we rest content with a philosophy of technology that is unable to comprehend them?’ (Feenberg 1999, xiv). This paper has outlined some relationships that are framed by performance and made evident through their significance in reading them. It has so far avoided left-leaning conclusions, but if we centre the action of performance upon these relationships, or if we make these relationships an integral part of the action, then performance is well-placed to examine the struggles to which Feenberg refers. Performance can provide the arena for the philosophy of technology to carry out its internal debates and explore the manifestations of theory and the ‘enormously diverse kinds of technology in the world’ (Winner 1993, 363), and it can allow the field to explore its speculations in less abstract forms so that they will not be considered ‘vacuous and arm-chair bound’ by the opposing school’s ‘rich empirical detail of social science studies of technology’ (Winner 1993, 364). To do this, however, leaning-left politically seems to be a very obvious direction to take. As a conclusion to the case study of Playing ‘The Maids’, what follows is a political reading of what is implied by the presence of Curtin and O’Shea, and by inference the inclusion of technology and those who use it within a performative frame.

As Merleau-Ponty points out, our being through the act of seeing ‘is seen’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 99): our body looking is ‘my body looked at’ (123) because we never see from a position of nothingness, so the technological object that that is viewed by a being is only ‘a double’ of one viewed by another in their own ‘camera obscura’ (122). The average theatre-goer is unused to seeing the protagonists of backstage. These are people who are deliberately hidden to preserve the “magic” of the theatre experience and the integrity of the illusion, so they are invisible people; but we know what they look like because we know what the theatre looks like when the illusion fails and “backstage” enters. O’Shea and Curtin are visible technicians, and their responsibility reminds us of other technicians we might see. However, it is rare to see a technician on stage, as many years of convention has ensured that this is “not done”. We even dress them in black so that if they are “on-stage” they are optically less visible, in the hope that they are also perceptually less visible. The technician-performers represent, by proxy, the technology’s failure, and they also represent other technicians and technologists in our relationships with our technology, for each technological object holds within itself the aesthetic of its own potential failure: the cracked screen of the smartphone, the “blue screen of death” of the PC, the “beachball of death” of the iMac, static on analogue televisions, digital tearing and judder on digital televisions, the infinite buffering circle of any streaming video. A technology’s failure pushes that technology into perceptual visibility, and with it we are made aware that there are other people with other perspectives of the same technology when our technology fails. We rarely think of mechanics when driving, unless the service is due, or we hear a new noise; taking our new phone back to the “genius” who sold it to us is the last thing on our minds when we open its box; we do not spare a thought for the washing machine repairperson as we put on a load, only when the machine will not work. At the point of a

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technology’s failure we become especially aware of it, it becomes visible to us, and what also becomes visible is the technician who views that technology in an entirely different way to us. This is not to say that the technician does not experience the same phenomena with technologies themselves. It is unlikely that all technologies are perceptually visible to them: they may be adept at mending a machine, but when their tool for doing so breaks, it too will become visible and with it the being who can fix it. In the frame of the performance O’Shea and Curtin remind us of the technician, as do the performers who operate the televisions and cameras and other specific theatre technologies used by The Wooster Group, Blast Theory, or Kneehigh, for example. In reminding us of the invisible technician, we are reminded of the failure of the technology, not because it is failing, but because they are operating it inside a performance frame to which we do not have access. So, as we gaze at the performance, the technology becomes visible and they, as now visible technicians, are responsible for it.

As our everyday technologies fail they become visible to us, and with these failing technologies come technicians. Their bodies are pushed into visibility. With their emergence into our gaze this visibility becomes political because ‘visibility is a trap’ (Foucault 1991, 200). In the current neo-liberal climate of late capitalism, the technician is an underclass, offering a service each time they become visible to the user to fix or assist in the unusable technology. The technician and the user in this circumstance can “see” the technology, but when the technology is fixed, the technology for the user falls back into invisibility, and with it the technician. The assumption for the technician must be that because the technology is visible to them, they must also be visible to the user: for them the technology is both visible and embodied. Consequently, they assume they are ‘perfectly individualized and constantly visible’ (Foucault 1991, 200), but of course they are ‘the object of information, never a subject in communication’, and consequently their consciousness of permanent visibility in that relationship ‘assumes the automatic functioning of power’ (201). The user only sees them when the technology is unusable, when it is visible and the technician is responsible. When it becomes embodied again, the user no longer sees the technician, and they become invisible once more. Playing ‘The Maids’ explores power dynamics and modern servitude as its theme, and its scenography highlights those same relationships by making the use of technology visible.

In anticipating “the next technological revolution” Larry A. Hickman visits Heidegger’s early ‘brilliant analysis of the deep fissure that divides two types of technological response to the world’ (Hickman 2001, 173). On one side there are technologies we have ‘assimilated to our quotidian lives’ that have made them ‘virtually transparent in use’, whilst on the other side there technologies which require ‘conscious instrumental engagement’ (Hickman 2001, 178). In short: some technologies are invisible to us, and that is philosophically problematic as it suggests a political relationship as well as a physical one. Hickman points out that Heidegger’s work and the works of Merleau-Ponty advanced our ‘understanding of human situatedness and embodiment’, but were unable to offer a ‘reform of technical culture’ (178) with a view to describing how a political philosophy of technology might be formed. In attempting the same project, Feenberg acknowledges:

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Real change will not come when we turn away from technology toward meaning, but when we recognize the nature of our subordinate position in the technical systems that enrol us, and begin to intervene in the design process in the defense of the conditions of a meaningful life and a liveable environment. (Feenberg 1999, xiv)

A more dangerous implication than this paper has heretofore raised, especially when considering the ubiquity of mobile communications technology, is that it may be not only the technician who is invisible, but the technologists who govern the technologies, or the governments who wish to control the technologies or use it for observation of the people. If we acknowledge their existence as beings who are unverifiable, the user and the technician will never know if they are ‘being looked at at any one moment; but must be sure that’ they must ‘…always be so’ (Foucault 1999, 201). But this is just one political reading of a modest example and is perhaps for another wider discussion and another paper. For now this paper offers a view of what theatre can offer to the field of the philosophy of technology. For Genet, ‘in the theatre everything happens in the visible world and nowhere else’ (Pucciani 1966, 48), and the theatre can explore many worlds; but each time it brings technology to the centre of attention it is making a political statement, for that technology is visible and with it comes responsibility.

Works Cited

Auslander, Philip. 1999. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. London: Routledge.

Barba, Eugenio. and Phillip Zarrilli. 1988. ‘Eugenio Barba to Phillip Zarrilli: About the Visible and the Invisible in the Theatre and about ISTA in particular.’ Theatre Drama Review 32 (3): 7–16. https://doi.org/10.2307/1145900

Bay-Cheng, Sarah, Chiel Kattenbelt, Andy Lavender, and Robin Nelson, eds. 2010. Mapping Intermediality in Performance. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Birringer, Johannes. 1998. Media & Performance: Along the Border. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Bowie, Andrew. 2015. “The ‘Philosophy of Performance’ and the ‘Performance of Philosophy’.” Performance Philosophy 1: 51–58. https://doi.org/10.21476/PP.2015.1131

Braun, Bruce. 2004. ‘Nature and Culture: On the Career of a False Problem.’ In A Companion to Cultural Geography, edited by James S. Duncan, Nuala C. Johnson and Richard H. Schein, 151–179. London: Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470996515.ch11

D’Arcy, Geraint. 2013. ‘The Yellow Sound an unstageable composition? Technology, modernism and spaces that should-not-be.’ Body, Space, Technology 12. http://people.brunel.ac.uk/bst/vol12/geraintdarcy/geraintdarcy.pdf

Causey, Matthew. 2004. Theatre and Performance in Digital Culture: From Simulation to Embeddedness. London: Routledge.

Dixon, Steve. 2009. Digital performance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Fischer-Lichte, Erika. 1997. The Show and the Gaze of Theatre: A European Perspective. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

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Feenberg, Andrew. 1999. Questioning Technology. London: Routledge.

Foucault, Michel. 1973. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception Translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Taylor and Francis.

———. 1991. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin.

Garrety, Karin and Richard Badham. 2004. ‘User-Centred Design and the Normative Poltitics of Technology.’ Science, Technology, & Human Interventions 29 (2): 191–212.

Giannachi, Gabriella. 2004. Virtual Theatres: An Introduction. London: Routledge.

Goffman, Erving. 1986. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. New York: Harper and Row.

Hickmann, Larry A. 2001. Philosophical Tools for a Technological Culture: Putting Pragmatism to Work. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Idhe, Don. 2004. ‘Has the Philosophy of Technology Arrived? A State-of-the-Art Review.’ Philosophy of Science 71 (1): 117–131. https://doi.org/10.1086/381417

Jensen, Amy Petersen. 2007. Theatre in a Media Culture: Production, Performance and Perception Since 1970. Jefferson: McFarland & Co.

Kim, Sunhee. 2015. ‘Playing the Maids public promo.’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stWcbtqN6kQ

Kirkkipelto, Esa. 2015. “For what do we need Performance Philosophy?” Performance Philosophy 1: 4–6. https://doi.org/10.21476/PP.2015.117

Kozel, Susan. 2007. Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Lacan, Jacques. 1994. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Pyscho-analysis. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin.

Llanarth Group, Gaitkrash, and Theatre P’yut. 2015. Playing ‘the Maids’. Programme Notes. Cardiff: Chapter Arts Centre.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

O’Reilly, Kaite and Adrian Curtin. 2015. ‘Intercultural Dramaturgy.’ Exeunt, February 17. Accessed June 29, 2015. http://exeuntmagazine.com/features/playing-the-maids-intercultural-dramaturgy/

Phelan, Peggy. (1993) 2001. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge.

Pucciani, Oreste F. 1963. ‘Tragedy, Genet and The Maids.’ The Tulane Review 7 (3): 42–59. https://doi.org/10.2307/1125083

Reinelt, Janelle. 1994. ‘Staging the Invisible: The Crisis of Visibility in Theatrical Tepresentation.’ Text and Performance Quarterly 14 (2): 97–107. https://doi.org/10.1080/10462939409366075

Sinfield, Alan. 1990. ‘Theatre and Politics.’ In Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism, edited by Martin Coyle, Peter Garside, Malcolm Kelsall, and John Peck, 475–487. London: Routledge.

Sørenson, K. H. 2004. ‘Cultural Politics of Technology: Combining Critical and Constructive Interventions?’ Science, Technology, & Human Interventions 29 (2): 184–190.

Winner, Langdon. 1993. ‘Upon Opening the Black Box and Finding it Empty: Social Constructivism and the Philosophy of Technology.’ Science, Technology, & Human Values 18.3: 362–378. https://doi.org/10.1177/016224399301800306

Zarrilli, Phillip. 1988. ‘For Whom is the “Invisible” Not Visible?: Reflections on Representation in the work of Eugenio Barba.’ Theatre Drama Review 32 (1): 95–106. https://doi.org/10.2307/1145872

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Biography

Geraint D’Arcy is a lecturer in theatre and drama at the University of South Wales. He has published papers on aspects of the manifestation of technology and information in popular culture and upon theatre technology and scenography. His 2011 PhD was entitled Towards an Aesthetics of Theatre Technology. Geraint is currently writing a book on film and television set design.

© 2017 Geraint D’Arcy

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY VOL 3, NO 1 (2017):199–215 DOI: https://doi.org/10.21476/PP.2017.31109

ISSN 2057–7176

PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY

A ‘PARADOX OF EXPRESSION’: MERLEAU-PONTY AND THE INTERTWINING NATURE OF BRECHT’S ‘NOT…BUT’

PROCEDURE

COHEN AMBROSE COMMUNITY COLLEGE OF BALTIMORE COUNTY

[F]or the first time, through the other body, I see that, in its coupling with the flesh of the world, the body contributes more than it receives, adding to the world that I see the treasure necessary for what the other body sees. For the first time, the body no longer couples itself up with the world, it clasps another body, applying itself to it carefully with its whole extension, forming tirelessly with its hands the strange statue which in its turn gives everything it receives; the body is lost outside of the world and its goals, fascinated by the unique occupation of floating in Being with another life, of making itself the outside of its inside and the inside of its outside. And henceforth movement, touch, vision, applying themselves to the other and to themselves, return toward their source and, in the patient and silent labor of desire, begin the paradox of expression.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and The Invisible (1968, 143–144)

In one of his last writings before his death in 1961, Maurice Merleau-Ponty makes the case that one’s flesh is the vanishing point of the distinction between subject and object, self and other, and the individual and the world. He argues that to look at oneself through the eyes of another necessarily blends the divide between one body and another and, by applying one’s senses to another’s, one engages in a “paradox of expression,” or a double-agency between both oneself and another. I borrow Merleau-Ponty’s phrase as my title because it is particularly apt regarding a performance technique that German playwright, director, theorist, and co-founder of the Berliner Ensemble, Bertolt Brecht, called the procedure of “fixing the ‘not…but’,” which produces a Verfremdungseffekt.1 The Verfremdungseffekt creates a sense of ‘defamiliarization’ in the spectator’s

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consideration of a character. I use Merleau-Ponty’s “paradox of expression” as a way of considering Brecht’s call for the co-presence of the actor and their character in a stage performance. I borrow Nick Crossley’s approach to phenomenological intersubjectivity and consider the apparent theoretical implications in the performance of the ‘not…but’ procedure. I argue that in order for the actor to successfully perform Brecht’s ‘not…but’ procedure in performance, the actor must play into their character while occasionally playing out of the character—employing what I call a ‘reflective block’—in an alternative attitude so the spectator will notice their comment on their character.

In his essay “A Short Description for a New Technique of Acting Which Produces an Alienation Effect”, first written as a prefatory note in 1940, Brecht states that the “aim of this technique was to make the spectator adopt an attitude of inquiry and criticism in his approach to the incident… [t]he actor must invest what he has to show” (Brecht 1964, 136). There are many techniques for creating Verfremdungseffekte in the theatre that are achieved with music, technical, staging, and design choices. I will remain focused, however, on the actor’s role in creating the effect. One Berliner Ensemble member, Ekkehard Schall, asserts that although other stage devices can aid in creating Verfremdungseffekte, “the best means of Verfremdung remain those which pull the contradiction out of a performance’s unity” (2015, 65–66). Brecht argues that the actor’s intent and opinion is as important as their portrayal of the character’s psychophysical experience. I argue, however, that this critical reproduction cannot exist as a seamless, simultaneous series of actions, but rather as an interconnected double helix: first performing toward a complete transformation, and then stepping out of the character’s psychophysical experience and showing the character performing a contradictory act—something they would not do. By picking up Brecht’s line, I too have explored the process of working with actors to produce distancing effects in their acting in a 2012 performance project, The Galileo Experiment, some results of which I chronicle here. Brecht was not suggesting a completely new type or form of acting. He was arguing for a kind of double-agency: a perception of character that leaves room for the presence of the actor whose consciousness and opinions surface, disappear, and reappear throughout the performance.

Brecht wanted the actor to not only perform the role of the character, but to be dexterous enough to show the audience that he is showing them an alternative action to that action which the character actually performs in the play. To further his illustration, Brecht addresses the ‘not…but’ procedure. This idea was central to my query when entering the first rehearsals for The Galileo Experiment. What does it look like, I wondered, for an actor to imagine his character behaving in one attitude, but instead perform in an alternative attitude?

When he appears on the stage, besides what he is actually doing he will at all essential points discover, specify, imply what he is not doing; that is to say he will act in such a way that the alternative emerges as clearly as possible, that his acting allows the other possibilities to be inferred and only represents one out of the possible variants…. Whatever he doesn’t do must be contained and conserved in what he does. In this way every sentence and every gesture signifies a decision; the character remains under observation and is tested. The technical term for this procedure is ‘fixing the “not…but”‘. (Brecht 1964, 137)

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Performing the ‘not…but’ procedure is the performance process at the heart of my argument and will remain my central example of producing a Verfremdungseffekt in acting.

In December 2012, I staged four scenes of Brecht’s Life of Galileo in a 200-seat black-box space on the University of Montana’s Missoula campus. I pared the script down to nineteen pages and eight characters. I worked with five actors, a stage manager, a costume designer, a composer, and a vocalist. A public audience of about eighty people witnessed the performance on

This essay seeks not only to investigate the practical applications of the ‘not…but’ procedure, but also to interrogate the philosophy such a process inherently performs. Although Brecht’s desired outcomes of inspiring a conscious experience in the theatre, the illumination of the power structures that distort our perceptions of the world, and a generally Marxist philosophy that is deeply embedded in the text of his plays themselves are deeply relevant to my aims, in this essay, I am admittedly interested in focusing singly on the phenomenological nature of the Verfremdungseffekt, an issue with which I doubt Brecht himself was particularly concerned. Moreover, David Barnett argues, “[i]f practitioners use the innovations without reference to the reasons why Brecht developed them, they will ignore the political starting point and offer performance that no longer provides insights into the workings of the world in favour of mere theatrical effects” (5). While it is not my aim to divorce Brecht’s political philosophy from his (or my) practice as a theatre-maker, I feel it permissible to explore other philosophical underpinnings of Brecht’s practice without devoted reference to his Marxism because, as Barnett later makes it clear, Brecht’s contributions do not exist in a vacuum; rather, they ongoingly present newly relevant findings within evolving contexts. Furthermore, if Brecht’s political philosophy led him to develop a theatrical aesthetic that “encourages spectators to pick out contradictions in society and seek new ways of reconciling them” (Barnett, 4), which I agree did indeed, then an in-depth examination of the phenomenological contradictions inherent in performing the ‘not…but’ procedure seems like a valid and important contribution not to “mere theatrical effects,” but to a piece of the very political and philosophical project to which Brecht was so devoted. Finally, this essay seeks to chronicle my journey as a practitioner in quest of a deeper understanding of precisely how to capture contradiction in an actor’s performance, and the reader will find that by the end of my

Fig. 1. Floor plan for The Galileo Experiment. December 10, 2012. The actors performed in a twenty-foot diameter white chalk circle drawn on the black stage floor. Chairs were arranged around the circle leaving four aisles for entrances and exits (fig. 1). The pianist played at an upright piano set at the end of one aisle just outside the circle. Galileo’s table sat in the center of the circle for scenes one and four.

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journey, I arrive at a discovery different from that of my hypotheses, one that I think fits nicely into both Merleau-Ponty’s and Brecht’s deeply holistic and context-specific philosophies.

In Intersubjectivity: The Fabric of Social Becoming (1996), Nick Crossley defines two contrasting phenomenological perspectives on intersubjective relationships: egological and radical. In a reading of Edmund Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations (1931), Crossley articulates that egological intersubjectivity “involves an empathic intentionality which experiences otherness by way of an imaginative transposition of self into the position of the other” (1996, 23). In this mode, the self intellectually distinguishes self from other and subject from object in order to assess their own position in relation to the world and others. In a reading of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Crossley clearly illustrates the departure Merleau-Ponty took from Husserl’s assertion that (egological) intersubjectivity is reflective, self-aware, and experiential. Crossley suggests that radical intersubjectivity, in contrast, “involves a lack of self awareness and a communicative openness toward the other, which is unconditional. Self engages with other in this modality but has no experience of them as such” (1996, 23). In this modality, Merleau-Ponty is not arguing for an a posteriori demonstration of the facts, but rather a simple acceptance that the world is merely available to the subject to be lived in—reflectively or otherwise.

This article takes the approach of two articulations of phenomenological intersubjectivity between self and other. I do not argue or imply that the actor engages in an intersubjective relationship with their character. Such an argument would be impossible because the actor and character share a physical body and the character is itself a conceptual construct of the actor’s conscious mind. Both modes of intersubjective perception and relation between actor and character exist co-presently and the ‘not…but’ procedure is simply a moment of reflective clarity in which the actor steps beyond their character and takes stock of their present experience. The sensible and the sentient aspects of experience are neither mutually exclusive nor one and the same. Both radical and egological intersubjectivity are, in fact, reliant upon one another. In order to perform the ‘not…but’ procedure, the actor must break away from the radical mode in which the actor’s perception of their character is pre-reflective, and consciously sense the character—which shares a body with and was conceived by the actor—in the egological mode. To “contain and conserve” what he does not do in what he does, the actor must perform in both the radical and egological modes of intersubjectivity. It is, like Merleau-Ponty’s project, a holistic process that is by its very nature paradoxical. By breaking away from the radical mode in which the actor’s perception of their character is eventually pre-reflective, and considering an egological mode in which the actor’s perception of their character is conscious and reflective, I argue that phenomenological intersubjectivity—be it the radical or egological mode—is an ongoing, fluid process of uniting subject and object, actor and character.

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Radical Intersubjectivity: Towards a Phenomenology of Brechtian Acting?

Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology posited a pre-reflective, ongoing, interactional relationship between subject and object. In order for the actor to show an alternative, unexpected attitude of the character, the actor must first build a character and play into the character until they can perform their character in a pre-reflective manner. This kind of intuitive, instinct-driven performance of character requires actors to open themselves to all available influences in the world around them. Human subjectivity is not a private affair. In order to have a basic understanding of their ontology, individuals must engage with the world and others in order to be reflected back onto their consciousness. In the radical mode of intersubjectivity, human consciousness is simply an opening onto otherness. Crossley argues that for Merleau-Ponty, the self is 1) unaware, 2) communicates with and responds to others on the basis of their perceivable actions, and 3) that perception is pre-reflective (1996). Because the actor has a body, they are in constant sensuous, embodied engagement with the character with whom they share that body. The character is, of course, a conceptual construct of the actor’s conscious mind; therefore, the character has no autonomous agency as such because whatever the character does, the actor does as well. “Radical intersubjectivity,” Crossley writes, can be conceptualized as “an irreducible interworld of shared meanings” (1996, 24). In other words, whatever phenomena are available to the individual as a sensing being are available to be engaged with. Whatever the means of engagement, the intersubjective connection is sub-conscious. Like the subject’s pre-reflective experience of objects and others, the actor’s perception of their character too is public and, therefore, intersubjective.

The radical mode of intersubjectivity is an a priori given state that, as individuals in the world, we take for granted. In the radical mode, actors do not take conscious stock of the literal, physical images of the goings-on in the world around them. Their perception of the images skips directly to meaning and, subsequently, actions and reactions. The character’s world “is neither contemplated nor observed. It is participated in” (Crossley 1996, 28). However, an actor must first contemplate and observe the facts and literal images in order to put the pieces back together to form the character’s whole world. Only after locating the source of the meaning of the images in the character’s world can the actor let go of their reflective, conscious awareness and engage in a pre-reflective, radically intersubjective interplay with their character. In order for the actor to also “imply what he is not doing,” as Brecht insists, the actor must first be able to perform the character in the radical mode.

In The Galileo Experiment, we took a physical approach to building a character and finding a way into a character’s psychophysical experience. Before the actor can begin to successfully develop and build their character’s physical bearing, they need to become consciously aware of their own comportment. An individual’s comportment is more than just their physical gait, but an outward, physicalized expression of their inner state. In other words, the word comportment is a concise label for a person’s entire psychophysical process. In order to fully explore this phenomenon, I developed a rehearsal workshop titled ‘Becoming Aware of Comportment’.2

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The workshop included a series of walking exercises in which actors observed one another’s movements, took notes on their comportments, and held short discussions. There were many discoveries in the workshop, including one actor who noticed another actor who vigorously swung her arms tightly to her sides. The actor responded to her spectator’s note by admitting that she was conscious of her weight. She articulated that perhaps her unconscious tendency was to walk quickly and swing her arms close to her sides in order to make herself appear more slender. In a journal entry about the workshop, another actor wrote, “[t]he exploration of my physicality strips layers from me and shoves me into a state of vulnerability. From this state, I am able to analyze myself more freely and mostly without attaching imagined meaning to my own perceptions of my physical self” (Hodgson 2012). This simple experience of looking at their own bodies and asking why they move the way they do seemed to help make room for the actor to build their character’s comportment. Making the actors conscious of their own comportments and why they move the way they do was an important first step because rather than assigning imagined meaning—as they would for their characters—they uncovered actual possible meanings behind their own comportments. This step gave them the tools with which they would build their characters’ comportments.

Just as the actors had deconstructed their own comportment and articulated some of the reasons why they may carry themselves the way they do, in another workshop, I asked the actors to work the same way in reverse for their characters. Based on their characters’ social circumstances, I challenged the actors to move around the space experimenting with making specific physical choices that seemed right for their characters. Each actor was working with a wide range of character traits and social circumstances: Galileo, a financially struggling scientist; Young Andrea Sarti, Galileo’s landlady’s son, a boy of about ten who Galileo schools in order to help pay his rent; Virginia, Galileo’s daughter who, later in the play becomes a nun and spends her life taking care of Galileo under house arrest; Ludovico, a wealthy young man sent to study with Galileo because science is a popular conversation topic; and Federzoni, the poor, illiterate lens-grinder who assists Galileo with his experiments. All of these characters offered the actors multiple possibilities to comport their characters with a range of qualities that demonstrated their social class and circumstance.

In rehearsals, we explored a number of exercises to gather ideas for the characters’ comportments. Throughout, the actors honed and crafted their character’s comportment, including their walking gait, repeated gestures, the qualities of those gestures, and the specific ways in which they engaged with objects. After having specifically and consciously built the comportment of their character, each actor was now in dexterous control of two distinct comportments.

Fig. 2. Stephen Hodgeson as Galileo

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This image of two distinct beings sharing the same body harkens to a remark Brecht makes in The Messingkauf Dialogues. Brecht’s Philosopher says,

In future you actors can depict your characters so that one can imagine them behaving differently from the way they do…. You can set about outlining your characters much as when a bolder and more experienced engineer comes along and corrects his predecessor’s drawings by superimposing new lines on old ones…. (2012, 53)

An actor cannot completely extinguish his or her own personal comportment to make room for an entirely new psychophysical bearing. In Brecht’s image, the actor/engineer makes changes—sometimes vast—to the original comportment, but the old lines remain, fixed upon the paper’s memory like a line that cannot be completely erased. The old lines in juxtaposition with the new are another example of the actor’s and the character’s social circumstances and behaviors remaining exposed and interlacing throughout the performance. Even though the actor can never completely erase his or her own comportment, which is neither necessary nor ideal, the character’s comportment is as fully detailed and justified as the actor’s.

In the radical mode of intersubjectivity, the actor/character dialectic is a phenomenologically interactional relationship that occurs prior to any cognitive distinctions between an actor and their character. The performance is pre-reflective and the actor develops their character based on physical representations of the character’s potential inner states. The performance is in a constant state of pre-reflective communion between the actor and their character. Sometimes the spectator is witnessing more of the actor, sometimes more of the character, but always a combination of both. Because the character is the actor’s construct and because the actor and character share the same body, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the flesh functions as a useful way of thinking about the inherent mutability of the actor/character relationship.

The first step in Brecht’s ‘not…but’ procedure is a pre-reflective, interactional relationship between the actor and their character. On the one hand, the actor must perform the character in the radical, pre-reflective mode; meanwhile, on the other hand, the actor must find ways of allowing an alternative attitude to emerge. Like Brecht’s drawing analogy, some of the old lines emerge more clearly than the new and some of the new lines read more clearly than the old. The two sets of lines are not simply those of one character who changes its mind back and forth. Brecht is writing about the relationship between actors onstage with their characters. He writes, “[w]hen reading his part the actor’s attitude should be one of a man who is astounded and contradicts…The conduct of the man he is playing, as he experiences it, must be weighed up by him” (1964, 137). Brecht is arguing that the actor himself must do the weighing up of the “man he is playing.” In his description of “fixing the ‘not…but’,” Brecht writes, “[w]hatever he doesn’t do must be contained and conserved in what he does.” (1964, 137). In the analogy, the old lines represent what the character does not do and the new lines represent what the character does.

Thomas Baldwin makes it clear that, although it was not yet a fully developed idea in Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty was pointing to the flesh as the point at which subject

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and object are no longer distinct. In his analysis of the final, unfinished chapter of The Visible and the Invisible, “The Intertwining—The Chiasm,” Baldwin argues that “the relationship is reversible: the hand that touches can be felt as touched, and vice-versa, though never both at the same time, and it is this ‘reversibility’ that [Merleau-Ponty] picks out as the essence of flesh. It shows us the ambiguous status of our bodies as both subject and object” (2003, 248). The flesh of the actor’s body upon which the audience fixes its gaze is in fact a kind of ‘vanishing point’—the actor/character dialectic is the ambiguous status of the actor’s body as both actor and character.

Borrowing the image of the Greek letter x (chi), Merleau-Ponty developed a new concept of the body that he called the ‘chiasm’, the crossing-over and combination of subjective experience and objective existence. The flesh, Merleau-Ponty argues, provides access to both perspectives. He argues that our experience is both that of the touching subject and as the tangible object.

The body is lost outside of the world and its goals, fascinated by the unique occupation of floating in Being with another life, of making itself the outside of its inside and the inside of its outside. And henceforth movement, touch, vision, applying themselves to the other and to themselves, return toward their source and, in the patient and silent labor of desire, begin the paradox of expression. (1968, 144)

Since the actor’s body is inhabited by and under the influence of two sets of social circumstances, when performing “with a definite gest of showing” (Brecht 1964, 136), there is necessarily a continuous conversation between what the actor is doing, what the character is not doing, what the actor is not doing, and what the character is doing. Remember the metaphor of the engineer’s drawing: at certain points the old set of lines seem to emerge as the bolder of the two. To perform in two opposing attitudes back and forth, from the perspective of the character to an alternative perspective of the character, as imagined by the actor, and back again, would seem to create a paradox, not necessarily a diametrical paradox, but as Merleau-Ponty suggests, a paradox that takes as its point of departure the flesh of the same body. In this way, the actor and their character co-exist in oneness with each other and their real and imagined worlds. “[F]or the first time, I appear to myself completely turned inside out before my own eyes” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 143). Although he is talking more generally about one’s own body in engagement with another separate body, I am adapting Merleau-Ponty’s concept of a body revealing itself to itself via the observation of another body’s observation of that original body.

The case of Brecht’s ‘not…but’ procedure is similar: in one instance, the character’s attitude is absent and the actor’s present, whereas in another instance the opposite is the case. Another way of imagining it might be that an actor/character braid (or chiasm) is drawn before our view and as one disappears beneath, the other arises from below. “For the first time, the body…clasps another body, applying itself to it carefully with its whole extension, forming tirelessly with its hands the strange statue which in its turn gives everything it receives” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 144). This communion between bodies coming together to form a “strange statue,” I argue, is what Brecht is effectively asking of the actor in his ‘not…but’ procedure. He asks the actor to share a body with a character and to be able to show when the audience is to hear from the character or from himself.

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The relationship that is developed by the joint actor/character Being is inherently corporeal because in order to show either side of the coin, the coin itself must be physically turned over just as the actor must physically turn himself over from the character’s body and into his own or into another comportment in order to show both perspectives. Although the character cannot be released from its containment within the perceived illusion, it maintains only one half of the relationship the spectator witnesses onstage.

Egological Intersubjectivity: Bracketing Out Another Perspective

Rather than engaging in a pre-reflective, ongoing interactional relationship with their character as in the radical mode of intersubjectivity, the actor also has the option to rely on their imagination to theoretically put them in the shoes of their character. In this way, the actor is not inextricably bound to the character simply because they share a body. From this perspective, rather, the actor can go through the same process as described in the previous section, but maintain a poised readiness to detach themselves from their character and perform the final step in Brecht’s ‘not…but’ procedure. In Crossley’s terms, this is egological intersubjectivity. I argue that the actor can foreground the reflective aspects of the egological mode in order to “discover, specify, imply what he is not doing” (Brecht 1964, 137). “Through imagination,” Crossley writes, “we are able to detach ourselves, in part, from the world of shared perceptions and thus to (partially) escape the intersubjective world” (1996, 47). Although he qualifies this use of imagination as a partial detachment because it is impossible to remove oneself from the world’s phenomena, Crossley is suggesting that by imagining ourselves in the shoes of another (even a fictional character), we can put ourselves in their position via a series of mental operations. “Embodied simulation is conceived of as a basic functional mechanism of our brain, enabling not only a direct bodily access to the actions, emotions and sensations of others, but also the possibility to imagine similar self- and other-related contents” (Gallese and Wojciehowski 2011, 14). In other words, we are not bound to the world and others just because we have a body whose senses mediate one hundred percent of our experience. There is, however, a private space—an egological space, which is theoretical, not real—in which the self can create and maintain an intellectual distance from the world and others.

Another difference between this mode and the radical mode might be to say that in the radical mode, the self feels the other and their mutual world; while, in the egological mode, the self seeks to understand the other in order to know how to engage with them in their world. Merleau-Ponty illustrates this point by describing a number of observations regarding imitation in early childhood. He argues that when young children imitate adults, they are imitating the results of the actions or gestures the adult is performing rather than the action or gesture itself. He cites an observation where a child is able to hold a hairbrush to his head and brush his own hair, but is later unable to imitate the gesture of lifting his hand to his head without a brush (Merleau-Ponty 1979). He writes, “[the child] is still unreceptive to the nonconcrete and aimless gesture” (35). In the acquisition of skills, the child is performing an egological moment—a transposition of themselves into the experience of the adult in order to gain an understanding of his own perceptual experience of the world. For Crossley, this phenomenon is significant for two reasons. First, it means “the child is

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oriented to and responds to the meaning (qua purpose) to the gesture as a whole, rather than to the empirical extension of the adult’s body through space” (1979, 52). The child imitates the gesture in a quest to understand why the adult performs the gesture and is therefore oriented to the meaning of the action. Second, it “makes a strong case for the notion of a lived sense of corporeal equivalence between body-subjects. It suggests an innate intercorporeality” (1979, 52). This intercorporeality is a useful way of thinking about the ways in which humans step back and take stock of their surroundings in order to make logical sense of the world.

In the egological mode, the actor is not so much feeling the character as they are viewing and thinking about them from various perspectives in order to understand the possibilities for how and why they do what they do. The actor consciously constructs not only the mental concept of their character, but embodies their character’s experience in an innate intercorporeal relationship. In the radical mode, the actor is in a deep, immersive, pre-reflective engagement with their character, but when in the egological mode, the actor is stepping away for another vantage point. From the egological perspective, we reduce the other to the consciousness that we have of them. Consciousness, therefore, is the subject of perception as opposed to basic bodily existence as it is for Merleau-Ponty. Throughout another chapter, Crossley argues that the other, in the egological modality, is experienced as 1) a psychophysical object, 2) a subject who experiences and knows us, and 3) an intersubject who sees the world as we do. Notice here that in the egological mode of intersubjectivity, the other is given the same qualities and abilities as the self, but there is not yet any talk of a recursive feedback loop between the two subjects. If I have a body that senses, you must have a body that senses. If I can see you, you must be able to see me. If I see the grass as green, you must also see green grass. This is different from the radical mode because it is a conscious acknowledgement of the other as different from the self, which, in return means that the self is an individually perceiving self. My imagination allows me to draw these conclusions because I imagine myself as you in order to know you as separate from me. By recognizing the other as distinct from myself, I therefore recognize that I too am distinct from them. This theoretical awareness of self as distinct from other comes later in the child’s development than the radical mode, with which they are born (Crossley 1996, 50).

From the egological aspect, the self’s relationship with the other is less immediate than the radical approach. In fact the whole dichotomy of self and other is a conscious, theoretical concept. “[S]elf and other are objects of our experience,” Crossley writes, “and the more reflective and reflexive aspects of our being more generally” (49). In order to understand the other, the relationship is mediated by the self’s anticipations and self-conscious performance of the attitude of the other. The self perceives the other as different and, using empathy and simulation, tries to imagine what it is like to be that person by adopting and performing in the attitude of the other. Once this initial step is experienced, the self can step back and look at the other in a new light. In other words, after thoroughly developing the character, the actor is able to experience their character as a psychophysical object: a conceptual ‘other’ in need of being consciously interpreted, analyzed, and adjusted.3

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Performing the ‘not…but’ Procedure in The Galileo Experiment

In order to successfully perform the ‘not…but’ procedure, the actor must first choose moments in the text where their character behaves in a strange, surprising, remarkable, or contradictory manner. When designing our rehearsal process, I took clues from Brecht:

Before memorizing the words [the actor] must memorize what he felt astounded at and where he felt impelled to contradict…. The actor should refrain from living himself into the part prematurely in any way, and should go on functioning as long as possible as a reader…. Given this absence of total transformation in the acting there are three aids which may help to alienate the actions and remarks of the characters being portrayed: 1. Transposition into the third person. 2. Transposition into the past. 3. Speaking the stage directions aloud. (1964, 137–8)

By choosing specific moments to step back from the character and make their commentary visible, the actor is not under pressure to impulsively maneuver between the radical and egological modes. Rather, they have identified specific moments in the play’s text that are appropriate signposts for the actor to abandon their pre-reflective immersion in their character and reflect on their character’s behavior.

With strangeness or contradiction in mind, I asked the actors to ‘freeze’ a scene by raising a hand and narrating their character’s behavior or attitude in the third-person as if in a novel. “Speaking the stage directions out loud in the third person,” Brecht continues, “results in a clash between the two tones of voice, alienating the second of them, the text proper” (1964, 138). In this exercise, the actor is automatically distanced from their character (and, subsequently, the text itself) simply by shifting into the third-person singular and past tense. The actors became narrators for their characters’ actions and behaviors. Without much specificity, I simply asked the actors “after you speak, if you sense a ‘remarkable’ or ‘contradictory’ moment in the text, raise your hand, break character, and describe the quality of the character’s action.” For example, the actor playing Andrea raised his hand at one point following one of his own lines and said, “…he said patronizingly” (Swibold 2012). I encouraged them to keep the scene moving as quickly as possible despite these interruptions, which helped to give the actors a sense of dexterity when it came to flexing between the radical and the egological modes. The exercise also allowed the actors to impulsively re-discover and announce their previously found moments of contradiction. These moments of strange, contradictory behavior varied. For example, actor Katie Norcross:

Virginia is a mess of contradictions. It’s this weird twofold relationship where she wants to both explode at her father and hug him at the same time. These feelings lead to contradictions that manifest physically. She has moments that are both docile and strong willed. One second she’s being a “good daughter” and the next she’s standing up to Galileo and challenging him. (Norcross 2012)

In a sense, it became a diegetic commentary on their character’s behavior not via narrative language, but via physical performance. In another particularly effective example, Hodgson found

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a moment of Galileo’s behavior that he had found remarkable because it happened to strike a chord with him personally. The Curator (Hugh Bickley) is trying to convince Galileo to develop something useful for the city, but Galileo wants money for his astronomical research:

CURATOR: We realize you are a great man. A great, but dissatisfied man, if I may say so.

GALILEO: You’re right, I am dissatisfied. I’m forty-six years old and I’ve achieved nothing that satisfies me.

CURATOR: I won’t disturb you any longer.

Up until this point in the play, Galileo is all arrogance and bravado. His contradictory statement is striking because it is the last thing we expect him to say to the Curator. When Hodgson spoke the line “You’re right, I am dissatisfied. I’m forty-six years old and I’ve achieved nothing that satisfies me,” he dropped Galileo’s comportment entirely, sat back in his chair, and with a sigh, recited the line in a distanced manner, suggesting that Hodgson himself was speaking the line as it applied to his own life. It was a moment of distanced reflection and simultaneous heartache because it was real not only for the character but also, at least in some aspect, for the actor (Video 00:28–00:45). This kind of narration from outside the physical comportment of the character gave way to the sense of the “outward expression” for which Brecht argues. Brecht argued, however, that the attitude of showing must be an ongoing feature of the actor’s performance, not just certain moments here and there.

In another rehearsal, I asked the actors to bring a personal object from their everyday life to rehearsal that had significance in the actor’s life and that was small enough to fit in a pocket (a small stone, a lucky pen, a keychain). When they approached the moments in the scene that they had deemed strange, surprising, remarkable, or contradictory—and in which they had previously frozen the scene to narrate—I asked them to take hold of their object and imagine it as a point of connection with their own lives. When they took hold of their object, I asked them to physically release themselves from the comportment of their character and return to their own. Although they still spoke the lines, they ‘left’ the comportment and world of their character for a brief moment and showed the other half. They switched from the perceived to the perceiver in order to offer the audience a glimpse into what they, the actor, thought was important about this character in this moment and to take note of it. After the moment had passed, they reentered the character’s comportment and continued the scene (figs. 3–5 and Video 00:07–00:13, 00:19–00:26, and 00:28–00:45).

Excerpts from The Galileo Experiment:

https://youtu.be/wA_1WdgZ5Lglink

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Brecht used a similar process with English actor Charles Laughton who helped translate a later version of the play and first played Galileo for the American premiers in Los Angeles in August of 1947 and New York in December that same year. Both avid cigar smokers, Brecht writes about Laughton’s work in his 1948 manifesto “A Short Organum for the Theatre”: “[w]e find a gesture that expresses one-half of his attitude—that of showing—if we make him smoke a cigar and then imagine him laying it down now and again in order to show us some further characteristic attitude of the figure in the play” (Brecht 1964, 194). Galileo does not smoke, but Laughton does. The actor holds the object while ‘showing’ a different, unexpected perspective, and lies it down in order to perform the character’s expected behaviors and attitudes.

The essence of the personal object (Laughton’s cigar or an actor’s keychain) has the power to become a critical and emotional link between actor and character. Perhaps the moment of contact between the hand and the object is the phenomenological fulcrum that mediates the shift between the comportments of actor and character. Perhaps the object, in its interaction with the flesh, which the actor and character share, is the fulcrum between the radical and egological modes.

These moments of stepping out of character, however, were not effective as performance choices because they were not obvious enough for a spectator to notice; whereas the moments of stifled decisions carried an energy of something not being said/done that a spectator could feel. Perhaps stepping out of the character’s comportment and using personal objects to aid in the psychology of doing so are only useful as rehearsal exercises. In any case, the actors became agile enough to navigate the transitions from within their character, into themselves or a different, unexpected attitude, and back again. This experience gets at the heart of my argument that the actor can successfully perform Brecht’s ‘not…but’ procedure by performing in both the radical and egological intersubjective modes.

Fig. 3. Actor Katie Norcross in the character’s comportment.

Fig. 4. Norcross shifts into her own comportment.

Fig. 5. Norcross shifts back into the character’s comportment.

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Brecht’s ‘not…but’ and Crossley’s ‘reflective block’

Brecht’s ‘not…but’ procedure is akin to the process of what Crossley calls the ‘reflective block’, where all pre-reflective experiences of another are suddenly brought to the forefront of reflective consciousness. Crossley describes the swing between the two modes:

Sometimes we are deeply engrossed with others, too engaged to be aware of either ourselves or of them. At other times, and rapidly, we can become sharply aware of both, constituting them as reflective and reflexive aspects of experience. All spontaneous actions can be stultified by a reflective block, only to be undermined later by a genuine and spontaneous communication which collapses the reflective barrier of self and other. (1996, 71, emphasis mine)

In terms of performance, the ‘reflective block’ is the moment in which an actor suddenly and intentionally becomes aware of their work on the character. At points, actors should allow themselves to be in deep, pre-reflective engagement in their character’s experience and given circumstances. However, when considering the ‘not…but’, this removal of the illusion of the actor as character is the moment when the actor becomes sharply aware of both the radical mode of immersion in the character and the egological mode of taking a reflective step away from the character. In effect, the ‘reflective block’ that stultifies the actor’s fluid, spontaneous co-existence with their character is the alternative attitude for which Brecht calls when performing the ‘not…but’ procedure.

This swinging back and forth between radical and egological intersubjectivity that Crossley describes perhaps reads as an exaggeration of what really happens. Merleau-Ponty makes this argument in “The Intertwining—The Chiasm,” as do contemporary cognitive scientists and philosophers (see Edleman 2005). The stark shifts between the actor’s and their character’s comportments that the actors in The Galileo Experiment made were perhaps also an exaggeration of what Brecht was calling for in his description of the ‘not…but’ procedure. “It should be added that the egological attitude always necessarily entails the radical attitude as an underlying function” (Crossley 1996, 71). The radical, pre-reflective mode of experiencing the world and others is a given. It is an a priori state of being. The egological mode pops up every once in a while and our metacognitive faculties suddenly come to life and make us reflect on our ontology. The actor—once able to perform their character with deep, pre-reflective engagement—is then able to determine when the reflective mode is going to emerge and generate an alternative attitude to their character’s perspective.

The actor cannot completely leave the character’s bodily experience, as I had assumed in our rehearsal process, and still be performing the possibility of an alternative to their character’s actions. “Whenever we are reflectively aware of the other we are still, always, necessarily responsive to their moves at an unreflective level. We are always affected by what they do and say, by their movements and gestures” (Crossley 1996, 71). The actor has to remain in some kind of ‘touch’ with their character in order to perform an alternative action or possibility. Neither the ‘reflective block’ nor the ‘not…but’ procedure are a complete stepping out of character to make

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commentary on behalf of the actor. Rather, the actor must consciously choose to do something the spectator would not expect the character to do. The actor’s choice to show their process of showing their character performing in an unexpected manner is the ‘reflective block’. When the actor chooses to allow their character to perform in a manner more consistent with the spectator’s expectations of the character, the block is undermined, reestablishing the radical mode.

Conclusion: The Sensible-Sentient and the ‘not…but’ Procedure

I created The Galileo Experiment because I wanted to know what kind of toolkit the ‘Brechtian’ actor needs in order to perform the ‘not…but’ procedure. I had assumed that the actor would need to create a definitive split between themselves and their character in order to show the spectator their social criticisms of the character while performing onstage. I found that not only was Brecht asking for something much more complex and dynamic, but that the actors in The Galileo Experiment discovered various ways of pointing to their characters’ behavior while performing them onstage. I began this research wondering how the actor performs in one attitude while simultaneously performing with the potential for an alternative attitude to emerge. My theoretical investigation constructed a fairly traditional dialectical framework of two seemingly opposing modes of phenomenological intersubjectivity—radical and egological—as defined by Crossley. However, I admit that, to some extent, Crossley’s categories try too hard to simplify Merleau-Ponty’s inherently holistic project. I want to conclude, therefore, with a return to Merleau-Ponty and offer a more holistic, interactional, and dynamic transference of reflective awareness and pre-reflective engagement. I conclude that performing Brecht’s ‘not…but’ procedure is not a stark switching back and forth between radical and egological intersubjectivity, but a leaning to one side in order show an alternative attitude of the character. Perhaps there are more than two sides of a character’s potential for contradictory or remarkable behavior. Perhaps there are many ways of “fixing the ‘not…but’.”

Merleau-Ponty conceptualizes the human body’s relationship with itself and others in two primary ways. He argues that the body can, on the one hand, be a sensible object—one that actively senses itself and others. On the other hand, the body can be passively sentient, or phenomenal—a body that is sensed by itself and others. Remembering the example I examined earlier from Phenomenology of Perception, in “The Intertwining—The Chiasm,” Merleau-Ponty describes the ways in which his right hand can perform the touching of another object, while his left hand simultaneously touches his right hand. In this way, he argues, the right hand is both touched and doing the touching—it is a sensible-sentient, or a sensing phenomenon. However, this twofold experience, he argues in his final work, cannot share the stage so to speak; moreover, the experience of touching and being touched cannot be experienced with an equal intensity simultaneously:

If these experiences never exactly overlap, if they slip away at the very moment they are about to rejoin, if there is always a “shift,” a “spread,” between them, this is precisely because my two hands are part of the same body, because it moves itself in the world, because I hear myself both from within and from without. I

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experience—and as often as I wish—the transition and the metamorphosis of the one experience into the other. (1968, 148)

If I forge this understanding of the human body’s experience of itself and others into a lens through which to examine Brecht’s ‘not…but’ procedure, I argue that the ‘reflective block’ is the actor performing “the transition and metamorphosis” from sentient character being sensed by the spectator, to the sensible actor touching and commenting on the character.

Merleau-Ponty’s procedure of performing both the overlapping sensible and the sentient aspects of experience suggests that they are neither mutually exclusive nor one and the same. They are, in fact, reliant upon one another. In order to sense its own body, that same body must be sentient and in order to be sentient, that body must be sensed. In much the same way, in order to perform the ‘not…but’ procedure, the actor must consciously sense the character, which lest we forget shares a body with and was conceived, at least in part, by the actor. This theoretical examination of both the sensible-sentient that Merleau-Ponty describes and Brecht’s ‘not…but’ procedure does not necessarily divide the actor into a sensing subject and the character into an objective, sentient phenomenon. The relationship is an ongoing, fluid process uniting actor and character as a sensible-sentient being that is merely highlighting contradictory aspects of its shared sets of behaviors. Brecht’s ‘not…but’ procedure requires the actor to become well aware of the intertwining dual nature of human perception and presence. To “contain and conserve” what he does not do in what he does, the actor is performing in both the radical and egological modes of intersubjectivity.

The ‘reflective block’ produces a brief Verfremdungseffekt. It is not necessarily a complete removal from character, but a choice to twist the character around to see what is on the other side, then twisting it back again to further explore the more familiar. “Egological intersubjectivity,” Crossley concludes, “is only a relative reflective distancing. It is never absolute” (1996, 71). As in our conscious lives when we have moments of reflection or moments where we question our choices based on the perceptions of our experiences, so the actor has the agency to choose when to consciously show a character’s opposite possibilities. Echoing Schall, Mumford argues that the ‘not…but’, is a procedure Brecht explored in order to “create each character as an unstable unity of opposites…to show that humans are ever-changing entities, constantly shaped by and contributing to the flux of their physical and social environments” (2009, 116). In The Galileo Experiment, we explored a handful of these techniques in order to discern what worked and what did not. Some were most effective as rehearsal tools for discovering possibilities, but the most effective performance techniques were those where the actor remained in the character’s comportment, stifled the impulse to do what the character wants to do, and instead made a contradicting choice. Choosing which action to allow the character to play into in a given moment of the text, and then contradicting that action and showing their conscious choice to do something else is the phenomenological experience of performing in both the radical and egological modes of intersubjectivity. It is “fixing the ‘not…but’.” It is the “paradox of expression.”

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1 Translated literally: prefix ver=strong; adjective fremd=foreign; noun Effekt=effect. Because of the historically contested nature of its English translation, I prefer the German noun/adjective Verfremdungseffekt in place of ‘defamiliarization’, ‘alienation’, ‘estrangement’, ‘distanciation’, or any other confusing English variant.

2 This workshop is an adapted variation on a workshop Meg Mumford describes in her 2008 monograph Bertolt Brecht called “Strutting Your Stuff” (143–145).

3 This reoriented perception of the other by the self is what Husserl called the epoché, or ‘bracketing’. ‘Bracketing’ is a cognitive operation in which one theoretically removes consciousness from belief in the real world in order to objectively analyze the conditions of a given set of experiences.

Notes

Works Cited

Baldwin, Thomas. 2004. Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Basic Writings. New York: Routledge.

Barnett, David. 2014. Brecht in Practice: Theatre, Theory and Performance. London: Bloomsbury. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781408183144

Brecht, Bertolt. 1964. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. Translated by John Willett. New York: Hill and Wang.

———. 1965. The Messingkauf Dialogues. Translated by John Willett. London: Methuen Drama.

———. 1980. Life of Galileo. Edited by John Willett and Ralph Manheim. Translated by John Willett. London: Methuen Drama.

Crossley, Nick. 1996. Intersubjectivity: The Fabric of Social Becoming. London: SAGE.

Edelman, Gerald M. 2005. Wider Than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Gallese, Vittorio, and Hannah Wojciehowski. 2011. “How Stories Make Us Feel: Toward an Embodied Narratology.” California Italian Studies 2 (1). http://escholarship.org/uc/item/3jg726c2

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Edited by Claude Lefort. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

———. 1979. Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language. Translated by Hugh J. Silverman. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

———. 2002. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. New York: Routledge.

Mumford, Meg. 2009. Bertolt Brecht. New York: Routledge.

Schall, Ekkehard. 2008. The Craft of Theatre. Translated by Jack Davis. London: Methuen Drama.

Biography

Cohen Ambrose is an actor, director, teacher, dramaturg, and scholar, who has lived and worked in Montana, Washington, New York City, Prague, Czech Republic, and Baltimore. He is currently Assistant Professor of Theatre at the Community College of Baltimore County.

© 2017 Cohen Ambrose

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY VOL 3, NO 1 (2017):216–232 DOI: https://doi.org/10.21476/PP.2017.3163

ISSN 2057-7176

PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY

AN EARLY CONCEPT OF THE THEATRE OF INTERPLAY: THE RELEVANCE OF BRANKO GAVELLA’S THEORY FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY1

SIBILA PETLEVSKI UNIVERSITY OF ZAGREB

Branko Gavella (1885–1962), a well-known Croatian theatre director of late modernity, had a significant impact on ex-Yugoslav theatrical life. However, it is important to stress the fact that Gavella’s formative years were spent in Austro-Hungarian cultural milieu: he defended a doctoral thesis in the field of epistemology under the title Die Erkenntnistheoretische Bedeutung des Urteils [The Epistemological Significance of Judgment] in Vienna in the year 1908, then he started contributing theatre reviews to Agramer Tagblatt in 1910, and he put his first theatrical production—Schiller’s The Bride of Messina—on the stage of Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb, in the year of 1914. Gavella had conceived the conceptual gist of his theoretical work in the early thirties (see Gavella 1934a, 1934b, 1934c), and it is beyond any doubt that his anticipatory theoretical insights into the phenomenon of acting make him a pioneer in the modern, and to a certain anticipatory degree, in the postmodern field of performance philosophy. Upon thoroughly reading the available material—Gavella’s theoretical essays and fragments posthumously collected under the title Glumac i kazalište [Actor and Theatre]; exploring the wider context of his thought on theatre aesthetics as presented in the articles and pieces published in various periodicals and in his books Književnost i kazalište [Literature and Theatre] and Hrvatsko glumište [Croatian Stage]—we have for the first time extrapolated the theoretical and philosophical level of Gavella’s approach to theatre performance, publishing our findings in 2001. The book Kazalište suigre: Gavellin doprinos teoriji [Theatre of Interplay: Gavella’s Contribution to Theory] (Petlevski 2001) was the result of a multi-decade research recognized mostly nationally and regionally. The wider international audience had been informed about Gavella’s theoretical work only recently, on a small-scale,

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informative level (see Petlevski in Cornis-Pope and Neubauer 2007; Blažević 2014). The aim of this paper is to contribute to the shift in the perception of Gavella’s work, and to point to the relevance of Gavella’s theory of acting for the autochthonous development of the European branch of the modern philosophy of performance, as an interdisciplinary field of research different from the methods traditionally employed by aestheticians of theatre.

The main reason for having renewed our research adventure into Branko Gavella’s body of work was the need to demonstrate operability of his concepts—both theoretical and practical—in the context of some recent interdisciplinary insights into the performance phenomenon. Gavella’s system is based on the phenomenology of intersubjectivity. The actor represents the spectator, so in a hermeneutic sense, there occurs a merging of actor and spectator, an inner interplay caused by the process described by Gavella as the new experiencing of one’s self. Gavella’s theory can clearly distinguish concepts that we bracket today under the rubric of meaning, as opposed to use, i.e. language-reference, as opposed to speaker’s reference. Already in the 1930s, he applied the relation of semantics to pragmatics, as it would eventually be understood in speech act theory from Austin on, to the problems peculiar to theatre. We will elaborate upon what was stated above later in this text. Gavella’s experience of analyzing the system of acting led him to expand the terms role and mask. Gavella transported these terms, seemingly specific to theatre performance, from the domain of theatre studies to the spheres of inquiry appropriate for the philosophy of language, cognitive psychology, and of what is now known as the theory of autopoietic systems. The core of this paper deals with Gavella’s “speech situations”, and the dynamism of exchange in the relational space of culture.

In order to reconstruct Gavella’s incomplete outline for a structural analysis and situate it in its proper context, it was necessary to demonstrate the consistency of Gavella’s analytical system first. To this end, we have compiled the Glossary of Gavella’s terms (Petlevski 2001, 167–208)2 as an indispensable guide for the study of the theoretical aspect of Gavella’s aesthetics. While the maturity of conception underlying Gavella’s thought on the theatrical phenomenon was never questioned, its systematic nature was customarily denied; faulted for “broadsheet haziness,” it was relegated precisely to the category of thinking about theatre from which Gavella was most anxious to distance himself. In view of their importance within the system, detailed elucidation of the terms aesthetic function, aesthetic value, aesthetic object, norm, aesthetic material, intention, the collective pole of reception and creation, experience, style, structure, collective pole of creation, collective pole of reception, dramaturgical exemplary formula, sign, Mitspiel, etc. was sorely needed. The fact that Gavella never completed his projected study notwithstanding, upon determining the position of key terms within his aesthetic system, the consistency of Gavella’s structural analysis can indisputably be established, followed by an inquiry into the possible links with related theoretical attempts of the 1920s and the 1930s.

The mainspring of Gavella’s theoretical thinking lies in Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen (Husserl 1900/1901). His theory of acting is based on the phenomenology of intersubjectivity. The analysis of the immanently social nature of the phenomenon of acting, on the other hand, brings the papers of Branko Gavella, especially his so called “Czech manuscript”, close to the poetics of the immanent

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development as it was argued by the school of Prague structuralism. Gavella’s theoretical reflections on the nature of the actor’s phenomenon and theatre aesthetics are close to some reflections by German theatre scholar Max Herrmann: they share the idea of Mitspiel that applies to the reception interplay between actor and spectator, but Croatian theoretician is more radical in his “structural” hermeneutical approach. The result of Gavella’s ambition to sum up the creative results on the modern national stage was a book titled Croatian Theatre; An Analysis of the Development of Its Style. Here Gavella traces historical and “structural” changes in the development of Croatian style of acting. The importance of that book for Croatian theatre studies can be compared to Herbert Ihering’s Der Kampf ums Theater for German theatre studies (see Ihering 1922; extended version 1974). Concepts like: “rhythmisation of the artistic material” (Gavella) and “rhythmische Ablagerung seelischer Kräfte” (Ihering) and the concept of the “new pathos” (Gavella and Ihering) are highly valuable for contemporary insight into the phenomenon of acting.

Ever since Austin, philosophy of language has been keenly aware of the fact that every speech act opens up the possibilities of its more or less predictable contextualization. Obviously, the more possibilities of contextualization there are, the less likely it is that each and every presupposition for the understanding of the speech act in question will ever be graspable. One of Gavella’s most significant contributions—thus far unacknowledged and unappreciated—is his early recognition of the fact that the fundamental task of the actor is predicated on the ability to strike a balance between an unpredictable bodily induced understanding (what Shoshana Felman [2003] would term the scandal of the speaking body), and what Gavella called the grammar of the inner experience of speech (see Gavella 1967, 94, 95).

Gavella distinguished between the form of belief, on which the reception of a particular substances as mandatory is predicated, and the form of trust (Gavella 1967, 163), which results from interplay in theatre performance. This form of trust must be visible; it must find its expression in the actor’s artistic interpretation so as to enable everything—voluntary and involuntary—to be received as a theatrical description of the world. From the theoretical standpoint, Gavella’s insistence on the ability of the actor to bring his body into a state of labile balance is the most innovative (see Gavella 1967, 145, 156). This type of balance is a state of active preparation (see Gavella 1967, 141, 145) for merging with various individual movements that always have an emotional, physiological, and socio-cultural source in the personality of the actor, but also in the consensus of the interpretative community (in Gavella’s terms, the “actual” community (Gavella 1967, 39), which brings actor and spectator together in the course of a specific, theatrical and hermeneutical interplay. Reflections of this sort, whether assessed against the achievements of theatre studies of today or the so-called theatre anthropology of the 1980s, create an interesting bypass toward the contemporary schools of acting, such as Eugenio Barba’s, for instance.

Gavella is aware that a potentially “new work of art” can result from a disposition toward someone else’s work of art. In this respect, his claim that every contact with foreign theatre life expands one’s views thereby giving clearer perspective on one’s own creation (see Gavella 1970, 144) is an interesting theoretical move. The terms of Barba’s ISTA method, such as “the field of pre-expressivity” (Barba 1995, 104–108) and “transcultural behavior” (Barba 1995, 6, 9, 10, 41, 44, 116,

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134); “transcultural milieu” and “precultural common ground” of acting techniques (see Pezin 1986, 171)—are to an extent comparable to Gavella’s notion of theatrical “new vitality” (Gavella 1967, 25, 108, 109) founded in the contact between “native” and “outlandish” theatre life, in particular when we consider that this concept is a result of Gavella’s efforts to bridge the gap between cultures by means of the universal roots of internal speech. It could be argued that Gavella remains an advocate of drama in the theatre, since for him the text is the “starting point” in search of a universal language that is prior to the realizations of dramatic ideas in actual national tongues. However, it is not only the dramatic text that is at issue here. Through his work on himself, the actor becomes transferable material, the creator of the performance-dramatic significance, and a mediator in search for the internal speech of mankind. It is the search for the transcultural, universally comprehensible language that also makes Gavella a hermeneutist of the stage text. This task would be inconceivable without a comprehensive pedagogy of acting.

Stage speech and stage movement both convey the psychic correlates of reality. The body of the actor in movement corresponds to thoughts, feelings, and different frames of mind. In this way, each expressive gesture is related to a phase in the process of experiencing reality. These are the points that make possible tracing Gavella’s theoretical observations back to its sources in Platonic laws of correspondence. In no way does this undercut the modernity of his insights. For Gavella, experiencing states invariably comprise a communicative impact. Each gesture, whether deliberate or accidental, performed on stage, under specific conditions, in front of the spectator, becomes an expressive gesture. All movements appear to have been performed with a purpose in mind. It is the performance situation itself that imposes an interpretation of contingent as intentional. More than that, Gavella is aware that no actual comprehension of verbal utterances and stage performances can fully comprehend all the necessary conditions for understanding. Reception inevitably means that interpretation is to a significant degree arbitrary. While each gesture is expressive and “distinctively determined in quantitative and qualitative terms,” such determination “never coincides with the approximate observation of the gesture by external observer” (see Gavella 1967, 50–53). Gavella derives the basic principle of performance from the tension that obtains in the relation of internal and external, defined and indeterminate, deliberate and contingent. He obviously believes in the acting technique aimed at revealing the rules of correspondence between the body, mind, and spirit, whereby the equilibrium of accidental and deliberate is realized in the interplay of actor and spectator. Contraries achieve a purpose in the equipoise of the stage text. This strand in Gavella’s school of acting—which is in certain aspects akin to the theory of François Delsarte (see Delsarte 1882; 1893), once one of the most influential, and today all but forgotten teacher of acting—is borne out by his insistence that all of actor’s movements, stances, and gestures actually have a purpose. Gavella cannot consider actor’s work but in keeping with the aesthetic principles of nature, which he supposes to be universal and transcultural, even when partly realized through a set of norms that comprise the “sociality” of a particular community and period. Delsarte’s and Gavella’s considerations of the phenomenon of acting anticipate later developments as they both regard acting as a structurally determined system in ceaseless interaction with the medium in which it takes place. Many of Gavella’s conclusions pointing toward the line of thinking that would, from the 1970s on, be advocated by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela in theoretical biology and neurology, specifically in their thesis on living beings as

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molecular autopoietic systems. When Niklas Luhmann applied his version of the concept of autoipoiesis to the theory of social systems, the outcome was a methodological turn in the field of cultural theory.

As some of Gavella’s insights have only recently attracted the attention of theoreticians, considered in the light of recent theories of acting and other theatre phenomena, they appear in a new guise. Thus Patrice Pavis (2001, 13–27), for instance, concludes that what is at stake on paper, no less than on stage, is “a manipulation of bodies for the purpose of exploring the ways in which they think and make us think.” When Pavis writes of the actor’s “visible” and “invisible” work, it is the same split into a technical and a normative personality in the creation of a role, where, as Gavella would say, the two aspects of the acting material appear—the two functions of the body that thinks and makes us think (see Gavella 1934a; 1934b; 1967, 158; Petlevski 2001, 19–51). A new reading of Gavella’s theory—free of unruly distortions, yet adhering to the premises of his theory and mindful of the context of his conclusions—presents a convenient starting point for a novel and rewarding exploration of theatre performance as the point where the intermediary nodes of several arts, a number of epistemological horizons, and scholarly disciplines converge. Today, Gavella’s startlingly daring endeavor to join theory and theatre practice helps the students of theatre to realize the importance of checking the theory against the pedagogy of acting, all the while attuned to the historical moment and the cultural context in which every movement on stage “thinks” its time.

In the discussions of the so-called metaphysics of performance in the theory of acting, as exemplified by Charles Marowitz’s The Act of Being: Towards a Theory of Acting (1978), considerations of the disparity in the effects achieved by impersonation in life and in acting, suddenly come to the fore. In contrast to everyday impersonation, i.e. pretending that one is who one is not, in the theatre, impersonation, as it appears in various systems of acting (for example, Stanislavsky’s) means exactly the opposite. It means becoming what you are. When, in the act of theatre performance, the dramatic person uses the actor’s body; it ceases to be something to which the actor would direct our attention—it becomes embodied by virtue of the metaphysics of performance.

The question as to how a subject with a singular consciousness can reach another subject, and understand him, in the first place naturally presents itself here. The Heideggerian immersion of the subject in the being-in-the world was an attempt at resolving this particular dilemma. In the 1980s, the theories of intersubjectivity discussed the “orientation toward the consensus”—what Gavella had much earlier called the normal degree of orientation (see Gavella 1967, 88; Petlevski 2001, 51, 77). On the other hand, as a theatre practitioner, Gavella was intensely aware that the background assumptions pretending to present the common social experience objectively are being furtively colonized by argumentative discourse. This discourse comes from various spheres, and a Foucauldian school of thought would assign to it a power stemming from the shared base of language, culture, class, and status. Today, we would add race and gender to these spheres of power bringing to bear all sorts of conscious and subconscious pressures to enforce commonality by means of norms, canons and conventions.

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All meaning stages the framework of its understanding, and an act of telling is always an act of showing—Goffman would maintain in the 1970s. For Gavella, the “structural forms of speech” and the “structural forms of reality” coincide (see Gavella 1967, 85). The two meanings fuse in the person of the actor. Both the “extra-dramatic significance” (related to the actual events and the norms for orientation in a social context), and the “performance-dramatic significance” (related to the norms and conventions of drama and acting)—stage the framework within which the spectator understands the actor on stage as some sort of expression (see Gavella 1967, 78). By showing himself, the actor a) tells something to the spectator, and b) tells something about the spectator. This “staging” is a reversible process, implying the creation of the internal spectator in the actor, but also the parallelism of reaction in the spectator (see Gavella 1967, 167–168). A form of trust (Gavella 1967, 163) is established between them, which enables the presuppositions from the sphere of “shared knowledge” (see van Dijk 1998, 31) to be liberated, thereby creating the situation of communication, even if no actual information is exchanged. Potential action (Gavella 1967, 109, 167) produced in the spectator is actually a kind of performative understanding. Let us have a look at why this is so. Gavella’s concept of interplay is highly complex (see Gavella 1967, 24, 151; Gavella 1982, 46; Petlevski 2001). Yet, it is in part (the part that refers to the cognitive-experiential process and the creation of aesthetic object as a result of the “co-operation” between actor and spectator) closely related to the later idea developed by van Dijk’s that there is really no neutral, non-performative way of speaking of what is being performed (see van Dijk 1977). By their very form, utterances are able to create the framework-script within which their meaning as events takes place. This ability of utterances to create conditions for the “context of communication” by their form can, for example, transform a philologist into an actor (in the sense of someone who acts). The reception of the phenomenon of acting is much else besides, but its necessary condition is the ability for performative understanding.

Were it not for Gavella, but for some contemporary scholar, we would not hesitate to interpret the conclusions he draws in “On Criticism and Dramaturgy” in the context of contemporary theory. “The stance of the critic is not extra-artistic,” Gavella writes (2005, 190). The essay about dramaturgy and criticism, published in 1952, was based on Gavella’s theoretical reflections from the 1930s. In this text, Gavella discusses the concept of preformed types. Preformed types have a performative potential (in the language we speak, but also in the language spoken by our somatic organization). They contain in their structure “all the elements that can become the vehicles of the capacity of manifest intentions to be interpreted” (Gavella 2005, 111).3 Gavella defines criticism as “the deep understanding of the conflict raging in the work itself between the preformed types and material tending toward schematization”, on the one hand, and “the artist’s aspiration to grasp elementary reality”, on the other hand (see Gavella 2005, 189). 4 This tension, which Gavella elsewhere calls the two-fold aspect of speech (Gavella 1967, 85), exists within the artist, but it is also present in the critic who has the “need for a liberating new form” (Gavella 2005, 190). The critic is automatically transformed from the philologist into an actor, as there is no neutral, non-performative way for the critic to speak about what has been performed.

Some of the topics the contemporary theatre semiology finds interesting—were already solved in Gavella’s theory in the 1930s. When Bert O. States maintains that the objects on stage are

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assimilated by the imagistic nature of the performance text, he takes the example of a dog who, placed on stage, is “certainly an object”, but he explains that “the act of theatricalizing it—putting it into intentional space—neutralizes its objectivity and claims it as likeness of a dog” (States 1985, 35). (Adding, of course, that in the theatre there is no ontological difference between an image and an object.) According to States, the same holds for the actor as “a real object on stage” (34), since s/he is not identical to the character, and presents images of human acts, including speech acts, which would be iconic replicas of actual speech acts. Strongly contesting States’ simplification, Eli Rozik analyses the phenomenon of acting in four points, reaching the conclusion that since “the actor combines producer of images and image-text in the same body” (Rozik 1999, 203), he cannot be a case of iconic identity, and therefore cannot be reduced to a “ready-made” object on stage (see Rozik 1999, 198–211). In his capacity of the producer of signs, the actor uses the material of his body. The actor’s body is a text—it is identical neither to the actor who forms it (and who inhabits the real world), nor to the performed character (who inhabits the fictional world). To anyone who has read Gavella’s detailed analysis of the issue of the actor’s body as material for the actor’s aesthetic disposition, it is clear that he dealt with all these aspects already in the 1930s. According to Gavella, the “material normativity of acting” (Gavella 1967, 84, 113, 114) (acting being an art that uses speech as a means of expression) appears alongside various other social givens. Rozik’s concern is “metatheatricality,” (Rozik 1999, 207) defined by him as the experience of the body and the actor’s awareness of this experience in acting a role. He is particularly interested in the “ontological gap” (Rozik 1999, 205) between the performance-text and the producer of signs, between the performance-text and the fictional world; the gap which reveals the fact that the theatre is not the world, but a description of the world—a cultural formation—in the same way in which this is the case in the media that do not stage similarity on material level. Rozik’s question is: can semiotic methods deal with “metatextuality” in the first place? Further, he maintains that, due to the fundamental fictionality of theatre performance, the material text of the actor’s body can be integrated into the overall metaphorical image of drama, and he therefore contends that the material component of the signifier is assimilated—“consumed”—by the representative function.

On the basis of his directing and teaching experience, Gavella sometimes arrives at more felicitous solutions than many a contemporary theorist of acting. The way he makes difference between the two sides of actor’s personality—the normative and the technical one—(see Gavella 1967, 112, 113, 114) allows him to treat “acting material as a fraction of the sphere of general liveness of material” (Gavella 1967, 163). He analyses the points where a manifold consensus takes place between spectator and actor, in the form of understanding based on exchange among various cultural “structures of authoritativeness”) (Gavella 1967, 85). The actor’s awareness of his own body is of no less interest to Gavella than it is to, for instance, Rozik. Except that Gavella also confronted the same problem in practice, as a director, which, without any doubt, could only have served to enrich his approach. As soon as he defined actor as “a symbol of reality within the literary setting of drama” (Gavella 1967, 125), Gavella posed all the crucial questions in the contemporary theory of acting, as well as in the philosophy of language. At the beginning of the 1980s, the discovery of the part played by the body in speech (the body multiplying the assumptions for understanding verbal utterances and stage performances) was nothing short of a “scandal” (Felman 2003). Speech

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categories, Gavella claims, are parallel to the categories of reality, which is why the gestures of the actor, whether voluntary or involuntary, performed consciously or not, are always directly related to internal substances. Gavella distinguishes speech as the material of drama from speech as the material of acting. He is firmly convinced that there exist “categories of speech for signifying speech situations” (see Gavella 1967, 64, 85, 92, 93) which appear both in the verbal material of drama and in the verbal material of acting. It is only the actor’s intention that occasions “the transposition of verbal material from its actual representativeness into internal representativeness” (Gavella 1967, 92). The body on stage carries the awareness of theatre as a cultural formation over the fourth wall. One of the ways in which it does this is the deliberate stylization of gestures in acting. But it can also do it in an involuntary manner, through the disobedience of the body and its physiological givens which set the limits to the actor’s creative freedom in manipulating his own physical material—voice, facial expressions, gestures, and body posture—with everything taking place on stage, whether intended or unintended. Anything that could appear on stage inevitably has the tendency to be taken as a product of an intention, as a “description of the world.” Gavella claims that even the actor’s involuntary gestures are “directly related to the inner substance” (Gavella 1967, 127; also see Petlevski 2001, 19–51). But is this relation predicated by the stage as a culturally given fact?

The relevance of Gavella’s contribution to theory goes well beyond the local context of theatre studies in Croatia, especially when, in the analysis of the verbal aspect of acting, his interest lies in the relational dynamics including both the individual and the medium of its existence. Maturana’s concept of “relational dynamics” (see Maturana and Varela 1980, 1987; Maturana 1978, 1990; Maturana and Verden-Zöller, 1993) refers to the definition of behavior that is not merely a property of an organism, but a “feature of its existence in relational space” as a space of exchange. Present-day readers of Gavella’s writings cannot but be fascinated by the extent to which Maturana’s claims concerning “relational dynamics” correspond to Gavella’s remarks, especially in Gavella’s text on the “Social Atmosphere …” (see Gavella [1952] 2005a, 103–132). In fact, this should not be surprising, since the most prominent sociological application of Maturana and Varela’s theory of autopoietic systems (see Maturana and Varela 1980), proposed by Niklas Luhmann in his study Soziale Systeme (Luhmann 1984; see also Luhmann 1982) came about by a productive combination of the already developed phenomenological theory of meaning (itself thoroughly assimilated by the German philosophical tradition) with the recently adopted and considerably adapted systems theory of Humberto Maturana. The sources of Gavella’s theory are phenomenological, and most consciously so—for example, the comprehensive theoretical introduction to the text on social atmosphere in the Croatian National Theatre is labeled a “phenomenological digression,” which, Gavella claims, was necessary “lest the considerations of the role of language in social groups be beside the point” (see Gavella 2005a, 102–126).

Gavella analyzes the phenomenon of acting in order to show how communication functions as a selection from the indefinite complexity of the media into a definable complexity. His first task is to show the ways in which the position of the (inner) spectator is realized in the two aspects of the actor-function. Later, he elucidates upon the dynamics of exchange taking place in the relational space (the space of interplay) between the phenomenon of acting as a structurally determined

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system, and the medium partaking of the exchange (a structurally determined social system). The fact that Gavella’s interest in historical problems does not go beyond the level of conceptual models is the major deficiency, as well as the major advantage (within the context of local scholarship, it is in fact positively ground-breaking), of his attempts at studying cultural history. Gavella is not interested in historical facts as such, still less in the reconstruction of the chain of events offered by the approach to history-writing in the style of Ranke. He conceives of history as a field of activity, where no interpretation of past facts can claim to be “more accurate” (i.e. “more adequate”) than any other. Facts are not discovered—since there is no independent standard of objectivity that would enable the preference for one reading of history over another; all that one can do is assume a certain position with respect to them (see Fish 1980). Conceiving of the standards of objectivity in the interpretation of history as relative (in Gavella’s case, even subjective) follows quite naturally from the way the position of the observer is defined in the systems which the adherents of Luhmann’s theory of social systems today would call autopoietic. Past and future exist here solely as explanatory concepts introduced by the observer. To repeat, Gavella is not interested in reconstructing history, but in the methods of cultural history—the historical perspective predicated upon the (interpretative) position of the observer (or, in the theatre, of the spectator) within the dynamics of exchange that emerges between social systems and their respective media.

Gavella’s insight into the phenomenon of theatre performance abandons Kant as a philosophical starting point at a fairly early stage, bidding farewell first of all to the Kantian interpretation of the relationship of parts to the whole, in which the system is conceived as if the parts existed specifically for the purpose of comprising the whole. Thanks to his profound insight into the phenomenon of acting, Gavella is soon led to realize that the relating of parts to the whole becomes pertinent exclusively from the position of the observer. For the theorists of autopoietic systems, and to a significant extent for Gavella as well, the part-whole relation is, in Maturana’s wording, but a metaphor for the observer’s misunderstanding (see Maturana 2002, 9), a working concept necessary in order to understand the way in which the system functions. The emphasis is suddenly no longer on the components of the system, but on its dynamics—the ways in which the processes within the social network are being integrated into the spaces of exchange particular to their respective media. According to Maturana’s analysis, behavior is not a property of an organism but a feature of its existence in relational space, with the dynamics of actual relations including both the organism and the medium in which the organism exists. Autopoiesis is not a property of living beings; it is a manner in which they exist. Human beings exist in and through language. The mind, as a “phenomenon of languaging in the network of social and linguistic coupling” is not something that lies within the brain (Maturana and Varela 1987, 234). In “Autopoiesis, structural coupling and cognition”, Maturana says that we human beings “coexist as languaging beings with other languaging beings” (Maturana 2002, 27). The fundamental aim that Gavella set for his research consisted in discovering the particular features of the “process of our collective existence” wherever there obtains a specific “manner in which social formations exist” (Gavella 2005a, 106–107). Gavella observes that, because they are collective, it is characteristic of social phenomena that the function of such social formations is at the same time the character of their existence:

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As soon as, in the processes of our collective existence, it becomes a matter of someone trying to say something to somebody else in view of a particular purpose, these subjects, objects, purposes, and trajectories become constant in character. They are repeated as being the “verbal” signs of something that is repeated in various speech situations, thereby becoming constants in the variability of these speech situations. These constants are something common, identical, and general. In the multiplicity of individual existences aspiring to mutual understanding—groups are thereby created combining individuals into sets with relatively constant common elements. New creations come about, which are not dissimilar in character to the resemblances we notice in the faces of family members. This resemblance exists as something definite in those faces, yet not as something that would exist by itself apart from those faces. (Gavella 2005a, 106–107)5

Like Maturana, Gavella notices that what matters to the system is the manner in which it is realized, and not the components that comprise the system. Maturana provides examples for his argument that are not taken from biology. The first example is the tornado (see Maturana 2002, 10) that does not consist of the molecules of air themselves; tornado as a meteorological phenomenon is created by the manner in which the molecules of air flow through it. The second example is the club (see Maturana 2002, 10). This social phenomenon exists as a discrete conversational network realized by individuals that change over the years; the club remains the same, and its system works in the same way, as long as the conversational network obtains by which the club is defined, as long as it is preserved in the specific manner of interaction that persons who are members of the club in any given period of time engage in. On the conceptual level, Gavella says the same, but his examples are chosen differently, as it is only logical, since his aim is to discover constants in the historical development of social formations, while the primary focus of his research is the analysis of the phenomenon of acting. Gavella singles out “the partial analogy with the phenomenon of physiognomy as it obtains in particular faces” as being “one of the fundamental traits” of the “collective formations” of sociality:

Their function, then, is the character of their existence, precisely ‘to give character’ to particular physiognomies. As a primitive example of this, I would cite the existence of resemblance that obtains among the individual family members. This resemblance means that all the individual physiognomies are characterized by having something in common. Furthermore, it is of importance that these collective formations assume some other marks of the individual faces. They also have their masks. (Gavella 2005a, 108)

For Maturana, the concept of preservation is of fundamental significance, with the understanding of the dynamics of preservation, by virtue of which biological evolution is a historical process, being preponderant. The notion of preservation, which, in the case of living systems, is made actual in two ways—through the law of the preservation of autopoiesis, i.e. through the preservation of the conditions under which living systems are possible as such, and through law of the preservation of adaptation—can be applied to social formations as well, due to the fact that autopoietic systems function in analogous manner. In Gavella’s elaboration of the functioning of social systems, the concept of preservation is represented by the phenomenon of the mask, where the law of the

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preservation of autopoiesis (the structure of the system and the manner in which the system exists is constant), and the law of the preservation of adaptation (the system is elastically variable; it adapts to the manifestational needs of the experiential system, thereby effecting movement on the historical axis) both apply:

The phenomenon of the mask is for me the crux of the entire apparatus by means of which our beings manifest their experiential states; it is both constant in its material structure and elastically variable in its adaptability to all the manifestational needs of our experiencing. This experiencing can also have the intention to dissimulate, such physiognomic ‘insincerity’ leaving tiny, microscopic, yet still conspicuous manifestational signs on the mask. (Gavella 2005a, 111)

The “Social Atmosphere” is a theoretical work offering a rather concise and cogent summary of the results of Gavella’s research on the speech act within the phenomenon of acting, with respect to the relation that obtains between the work of the actor and the historical moment. All the key concepts that Gavella had been developing in his theory of theatre since the early 1930s are to be found in this neglected text, which, never having received due scholarly attention, remains bereft of adequate interpretation to this day. It is true that its importance becomes apparent only after the function and role of all the major correlative terms in Gavella’s theory have been established. It should also not be forgotten that Gavella’s theory, while meticulously structured, was all but inscrutable as presented in the various writings from which it had to be reconstructed: in addition to comprehensive texts devoted to the specific aspects and details of the phenomena under study, there were also fragments, as well as several manuscript versions, with the often still baffling and unresolved resemblances and differences between the published and manuscript versions of the same text, not to mention the subsequently added comments written in the margin of published papers. Gavella had to wait over half a century for his scholarly intentions to start resonating within the Croatian academic community. The fate that befell his theory—to be accepted only belatedly and still not entirely—repeats the structural pattern of one of the key issues in social linguistics—brilliantly expounded in Gavella’s “Social Atmosphere,” and, of course, made famous as the argument John F. Searle proposed in his Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (1983)—the issue of the distinction between the intention to represent and the intention to communicate. This problem, which still remains the bone of contention for the theories of Austin, Searle, and Derrida, refers to the existence or otherwise of some “privileged contexts” on the basis of which certain speech acts could be deemed “normal” or “parasitical.” Austin’s theory of speech acts relates the concept of the “normalcy” of an utterance to the idea of an existing level of reality where utterances are verifiable on the basis of denotata. The context of speech acts realized in everyday communication, which, according to Austin, determines whether an order will indeed be an order, or a promise a “true” promise, depends on the total situation, the total context in which an order or a promise are being realized as speech acts. In Searle’s speech act theory, it is the intention of the speaker (the author of the speech act) that determines whether a given speech act will be “normal” or “parasitic,” that is, fictional, like an actor’s “as if” propositions. Searle’s argument is that it is possible for someone to intend to represent something in speaking, without necessarily having the intention of communicating anything. Hence, there is a distinction between the intention to

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represent and the intention to communicate. The speaker represents the state of things, while that which is thereby being represented (“representation”) can, but does not have to be, communicated (see Searle 1986, particularly the chapter on communication and representation). Let us have a look at Gavella developing a similar argument:

First of all, we should be aware of how complex is the phenomenon of language, and to bear in mind that in it we find a speech intention with a tendency that does not go beyond internal fixation the sole purpose of which is to enable orientation in the course of one’s experiencing, or a tendency toward external manifestations through various communicative characters and aims of materialized fixations; manifestations are further to be found by means of acoustic or optic symbols or other kinds of signs acting as surrogates for the verbal communicative tendency. (Gavella 2005a, 121)

Searle’s “representation of the state of things,” characteristic of the intention to represent, would correspond to Gavella’s concept of the verbal (speech) intention helping the subject orient himself within his own experiential world, the intention which attains its purpose within the world of the subject’s experiencing and therefore does not have to—although it can—realize the communicative purpose as well. Gavella is interested in this kind of intentionality of the speech act as forming the part of the “preparatory stage” in which “verbal reserves” are being created by means of “representational shortcuts” (Gavella 2005a, 122) The speaker uses these shortcuts in “effecting speech intentions” (122) that provide words with meaning, i.e. create a role within the communicative intention, or within the speech intention that creates a communicative situation even when there is no active exchange of information:

The word ‘mother,’ for instance, has a meaning: it denotes a female, etc. However, it is only given sense when it is provided with a role, with a place within the effecting of a speech intention. Whether upon entering a speech series or in isolation, it is assigned the intonation of summoning, grieving, etc. In such cases the verbal trajectory of its meaning connects with the verbal trajectory of some speech-situation, such as the need for something, summoning or something else, creating a new verbal trajectory. (Gavella 2005a, 122)

Gavella lucidly observes that we enter speech as “natives” of specific social groups (Gavella 2005a, 124). The ostensible normalcy or abnormalcy of a particular speech act is only made actual in the context of the native world to which we belong. Already in the early stages of learning our mother tongue, we acquire a set of “already formalized and constant, already viable, trajectories.” This “material for communication” with the environment is predicated upon “the convention of comprehensibility,” to which, Gavella proceeds, “everyone who would aspire to making his speech comprehensible must become subjected” (see Gavella 2005a, 123; Petlevski 2001, 19–49, 191–192). Communicative intention—the actualization of which, in Gavella’s words, depends on “the constant repetition of certain elements in certain situations”—is, however, not the sole feasible intention in speaking. As regards speech, normativity is but relative:

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Yet only in this relative normativity (which is indeed of extraordinary importance, since it represents social normativity of our life at its most elementary) does there exist the possibility of individual will asserting itself, the will to change these conventions, and to introduce new norms of understanding. (Gavella 2005a, 122)

Gavella does not overestimate “the will” behind the representative intention, but his theory takes it into consideration to a greater extent than do the speech act theorists of the early 1980s. This is easily explained by the fact that the primary focus of his interest was on the artistic utterance (as dramatic word and actor’s speech). The analysis of the role of language in acting enhanced Gavella’s theoretical considerations of verbal intentions. He is most keenly aware that the way in which speech is understood is determined by the way in which a word or a phrase is understood within a specific community, taking into consideration the fact that use varies depending on the differences of period and location. Austin did not venture beyond conventions; Searle was more preoccupied by the role of intention in speech acts, and Derrida’s criticism of their theories foregrounded the impossibility of contexts ever being grasped in their totality. His theoretical analyses of the role of speech in acting, enhanced by the practical experience of teaching acting, enabled Gavella to assume (very early on) the—today we would say Derridean—perspective within which it is clear that it is impossible to comprehend the totality of situations in which speech act takes place. Gavella distinguishes between the “general verbal trajectory of actualized sense” (see Gavella 2005a, 123) and the trajectory along which the “realization of that actual sense prompted by the actual speech situation” moves. Of speech situation (Gavella 2005a 107, 122; see also Gavella 1967, 64, 92), he says that

already by itself, in its complexity, it demands a combination of verbal trajectories for it to be exhaustively realized—as, for instance, the trajectory of asserting can combine with the trajectory of firmness of belief as regards the cogency of respective assertions, or the trajectory of interrogation can combine with the trajectory of earnestness, or of expectation of a certain answer, etc. And it is of utmost importance for these trajectories to have constant formulae of movement and amplitudes of oscillation. (Gavella 2005a, 123)

Gavella sets great store by the understanding of the dynamics of preservation of social institutions, as dynamically structured systems engaged in an incessant exchange with the medium they are embedded in. The dynamics of preservation is best seen in the example of speech acts that manage, from one moment on the historical axis to the next, to preserve the formulae of movement and amplitudes of oscillation of verbal trajectories that relate to specific stock situations within a closed circuit of “collective formations, sets, and means of social interaction” (Gavella 2005a, 109, footnote 13). Each of these formations—Luhmann would say “functional subsystems” (Luhmann [1984] 1995, 54)—has its respective specific medium of communication, which determines the manner in which the formation interacts with its environment. Theatre is an example of such a functional subsystem. Gavella is interested in “speech models,” but he is even more interested in the way verbal intention is made actual in the sphere of artistic creation. He clearly sees that as soon as the sense of speech is being subjected to artistic creation, it becomes “altered”.

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Luhmann’s distinction between system and environment, as expounded in Reden und Schweigen (1989) is based on a conceptualization that defines environment (Maturana’s medium) as the remaining quantum of something from which the system needs to separate itself. An environment is always an environment, never a system. Each re-duplication of the schema has to retain the specificity of differentiation (in particular its asymmetry). The repetition of the schema multiplies distinctions, but it does not create a new system. Luhmann sets up the analogy: psychic systems come about by producing thoughts, while social systems come about by producing communication, with both thoughts and communication creating meanings in the same way. People are within the system as performers, but they do not form a constituent part of the system. The factors determining what counts as communication to a great extent partake of the immediate situation, such as the previously actualized instances of communication, which are themselves the outcome of a constant process of communication as it takes place from an instant to the next, in a temporal sequence, as opposed to the specific traits of the psychic system of an individual. Speech, for instance, offers its elements the structural possibility of being separate from that which they designate: the same elements can refer to different things, indicate various semantic fields, or be related to diverse intentions. Speech functions perfectly in the absence of referents: moreover, it does not need neither speaker, nor hearer, it can be comprehended even when the speaker is wrong, tells lies, or when, for example, an actor utters correctly a line of dialogue in a foreign language of which he does not have a good command.

Already in the 1930s, Gavella applied the relation of semantics to pragmatics, as it would eventually be understood in speech act theory from Austin on, to the problems peculiar to theatre. Not only that, his experience of analyzing the system of acting led him to expand the terms role and mask. Gavella transported these terms, seemingly specific to theatre performance, from the domain of theatre studies to the sphere of research in philosophy of language, cognitive psychology, and the theory of autopoietic systems. The term role appears in the discussion of language-use, as the “effecting of verbal intention,” which endows language-meaning with a “sense,” whereby the verbal trajectory of meaning merges with the “verbal trajectory of the speech-situation” (Gavella 2005a, 122). Describing this apparatus amenable to “all intentions of manifestation,” Gavella also employs the term manifestational mask, which as a result of “certain material permanence” guarantees “the certainty of interpretation” (see Gavella 2005a, 111), with the nature of interpretation itself being determined by the type of relations that are established “among persons interested in this interpretation” (see “Social Atmosphere” [1968] 2005a, 103–165). In this manner the material of experiencing acquires “stability in its congruence” (see “Reverberations of October in Croatian Cultural and Political Life” [1952–1953] 2005a, 85–103), the mechanism enabling communication by means of a scale of “preformed types” (see “Dramaturgy and Criticism” [1952] 2005a, 187, 193). The conclusion that in creating his mask the actor does not use raw material but “a mask that is already socially prepared for manifestational ends” is of cardinal importance for Gavella’s theory:

The principal medium of our communication, language in the narrow sense of articulate speech, and language as spoken by our entire somatic organization (facial expressions, gestures, stance, body posture), would have to include in its structure all the elements capable of being conveyors for the interpretability of manifestational intentions. The degree to which these elements will be

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interpretable, the wealth of interpretive nuances, will in turn depend on the cohesion of the groups in which they are deployed, on the intricacy, multiplicity and significance of the objects which represent the common interests of these groups, as well as on the degree to which they share common interests in general. (Gavella 2005a, 111–112)

Gavella is fascinated by this structure of repetition, of which Derrida would say that it concurrently implies identity and difference. A sign that would appear but once and never again—would not be a sign at all. Identity, in fact the typical identity of the sign (see Derrida 1973) is that which—whatever it may be—remains in repetition. Gavella’s view of history is always motivated by the search for the relation of identity and difference in social groups displaying a specific structure of repetition over decades or centuries. This is a structure that, we could perhaps say today, in the function of the survival of the autopoietic system, subsists in the cultural space of exchange.

1 This work has been supported by the Croatian Science Foundation under the project number IP-2014–09–6963.

2 The Glossary (included as an appendix to my book on Gavella's performance philosophy) had been compiled and published before the revised edition of Gavella's theoretical works from the year 2005 edited by Batušić and Blažević. This is one of the reasons why in this text I quote from previous editions of Gavella's theoretical works edited by Batušić, and from his original manuscripts. 3 Originally, the text where Gavella develops this idea, “Social Atmosphere of Croatian National Theatre and its Relationship Towards its Theatrical Neighbourhood”, was accepted for publication by Jugoslav Academy of Arts and Sciences in November 1960 and published in 1968. 4 Originally, the text was published in Zagreb under the title “On Criticism and Dramaturgy”, 27 May 1965, Vjesnik 2264:2.

5 All larger quotations from Gavella in this text are taken from the selection of his papers collected under the title Branko Gavella. Dvostruko lice govora (2005a). As stated before, the core of his theoretical system was conceived and written down in the early 1930s, and the elaboration of his theory, combined with cultural history approaches, was completed in the early 1950s.

Notes

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———. 1893. Delsarte system of oratory, including the complete works of M. l’Abbé Delomosne and Mme Angelique Arnaud (pupils of Delsarte) with the literary remains of François Delsarte by Angelique Arnaud, l’Abbe Delaumosne, François Delsarte, Frances A Shaw, and Abby Langdon Alger, 4rd edition. New York: Edgar S. Werner.

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Derrida, Jacques. 1973. Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.

Felman, Shoshana. 2003. The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J.L. Austin, Or Seduction in Two Languages. Translated by Catherine Porter. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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Gavella, Branko. 1934a. «Gluma. Kazališni problemi» [Acting. Theatrical Problems]. Danas I. No. 2. Beograd. 1. II, 184–193.

———. 1934b. «Glumac i publika. Kazališni problemi» [Actor and Audience. Theatrical Problems]. Danas I, Book II. No. 5. Beograd. April/ May 1934, 200–206.

———. 1934c. «Režija, kritika i publika. Jedan predgovor» [Directing, Criticism and Audience]. Danas I, No. 1. Beograd 1. I, 92–96.

———. 1952a. Socijalna atmosfera Hrvatskog narodnog kazališta i njegovi odnosi prema kazališnom susjedstvu (I. dio) [Social Atmosphere of Croatian National Theatre, and its Relation To Its Theatrical Surroundings]. In Gavella, Branko. 2005. Branko Gavella. Dvostruko lice govora, edited by Sibila Petlevski, 103–132. Zagreb: CDK.

———. 1952b. «O kritici i dramaturgiji» [On Criticism and Dramaturgy]. Vjesnik No. 2264, May 27. Zagreb, 2. In Gavella, Branko. 2005. Branko Gavella. Dvostruko lice govora. [Branko Gavella. Double Face of Language], edited by Sibila Petlevski, 187–193. Zagreb: CDK.

———. 1967. Glumac i kazalište [Actor and Theatre], edited by Nikola Batušić. Novi Sad: Biblioteka Sterijinog pozorja.

———. 1970. Književnost i kazalište [Literature and Theatre]. Zagreb: Kolo Matice hrvatske.

———. 1982. Hrvatsko glumište [Croatian Stage]. Zagreb: GZH.

———. 2005a. Branko Gavella. Dvostruko lice govora [Branko Gavella. Double Face of Language], edited. by Sibila Petlevski. Zagreb: CDK.

———. 2005b. Teorija glume: Od materijala do ličnosti [Theory of Acting: From Material to Personality], edited by Marin Blažević and Nikola Batušić. Zagreb: CDK.

Husserl, Edmund. 1900/1901. Logische Untersuchungen. Halle: M. Niemeyer.

Ihering, Herbert. 1922. Der Kampf ums Theater, Dresden: Sibyllen-Verlag.

———. 1974. Der Kampf ums Theater und andere Streitschriften 1918 bis 1933. Berlin: Henschelverlag.

Luhmann, Niklas. 1982. The Differentiation of Society. New York: Columbia University Press.

———. 1984. Soziale Systeme, Grundriß einer allgemeinen Theorie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Published in English as Social Systems (1995). Stanford: Stanford University Press.

———. 1989. “Reden und Schweigen” in Peter Fuchs and Niklas Luhmann Reden und Schweigen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Marowitz, Charles. 1978. The Act of Being: Towards a Theory of Acting. New York: Taplinger.

Maturana, Humberto R. 1978. “Cognition”. English translation in the Observer Web Archive Edition. First published in Wahrnehmung und Kommunikation, edited by Peter M. Hejl, Wolfram K. Köck, and Gerhard Roth, 29–49. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

———. 1990. “Science and Daily Life: The Ontology of Scientific Explanations.” In Selforganization: Portrait of a Scientific Revolution, edited by W. Krohn and G. Kuppers. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2975-8_2

———. 2002. “Autopoiesis, structural coupling and cognition: A history of these and other notions in the biology of cognition”. Cybernetics & Human Knowing 9 (3–4): 5–34. Available at http://cepa.info/685

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Maturana, Humberto R. and Francisco J. Varela. 1980. Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Dordrecht: D. Reidel. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-8947-4

———. 1987. The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding. Boston: Shambala.

Maturana, Humberto R. and G. Verden-Zöller. 1993. Liebe und Spiel, die Vergessene Grundladge des Menschlichkeit. Hamburg: Carl Auer Verlag.

Pavis, Patrice. 2001. “Les études théâtrales et l’interdisciplinarité.” L'Annuaire theatral: revue quebecoise d’etudes theatrales 29: 13–27.

Petlevski, Sibila. 2001. Kazalište suigre. [Theatre of Interplay]. Zagreb: Antibarbarus.

———. 2007. «The Director as Thinker». In History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe. Junctures and disjunctures in the 19th and 20th centuries. Volume III: The making and remaking of literary institutions, edited by Marcel Cornis Pope and John Neubauer, 215. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Pezin, Patrick. 1986. Bouffonneries (France) 15 (1). An issue devoted to theatre anthropology.

Rozik, Eli. 1999. “The Corporeality of the Actor’s Body: The Boundaries of Theatre and the Limitations of Semiotic Methodology.” Theatre Research International 24 (2): 198–211. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0307883300020824

Searle, John F. 1983. Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139173452

———. 1986. Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends. Oxford: Clarendon.

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———. 1998. Ideology. A Multidisciplinary Approach. London: Thousand Oaks, and New Delhi: Sage.

Biography

Sibila Petlevski—an author of more than twenty books in different genres—is a Full Professor at the Academy of Dramatic Art, University of Zagreb; doctor of humanities and scholar in the fields of performance studies, interdisciplinary art research and cultural studies. Apart from her academic and scientific career, Petlevski is a professional writer: an awarded novelist, poet, playwright, performer, editor and translator, member of L’Académie Mallarmé, ITI-UNESCO, Croatian Association of Theatre Critics and Theatrologists; two mandates on the International Board of the International P.E.N., currently the chair of Croatian National Council for Humanities. She is the author of awarded books on European drama and theatre (Symptoms of Modernity and Theatre of Interplay). Her play Ice General was awarded at Berliner Festspiele TT-Stückemarkt in 2005. She is the leader of the science & art project titled How Practice-led Research in Artistic Performance Can Contribute to Science supported by Croatian Science Foundation. http://www.sibilapetlevski.com

© 2017 Sibila Petlevski

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY VOL 3, NO 1 (2017):233–245 DOI: https://doi.org/10.21476/PP.2017.3152

ISSN 2057-7176

PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY

ETHICS OF PLAY IN EARPIECE PERFORMANCES BY NATURE THEATER OF OKLAHOMA AND GOB SQUAD

FRED DALMASSO LOUGHBOROUGH UNIVERSITY

In Rhapsody for the Theatre, Badiou propped the notion of the ethics of play against a theory of the subject that had yet to be fully deployed. His reflection remains tentative and he simply suggests ‘that the actor could very well show a subject without substance,’ that ‘always between-two, [the ethics of play] operates in the pure present of the spectacle, and the public […] gains access to this present only in the aftermath of a thought,’ and ultimately that ‘the ethics of play is that of an escape’ (Badiou 2008a, 216, 221). There is a delay at work in the ethics of play, an in-between. By looking at Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Life and Times and Gob Squad’s Gob Squad’s Kitchen (You Never Had It So Good), this article proposes to examine how an ethics of play could be materially deployed in these earpiece performances through the delay, albeit minimal, the in-between text or instruction and their actualisation on stage. NTOK’s Life and Times and Gob Squad’s Kitchen have little in common except for the fact that both performances rely upon the ability of performers or participatory audience members to convincingly speak lines and execute instructions received through wireless headphones. However, these similarities become meaningful when seeing the two performances through a Badiouan lens and very useful when it comes to explaining what Badiou’s elusive notion of the ethics of play might entail. In this article, I revisit two theatre reviews I absent-mindedly wrote, or so it seemed at the time, while trying to come to terms with Badiou’s notion of the ethics of play. My spectating was under influence, albeit of a philosophical nature and this article also assumes its own bias: after all, performance philosophy could also consist of taking concepts for an evening at the theatre and make them perform in a sort of play within a play. In hindsight, I was also perhaps unconsciously emulating Badiou’s series of short pamphlets about theatre in Rhapsody for the Theatre in response to shows he had seen at the time. In his treatise,

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Badiou rehearses his ideas for the notion of the ethics of play within a three-pronged Theatre dialectics. However, he is more than reluctant to directly relate his newly forged concepts to specific performances and leaves this to the character of the Empiricist. While it also resists empiricism to a degree, this article will suggest how NTOK’s Life and Times and Gob Squad’s Kitchen could perform some of Rhapsody for the Theatre’s dialectical tensions between the theatrical State, the ethics of play and the spectator-subject.

A Theatre of presentation

As a condition for a Theatre event to occur, Badiou’s ethics of play is described in his Rhapsody for the Theatre as an escape from representation, but also from what he calls a “theatre of Presence”. Badiou’s words are lapidary on this: ‘The Mass is worn out, the theatre of Presence is obliterated’ (Badiou 2008a, 217). The ethics of play consists of the performer’s ability to present existence as movement away from essence, from the innate, the inherent, the intrinsic. As opposed to theatre and its predetermined roles, Theatre (capital T) is presented as the antithesis of the Catholic mass because it is not ruled by substantialism. Badiou stresses that what he considers to be bad theatre ‘gives up on the ethics of play insofar as it distributes substances’ (Badiou 2008a, 220). Moreover, the idea that the ethics of play goes against any theatre of Presence is in line with Badiou’s transitory ontology. The concept of Presence (capital P) has to be understood here as it is being used by Badiou in Rhapsody for the Theatre in an analogy with the Catholic Mass in terms of substantialism and transcendence; while it might evoke certain aspects of it, it does not encompass the whole complexity of what the notion of presence has come to refer to in Performance Studies. For Badiou, any ontological investigation is irremediably localised and Theatre can only happen in the here and now of a materialised performance. Being as a global transcending entity or as an absent Presence or, in Heideggerian terms, “being in totality” is out of the question. He extracts a theorem of the non existence of ‘total being’ from the fundamental axioms of set-theory, which he sees as the principles of what he calls the ontology of the multiple: there is no set which contains all the sets. It is impossible to conceive a multiple, thus a being, which would be the aggregate of all the possible beings. Since for Badiou, being is also only by being-there, he brushes aside the question of the essence of being to focus on appearing as for him appearing is the site of being when conceived in all its multiplicity. Since the materialisation of being-there implies a situation, a site, appearing is what links or connects being to its site. Thus the essence of appearing is precisely that connection and not something predetermined by the situation or the site. In the case of Theatre, that connection is governed by the ethics of play. Within Badiou’s Theatre dialectics, the ethics of play enables the spectator-subject to think the relation between the inconsistency of being as a pure multiple and the consistency of its appearing. For Badiou, accessing the idea of the pure multiplicity of being does not happen by ‘shunning appearing, nor by singing the praises of the virtual […] but by thinking appearing as appearing, and thus as this part of being, which happens to appear, and offers itself to thought as a deceit of seeing’ (Badiou 2008b, 23). This is the reason why while he refutes a theatre of Presence, Badiou advocates a theatre of presentation. The aim of the ethics of play is precisely the provocation of presentation—not the presentation of being but that of appearing since according to Badiou’s ontology, ‘being does not in any manner

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let itself be approached, but solely allows itself to be sutured in its void to the brutality of a deductive consistency without aura’ (Badiou 2006, 10). To provoke presentation, the ethics of play demands that actors resort to decisive bodily and vocal gestures. However, Badiou stresses that ‘the central virtue of the actor is not technical but ethical’ (Badiou 2008a, 219). Theatre’s play of differences and the celebration of being as a multiple are not the main reasons why Badiou speaks of ethics. He explains that actors cannot rely upon effects—as these would equate acting to a straight imitation of an object or a caricature of predetermined roles, but upon gestures clearly signifying availability, an opening (Badiou 2008a, 219). He stresses that the ethics of play is only possible from the edge of the void, in other words, at the threshold of the absence of an object to imitate. The actor’s provocation of presentation has to point to the out of joint nature of a world where ‘nothing coincides with itself’ (Badiou 2008a, 221).

In episode 1 of NTOK’s Life and Times, everyday routine in a New Jersey suburban town is strangely conveyed on stage through Spartakiada inspired choreography drawing from a series of athletic exercises developed in Czechoslovakia and other Eastern Bloc countries for mass political celebrations. On stage, the ballet of red balls, white squares, blue scarves and yellow gymnastic rings creates visual jolts that combine with the prosodic and at times, operatic delivery of lines to hypnotic effect. The performers execute these movements with utmost precision following the instructions of a conductor. It seems that this choreography somehow answers to Badiou’s imperatives in terms of the ethics of play. The performers’ commitment to incessant instructions to perform such or such a movement does not confer them an auratic presence, but their incessant activity is mesmerising. However, they never embody the real-life character whose story they are telling, instead their industrious choreography of decisive bodily and vocal gestures resembles a technical assembly line that would disperse any notion of embodiment and yet provide the audience with the consistency of an absence or with the consistent failure to represent a life story. The playtext of NTOK’s Life and Times is an edited version of a 16-hour phone conversation between Pavol Liska and Kristin Worrall, a member of the company during which Worral tries to answer the question: “Can you tell me your life story?” The performance shares most characteristics of headphone verbatim as defined by Caroline Wake:

In headphone verbatim, the performance displays not only its source material but also the mechanical device needed to record and repeat that material. In both rehearsal and performance, the actors wear headphones, through which they hear the audio script. They then repeat that script as immediately and exactly as possible, including—as noted above—every stammer, pause, and repetition. (Wake 2013, 322–323)

However, Wake is reluctant to describe NTOK’s work as headphone verbatim because their approach is not strictly documentary (Wake 2013, 330). In this, Wake agrees with Karinne Keithley who stresses that Copper does not ‘simply “document” a nonfictional reality as documentary theatre might; rather, in collaboration with the company, she collects, transcribes, and orders linguistic data so that they may collectively energize it on stage’ (Keithley 2010, 69). Although the text of Life and Times has been edited, it retains all the hesitations of the phone conversation and is punctuated by a large number of “ums” and silences. As argued by Rachel Anderson-Rabern,

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NTOK’s work could be described as developing an awareness for ethical listening (Anderson-Rabern 2010, 96), however here their methods for recording, structuring and performing everyday gesture and language will be analysed as an ethics of play. When channelled through the headphones, these repetitive “ums”, pauses and hesitations contribute to replicate the distance inherent to any phone conversation, but also to highlight the transmission delay, that is then reproduced when the text received through the earpiece on stage is then spoken. This also highlights the sense of the elliptical and of the unexpected that govern the piece.

As directors of NTOK, Liska and Kelly Copper have developed several techniques and dramaturgies of chance over the years and in this performance. In Life and Times, both randomly prompt the performers to reproduce rehearsed gestures or sequences of movements. Copper is conducting the performers from the orchestra with a set of instructions displayed on cue-cards not visible from the auditorium, while Liska assigns lines to the performers through their earpiece. Following John Cage and Richard Foreman, there is in fact no work by NTOK that was not written in large part with dice, decks of cards or coins. However, as Florian Malzacher stresses ‘chance is not completely arbitrary. Rather it is something that comes to you and then in a sense belongs to you. Something that one must view as a challenge and which demands flexibility of thought. Leaving certain decisions to chance does not equal less work; it merely shifts the focus’ (Malzacher 2012, 19). In Inaesthetics, Badiou asserts that ‘a theatrical representation will never abolish chance’ and in Rhapsody for the Theatre, that ‘the paradox of theatre […] lies in the fact that it presents itself as a figurative luxury, a solid chain, a cultural temple, but […] it is actually made of flight and chance’ (Badiou 2004, 74 and 2008a, 199). Within Badiou’s Theatre dialectics, the ethics of play ensures that chance is allowed to disrupt the system of representation, while in his theory of the event, fidelity ‘names a process that separates and discerns the becoming legal of chance’ (Riera 2005, 12). Chance becomes the rule when the evental subject has decided upon the undecidable inherent to the event to choose a new law to follow. To an extent, Badiou’s Rhapsody for the Theatre announces his theory of the event since the ethics of play might well ensure the becoming legal of chance when it comes to the Theatre event. To an extent, the actor’s ethical availability that Badiou insists upon, amounts to an ethical opening to chance and consequently to the endless possibilities and configurations of the new.

Life and Times might not be a staged attempt to recollect someone’s life story by excavating and ordering past experiences, but a discourse on chance and existential randomness. On stage, performers appear extremely focused and at the same time totally lost as they are literally kept on their toes by the quick succession of random and at times, contradictory instructions they are meant to follow. In her review of the performance, Helen Shaw remarks that ‘we see their anxious micro-expressions as their eyes slew to the prompter, checking for the next move’ (Shaw 2013, 5). Although the performers draw from a well-rehearsed repertoire of actions, they are constantly on the edge especially when they serve food to the entire audience at every interval or in a more comic fashion in episode 3, when they are forced to swap the lines of Agatha Christie’s play The Mousetrap for the lines of the performance’s telephone conversation verbatim transcript, while staying in The Mousetrap’s stereotyped characters when it comes to expressions and movements. This melodramatic atmosphere is suddenly disrupted by the apparition of silver body-suited aliens

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armed with giant party popper guns. Malzacher explains that when ‘it becomes apparent that an actor has developed patterns or strategies for saving himself, that effort must be thwarted. Salvation is boring and the bar is steadily set higher through, for example, continually inserting new dances into a piece. Being over challenged is not an imperfection but rather intentional’ (Malzacher 2013, 5). The restless agitation and volubility of the performers cannot disguise the fragmented nature of the narrative nor its explicit randomness. As pointed out by Jacob Gallagher-Ross, audience members are ‘constantly reminded of the gaps, the fissures, the forgotten or poorly recollected people. The pointillist particularity of the memories Worrall has managed to keep only gestures to the vast swathes of time and experience forever lost to her (or any of us)’ (Gallagher-Ross 2012, 70). During the performance, we are constantly reminded of the obvious, but no less painful, impossibility to tell a life story in its entirety. NTOK develop in fact a complex dramaturgy of ellipses as their performance unfolds in a syncopated mode. In Life and Times episode 1, the text appears as supertitles on two screens while the performers sing the lines they are being fed through earpieces. Shaw remarks that ‘ripples of laughter move through the audience as the droll, uninflected “voice” of the supertitles elevates what happens below into an opera—and since we read faster than they can sing—syncopates our response to it’ (Shaw 2013, 5). There are thus two levels of syncopation in the performance: the one directly experienced by the audience reading then listening and the one spectators experience in the form of a brief delay when watching performers processing the lines they receive through their earpieces before uttering them.

Copper stresses that Life and Times ‘is not meant to be an all encompassing biography—or even a biography, for that matter’ and that they use the first person account as ‘a lens for a more enlarged consideration of self, community, and history.’ (Copper 2013, 7) When Worrall names herself in the text, other performers use their names instead and Copper stresses that ‘though the language in Life and Times is all first-person singular, the “I” in performance is very much plural’ (Copper 2013, 7). Remembering is presented as an activation of compossible experiences. As pointed out by Shaw, ‘for some, the multiplying voices emphasize a kind of choral sensation that those on stage are repeating our own private, often embarrassing memories’ (Shaw, 2013, 6). This is even more striking that most of the audience members’ childhoods have in theory very little to do with growing up in a New Jersey suburban town. What is being drawn over the 12 hours of the performance is a multi-layered memory map where we are left to wander, backtrack and which ultimately leads us to address our own apparently forgotten childhood and teenage years. There are recurrent names or narrative motifs which provide some bearings within the epic tale, but also moments where the narration seems to hit a dead-end or an incommensurable gap: for example there are several mentions of the child staring at ‘mum’ cooking through the bars of a wooden bench’s back or staring at the rug and saying with the nostalgic tone of an ineluctable loss “I need to remember this moment for the rest of my life.” Paradoxically, these moments have the soothing effect to reiterate the randomness of memory and qualify as worth remembering moments that could have on the contrary seemed insignificant at the time. Rather than a life story, we are presented with flashes of experience that in turn trigger our own and we are encouraged to open the floodgate of long neglected but now revived memories. This collective act of remembering is enabled by the emphasis placed on hesitations and syncopations in the performance that invites spectators to delve into their own past. In the words of Jean Luc Nancy, NTOK’s dramaturgy of syncopation

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generates ‘the emptiness or the opening of this space—its very spatiality or its many spacings (espacements): it is the place of our compearance’ (Nancy 1992, 373). The ethics of play at work in NTOK’s Life and Times fractures the theatrical state, that is, a system of representation conventionally ruled by the projection of an alleged inner self upon predetermined categories. The ethics of play calls for an escape from the self into the collective by inscribing the spectator-subject in the syncopated time of the delay between instruction and action, between interpellation and commitment. In Gob Squad’s Kitchen (You’ve Never Had It So Good), Gob Squad resort to earpieces to develop a strategy similar to that deployed by NTOK. However, the complexity of Gob Squad’s apparatuses to create “spacings” makes the place of compearance they generate very interesting to analyse.

A performance of spectrality

Gob Squad’s Gob Squad’s Kitchen (You’ve Never Had It So Good) is an attempt at a live re-enactment of Andy Warhol’s filmed performance Kitchen. ‘This reconstitution of the 60s is presented as a demystification: the film projected to the audience is shot live behind the screen that becomes more porous a barrier as the piece unfolds. Ultimately performers ask audience members to stand in for them “guess-performing” the original Kitchen and, as if by magic, the “volunteers” suddenly exude a screen/stage presence, which transcends technology and demonstrates the mysterious power of theatre’s immediacy’ (Dalmasso 2011, 32). These hasty comments have been calling for some explanation for some time and I would now like to explain what I could have meant when reviewing this show. When referring to a mysterious immediacy, I probably had in mind what Jacques Derrida defines as ‘a spectral moment, [as] a moment that no longer belongs to time, if one understands by this word the linking of modalized presents (past present, actual present: ‘now’, future present’ (Derrida 1994, xx). What Gob Squad achieve overall in Kitchen is to recreate moments in time, that of the original Warhol films Kitchen, Kiss and his series of Screen Tests. Gob Squad performers repeatedly say “this is real”, that they are “in the moment” or even “full of the moment” while also continuously pointing to their incapacity to be other than themselves performing themselves and to the difficulties to be themselves then, that is while impersonating Warhol’s performers in May 1965 when the original Kitchen was filmed (Gob Squad 2011). Gob Squad’s Kitchen could be described as a playful experience of spectrality. It is not so much Warhol’s actors who haunt Gob Squad performers, it is more their everyday selves haunting themselves as performers trying to impersonate the original Kitchen performers. Although commenting upon their creative process throughout, the performers do not of course talk in terms of spectres or spectrality. As Derrida would remark, you probably would have to be an academic, a scholar to ‘be capable beyond the opposition between presence and non-presence, actuality and inactuality, life and non life, of thinking the possibility of the specter, the specter as possibility’ (Derrida 1994, 12). Gob Squad’s Kitchen raises issues in terms of the interaction between two different types of spectral materiality—that of the stage and that of the screen, and in terms of the shift between projected and non-projected appearance throughout the performance. To an extent, it is possible to describe what happens on stage as an interaction between two different intensities or two materialities of appearance. Supposing that there is a difference, a shift, a movement between two

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intensities of appearance, this invokes the possibility of a spectre or the spectre of a possibility: precisely that of a spectre able to move from one world or materiality to another and/or that of what is impossible in one world to become possible in another. In any case, Gob Squad’s Kitchen presents us with a porous moment, a disjointed time between the now of Gob Squad’s performance and the now of Warhol’s 1965 film.

By playing with the theatricality of the spectral, Gob Squad provide us with an aesthetics and a stage configuration to observe the dialectics at work between stage and screen, theatre and cinema. Their dramaturgy creates a dialectical space in between different materialities of performance or intensities of appearing through constant shifts from one ‘world’ to another. However, it remains difficult to bridge the gap and precisely explore the dialectical movement between the cinematic and the theatrical as a shift between two modalities of performance or two different intensities of existence. There is also the risk of adopting a dialectical standpoint that might ultimately send theatre and cinema back to back and fail to do justice to the trespassing spectres. Yet, ‘the dividing line between the ghost and actuality ought to be crossed’ (Derrida 1994, 38) and this is largely what Gob Squad do, simply because by inviting audience members to stand in for performers joyfully failing to embody Warhol’s screen personae, Gob Squad’s Kitchen opens up a possibility for anybody in the audience to encounter their own spectre in the form of a potential different self, perhaps even a potential other within themselves. This is not simply hinted at, or pointed at, but this potentiality is materially created on stage by precisely materialising a screen appearance and transferring an image upon a three-dimensional stage. And this works on many levels: Gob Squad live performers attempt to embody and flesh out, so to speak, the 1965 celluloid performers in Warhol films, then Gob Squad performers become celluloid, then dematerialised as mere voices whispering through headphones as they are in turn embodied by audience members. It is precisely the multiplication of bodies, the repetition of the embodiment process that creates this possibility for spectres. However, this embodiment paradoxically seems to equate dematerialisation and desynchronisation as each level of performance implies a degree of disappearance. This is the case for Gob Squad performers disappearing backstage behind a screen for their image to be projected to the audience; this is also the case for the audience members disappearing backstage behind the screen or when on stage behind the headphone apparatus as their movements are dictated by Gob Squad performers acting like remote puppet-masters. However, the embodiment is not unilateral, there is a constant back-and-forth between embodied and embodying creating a movement of diffused origin. The time is out of joint and after a while we are unsure of where the performers are and of who is haunting whom. There is a crossing of several worlds: that of 1965, that of performers live on screen re-enacting Warhol’s film, that of the same performers performing themselves on screen and on stage, that of the audience members, that of audience members impersonating performers, that of performers becoming audience members, etc. This movement across realities creates the possibility of a crossing and consequently a spectral possibility or potentiality. What remains striking with Gob Squad is the importance they attach to the materiality of their creative process. Audience members enter backstage and as they make their way through to the auditorium behind a massive screen, they walk through the film set but also among cameras, wires and other filming apparatuses. This invitation to materially take part in the performance culminates, when in their attempt to recreate

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Warhol’s Kitchen, Gob Squad performers gradually replace themselves by audience members one after the other as a last resort and declare that they cannot reproduce the ‘aura of the people in the original film’ (Gob Squad 2011). However it is not a simple reversal of places. Audience members literally stand in for them, being told what to do and say through big headphones that are not disguised. However, despite the artifice being over exposed, as their images appear on the screen, the volunteered audience members seem to suddenly exude an uncanny presence. What occurs towards the end of Gob Squad’s Kitchen seems to exceed the aims of participatory theatre in terms of audience involvement. Here, the performers are not only replaced, but audience members achieve what performers could not. As they appear on the screen, their image is constructed so as to evoke the improvised ‘auratic presence’ of the original Warhol performers. More precisely, Gob Squad builds a sense of expectation until that point in the performance and it is undeniable that when the audience members replace the performers, something happens. They appear as believable embodiments of the original Kitchen’s real characters. This transformation has been prepared by the script and by Gob Squad performers’ intentional repetitive failed attempt to achieve the detached self-consciousness allegedly displayed in Warhol’s original film. Not only the volunteered audience members seem to exude a particular presence, but somehow they seem suddenly more ‘present’—read granted a higher intensity of appearance—than Gob squad performers. One might argue that the audience members are non-performing and that in itself might ‘present’ something beyond the performers’ reach, and perhaps we might be touching upon “the real” Gob Squad performers claim to be the object of their performance quest throughout (Gob Squad 2011).

In Warhol’s original films used as a basis for Gob Squad’s re-enactment, be it Kitchen, Kiss, Eat, Sleep or the Screen Tests, the performers are asked to act as if the camera was not there. In fact, it is well documented that for part of the Screen Tests, Warhol pretends to go and make a coffee and does not tell the person he is filming that the camera is rolling. David James argues that the camera is a presence and under its gaze and against its silence the person must construct herself or himself. He insists that because the camera ‘makes performance inevitable, it constitutes being as performance’ (James 1989, 69). While in Warhol’s Kitchen, performers ignore the camera, escape from its glance and pretend it is not there, the contrary occurs in Gob Squad’s Kitchen where everything is performed for the camera, in fact for the audience watching the big screen separating them from the performers performing live backstage. Most of the time, instead of being (or pretending to be) oblivious of the camera, Gob Squad performers alternate in fact between pretend self-consciousness and pretend non self-consciousness in front of the camera. However, when the audience members perform, they are given more instructions, more lines to repeat and there seems to be very little room or time for self-consciousness. They have very little leeway to perform themselves performing Kitchen as Gob Squad performers did. The audience members do not perform but they are performed upon; they become material for performance not performers. With Gob Squad’s Kitchen, we are definitely dealing with being-there and appearing: the being-there of theatre, the appearing of cinema and potentially vice-versa. If only because of the use of a screen as a mediator between the live performance happening backstage and the audience, it would be tempting to analyse Gob Squad’s performance in terms of a screen ‘presence’ overtaking that of performers on stage. In fact, the audience members receive instructions through

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headphones, they are prompted to say such and such lines and as such they are rather over-performing. And yet something shifts in the modality of performance. This might be simply the result of a higher degree of appearing intensities. Perhaps audience members turned performers seem more materially here as they are grounded by instructions and cumbersome headphones. In any case, the syncopated rhythm of the lines delivery due to the delay in transmitting what they are fed through headphones inscribe the audience members turned performers in a time slightly out-of-sync or out-of-joint.

In Gob Squad’s Kitchen, the camera creates a relation to the site that at first sight does not seem to be predetermined in the sense that it allows the performance to invent a new relation to the site—a life-performance situation including live footage, and thus to reveal a new site, that of an intersection or conflagration of different past, present and possibly future worlds. Nevertheless in Gob Squad’s re-enactment of Warhol’s filming session, the way the camera inadvertently captures “being as performance” is far from being completely non-predetermined (James 1989, 69). Every plan has been carefully thought through even when there is scope for improvisation at particular moments and even if Gob Squad’s performers cannot fully control the audience members turned performers. However, paradoxically it seems that the use of earpieces and the delay between instruction and execution, or live directing and acting, resets the audience’s expectation of the unexpected. Suddenly, in these suspended fractions of a second, it is as if the cumbersome apparatus becomes invisible and leaves space for the unpredictable.

Ontological delay and inexist[a]nce

According to Badiou, ‘Being does not diffuse itself in rhythm and image, it does not reign over metaphor, it is the null sovereign of inference’ (Badiou 2006, 10). By rhythm Badiou refers here to repetition and this remark has to be understood in relation to the idea explained earlier that being is necessarily subtracted from representation—a subtraction that can only be grasped in the materiality of being-there that precisely reveals the void of a situation, its underpinning vacuum, as the substratum of being. However, following French linguist and philosopher Henri Meschonnic, rhythm could be defined not as a regularity of similar intervals or recurrences, based on repetition, periodicity and measure, but as dispositions or configurations without any fixedness or natural necessity and resulting from an arrangement that is always subject to change. Meschonnic sees rhythm as a subjective configuration of meaning in the discourse, as the mark of the subject (Meschonnic 1982, 70). Similarly, if rhythm is defined not as the regular recurrence of the same but as what eludes repetition and points to the void through for example, syncopation, then any presentation of a gap, of a delay could be considered ontological. According to an ethics of play turned ethics of appearing, the site of appearing would not be the body of the performer or participants. It is the gap or delay in between the instruction given through the earpiece and its execution that would give consistency to appearing and thus provide the substratum for performance. To an extent, it would make sense to suggest that in the case of Gob Squad’s Kitchen and NTOK’s Life and Times, the site where being ‘allows itself to be sutured in its void to the brutality

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of a deductive consistency without aura’, is the connection, the interplay, the delay, the gap, the void (Badiou 2006, 10).

In the case of Gob Squad’s Kitchen and NTOK’s Life and Times, what happens to appear in the gap provided by the delay is a haunting, an inexist[a]nce that surges forth from the void of representation. In NTOK’s Life and Times, this is only possible because representation is fractured to allow the coincidental emergence of other possibles through the syncopated performance. Between screen and stage, the dramaturgy of Gob Squad’s Kitchen also generate “many spacings” to create a place of “compearance”, in that case, space for a collusion of performers and audience members through a restless mirroring of different performance moments (Nancy 1992, 373). For Badiou, Theatre (capital T), does not give substance to differences and ‘turns every representation, every actor’s gesture, into a generic vacillation so as to put differences to the test without any supporting base’ (Badiou 2008a, 219–220). No absolute reference is required to effect a differentiation, to install a distance. This is the reason why the actor abiding to the ethics of play does not need an object to imitate, but needs to present a constant minimal self-distancing. I would like to suggest that the function of the delay is to create the possibility for a syncopated self. This gap in the performance ensures that nothing exactly coincides with itself and points to the perpetual resetting or deferral of any referent and ultimately to the possibility for the radical new to emerge, for the impossible to occur. Badiou describes in fact the ethics of play as ‘an inauguration of meaning’ and for him, Theatre (capital T) ‘presents differences as objectless transparencies’ and ‘does not exist except in the act itself’ (Badiou 2008a, 220). There is no ground for differences, they just appear as such in action. This is what Badiou means when he writes that ‘theatre proposes to us a signification of supposed substances, and Theatre (capital T), a procedure exhibiting generic humanity, that is to say, indiscernible differences that take place on stage for the first time’ (Badiou 2008a, 220). Acting becomes ethical not by erasing all differences but by pointing out the arbitrary nature of any marker of difference, and thus by showing on stage the ‘evaporation of every stable essence’ (Badiou 2008a, 221). The ethics of play precisely consists of an escape from any system of representation, or differentiation. The delay at work in the transmission of lines serves as a reminder that what grounds performance is precisely that opening onto the perpetually same but different and not a closing down in different categories. This resonates with the way both NTOK and Gob Squad work. For Badiou, actors have to literally engage in a play. Like in the original éthique du jeu, the English term “play” refers as much to a game as to acting. For Badiou, there is ‘a cogito of the actor […]: I am not where one thinks that I am, being there where I think that one thinks that the other is’ (Badiou 2008a, 216). This is also the paradox of the actor as defined by Badiou to point to what subtracts itself, to present the void, to signify an opening, but also an availability. For the actors, the ethics of play consists of playing an endless hide and seek game as much with themselves as with the audience and this is precisely what happens in Gob Squad’s Kitchen and Life and Times. According to Badiou’s definition of existence, there are only fluctuating degrees of appearing in a given world, variable intensities of being-there. His conception of Theatre supports this and, to an extent, it seems that in the case of the two earpiece performances under scrutiny here, life lets itself only be approached as a delay, a syncopation, a hiatus, a subtraction, an inexist[a]nce.

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Syncopation is at the core of the shift in Badiou’s theory of the subject from a political subject identified as ‘We’ or ‘I’ to a subjective instance which is precisely what is not supposed to exist and which bears the mark of the exception, that is, a subject whose affirmation takes the form of a hiatus, a void, a grammatical incision. In Logics of Worlds, Badiou explains that the subject resides in:

the “aside from”, the “except that”, the “but for”, through which the fragile scintillation of what has no place to be makes its incision in the unbroken phrasing of a world. “What has no place to be” should be taken in both possible senses: as that which, according to the transcendental law of the world (or of the appearing of beings), should not be; but also as that which subtracts itself (out of place) from the worldly localization of multiplicities, from the place of being, in other words, from being-there. (Badiou 2009d, 45)

Badiou’s theatre articulates the subject in such a manner that it follows the theoretical shift from a named subject to a subject marked by inexist[a]nce. The ethics of play conceived as an escape in Badiou’s Rhapsody for the Theatre seems to rehearse the notion of inexist[a]nce developed in his more recent Logics of Worlds. For Badiou, inexist[a]nce is a mode of existence: existence measures the degree of appearance of an object in a world: inexist[a]nce being the minimal degree of appearing in a world (Badiou 2009d, 322). To an extent, he derives the notion of inexist[a]nce from Derrida’s notion of différance. For Badiou, inexist[a]nce is a materialist ‘worldly way of non-existing’ (Badiou 2009c, 144). In Pocket Pantheon, Badiou explains that what is at stake in Derrida’s work is ‘the inscription of the non-existent’ and the recognition that such an inscription is impossible. Endorsing Derrida’s approach, Badiou stresses ‘You must demonstrate the vanishing point by making language free. You must have a language of flight. You can only organise a monstration of the non-existent if you use a language that can stand non-existing’ (Badiou 2009c, 144). Badiou’s ethics of play conceived as an escape from representation provides if not a language of flight, at least a dispositive to account for what inexists in a world. In this respect, the transitory nature of politics is precisely what is at stake in Badiou’s ethics of play insofar as politics is defined as ‘the art of the impossible’ (Badiou 2009a, 317). For Badiou, politics has ‘value only insofar as it prescribes a “possibility” for a situation that the immanent norm of this situation defines precisely as impossible’ (Badiou 2009b, 48). In other words, for Badiou politics occurs when what was not given any place in a given situation, suddenly comes to the fore. Badiou considers different degrees or intensities of existence in a given world or situation and ultimately equates true politics to the raising up of the inexistent, that is, the emergence in a given situation of what was not deemed possible (Badiou 2011, 80). Within Badiou’s philosophical system it is the notion of inexist[a]nce that seems to be the most closely related to the ethics of play because inexist[a]nce is also of a transitory nature. In terms of performance, the ethics of play ensures the creation of a gap, a delay, and that space is made for ‘what has no place to be’ and to an extent, this is what relates the headphone dramaturgies of Gob Squad’s Kitchen and NTOK’s Life and Times to politics as defined by Badiou.

To conclude, Badiou’s notions of ethics of play and inexist[a]nce delineate a non-space, a void that seems to materially appear in Gob Squad’s Kitchen and NTOK’s Life and Times through the delay

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rendered manifest by the headphone dramaturgies. In NTOK’s Life and Times, the dissemination of suburban life fragments through headphone transmission creates an aesthetics of the everyday detached from its representation. Because of the transmission delay, the real life narrative is opened up and remembering is presented as an activation of choral compossible experiences. As for Gob Squad’s Kitchen, it blurs the boundaries between performance and non-performance, but the transmission delay empowers the audience members turned performers and consequently the whole audience to embrace the possibility not only of a reversal of places on stage and beyond, but to consider the possibility for the destruction of the system of places, for the raising up of the inexistent. This is in line with the way, in Badiou’s Rhapsody for the Theatre, the ethics of play emancipates spectator-subjects towards the collapse of the theatrical state.

Works Cited

Badiou, Alain. (1998) 2004. Handbook Of Inaesthetics, translated by Alberto Toscano. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

———. (1988) 2006. Being and Event, translated by Oliver Feltham. London and New York: Continuum.

———. (1990) 2008a. Rhapsody for the Theatre: A Short Philosophical Treatise, translated by Bruno Bosteels. Theatre Survey 49 (2): 187–238. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040557408000124

———. (2003) 2008b. ‘Dialectics of the fable’, translated by Alberto Toscano. Science Fiction Film and Television 1 (1): 15–23. https://doi.org/10.3828/sfftv.1.1.3

———. (1982) 2009a. Theory of the Subject, translated by Bruno Bosteels. London and New York: Continuum.

———. 2009b. L’Antiphilosophie de Wittgenstein. Caen: NOUS.

———. (2008) 2009c. Pocket Pantheon, translated by David Macey. London and New York: Verso.

———. (2006) 2009d. Logics of Worlds: Being and Event, Vol. 2, translated by Alberto Toscano. London and New York: Continuum.

Copper, Kelly, Florian Malzacher, and Nature Theater of Oklahoma. 2013. Life and Times, Episode I. New York: 53rd State Press.

Dalmasso, Fred. 2011. ‘Neat Festival - Gob Squad’s Kitchen (You Never Had It So Good).’ Total Theatre 23 (3): 32–33.

Derrida, Jacques. (1993) 1994. Specters of Marx. New York: Routledge.

Gallagher-Ross, Jacob. 2012. ‘This is your life’. PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 34 (3): 63–70. https://doi.org/10.1162/pajj_a_00112

Gob Squad. (2007) 2011. Gob Squad’s Kitchen (You Never Had It So Good). Nottingham Contemporary, 30 May.

James, David. 1989. Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Keithley, Karinne. 2010. ‘Uncreative Writing: Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Romeo and Juliet’. Theater 40 (2): 66–73.

Malzacher, Florian. 2012. ‘Previously on Nature Theater of Oklahoma’ in Life and Times - Episode V, 113–128. New York: Nature Theater of Oklahoma.

Meschonnic, Henri. 1982. Critique du rythme. Anthropologie historique du langage. Lagrasse: Verdier.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1992. ‘La Comparution /The Compearance: From the Existence of “Communism” to the Community of “Existence”‘, translated by Tracy B. Strong. Political Theory 20 (3): 371–398. https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591792020003001

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Nature Theater of Oklahoma. 2013. Life and Times. Norwich Arts Center, 25 May.

Riera, Gabriel. 2005. Alain Badiou: Philosophy and Its Conditions. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Shaw, Helen. 2013. ‘Total Dedication: Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Life and Times, Episodes 1–4.’ TheatreForum 43: 3–9.

Wake, Caroline. 2013. ‘Headphone Verbatim Theatre: Methods, Histories, Genres, Theories’. New Theatre Quarterly 29 (4): 321–335. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X13000651

Biography

Fred Dalmasso is Lecturer in Drama in the School of Arts, English and Drama at Loughborough University. He has published on practice-based theatre-translation and on the interaction between theatre, performance, philosophy and politics. Among his recent publications are a chapter entitled ‘Remote Spectating - Drone Images and the Spectacular Image of Revolt’ in Fisher, Tony and Katsouraki, Eve (eds.) Performing Antagonism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and an edited book entitled Syncope in Performing and Visual Arts (Le Manuscrit, Via Artis, 2017). He is also a practitioner and works as artistic director and performer for collect-ifs.

© 2017 Fred Dalmasso

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY VOL 3 NO 1 (2017):246-265 DOI: https://doi.org/10.21476/PP.2017.31124

ISSN 2057-7176

PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY

CORACLES, CASTANETS, CADAQUÉS

KATHLEEN M. GOUGH UNIVERSITY OF VERMONT

This ReView takes the form of a theatrical script written for the stage. It is a ReView of a series of therapy sessions that took place two years ago, over a period of seven months. The therapeutic encounter unwittingly repeated what might be called the sonic dramaturgical form of past events and actions from everyday life. While the therapy sessions were spent discussing my relationship to experiences happening in the present, my somatic feelings approximated a kind of auditory déjà vu. That is, in the therapeutic encounter my bodily sensations took the paradoxical shape of an old musical loop with new notes: the tune was vaguely familiar, but the new notes left me constantly guessing as to when I may have first heard the tune, or if I was hearing it for the first time in my therapy sessions.

Psychoanalysis offers one paradigm for understanding this experience. It is the interrelation of trauma with the repetition compulsion. It goes something like this: we repeat our traumatic experiences unconsciously as a way to rewrite history. The problem is not with the attempt to rewrite. To me, the pain or problem comes from the inability to understand that a repetition is occurring at all. The additional complication is that this unwitting repetition is understood as a compulsion to rewrite trauma while we are all the time standing inside of it—a kind of immanent critique gone awry. What is it to rewrite history when a past “event” never presents itself as a narrative or a series of visual images? How does the repetition compulsion “work” if there is no origin story for trauma that will stay put?

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An alternative to considering past events as discrete images or narratives to be recalled, is to think about them as continuous sound formations. In some respects, this is a challenge both to our stubborn persistence on using Euclidean visual space to map our relationship to time, and to traditional theories in psychoanalytic philosophy because of the long history of the relationship between psychoanalysis and narrative (Freud), and psychoanalysis and archetypes (Jung). What if our philosophical inquiry was to begin with auditory perception and did not default to visually-based models of knowledge-production? As Walter Ong reminds us, unlike visual images, “there is no way to stop sound and have sound.” Sound, in other words, lives in fulltime present awareness. “All sensation takes place in time, but no other sensory field totally resists a holding action, stabilization, in quite this way” (Ong 1982, 32). What is it to see in auditory space, to see with our ears? How does this story tell different stories about our movement in psychophysiological space and the way it produces our affects and actions? In “The Future of Music: Credo,” John Cage writes: “the principle of form will be our only constant connection with the past. Although the great form of the future will not be as it was in the past, at one time the fugue and at another the sonata, it will be related as they are to each other” ([1958] 2013, 5–6). This ReView cannot revisit history in images, which is the paradox at the center of this image-laden performance.

One of the ways that new content was generated in the therapeutic context was in my surprisingly literal manifestations of what psychoanalysis calls transference. Typically, transference is the redirection of desires and feelings—especially of those unconsciously retained from childhood— toward a new object. Perhaps both my performance and research training predisposed my imagination to be analogous to the stage, which is both literal and metaphorical: I started “transferring” important works of art onto my therapist. The most important artwork (that you will come upon in the performance extract below) was a Byzantine Icon I had recently written about in relation to sound: Christ Pantocrator (Gough 2016). My therapist began moving like the painting; the painting sounded like him. It was here I had my first experiences with synesthesia as an embodied reality and not a subjunctive metaphor.

Ultimately, the therapeutic relationship disintegrated for reasons that were never able to be resolved or revealed, but the loop continued. Since this sonic hyperarousal persisted, I decided to turn a keen dramaturgical ear to the auditory qualities that had shaped my somatic stories of hurt into sublime images. In the ReView included below, Act I of Coracles, Castanets, Cadaqués, you’ll hear the WRITER describe the theory of complementarity developed in the field of physics by Niels Bohr: “you can recognize a deep truth by the feature that its opposite is also a deep truth” (Wilczek 2015, 52). One of the most profound aspects of Bohr’s theory is the idea that both “deep truths” can be meaningful and informative, but it is impossible to apply them both at once. In this theatrical ReView of my therapeutic encounter, psychopathology is looped with a psycho-spiritual encounter: our wounds that never heal are our encounters with creation and imagination. Enter THEATRE stage right.

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CHARACTERS in ACT I

KATIE female; 40s; theatre professor living in Burlington, VT who begins writing a play because of the preternatural experiences that take place in her therapist’s office

MARK male; late 40s/early 50s; Katie’s therapist; type-A; formal but with some boundary issues

ACTOR A male; plays: BRITISH THEATRE PROFESSOR, ALLEGORICAL

FIGURE (LONELINESS), DANCER

ACTOR B female; plays: ALLEGORICAL FIGURE (NARCISSISM), DANCER

ACTOR C female/gender neutral; plays: TIGER, ALLEGORICAL

FIGURE (CONTROL), DANCER

(Scene begins with William Blake’s Tyger on the screen, and a white light on an empty podium. KATIE goes to podium, hits the “play” button on an iPad and then opens an

oversize book labelled “JOURNAL”; the voice we hear is the recorded voice of the “WRITER” (KATIE’s inner voice) which is almost an iconic voice which indicates KATIE’s flair for the dramatic: think Maya Angelou or Patti Smith. KATIE then lays down on a couch

center stage. ACTOR C as TIGER appears on stage—just walks around, checks out the audience, is both weird/creepy and funny like a trickster figure. KATIE doesn’t notice—

and won’t notice—TIGER until ACT III. MARK is the third person to arrive on stage in quick succession and takes a seat in a comfy looking office chair.)

William Blake, “Tyger” (1795). British Museum, William Blake Archive: Collected in Songs of Experience.

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WRITER

I had only been to see him one time when I had the dream. I think it happened because I was there. It was time.

MARK’S VOICE

“Maybe the tiger never left,”

WRITER

he said, about seven months later, when I had the dream a second time. But his return this time was different. The tiger wasn’t me, or wasn’t only me. Tiger arrived to visit me during a silent meditation retreat. I woke up on day three, eyes wide open, and whispered softly to myself:

(creepy whisper with electronic echo)

“the tiger is back.”

(Beat)

I was a teensy bit reticent to say anything to Mark. Mark’s an important character in this story so I thought I should give him a name. I knew he’d say something to the effect that:

MARK’S VOICE

“Everything or everyone in our dreams is a version of ourselves.”

WRITER

And then I'd say something like: “that's nice, but it's also a rabbit, or Marcel Duchamp, or a bus, or a tiger using its paw to get into my parents’ kitchen door,

(next part is said in staccato, more than a hint of frustration)

and I’m in the kitchen and the tiger is not me because it’s the fucking tiger!” But when he said things like this, I didn’t actually say what I was thinking. I mean, does anyone really do that in therapy? I smiled politely and nodded my head in a well-mannered passive aggressive way. He did this too.

(KATIE and MARK get up and circle each other around the podium slowly—three steps forward, one step back, repeat during the following monologue)

At first I very rarely saw eye to eye with him. But that may be because my eyes had started turning into ears. That’s when I knew we had been fighting for over a month.

(Beat)

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This is something the tiger and I have in common: both of us have a weirdly acute sense of hearing.

(TIGER on stage demonstrates this next part)

A tiger’s ears can swivel around like a radar dish honing in on subtle sounds around him. He doesn’t need his eyes to track his prey. I think he gave me his mad skillz when I was with Mark, but I’ll get to that later. Back to the tiger.

(TIGER joins this two-person conga line behind KATIE—she never notices but MARK is behind TIGER, alarmed at first; he keeps a close eye on him)

Now don’t fret. I promise this is not going to be like some stage version of the Life of Pi. This tiger is not Richard Parker, and he’s not god, and he’s not even allegorical. Well, maybe a little allegorical in that he says other than what he means and means other than what he says. Actually, he doesn’t say anything, but you know what I mean. I didn’t grow up in India and my family didn’t own a zoo. I’ve never actually seen a tiger in real life.

(Just before TIGER is about to attack KATIE, she hears a noise like a tiger growling, but can’t be sure; then MARK pushes TIGER to the side of the stage just before she notices)

KATIE

(pauses the recording on the iPad)

What is it?

MARK

(thinking quickly)

You’ve changed your inner voice this week.

KATIE

Yes. I thought I’d mix it up a little. Make it a bit more theatrical. Why?

MARK

(gives a sneaky side eye to TIGER)

Nothing. I like it.

KATIE

Can we just listen to the end of the audio thought bubble, please? It’s not much longer. Then you can talk. Alright?

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MARK

You mean then you can talk?

KATIE

(quizzical, slightly frustrated stare at MARK)

Sure. Whatever.

(hits play on the iPad)

(TIGER moves things around during the recording: changes the location of props or furniture. KATIE is oblivious, involved with listening to her thought bubble; MARK pays careful attention to the TIGER and attempts to put things back where they belong.)

WRITER

There’s this theory in physics called complementarity, which means that you can recognize a deep truth by the feature that its opposite is also a deep truth. Sometimes it’s useful to think of this truth in one way, and sometimes it’s useful to think of it in another. Both ways can be deeply meaningful and informative in different circumstances. But it’s impossible…uhh… I hope I’m getting the theory right. Yes! It’s impossible to apply them both at once. I’m telling you all of this so that you feel some comfort in knowing that this performance is based on a very important scientific theory in the world of quantum mechanics.1

(Beat)

I can’t guarantee that in this performance I can give you a cathartic Scooby Doo ending so that we all understand it was Mr. Withers in the amusement park all along, because this tiger is a shape-shifter. And even though he keeps popping up like a bad penny,

(TIGER looks up, pissed off, then exits)

you put up with him and even find a kind of weird comfort in his visits…

(Lights change—KATIE notices audience for the first time. MARK stays on stage. When she’s not speaking directly to MARK, he does what a therapist does—he’s like a one-

person on-stage audience who sometimes participates.)

KATIE

(Walks around, says hello to audience, gets a sense of the space—like she’s used to being behind the scenes)

This is a play that I started to inhabit in my therapist’s office. But I didn’t know I was living inside a play. I thought it was just therapy. But then shit started to get real. Like really real. Like theatre.

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(Spotlight here at the phrase “like theatre” that is first on KATIE and pans to MARK when she addresses him)

I think the rising action for the whole therapy-turned-performance began on the day I looked at my therapist and told him,

(turns to MARK)

“You know, you kind of remind me of a Byzantine icon I’ve been studying.”

MARK

First time for everything…

KATIE

As soon as I blurted it out, I thought: fuuucck, my brother is right. I do always sound like a character in a Wes Anderson film. Full disclosure: I think that almost everything in the world functions like a play, and that if we just know what genre we’re inhabiting when acting out different moments in our lives we can figure out a lot about what’s going on around us. You know how when an event occurs and you say something like “This is melodramatic, or this is surreal, or this farcical, or this is tragic!” Investigate that. It might be that you have stumbled into a story that has particular conventions that you can’t escape if you stay in that genre because that’s how the genre works. Those are the rules of engagement. If you want to change stories you probably need to change genres. This is how I figured out that Mark was behaving like a medieval icon. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before I get to the really real I need to back up to tell you a story about medieval art. And Byzantine icons. Because they’re a bit like unicorns.

(Sound design includes They Might Be Giants “Istanbul (not Constantinople)”; ACTORS A, B, and C dressed as Flamenco dancers (1) and Whirling Dervishes (2) appear on stage; images on screen include some of the mosaics inside Hagia Sophia. All of this will only

appear on stage until KATIE says “Wait. Wait. Sorry”; everything will repeat later at greater length.)

Byzantium. Constantinople. It surprises me that this is where my story begins, but it was kind of decided for me when my therapist started to move around the room like a Byzantine mosaic. We’ll start in the seat of the Christian world that was also the seat of the Muslim world. But this is before it was Istanbul. This is Constantinople. Wait. Wait. Sorry. Just before I get to Constantinople I need to take you there by way of Italy.

(Song “Istanbul (not Constantinople)” is replaced by “La Donna E Mobile” from Rigoletto; pianissimo to begin and growing annoying, sentimental and loud.)

It’s the Summer of 2012 and I’m in Assisi with my best friend.

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(music too obnoxious to continue)

Seriously? Stop it.

(“La Donna E Mobile” ends and turns into Gregorian chanting, perhaps mixed with Steve Reich’s “Proverb”—it should provide a kind of rhythmic score for the story)

Okay. It’s the summer of 2012 and I’m in Assisi with my best friend. I was living in Scotland, my best friend lives in San Francisco, and she has family who live on an olive farm outside of Rome. I know. Right? So there we were in Assisi after an adventurous road trip accompanied by a GPS that went on strike in sympathy with the railway workers.

(As the next part is spoken, an image of the Porziuncola appears on screen and the lighting on stage approximates that of a dimly lit chapel.)

Somewhat by accident we found ourselves inside this tiny chapel called the Porziuncola (which means little portion of land) along with two hardcore German Catholic tourists. You know what I’m talking about: full-on-wooden-crosses-on-the-back-pious-looking-uber-pilgrims. So this Porziuncola is inside the Basilica of Santa Maria of the Angels. This is where the Franciscan movement started—with St. Francis’ make me a channel of your peace, tame the wolves, and feed

Image 2: Tavolo di Prete Ilario di Viterbo (1393), Altarpiece in the Porziuncola, Assisi. Photo © Adrian Fletcher, 2012.

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the doves philosophy. There’s one of those super trippy 13th century medieval frescos inside the chapel over the altar.

(MARK uses a pointer to direct audience to the image of the Annunciation KATIE is discussing)

The image that stuck with me was the Annunciation. You know, when the angel Gabriel tells Mary she will give birth to the son of God? I mean, seriously, that’s a game-changer. Imagine being Mary: you might think that Gabriel is the mayor of crazy town, until you realize that Gabriel’s an angel who decided to stop by for a chat one evening while you were reading a book and announce your upcoming virgin birth, so the only resident of crazy town in the room is you.

Immediately I decided I wanted to start writing about medieval art. I didn’t know anything about medieval art, but it has always fascinated me: Why were the images flat? Why was there so much acid-trippy doodling between pictures? Why did most people dress like a cast member in Jesus Christ Superstar? Mostly, the medieval era is the last historical moment where I find Christianity really interesting. It is the last time that mystics roamed the earth in great number without being medicated or placed in insane asylums. I think that this magical relationship to the celestial world is still felt in the mind-bending ways they painted—that the paintings still give us access to the magic…

(She is lost in thought; MARK hurries her along) (To MARK)

Ok. God, you’re so impatient.

(To Audience)

So here’s some stuff I learned. Oh yeah, I guess I should mention that I teach theatre history for a living. Geeking out to tell you things is an occupational hazard. Ok. For medieval peeps, the physical world wasn’t all that interesting. Just kind of so-so. Maybe this had to do with all the fighting and famine and plagues and whatnot (kind of like now), but the spiritual realm was the primary reality. This world, this physical world happening in real time and space with me talking to you—this is just a metaphor for a much more mysterious reality.

(Beat)

I mean, I know, I know this is theatre so this really IS a metaphor, but for the medievals, the “all the world’s a stage and we are merely actors” was real—maybe in part because Shakespeare hadn’t even written this line yet. They were post-premodern that way.

Another thing: Medieval people liked their paintings. They weren’t dragging their knuckles and hitting their heads against a wall thinking “Why can’t I make a house look like a house?” Or “Why do I keep making Jesus bigger than the peasants he feeds?” Or “Why is that saint’s face so flat?” No, surprisingly. The medieval artists were making a cultural choice about what they found to be

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important. They didn’t paint in some flat 2-D style because they were stupid. They were simply not interested in portraying the concrete three-dimensional world.

(Beat; looks to audience)

Okay, now that we understand that, we’re ready to go to Constantinople.

(Loop Gregorian Chant to song “Istanbul (not Constantinople)”; return to the original Istanbul (not Constantinople) “number”; ACTORS A, B, and C as dancers also return and

fill the stage with festive atmosphere for about 15 seconds, then exit)

This is a picture of the Byzantine Icon I was studying.

(Image of the Christ Pantocrator appears)

Image 3: Christ Pantocrator Deësis (c. 1261), Hagia Sophia.

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You know, the one that reminded me of my therapist? This one is called “Christ Pantocrator.”

(Staring at image)

Yeah, I already get how loaded it is that this image reminded me of my therapist. You should have seen his expression when I told him.

(looks to MARK, playful)

But it wasn’t that the image so much reminded me of him -- well, maybe a little -- but the image sounded like him.

(Beat)

Maybe I should stop here to read part of the “Dear Mark” email I sent him. What do you think? I wrote, like, 27 “Dear Mark” letters which were meant mostly for myself. Over the course of seven months, I sent him two. This is an excerpt from the first one. This is when shit started to get real.

(TIGER circles the performance area. KATIE accesses the email on her iPad which is on the podium; when WRITER returns as voice over perhaps email is projected onto the screen.)

KATIE

Dear Mark, “Greetings…” Then blah blah blah “Crazy shit happening…” “Emotional ups and downs in the past couple weeks….” Okay, here it is:

(WRITER returns as voice over; MARK begins by reading the email silently as the audience listens; TIGER enters and reads over his shoulder. A very subtle soundscape begins here

and doesn’t end until KATIE says “and then something stopped my mind.”)

WRITER

“I have felt all along that there are two simultaneous conversations taking place in our sessions, and I have found it really disquieting: there is all the stuff I talk about (the “real stuff,” which I guess it is in a way), and then there is this subterranean conversation that I can explain more when I see you. The best way I can describe it is that it feels like shadowboxing.

(During next section there is choreographed movement between TIGER and MARK which, along with the soundscape, helps illustrate a sense of synesthesia.)

This past week, I became aware of a really weird feature in my memory of our weekly therapy sessions: from week to week I can’t remember the shape and size of your office, or exactly what it looks like. Every week I come in and take note as if for the first time: oh yes, there is a bookcase; that’s what his desk looks like; oh shit, there’s no corner there to hide like I was hoping there might be this week. While I know that you always sit in the same place in our meetings—in a chair in front of me at a neutral distance—that’s not how I remember it. The room expands and contracts in my memory, and this has to do with how close, or far away, or at what angle you choose to hear me

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during a particular session (where an emotional angle becomes a physical angle in my perception). It’s as if we inhabit auditory space: where hearing me instead of seeing me is the most important thing.

Sometimes you seem very far away, and frustrated, and the office becomes cavernous, like it is echoing. But last week I felt that you were sitting close, but at an angle so that I saw you in profile with your right ear in the foreground. I’ve been seeing you up close, far away and at a variety of different angles and it keeps changing the shape and size of your office. I’ve been writing about sound for the past two years, but I never realized until this past week that I started to inhabit the world as an auditory space a couple years ago when I began having daily panic attacks, and continued to have the sensorial experience of there being no solid ground. So I just try to listen deeply to feel if I’m connecting.” …

(TIGER exits; lights up)

KATIE

And then the overlong email continues. I thought this might be a good way to give him some advanced notice before I told him he reminded me of the Byzantine Icon. I’m sure you’ll agree that finding the right way to tell your therapist he reminds you of an image of Christ without having him hit the panic button, or inflating his ego in all sorts of unproductive ways is a wee bit of a challenge.

(Beat)

I should say that I didn’t even know if I really wanted to be in therapy with this person. I was ambivalent but also desperate for help. He wasn’t overly friendly. When I walked into his office on the first day, and told him about my paralyzing loneliness—like the kind that doesn’t go away even in company, the kind that feels like a disease, the kind where you avoid people or they avoid you because either you or them think it might be contagious—he asked me … Mark, do you want to tell the kind audience what you asked me?

MARK

Hmm.

(trying to remember)

Do you think it’s your karma?

KATIE

Yes. That is what you asked. I thought that this was such an odd question to ask a stranger on the first day of therapy that I decided to stay. My self-preservation instincts were still in development at the time.

(Turning back to the audience)

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Remember when I told you that I think that most of life operates like a play, and that if we understand what genre we’ve been moving in we can figure out a lot about what’s going on in our life? Yeah? When I started speaking to Mark I was teaching medieval morality plays to theatre history students. I had only been living in Vermont for six months. During that time, I had been on a handful of dates that started to fit the pattern that was oddly aligned with the morality play tradition—where everyone represents a virtue or a vice.

So, naturally, the dramaturge in me started to attempt to figure out what had been happening in my life by sketching out current events as a medieval morality play. I had already cast myself as bewildered ego, the protagonist, and these different male-people from my real life

(three ALLEGORICAL CHARACTERS arrive on stage)

—let’s call them allegorical figures—started to arrive to the stage in order to play the different vices. Let’s call them:

(ALLEGORICAL CHARACTERS speak in a way most befitting of the quality they represent)

ALLEGORICAL CHARACTER / ACTOR A

Loneliness.

ALLEGORICAL CHARACTER / ACTOR B

Narcissism.

ALLEGORICAL CHARACTER / ACTOR C

Control.

KATIE

But I couldn’t find a pattern for the subterranean relationship I was having with Mark because it was a relationship that I had never had to name.

MARK

(Confessional aside to audience)

She tried to talk to me about the confusing feelings she was having, terrified that they might be romantic feelings.

KATIE

(interrupting)

You see, Mark is difficult and cold, and I have a long history with difficult and cold male people.

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MARK

I was the only person who she admitted these feelings to…

KATIE

And what did you do, Mark?

MARK

(Long beat; before he speaks the audience needs to see MARK do what the line says)

I froze…

KATIE

(to MARK)

…Just decided that therapy was not the place to be discussing feelings. It was very New England ofyou.

(KATIE registers hurt, then returns to addressing audience directly)

Anyway, the more I thought about what part Mark might be playing in this medieval morality play, the more confusing it got. Then I started replaying in my memory the last conversation we had in his office. At one point he threw his hands up in the air, and said:

MARK

“Wake up! Your romantic feelings are not why you are here!”

KATIE

And I yelled: “How the fuck do you know why I’m here?”

(quieter now)

Seriously. Do you know why I’m here?

(to MARK)

I really wanted to know if you knew why I was there. The truth is …

(notices the ALLEGORICAL CHARACTERS are still on stage listening to her)

ummm, I don’t know

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(turns to ALLEGORICAL CHARACTERS)

Oh, sorry guys. You can go now. Thanks. Great job. Way to work the vices!

(Waves goodbye; long beat)

So…the memory of this conversation with Mark totally alarmed me because//

MARK

(He’s still cautious/confused/concerned about this past experience)

//because we never spoke to each other this way.

KATIE

Then something stopped my mind.

(the subtle soundscape throughout this scene stops abruptly; everything becomes deathly quiet)

It was his location in the office when we were fighting.

(MARK runs around the space attempting to demonstrate)

Mark was located near a wall where he never sits, at a desk and filing cabinet that may or may not be in his office—I could never quite get a factual accounting of the office contents. This conversation happened in silence while we were having a conversation about my neuroses, and I knew it wasn’t just my imagination.

(The next phrase is said in the same creepy whisper as “the tiger is back” from the opening scene)

It was as real as trees. I had never thought that something that seemed almost mystical could feel so traumatic. Or, that trauma could activate what felt like mystical experiences.

(Beat; wondering out loud to MARK)

Mark, do you think it’s possible that medieval mystics were really trauma victims?

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MARK

(totally frustrated that KATIE might once again attempt to turn her psychopathology into an historical examination. His frustration—exhibited through choreographed movement here—leads into the next section where the exhilarating and terrifying experience of something like emotional synesthesia happens. KATIE might be in her

chair moving slightly but only in relation to how Mark is moving and gesticulating. He’s down a corridor; then, near the door with his hand on the door handle and then in the air, eyes rolling; then a hugely oversized right ear enters the stage very close to where

KATIE is sitting; etc., etc)

(For this section the sound has to be loud and layered or simultaneous—a mixture of two people talking that is sometimes difficult—like pulling teeth—and sometimes you can hear laughter and certain things stick out like “ex-priest,” “week of the dead dads,”

“paralyzing loneliness,” “Dusty Springfield,” “Footwashing for the sole,” “Byzantine Icon,” “Disintegration Loops,” “lots of follow-up questions,” “Censorship,” “So much judgment,”

“Boring you”)

KATIE

(shouts loudly; visibly upset; pushes MARK without quite realizing it)

BASTA! Ennuuuuff!

(she’s surprised by her own outburst; attempts to regain composure, then quietly, apologetically)

I can’t yet.

(closes her eyes; as she does TIGER comes up beside her but she doesn’t notice; long beat and then TIGER leaves as KATIE says: )

It’s too soon.

(Lights change—MARK brings a coracle to the center of the playing area and KATIE sits inside of it; MARK then sits in his office chair stage right and watches this scene from a distance. TIGER comes up behind MARK and watches with him. Sound of water, maybe

the Radio 4 shipping forecast is mixed in to the sound design; then castanets, Flamenco sounds begin, subtly at first and then rhythm becomes louder)

In 2013, exactly 12 months after I visited Assisi, I was on a tour that left Barcelona and went all the way out to Cadaqués—where Salvador Dalí lived, and where I was going to take a tour of his house.

(vacation photos appear on screen)

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Image 5: Bear inside the entranceway to the Salvador Dalí House. Portlligat, Cadaqués. Photo by author (2013).

Image 4: Salvador Dalí House with egg on top. Portlligat, Cadaqués. Photo by author (2013).

Image 6: Katie poolside at Salvador Dalí House. Portlligat, Cadaqués. Photo by author (2013).

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Here’s an egg on top of his house; here’s a picture of the bear that greeted me as I entered his house; and here’s a picture of me sitting poolside at Casa de Dalí. As the tour was about to leave Barcelona I met a man who teaches theatre in England.

(actor arrives on stage gesturing—a bit campy, a bit drunk, kind and very animated)

He arrived to the designated location waving to people he may or may not have known, and while I couldn’t be too sure, he appeared to still be the merest smidge drunk from a party the night before. Since I like people who are a little bit messy, we became best friends immediately and didn’t stop talking for the next twelve hours.

(ACTOR A as THEATRE PROFESSOR and KATIE sit next to each other in the coracle, pantomiming being passengers on a bus; THEATRE PROFESSOR remains animated, doing

things that make KATIE laugh through the next bit of the story)

On the bus I remember he told me this hilarious story about castanets…

THEATRE PROFESSOR

Sabela, a dancer friend who’s from Northern Spain was auditioning for a performance program in London. Maybe at Central? Or RADA? Doesn’t matter. Anyway, she was asked—quite out of the blue—to do a little Flamenco number, and someone called out to someone else to find her some castanets. She was totally bewildered. She hadn’t a clue how to dance Flamenco and play the castanets, which, my dear, happens in southern Spain.

(Patronizing but funny)

Did you know that? Well, excuussee me but you are American.

(Beat; pantomime bus going over a large pothole)

The members of the audition panel couldn’t believe she didn’t know, laughed as if they were in on her joke, and called again for someone to bring her some castanets.

(He pretends to play castanets and stands up to dance flamenco in his seat—poorly)

(Shipping forecast, water sounds return. A low table and two cushions for sitting placed inside the coracle; KATIE and THEATRE PROFESSOR sit on the cushions.)

KATIE

(to audience)

We returned to Barcelona 12 hours later. Over dinner, I told him that the reason I think I was compelled to study medieval art is because it lacks perspective and orientation, and that it matches

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the feelings I’d been having for the last year—the panic, the disorientation with the ground. He said:

THEATRE PROFESSOR

(to KATIE)

It sounds as if you have been attempting to navigate from inside a coracle.

KATIE

(confused; doesn’t know the word “coracle”; gives a slight Scooby Doo head tilt)

THEATRE PROFESSOR

(to KATIE)

Yes? Coracle? A medieval boat? Ah, my dear: Coracles have been in use since about the sixth century. They were heavily used in Celtic regions: Ireland, Wales and the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. Oval in shape and very similar to half a walnut shell, the structure is made of a framework of leather, as well as interwoven foraged wood tied with rope made of animal hair.

KATIE

(to THEATRE PROFESSOR)

So you’re telling me that they have no front or back?

THEATRE PROFESSOR

(to KATIE)

Exactly. The boat of leather and foraged wood may seem to moderns a very unsafe vehicle to trust to tempestuous seas—and it is! But our forefathers fearlessly committed themselves to these precarious vehicles, and to the mercy of the most violent weather.

KATIE

(to audience)

Thanks to my ex-husband, whose name is the Gaelic word for seafarer, I had spent a lot of time in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. I have many memories of traveling in vehicles not fit for purpose—like riding a bike into the wind only to find I had turned into a cartoon character who peddled, but did not move. Or the times we used the windshield wipers on the car to clear away the waves from the sea as we were crossing the causeway on winter mornings. Despite myself, I fell in love with these little boats immediately, these coracles. It seemed so important that I knew about them—to

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know that others had committed themselves to indirection, had somehow accepted—even reluctantly—that we actually have control over so very, very little. Then I parted company with my medieval surrealist companion and I never saw him again. Just like magic.

(Surrealistic montage of images and bodies: coracle; ACTORS A and B as flamenco dancer and whirling dervish; Annunciation Fresco; Christ Pantocrator; vacation photos;

ACTOR C as TIGER; image of tiger’s tale that becomes a flame and then black out.)

End of Act I

1 This description of “complementarity” is found in Wilczek (2015).

Notes

Works Cited

Cage, John. (1958) 2013. Silence: Lectures and Writings. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Gough, Kathleen M. 2016. “The Art of the Loop: Analogy, Aurality, History, Performance.” TDR: The Drama Review 60 (1): 93–115. https://doi.org/10.1162/DRAM_a_00526

Ong, Walter. 1982. Orality and Literacy: The Technologies of the Word. London and New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203328064

Wilczek, Frank. 2015. A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design. New York: Penguin.

Biography

Kathleen Gough is an Associate Professor and resident dramaturge in the Department of Theatre at the University of Vermont. Her monograph, Kinship and Performance in the Black and Green Atlantic: Haptic Allegories (2013) won the 2014 Errol Hill Award for Outstanding Scholarship in African American Theatre & Performance from ASTR. Currently she is investigating how theories of sound and image as they are conceptualized in Byzantine and medieval European culture can be put to greater critical use in understanding current trends in contemporary experimental performance. Thanks to a Vermont Artist Space Grant from the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts and a Summer Research Grant from the Humanities Center and Office of Vice President at the University of Vermont, Coracles, Castanets, Cadaqués will have its first public reading/performance at the FlynnSpace in Burlington, VT in August 2017.

© 2017 Kathleen M. Gough

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY VOL 3 (2017):266-284 DOI: https://doi.org/10.21476/PP.2017.31126

ISSN 2057-7176

PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY

THE THEATRICALITY OF THE PUNCTUM : RE-VIEWING ROLAND BARTHES’ CAMERA LUCIDA

HARRY ROBERT WILSON UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW

Introduction—Roland Barthes and I

Thus it would be wrong to say that if we undertake to reread the text we do so for some intellectual advantage (to understand better, to analyze on good grounds): it is actually and invariably for a ludic advantage: to multiply the signifiers, not to reach some ultimate signified.

Barthes (1990), 165

It was in 2012, whilst developing a performance about falling, that I was first introduced to Roland Barthes’ concept of the punctum: the emotionally bruising, affective detail of a photograph that breaks through the field of signification (studium) to prick or wound the viewer. I was researching photographs of bodies caught in the act of falling when I came across Andrea Fitzpatrick’s compelling article on art after 9/11. Fitzpatrick (2007) adopts Barthes’ dual terms of studium and punctum to analyse the ‘movement of vulnerability’ in Richard Drew’s controversial Falling Man photograph, which depicts a man leaping from the World Trade Center. Through a comparison with Yves Klein’s Leap Into the Void (1960) Fitzpatrick manages to explore a crisis of subjectivity and the rupture of meaning in images of falling (85–86).

The concept of the punctum appears in Barthes’ last book La Chambre Claire: Note sur la photographie (1980) (translated into English by Richard Howard as Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography [1981]). What initially struck me about this book was Barthes’ exploration of his theory of photography’s affect in the autobiographical reflections on the death of his mother and his search for her in a pile of old photographs. As I read the book for the first time, I felt like Barthes was articulating the pain I felt when looking at pictures of my own mother, who died when I was 14. Drawing on Fitzpatrick’s article and responding to Barthes’ mournful reflections in CameraLucida, I developed a performance lecture, The Punctum, that weaved together an introduction to Barthes’ photographic theory; a series of live staged falls; and a photograph of my mother to stand in for Barthes’ absent Winter Garden Photograph.

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Figure 1: ‘The Punctum a lecture performance on falling and photography…’. Image credit: Beth Savage.

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Since this first encounter with Barthes’ punctum, it started to surface everywhere in my subsequent reading on theatre and performance. Of course, Barthes’ term appears in performance books that deal specifically with photography such as Peggy Phelan’s Unmarked (1994), Rebecca Schneider’s Performing Remains (2011), Dominic Johnson’s Theatre & The Visual (2012), and Joel Anderson’s Theatre & Photography (2015). However, I have been more interested in work that has transposed Barthes’ concept of the punctum directly onto the experience of watching live theatre and performance (see Bottoms 1999, 2007; Bleeker 2008; Duggan 2012). In these instances, the punctum’s affects in performance often seem to occur when the ‘reality’ of live bodies draw attention to their material presence in a way that breaks the field of representation. There is sometimes something missing in these transpositions, however. As if the act of applying Barthes’ term loses something in the process of naming (as Barthes himself writes, on attempting to locate the punctum, ‘what I can name cannot really prick me’ [Barthes 1993, 51]). A more suitable response to theorising the punctum’s unspeakable affects as they relate to theatre and performance might then be to investigate them through an embodied performance practice.

My research project for the last two and a half years has been to explore Barthes’ Camera Lucida as a set of implicit instructions for making performance. This project has necessitated a series of iterative re-readings of the text, whereby I return to Camera Lucida at the start of each stage of devising. As Barthes writes in the quotation from S/Z that heads this essay, this process of re-reading has not facilitated a better understanding of his work (per se) but it has allowed its signifiers to multiply (as each re-reading further complicates Barthes’ dense text). This has culminated so far in two performances made in response to Barthes’ book with a third practical project planned for 2017. This process, of devising performance in response to Barthes’ book, has intensified the proliferation of Camera Lucida’s ‘meanings’.

In Kate Briggs’ article “Practising with Roland Barthes” she reflects on the task of translating Barthes’ lecture course The Preparation of the Novel and argues for translation as a ‘productive practice’ that ‘is its own way of doing research, of arriving at new knowledge of the work in question: knowledge that springs from the translator’s speculative inquiry into the manner of its making’ (Briggs 2015, 128–129). My research is, in a similar way to Briggs, an experiment in practising with Barthes: where with suggests not only a kind of application of theory (and perhaps not even this) but a collaboration alongside him. Roland Barthes and I are exploring Camera Lucida as it relates to performance practice. Although, my own speculative inquiry is not the attempt to translate Camera Lucida into performance, as such, but perhaps, following Matthew Goulish, a version of creative response which ‘proliferates’, ‘multiplies out’ from ‘miraculous (exceptional, inspiring, unusual, transcendent, or otherwise engaging) moment[s]’ that I encounter in Barthes’ text (Bottoms and Goulish 2007, 211). Thus, my practice attempts to explore the importance of Barthes’ work to theatre and performance studies, whilst also exploring what theatre and performance does to Camera Lucida: how it transforms the text, arrives at new knowledge, offers new perspectives (multiplies its signifiers).

Perhaps this focus on Camera Lucida’s ‘miraculous moments’ has something in common with Barthes’ concept of pathetic criticism—where a reader approaches a work through its affective or powerful moments of pathos. In The Preparation of the Novel Barthes writes that pathetic criticism

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Figure 2: ‘posing with Camera Lucida…’

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could eschew (the novel’s) logical units in favour of the ‘power of its moments’ and that this would re-construct works based on their affective meaning. Barthes continues:

I know there are pathetic elements in Monte-Cristo from which I could re-construct the whole work... presuming we’d be willing to devalue the work, to not respect the Whole, to do away with parts of that work, to ruin it… in order to make it live. (Barthes 2011, 108)

In my re-reading(s) of Camera Lucida, I have attempted to respond to the book’s affective moments in order to re-construct it in the form of performance. Barthes’ writing encourages this approach: often, he uses language to evoke a particular kind of affective space, where the text can be encountered through a series of pathetic moments. Interestingly, in The Preparation of the Novel, Barthes manages to identify pathetic criticism as a mode of reading and then adapt it into a practice of writing. I hope to do something similar in my practice: to develop performances that encourage the audience to approach them based on the affective power of their moments.

Specifically, my annual re-encounter with Barthes’ rich text, and my performance responses to it, have currently led me to hone in on ideas of theatricality in the book. This writing seeks to re-view debates on theatricality and anti-theatricality in and around Camera Lucida. By exploring Barthes’ conceptualisation of the pose I will discuss how my own performance practice might re-theatricalise the punctum and challenge a supposed antitheatricalism in Barthes’ text. Additionally, I will argue for Barthes’ book as an example of philosophy as performance and for the ways in which pensiveness in performance practice might be explored as a mode of performance philosophy.

Part One: Textual Poses

According to Michael Fried, Barthes’ Camera Lucida is an exercise in ‘antitheatrical critical thought’ (Fried 2008, 98). Fried’s reading of Camera Lucida centres on Barthes’ descriptions of the accidental nature of the punctum, a detail that is ‘not, or at least not strictly, intentional’ (Barthes 1993, 47). Fried develops this claim to argue that if the photographer’s intentions are too easily discernible in a photograph, it becomes artificial and loses its affective force. In other words, if the photograph ‘shows itself being seen’ it displays an artificiality, a theatricality that must be overcome (Fried 2008).

It is true that Barthes treats theatricality and artifice with suspicion in Camera Lucida. The book is a search for an ‘authentic’ encounter with the ‘essence’ of his mother through photographs of her. He celebrates his mother’s ability to be photographed ‘without either showing or hiding herself’ avoiding ‘the tense theatricalism’ of the pose (Barthes 1993, 67, 69). This is a theatricalism that transforms a subject into an image, a process that Barthes himself cannot avoid when being photographed (‘I lend myself to the social game, I pose, I know I am posing, I want you to know that I am posing’ (Barthes 1993, 11) and later; ‘each time I am (or let myself be) photographed, I invariably suffer from a sensation of inauthenticity’ (Barthes 1993, 13)). Whilst this suggests that Barthes should dislike the frontal pose of portrait photography (due to its inherent theatricality) instead he argues that the power of the photograph is ‘of looking me straight in the eye’ (Barthes

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Figure 3: ‘the portrait’s inherent theatricality…’

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1993, 111). Barthes desires a frontal pose that separates the subject’s ‘attention’ from the beholder’s ‘perception’: in other words, the viewer may perceive something in the subject’s look that is entirely subjective (Barthes 1993, 111). This, according to Michael Fried, is how the photograph avoids theatricality. Fried argues that the punctum functions as a guarantee of antitheatricality: the non-intentional, accidental detail and the photographed subject’s ‘authenticity’; the naïve non-performance of a pose (Fried 2008, 102, 109–111). As a result, Fried writes, Barthes’ fascination with photography is borne from its ability to ‘overcom[e] theatre in and through the punctum’ (Fried 2008, 111).

Since Plato this derogatory coupling of artifice and theatricality has been well rehearsed in the antitheatrical traditions of Western thought and in Fried’s earlier discussions of theatre’s degenerative effect on art (see Fried 1967). Yet Camera Lucida’s supposed ‘antitheatricalism’ is contradicted by Barthes’ earlier writing on theatre: in particular, Barthes’ essay on Baudelaire’s theatre, from 1954. In this essay, Barthes desires bodies that are ‘touched… by the grace of the artificial’ (Barthes 1972, 28). Barthes is searching for a powerful theatricality, a ‘radiant perception of matter, amassed, condensed as though on stage’ (Barthes 1972, 28). Ironically, Barthes does not find this theatricality in Baudelaire’s plays but, rather, it ‘explodes… wherever we do not expect it’ in Baudelaire’s other writing (Barthes 1972, 28). For Barthes, Baudelaire’s theatre is so concerned with hiding its artifice (in order to present fully-formed fictional worlds) that it loses its potency. In fact, in this essay, Barthes has no time for art without ‘sensuous artifice’, arguing that theatricality must be protected, must ‘seek refuge’ from the ‘petit bourgeois sensibilit[ies]’ of the 19th century stage (Barthes 1972, 26, 30–31).

While Barthes’ essay on Baudelaire was written over 25 years earlier than Camera Lucida (and the powerful affect of theatricality is distinct from his concept of the punctum) they both share a concern with the ‘disturbing corporeality’ of bodies and their dual position as both absent and present (Barthes 1972, 27–28). As Timothy Scheie argues, in his excellent book Performance Degree Zero, Barthes’ decision to abandon critical writing on the theatre after 1960 is nevertheless replaced by the ‘figurative and textual theatre[s]’ of his later writings (Scheie 2006, 63). So while the literal live performing body is absent from Barthes’ later works, he is fascinated with the body’s ‘elusive double… neither living nor dead, neither present nor past’ (Scheie 2006, 19). This is echoed in Rebecca Schneider’s claims that Camera Lucida is actually an exploration of the theatricality of photography. Referencing Barthes’ conception of photographic presence as deferral, she writes that ‘by turning the evidentiary claim that “X is here before the camera” into a winking clone of “X is dead”… lies photography’s essential theatricality—it both is, and is not’ (Schneider 2011, 143).

The idea of the body’s theatrical double is reflected in Barthes’ writing style. Although Barthes’ ideal photograph may be one that ‘overcomes’ theatre in order to arrest the viewer with an ‘authentic’ encounter, on re-viewing Camera Lucida, it is possible to discern the graceful artifice of theatricality in Barthes’ writing. The narrator of Camera Lucida is aware of being read: he poses for the reader. As Scheie has argued, Barthes’ last book shares similarities with his unconventional autobiography Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes where he instructs the reader to consider the text ‘as if spoken by a character in a novel’ (Barthes 1977, 2). Similarly, Scheie writes that Camera Lucida is ‘distinctly theatrical’ in its deliberate and methodical reasoning (Scheie 2010, 170–71). There is also theatricality in the way that the book continually draws attention to its novelistic form. This is

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Figure 4: ‘he transforms himself in advance into an image…’

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captured in Barthes’ first line (‘One day, quite some time ago, I happened on a photograph of Napoleon’s youngest brother’ [Barthes 1993, 3]) but also recurs throughout part two of the book, where Barthes evocatively describes the mise-en-scène of his encounter with the Winter Garden Photograph: ‘there I was, alone in the apartment where she had died, looking at these pictures of my mother, one by one, under the lamp light, gradually moving back in time with her’ (Barthes 1993, 67). Margaret Olin, Geoffrey Batchen and Jean-Michel Rabaté have all highlighted Camera Lucida’s form as somewhere between the theoretical text and autobiographical novel (see Batchen 2009 and Rabaté 1997). At times Barthes poses as the Proustian narrator, at other times as the semiotician in search of a new language (or a ‘kind of philosophical detective’ (Batchen 2009, 10)). Beryl Schlossman takes the theatrical metaphor of Barthes’ posing further by arguing that the luxury and artifice of his writing stages a ‘theatre of subjectivity’ (Rabaté 1997, 146). In this sense Barthes is practising the kind of performance of self that he describes in the photographic pose where he ‘transform[s himself] in advance into an image’ (Barthes 1993, 10).

We could also say that as well as the textual posing of Camera Lucida being theatrical, the book is also performative (in the Austinian sense that the words perform actions). Barthes’ descriptions of the punctum bring about punctum-like effects. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Barthes’ descriptions of the Winter Garden Photograph. He decides to omit this image of his mother as a child arguing that ‘it exists only for me. For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture… for you no wound’ (Barthes 1993, 73). Yet, in his ekphrastic descriptions of the image, he invites the reader to invest it with their own punctum. For me, I fill the space left by the Winter Garden Photograph with an image of my own mother as a child. In this sense, it could be said that the book is an example of philosophy as performance: it performs thinking and practices its theories through writing. In its efforts to describe the affective force of photography, Barthes’ book creates an affective encounter between writer and reader. To return to the quotation from S/Z that starts this essay, the ‘ludic advantage’ of re-reading Camera Lucida (its playful pleasure) is that Barthes’ writing arrests the reader, it pricks us, bruises us through the perception of a ‘sensuous artifice’. In other words, Barthes’ writing explores the theatricality of the punctum in the theatrical split between Barthes and the narrator of Camera Lucida.

As Jean-Michel Rabaté argues: Camera Lucida is ‘a novel about Barthes’ mother’s death, [that] is also a theoretical piece documenting the impossibility of writing a novel about the mother’s death’ (Rabaté 1997, 8). It is this dedication to a praxis of writing that is often present in Barthes’ later works, from The Pleasure of the Text (1975) and Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975) to A Lover’s Discourse (1977), but it is perhaps most clearly articulated by Barthes in his lecture course on The Neutral at the Collège de France in 1978. The structuring of these lectures, around a randomly ordered series of 30 ‘figures’, clearly takes inspiration from John Cage’s aleatory practices in composition. As Barthes himself notes: ‘the sequence of fragments… would put “something” (the subject, the Neutral?) in a state of continuous flux… relation to contemporary music, where the “contents” of forms matter less than their circulation’ (Barthes 2005, 10). In this example, Barthes explores the self-proclaimed role of the ‘intellectual as artist’ (Barthes 2005, 17) that resembles Laura Cull’s arguments for the performance art credentials of Henri Bergson in her definition of performance philosophy (Cull 2012, 24). Barthes continues these experiments in form in Camera Lucida, exploring a theatre of subjectivity in his playful performance of thinking.

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Figure 5: ‘I fill the space left by the Winter Garden Photograph with an image of my own mother as a child…’

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Part Two: Posing with Camera Lucida

Given Barthes’ focus on the pose in his discussions of photography (and Camera Lucida’s textual posing discussed above) I would like to discuss an instance of posing from my most recent performance made in response to Barthes’ book—Kairos.1 In the light of Fried’s arguments—that photography must escape the inherent theatricality of the pose—what are the implications of staging the pose in theatre: to re-theatricalise it in the affective space of live performance? How might this offer a re-viewing of Barthes’ suspicion of theatrical posing?

Taking direct inspiration from Barthes’ idea of pathetic criticism; for Kairos I developed 12 fragmentary performance ‘moments’ based around a series of conceptual terms derived in response to Camera Lucida. These were titled: absence; air; desire; ecstasy; fragment; grain; haiku; intractable; kairos; mother; pose; unspeakable. The material (lasting roughly 1 hour) was performed four times over the course of four hours (to mirror the 48 sections of Barthes’ book) and the audience were welcome to enter the space at any time and leave at any time (encouraging a mode of spectatorship that did not respect the whole). Each of these sequences were performed in a random order dictated by the shuffling of 35mm slides in an old slide projector—which projected the titles of the sections onto a blank notebook. I started the performance dressed in a similar outfit to Robert Wilson in Mapplethorpe’s portrait of Wilson and Philip Glass (1976) and with each repetition I shed layers of clothing until the last sequence was performed fully naked. This structure created the possibility of viewing each section more than once: each time in a different context, with my body in increasing states of undress and exhaustion. As such each ‘repetition’ of the sequence aimed to be a variation due to the changing sequence of the material, the effects of tiredness on my body and the shifting make-up of the audience in the space.

The material I developed in response to these titles ranged from choreographed movement, to text and task-based actions. At times I attempted to create material based on my existing understanding of the terms (so ‘grain’ became an exploration of the material textures of the voice, or ‘air’ explored the specific aura of a face); at other times there was a more literal response to the word in the title (so for ‘haiku’ I read a series of haiku poems, and ‘unspeakable’ I sat in silence for a moment). I hoped, however, that the surface-level literalness of some of the sections was complicated by the shifting order and context in which they were performed, as well as by the non-narrative, task-based nature of the piece.

During the ‘pose’ section of the performance I performed a movement sequence of stilled poses drawn from photographs from Camera Lucida and other images that have entered into the research process.2 The individual poses, all situated around a wooden chair, were combined to fluidly transition from one position to the next. While this created the effect of a ‘movement’ sequence, I attempted to hold each pose for a significant amount of time so that the ‘stillness’ of it would register. To stage the still pose in performance immediately complicates the notion of stillness. As Andre Lepecki has discussed in relation to dance: ‘the still-act does not entail rigidity or morbidity it requires a performance of suspension’ (Lepecki 2006, 15). The still-act explores a tension between movement and stasis and as Rebecca Schneider observes: the often reinforced oppositions between moving and still, living and dead, theatre and photography are worth challenging. Problematising Barthes’ conflation of theatre and photography with death, she writes

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Figure 6: ‘the still-act does not entail rigidity or morbidity it requires a performance of suspension…’ Image credit: Beth Chalmers.

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that ‘photography and performance share […] the rowdier processional or street theatre legacy of theatrical irruption—instability, repetition, the ambulant freeze, the by-pass... the shared pre- and re-enactment of tableaux vivants, or living stills’ (Schneider 2011, 144). What Schneider is addressing here is the tendency to think of photography as a ‘violent stilling’—the death of theatre’s liveness—and she counters this in the compounding of ambulant and freeze, living and still, theatre and photography. In Kairos, placing the still poses ‘in time’, as temporary tableaux vivants—in what Schneider might call an ambulant freeze—invokes the liveness of the photographic pose, and its theatricality, in another medium.

These poses were inherently citational—in that they were re-enactments of the ‘original’ photographs. The section also referenced other moments of the performance as the pose sequence was looped three times and performed a total of four times throughout the piece. In this sense, the poses explored what Schneider terms the ‘theatricality of time’ in that they called backward and forward to their citational references (Schneider 2011, 6). Inspired by Barthes’ desire for the frontal pose of portrait photography, I ‘delivered’ each pose to an individual audience member, making eye contact with them as if their eyes were imaginary cameras. In these moments of eye contact, I attempted to keep my facial expression as neutral as possible in order to explore Barthes’ split between attention and perception discussed above. However, these moments could be described as encounters with the theatricality of the pose, in the terms discussed by Maaike Bleeker, as my actions in this moment, drew attention to the act of looking and made the ‘seer aware of his or her position relative to the work’ (Bleeker 2008, 34). There were also times when this reciprocal gaze, between myself and the audience member, provoked a shared smile; breaking the neutrality of my expression and highlighting our co-presence in the shared space and time of the performance. Far from Barthes’ split between the look of the subject in a photograph and the beholder’s perception, there was instead a shared encounter in the here and now of performance. After the first loop of movements, I turned the chair to the back of the space and delivered the sequence of poses facing away from the audience. If the direct eye contact drew the audience’s attention to the act of looking, I hoped that this playful reversal of the poses might encourage a consideration of the viewer’s privileged position of distance. The theatricality of the distant body is explored by Barthes in his description of a drag performance at a Parisian nightclub. He argues that there is an intoxicating theatricality in the ‘totally desirable and absolutely inaccessible’ body that is ‘seen from a distance in the full light of the stage’ (Barthes 1976, 128). Whether my facial expressions were neutral or not (and whether I was facing the front or the back of the space) there is no denying that in the last cycle of poses, my naked body (showing itself in the full light of the stage) added a provocative theatricality to the sequence. The body, re-enacting poses with utility, was made double by references to vulnerable/desirable/ abstract/tortured/male/female bodies.

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Figure 7: ‘I turned the chair to the back of the space and delivered the sequence of poses facing away from the audience…’ Image credit: Julia Bauer.

Figure 8: ‘references to vulnerable/desirable/abstract/tortured/male/female bodies…’ Image credit: Julia Bauer.

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Pensive Performance: A Conclusion in Suspense

I have tried to explore the ways that theatricality figures in Camera Lucida through the concept of the pose and my own embodied encounter with Barthes’ text. Camera Lucida explores a theatrical kind of textual posing that contradicts Fried’s placement of Barthes’ text within the tradition of antitheatrical critical thought. Furthermore, if Barthes’ book is re-viewed in the context of his earlier writing, then it is possible to make a link between the graceful artifice of theatricality and the dual posture of the photographic referent (as argued by Scheie and Schneider). To stage the pose in performance, as I explored in Kairos, highlights its citationality and the tensions between stillness and movement, intimacy and distance, and the provocative theatricality of bodies in the live encounter.

One audience member who saw Kairos commented that the slow and methodical task-based progression of the piece created a kind of pensive mood in the performance. Perhaps focusing in on the pensiveness of performance, through Barthes, can contribute to discussions of how performance thinks. It is possible to explore pensiveness in Camera Lucida by returning to Barthes’ split between attention and perception. Referring to two of André Kertész’s photographs, Barthes asks of the first (of Piet Mondrian in his studio [1926]) ‘how can one have an intelligent air without thinking about anything intelligent?’ (Barthes 1993, 111–113). In the second, of a boy holding a puppy (1928), Barthes describes a ‘lacerating pensiveness’ of the boy’s face even though ‘he is looking at nothing’ (Barthes 1993, 113). In other words, Barthes celebrates a fissure between the posing subject’s attention (or intention) and the beholder’s interpretation of their expression. Barthes’ description of this as a ‘pensiveness’ in the image of the boy illuminates his earlier claim that the photograph is subversive ‘when it is pensive, when it thinks’ (Barthes 1993, 38).

In S/Z, his in-depth analysis of Balzac’s short-story Sarrasine, Barthes discusses the notion of the pensive text. Quoting the last line of the story: ‘and the Marquise remained pensive’ (Balzac in Barthes 1990, 216) Barthes argues that by concluding the story with the Marquise deep in thought, the reader is left in a state of suspension: not knowing anything about what she is thinking. The Marquise’s pensiveness at the end of Sarrasine offers an ‘infinite openness’ for Barthes, where meaning is kept ‘free and signifying’ (Barthes 1990, 216). Perhaps pensive performance might similarly suspend meaning in the act of thinking. This is what Barthes loves about Kertész’s images of Mondrian and the boy: they create a zero degree, a neutral space of interpretation: ‘if only photography could give me a neutral, anatomic body, a body which signifies nothing… my body never finds its zero degree’ (Barthes 1993, 12).

Whilst the theatrical body rarely (if ever) offers up ‘a body which signifies nothing’, there are some contemporary performance practices where a kind of ambivalent approach to character could have a similar effect to Barthes’ pensive subject (in that they keep meaning ‘free and signifying’). Ex-Goat Island performer Karen Christopher has written on the company’s performance style noting that ‘when I play a character I play a series of gestures and sounds… what we do is task-based and we do not “pretend”’ (Bottoms and Goulish 2007, 84). The result of this task-based approach to character is what Stephen Bottoms terms the company’s affective/affectless dramaturgies. When discussing a movement sequence from the company’s 1996 performance How Dear Me to Me the Hour When Daylight Dies, Bottoms argues that the performers exude a kind

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of ‘anti-presence’ which suspends meaning, where ‘the use of a deliberately blank, unemotional facial glazing, means that there is no sense of these movements offering outward expressions of inner selves’ (Bottoms 1999, 425). Goat Island’s performance style explores a pensiveness similar to that described in Barthes’ description of Mondrian’s portrait—where there is a split between attention and perception. However, this pensiveness is not without its theatricality. Christopher describes a theatrical ‘multi-vocality’ in her approach to character when she writes that:

it is a specific thing I do when I complicate myself with more than one voice. Like a series of transparencies sliding over each other, we are trying to enact a kind of simultaneity of being. I am neither a representation of [the character], nor am I solely myself. (Bottoms and Goulish 2007, 84)

Perhaps, then, the punctum can be re-theatricalised through an exploration of the pensive in performance. By approaching performance through a play of presence and anti-presence, affect and affectlessness, character and self, it is possible to explore performance’s zero degree: an affective theatricality that suspends meaning. Perhaps pensiveness in performance might be described as a mode of performance philosophy: a pensive performance is a performance that thinks, and in the act of thinking suspends meaning. In this sense, it may be close to what Laura Cull terms ‘performance as thinking’ in an exploration of performance’s philosophical modes, where she argues for ‘an embodied encounter with the resistant materiality of performance’s thinking’ (Cull 2012, 12). The punctum in performance, then, might be thought of as a kind of theatricalised pensiveness that stages an encounter with performance’s thinking. The inherent theatricality of the pose is an apt space in which to explore this pensiveness: in the suspension of movement, of subject and of meaning.

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Figure 9: ‘with the Marquise deep in thought, the reader is left in a state of suspension: not knowing anything about what she is thinking…’ Image credit: Julia Bauer.

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1 Kairos was originally made for Buzzcut Festival in Glasgow in April 2016 and was subsequently performed at Outskirts Festival at Platform in Easterhouse (April 2016) and at Live Art Bistro in Leeds (June 2016). 2 The photographs that I developed poses from were—from Camera Lucida: James Van der Zee’s Family Portrait (1926); Alexander Gardner’s Portrait of Lewis Payne (1865); Robert Mapplethorpe’s Self-Portrait (1975); Robert Mapplethorpe’s Philip Glass and Robert Wilson (1976). The other photographs included an image of one of the Abu Ghraib prisoners that Rebecca Schneider discusses in Performing Remains (2011) and the image of Alan Kurdi, the refugee child who washed up on a Turkish beach in 2016.

Notes

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. 1972. Critical Essays. Translated by Richard Howard. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

———. 1976. Sade, Fourier, Loyola. Translated by Richard Miller. Berkeley: University of California Press.

———. 1977. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-03518-2

———. 1990. S/Z. Translated by Richard Miller. Oxford: Blackwell.

———. 1993. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. London: Vintage.

———. 2005. The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France, 1977-1978. Translated by Rosalind Kraus and Denis Hollier. New York: Columbia University Press.

———. 2011. The Preparation of the Novel: Lecture Course and Seminars at the Collège de France (1978–1979 and 1979–1980). Edited by Natalie Léger. Translated by Kate Briggs. New York: Columbia University Press.

Batchen, Geoffrey, ed. 2009. Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Bleeker, Maaike. 2008. Visuality in the Theatre: The locus of looking. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230583368

Bottoms, Stephen. 1988. “The Tangled Flora of Goat Island: Rhizome, Repetition, Reality.” Theatre Journal 50 (4): 421–446. https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.1998.0100

Bottoms, Stephen and Matthew Goulish, eds. 2007. Small Acts of Repair: Performance, Ecology and Goat Island. London: Routledge.

Briggs, Kate. 2015. “Practising with Roland Barthes.” L'Esprit Créateur. 55 (4): 118–130. https://doi.org/10.1353/esp.2015.0053

Cull, Laura. 2012. “Performance as Philosophy: Responding to the Problem of ‘Application’.” Theatre Research International 37 (1): 20–27. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0307883311000733

Fitzpatrick, Andrea D. 2007. “The Movement of Vulnerability: Images of Falling and September 11.” Art Journal 66 (4): 84–102. https://doi.org/10.1080/00043249.2007.10791285

Fried, Michael. 2008. Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Lepecki, André. 2006. Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement. London: Routledge.

Rabaté, Jean-Michel, ed. 1997. Writing the Image After Roland Barthes. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press.

Scheie, Timothy. 2006. Performance Degree Zero: Roland Barthes and Theatre. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. https://doi.org/10.3138/9781442678354

Schneider, Rebecca. 2011. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. London: Routledge.

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Biography

Harry Robert Wilson is a performance maker and researcher based in Glasgow. He has an MA and an MPhil in Theatre Studies from the University of Glasgow. Harry has shown performance work at Battersea Arts Centre (London), the Arches, Buzzcut Festival (Glasgow) Summerhall (Edinburgh), DCA and GENERATORProjects (Dundee) and DEFIBRILLATOR Performance Art Gallery (Chicago). Harry has taught on the Theatre Studies course at the University of Glasgow and on the Contemporary Performance Practice course at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. He is currently undertaking an AHRC funded, practice-as-research PhD project at the University of Glasgow exploring the relationships between performance and photography.

© 2017 Harry Robert Wilson

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY VOL 3, NO 1 (2017):285–309 DOI: https://doi.org/10.21476/PP.2017.31127

ISSN 2057–7176

PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY

THIS KINETIC WORLD: RETHINKING THE GRID (NEO-BAROQUE CALLS)

LARA D. NIELSEN IE UNIVERSITY—MADRID

Distance is not a safety zone but a field of tension.

Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (2005, 127)

Changing course and moving to Spain got me thinking about the grid again. I thought I’d left it, but I was heading right back into it. Truth is, there’s no getting out of it. Some things are for real.

It is in Spain that the city grid (la cuadrícula) renewed its license, so to speak, on modernity. Ruins of 2nd century BCE cities like Baelo Claudia, for instance, a Roman municipality doing trade with the Maghreb, imprint the grid’s heterogeneous and syncretic leave (complete with basilica, forum, amphitheatre, temples of Juno, Minerva and the Egyptian Isis). The Alhambra in Granada was built over Roman ruins, its fine interior courts and muqarnas (geometrical, or honeycomb vaulting) the signature of Moorish architecture and design. On the exterior, the grand scale of its organic layout piles quadrangular additions across the mountain ridge in a manner reminiscent of ramshackle medieval cities throughout the Mediterranean, with passages going this way and that. Thus it is noteworthy that among the first known cuadrículas implemented in early modern Spain was a military encampment built in Santa Fe de Granada, in 1491, by Catholic armies forcing out the Muslim Emirate of Granada in the Reconquista. For the Romans as for the Emirates and the Spanish, city grid regimes are conditioned by contact with its “others.”

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For some 200 years, Granada was the last Emirate standing in Iberia. The last of the Nasrid Sultans of Granada (Abu `Abdallah Muhammad XII, or King Boabdil in Spanish) fell to the artillery and canons of the Catholic Monarchs, King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile, on January 2, 1492. Christopher Columbus attended that elaborate surrender procession, and four months later it is again in Santa Fe de Granada that Los Reyes Católicos Ferdinand and Isabella anointed Columbus as Admiral of the Ocean Sea (among other titles), and a tenth of whatever riches were to be had in the New World. Consulting with the authorities of their time (sailors, philosophers, astrologers) Los Reyes Católicos made their move. Applying Reconquista logics and technologies to the new world, Spanish urban development established the city grid as a colonial planning rubric, both thing and idea, for new world administrations.

Navigating by constellations of stars, the grid hopscotches seas. The urban grid was implemented across the Spanish Americas, beginning with the first colonial grid city in Santo Domingo, 1502 (Hispaniola/ Dominican Republic). More quickly followed: Cartagena, 1522 (Colombia); Ciudad de los Reyes/Lima, 1535 (Peru); San Juan de la Frontera, 1562 (Argentina); Mexico City, 1585 (Mexico). Returning the city grid regime back to Spain, Madrid was chosen to be the capital city in 1561. Construction of the Plaza Mayor began in 1617, establishing a centralized grid for the Spanish seat of power. This is the transcultural story of mimicry and man (Bhabha 1984). While no one city is alike, the city itself is a medium (Lefebvre 2007; Kittler 2013).

Across Mediterranean, Atlantic, Caribbean, and Pacific trading cities, the grid’s metamorphoses are diverse (Focillon 1989). As at least one medievalist remarks, “Form is too promiscuous to remain faithful to its authors intentions” (Powell 2012, 15). It bears remembering that in geometry, there is no one kind of grid; in fact, there are too many kinds to meaningfully detail. At its most elementary, the Regular grid is made up of tessellated Euclidean bricks, i.e., the meeting of four squares at every vertex. A Cartesian grid produces unit squares and cubes. Rectilinear grids are parallelepipeds made up of rhomboids. Curvilinear grids make curved cuboids radiating out from a center, as in the ancient proscenium stages at Epidaurus; and in the three-dimensional model of the evil Empire’s Death Star, in Star Wars. Irregular grids too require a theory for their connectivity, or network flow. Geometry is diverse.

Whatever form the grid takes, tensions between calculation and imagination define it (Zielinksi 2006, 10). Generally, the grid presents a mode of data formatting and data visualization (design), using points, lines, and curves to communicate ideas, patterns, systems, and complexities. Without wishing to establish a point of origin for the grid, and without trying to establish a linear progression for grid media, I do want to notice things that rhyme with the grid. Dating from the Mesopotamian millennia, for example, mosaics made of patterned assemblages of materials (stone, glass, shells) dot Mycenean, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Islamic, and Venetian tilings, in pictorial and abstract iterations.1

Whether viewed as a spatial index, or as a network, when I think about the grid what I want to focus on is its sheer variability, in tandem with its key operating dynamic: that tension between calculability and imagination. To get closer to what I mean about that tension, you could say that

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the grid’s system design presents as a geography of geometricized reason that is matched by the no less impactful circuits of migrant flows and marronage flights (Césaire 1955; Roberts 2015). What Deleuze and Guattari call “fugitives from geometricization” are nothing less than lines that escape geometry (Fer 2004, 55–56; Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 499). Another way of saying it is that grids always also double as network sabotage. The mathematical correlate is Menger’s Theorem, the optimization principle of connectivity that holds the key to breaking networks: if you can identify the rule that makes a grid cohere, you can disrupt it.2 The grid’s reason warps and woofs, if you can master it.

Yet it’s still hard to shake the enduring fiction of the grid’s neutrality, on the one hand; or its “totalitarianism,” on the other (Siegert 2015, 98). I am wary of kingmen’s games in the former interpretation, and sympathetic to the concerns of the latter. For Latin Americanists like Walter Mignolo (1995), for example, Spanish grids enact violence, a cartographic “emptying” of indigenous histories in the Americas. A medium and a mechanism for such clearings, the cartographic grid stalls and installs coloniality, but not without shady deals, getaways, stowaways, and storytelling. Meanwhile, Mercator maps simultaneously project latitudes and longitudes pointing eternally North South East and West off the sheer surface of the map’s paper, as if the earth were flat; because it is not, such maps bluntly disfigure and deform space, and cannot measure the world as it is, even if Mercator maps continue to influence the imagination. The medium is the message.

While cultural conceptions of space are diverse, historians of cartography show that cartographic power in the Americas is a symptom of nationalizing administrations in search of pinning down “fugitive” (unofficial, unacknowledged, illegitimate, illegible, and resistant) landscapes. 3 As such, maps posit historically located and subjective forms of knowledge, rather than pure science; as Raymond Craib observes, “Maps are active, creative, and constitutive. More bluntly, they are implicated in creating the reality that they presume to reveal” (Craib 2000, 13). Revisiting the grid cannot but reenact the doubling of thing and idea, in all its fantasias.

Where the grid presents as pliable material and tool, its plasticity is repeatable and adaptable, corruptible. If the grid expresses geometry in spatial organization, material dynamics, and visual fields (a drawing, a map), it also harbors haphazard, mutinous, and renegade affordances. Following the logic of the line, the grid blurs the line. The grid oscillates between mimesis and methexis, inscribing ambivalence, and obsession. I see it everywhere, and I know I’m not alone.4 Tiling, La Alhambra, Granada. Photograph by Lara D. Nielsen.

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In Andalucía, where I live, the visual structure of abstract ornamentation in tesselated grid tiling summons the dynamic polyvocalities of geometric grids. Intersecting circles representing the Quranic six days of creation generate points and lines that build the Seal of Solomon. Patterns of hexagons and stars express original and eternal order, both spiritual and material. In Daud Sutton’s description, “Islamic design can be thought of as a form of visual music; the repetition and rhythm of its motifs establish an inner sense of balance and act as a visual extension of the invocatory remembrance of the Divine” (2007, 50).

Music theorists say John Coltrane heard it, too, in “A Love Supreme,” making the Coltrane Circle of Fifths as much music theory as it is devotional work (see Mwamba 2017; Hollander 2017). As a child, I had a coloring book of this kind of geometric design, and its rhythms stick with me to this day. Like tessellated tiling in Andalusian ceramics, which warp and weft the sacred (the singular, the exceptional) and the profane (the plural), honeycomb grids offer undulating patterns and permutations, again in hexagons. What I hear is that the universe is both capaciously diverse, and, in a state of flux. It’s not clear who or what is in charge, beyond the dynamics of continuity and change.

So say the physicists. Long story short, Einstein’s 1915 theory of relativity advances the idea that matter (energy) bends the grid of spacetime, producing dips and distortions in the webbed fabric of the universe: the grid warps and bends, the twisting has the effect of frame-dragging, the dilations curve timespace. Gravitational astrophysicists invite us to consider the sound of the grid when they listen to the bends of spacetime’s drum. In a way, this is what Georges Bataille saw, when he suggested that “space can become a fish which eats another,” because he perceives space as matter in itself, matter that also functions as a site for digesting relationships of distance (Fer 1997, 4). It is matter that inscribes the gravitational bends and the pliable planes of the polyrhythmic universe.

Reviewing grid orthodoxies invokes a commotion of disciplinary interests, definitions, and affordances (a design term for whatever an object allows a user to do). For me, the polyglot and polymathic grid has to do with ontological eurythmics. The grid’s affinities are with the cult of Pythagoras, in which geometric form (and numerical elucidation, in mathematics) express the harmony of the universe. The grid’s elemental lexicon is always proprioceptive. This can be articulated in architectural proportion, and in musical rhythm; in visual and sonic cultures. I don’t know what is going on exactly between music and mathematics. Just don’t let them tell you these things are “only” myth.

The Coltrane Circle of Fifths, fromhttp://www.openculture.com

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*

This dispatch proceeds on the premise that the grid’s dynamic pasts have something to offer to the way we think about the grid’s futures (Bolter and Grusin). The grid provides points of contact (materially and metaphorically) between old and new media cultures and materialisms, from image and narrative to network.5 The return to materialism in contemporary philosophy is a many-headed hydra and I will not attempt to account for it here.6 Except to say that it’s already been around for a while;7 and that thinking the systems, organizations, materialities, and technologies of things are (alongside the social life of things, as Appadurai [1986] suggests) among the most pressing social challenges of our time.

If the grid “serves to constitute a world of objects imagined by a subject” (Siegert 2015, 107), no less anthropocentric in emphasis, in my view, is the problem of how the grid in turn facilitates the question how “power issues not simply from signification and how we signify, but also how the world of objects about us is organized” (Bryant 2011, 18). What I’m interested in are the ways that the grid, as art and science (as design), can be used to make sense of the very forces it enacts and transforms, on the understanding that cultural production cannot be separated from material registers of the real.8

For media and cultural studies, the idea is not new; for media archaeology, the emphasis on materiality and technique is all, i.e. “data storage, transmission, and calculation in technological media” (Kittler 1990, 369). In the arts, renewed attention to what materials do (human and non-human objects and things) gives the nod to performance theory, too (Schweitzer and Zerdy 2014). Visual cultures, in particular, sustain robust dialogues with ways of thinking objects and materials, including constructivist, geometric, and non-objective works of the most recent centuries. For the better part of this essay it is back to the future of the grid’s visual cultures that I turn.

The grid’s representational capabilities have long been put to use to make perspective: to emplot the heavens, hell, and empire alike (if you believe in such things). At the same time, the grid’s abstractions continue to be regarded with suspicion. It’s a question of legibility. The grid’s Janus-faced powers compel cultural norms and refuse them. Rather than reject the grid as too distant from socially located performance research, I think we can ill afford to ignore the horizons of grid technologies and controls that so powerfully harness and transform social relationships. A return to the polymathic and polyglot grid poses an opportunity to attend both sites and modes of cultural practices and techniques. In reality, there is no choice; the grid’s materialities are upon us. In the beginning was the grid, and the grid was with you.

As a whole, William Egginton’s (2009) reading of the baroque could be said to locate the sum of such self-referential problematics, from idealist philosophy to discursive and object oriented works, within the anxious history of reason’s durability. In baroque and neo-baroque perspectives, artifact and artifice blur the line between outsides and insides, deterritorializing agential spaces of spectacle and spectatorship. I recognize grid dynamics in these flows of thought. Read one way, the grid emplots known knowns; read another way, it supplies the circuitry of escape. But it’s both at the same time, and it’s never either/or. Most likely, the grid’s alter ego is dark matter.

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The grid powerfully persists as organizational apparatus, or dispositive (Foucault 1980, 194). 9 Mechanisms and knowledge structures operate in discursive as well as material time and space, in each case relative and dynamic, as matter still slows and bends their passages. If we are as steeped in digital architectures as we jam their floods, it is also true that “the frantic abolition of all distances brings no nearness” (Heidegger 1971, 165). Whether examined through urban grids, early modern perspectival shifts, maps, modernism, or software/hardware, treatments of the grid as a cultural technique enjoy too broad and rich a history to ignore, even if (and also because) it has been extensively studied before. Perhaps it is enough to begin by observing that city grids, for one, combine systemic and structural organizational forces and flows, at the same time that they open and are open to improvisation.

Today, the grid also has to do with the interpenetrations of old industrial grids that are linked to ‘smart’ grids—conjoining the likes of railroads, barbed-wire, pulp and paper manufacture, water, mining, petroleum transport, communication towers, transatlantic cables, electric information severs, nuclear reactors, satellites, digital technologies, clouds, and e-waste salvage yards (toxic dumps found in third world countries after the recycling process) to the interdependencies within and among the globe’s ecologies. The digital revolution that has been the “linchpin” of global capitalism for the past thirty years, media theorists Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller (2011) argue, has a climate footprint. 10 My point is uncontroversial, that in art as in science the grid is not impervious to the material world; it is made up of its diffuse parts. The grid operates interactively with a diversity of moving parts, materials, medias, and mechanics; complete with incumbent institutional and social structures, languages, logics, and algorithmic apparati.

In response to a control society that deepens the entanglements of systems, structures, and disciplines, infrastructure is today’s new keyword (Berlant 2016). In early cybernetics, Norbert Weiner explains, “control is nothing but the sending of messages which effectively change the behavior of the recipient” (Weiner 1950, 8). Because so many organizational systems, structures, and disciplinary logics continually reconfigure the world (and vice-versa), today’s new media cultures, materials, and ecologies are to be found wherever and however grids emplot social, visual, virtual, and spatial complexities, ad-hoc recombinatory coalitions and assemblages coding (and concealing) conduct and conflict, from public utilities to communications and cyberwarfare. As I’ve argued before, performance research participates in the dynamics of social change, including migrations of agency, in the material and the imaginary (Nielsen 2012).

Perspective

For most, the grid provides a gameplan: a form of organization, a mechanism, a discourse, a geometry, a city, an architecture; a media. It stipulates science, social science, and art. Easy as tic-tac-toe, the grid typically presents an outwardly extending logic in the ordering of things, as well as an assignment of spatial coordinates. At a glance, the grid is an apparatus to graph and make the measure of space, often to serialize it, without end. As the art critic Rosalind Krauss observes, “the grid extends, in all directions, into infinity” (1979, 60). Looking inwards, the grid’s uses are seen too in games like checkers and chess, where laws control strategy and movement within the

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boundedness of that closed and ordered space. Closed grid schematics render fixity like the lock of a crossword puzzle. As a media, the grid grants access to “the expanded scene of viewing” (Fer 2004, 24). Behold the screen, man the scrum: vision “is not simply a matter of looking at the vista before us, but of entering into and moving across a field of vision” (57).

As seeing machine, the grid’s story includes linear perspective, as in Aristotle’s skenographia for the stage where it makes depth out of thin and flat spaces (Poetics, 335 BCE) and in Filippo Bruneschelli’s architectural engineering where it translate three dimensional space onto two dimensional surfaces (1420). By 1435, further building on the polymathic works of Pythagoras, Euclid, Ptolomy, and Ibn al-Haytham, Leon Battista Alberti’s treatises on the visible (in representational arts that include painting, architecture, and intriguingly, cryptography) begin with the mathematics of geometric form in order to put “art in the hands of the artist” (Alberti 1956, 40). Alberti understands perspective as a geometric instrument of visual representation. In the model Alberti developed for perspectival drawings, space operates as an extension of the viewer’s eye, as if looking through a window. Della Pintura is a manual for producing the realistic perspectival illusions of the volumetric world, one that relies on veils, windows, mirrors, and other manner of grid mechanics, boundaries and thresholds of perception that let loose the mediations of this kinetic world.11

Scholars continue to suggest that the urban grid derives from the geometric and perspectival cultures of the Renaissance. Think Leonardo da Vinci’s (1452–1519) Vitruvian Man (1490), which inscribes the mathematics of proportion in circle and square by applying architectural drafting to the technology of human form (from Vitruvius, de archetectura, 13–15 BCE). In the Codex Leicester, written in mirror-image code from right to left between 1506 and 1510 in Milan, the Tuscan again details draftings of this material world: studying hydrodynamics, deluge, and the management of water flows, for instance, in addition to the relations between suns, planets, and moons.12

Others say the great fable of Western Renaissance makes short shrift of the vast trove of things—including the many cultural designs and technologies that Los Reyes Católicos in Spain made its own, before and after the Reconquista: in tiling, pottery, architecture, shipbuilding, accounting, mathematics, cartography, and finance, in addition to the patchwork of aqueducts and mills that likewise conjoin ancient Roman with Islamic and other Mediterranean material cultures and technologies; in food, dance, and song. Sometimes today’s ‘creativity’ zeitgeist redirects curiosity about cultural forms back towards durable shells, rather than their polyphonic calls. The revolt of the medievalists urges more pluralistic views (Gersh and Roest 2003).

The visual arts have long understood the grid as a key optic of modernity that produces perception about space; orders subjects objects and things in space; at the same time that it disorganizes and disrupts matter and movement within and beyond its matrices, never attaining the fugitive and occult real. The grid’s alignments are prospective and retrospective; latent and proactive; real and illusory. Interestingly, Krauss’s seminal essay, “Grids,” defines the grid for modern art as anti-mimetic, and as anti-real, concerned neither with authenticity, or the discourse of originality.

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The question, Krauss later suggests, is what emerges from the grid’s repetition and recurrence (1981, 54); and from that I infer the question of how forces and systems concurrently succeed and falter in ordering the wandering matters of social life. As I noted earlier, tensions between abstraction and representation define modernist debates centering on the grid as a totalizing means of managing space through relationships of distance, on the one hand; and on the other, as the pathway to breaches in the system of modern administrations, whether in the context of pictures, or in the world.

Consistently, however, Krauss’s emphasis on the grid’s “paralogical suspensions,” as emblem and myth, summons a structure and perhaps even more crucially a concept of the grid that allows for inconsistency, and contradiction (1979, 55). This insight continues to inform digital media scholarship (see Hu 2016). Given the grid’s penchant for geometry, geometricisation, and fugitivity (from Star Wars to marronage), it will come as no surprise that for me, the grid’s “paralogical suspensions” bring to mind things that are associated with (and given a name) in the Old and New World baroques, and the Latin American neo-baroque after that.13 The many guises of the grid’s Reconquista (and runaways) never cease to churn.

On its own terms, the Latin American neo-baroque is defined not so much by the baroque’s old (and rich) flamboyance, as by new world heterogeneity (and thrift)—its abundant resourcefulness, and simulacra: an avant-garde visual and literary register that accommodates many more formal and cultural logics than any one traditional ‘genre’ generally allows (Wollen 1993; Zamora 2006). Revisiting the Spanish baroque’s profuse play with illusion and the real, the Latin American neo-baroque (as an aesthetic movement) makes a power play for riotous intertextuality—heteroglossic, virtuosic, and polyrhythmic—that, like the grid, also abstains from discourses of authenticity and originality. Rather than submit to any paradigm of loss (Calabrese 1992, xii), however, I see instability, polydimensionality and change as constitutive of grid logics and systems (partners in crime), rather than outside of it.

Following Deleuze, art historian Briony Fer reminds us that the enactment of repetition itself yields difference, whether in the context of design, the technological sublime, or performance: “repetition could be partial or infinite, redemptive or destructive” (2004, 3). Threads of dissent, distraction and dissonance weave through every grid. Unlike some literary scholars, I don’t think performance research is at risk of assuming that aesthetic forms and structures are ontologically separate from sociopolitical ones.14 I do think, however, that we cannot underestimate the surplus of systems, structures, infrastructures, and bureaucratic devices that order, thwart, and transform the materiality of social life (Nielsen forthcoming). In the brief case studies that follow, I visit two different port cities which themselves curate and review the pasts and the futures of grid logics.

Bienal Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo, Cartagena de Indias, 2014

Thanks to a friend, a conference on Negrismo (Blackness, or Négritude in the Spanish Caribbean) at the Universidad de Cartagena brought me to Colombia in the Spring of 2014. I was thinking about beisbol in the Caribbean, and the riddle of labor and performance (Nielsen, in-progress). Spanning

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high and low cultural genres, my scholarly attention to the grid is anchored in the performance arenas of sport: those carefully groomed fields of activity governed by the metricized spaces of baselines, yardlines, and sidelines—and by the simultaneously rule-abiding and errant movement, in gestures, kinetics, and kinaesthetics cojoining teams and individuals. For me, sport and dance share this fugitive shimmer, this coil of regulated and outlaw movement in the ambiguities of grid spaces, as CLR James understands it in Beyond the Boundary (1993). What I see in the baseball grid (aka the diamond) are the affordances of the grid’s design, as an object of material culture, and as colonial mediascape: at once a microcosmic practice and a simulacra of urban and other grids that organize eurythmics in space and time.

But that’s not what I want to talk about right now. The timing of the Negrismo conference was especially fortuitous because the first International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Cartagena de Indias was also in full swing (7 February–7 April 2014). An old city cresting the Caribbean, I was primed to ‘see’ Cartagena, seat of the New Kingdom of Granada (formerly Calamarí, before the Spanish arrived in 1533), in comparative cartographic perspective with other Spanish colonial grid cities in the Americas. Cartagena de Indias was an important trading port, a slave port and an administrative center. 15 To this day I can’t shake a rippling sense of déjà vu, accrued in that hopscotching from Carthage (Tunisia) and the Iberian Cartagena, to Cartagena, Colombia. Cities have a way of being many times and places at once; everything is in the interval.

Dispersed across a number of key historical buildings and sites so as to facilitate fluid and fresh experiences of the Centro Histórico, my first stop at the Cartagena Bienal is the Palacio de la Inquisición (Palace of the Inquisition). For the palimpsestically inclined like me, sites of exhibition matter. Los Reyes Católicos Ferdinand and Isabella established the Spanish Inquisition in 1478, which was concerned primarily with converts from Islam and Judaism. Declaring Cartagena a seat of the Inquisition in 1610 (following those in Mexico City and Lima), and adding architecture to its arsenal, Cartagena was an operating center, a node in the Spanish colonial system: to monitor and manage the colony, as well as to denounce and judge as heretics, whoever they were, and wherever they came from.16 The Palacio was completed in 1776 in baroque style, and in 1924 began to house El Museo Histórico de Cartagena de Indias.

Spanish artist Elena del Rivero’s site-specific exhibition in the Palacio, …Y tan alta vida espero… (After Santa Teresa de Jesús) (2014), is among the first publics encounter when entering the Palacio. It’s about Spanish colonizers. Tucked low and almost in

Elena del Rivero, …Y tan alta vida espero… (After Santa Teresa de Jesús) (2014).

Photograph by Lara D. Nielsen.

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the corner of a three-story courtyard wall that directs the gaze upwards and elsewhere, the piece weaves a mass of black thread and white pearl beads through the gridiron bars of a window. At first, I thought it was hair, the needles and pins sharply tucking the absent body in. Using windows throughout the Palacio, the site-specific installation is indeed about absence: if the seat of New Granada was colonized by men from Spanish Cartagena, del Rivero infers the tactile presence of Granada women left behind in the convents of Southern Spain, whose voices are not recorded in history. The gridiron windows frame the threshold space of gendered permissions and transgressions, controlled by the iron grid at ‘home’ and abroad. Studying the protocols of sociability in the Palacio, del Rivero implicitly compares them with the coeval protocols of the Inquisition’s tribunals and interrogations.

By presenting texture with no interior (classic modern technique), del Rivero models the violences of inquisition, itself a machine that abstracts information. The thread and the beads, in themselves imperfect replicas, perform another abstraction, by standing in for people who are made into subjects of the tribunal’s endemic judgment. Del Rivero’s other works focus on the kitchen as “the female grid,” where stories and life gather force from a single center of strategic operation predating the ages of mechanization and industrialization. Not strictly known as a fiber artist, del Rivero’s work at the Cartagena Bienal nevertheless invites visitors to think more deeply about the interlocking warp and weft of matter in Cartagena de las Indias’s spacetime.

Although I come from a family of women who weave, I am told weaving has only recently been recognized as a valuable craft, “with theories of its own,” let alone as a method for researching abstraction and dimensionality (Smith 2014; Porter 2014). No surprise, it is also the site of gendered divisions of labor. In her 1957 essay, “The Pliable Plane: Textiles in Architecture,” Bauhaus master weaver Anni Albers writes, “When we realize that weaving is primarily a process of structural organization this thought is startling, for today thinking in terms of structure seems closer to the inclination of men than women.” Nothwithstanding gendered sublations of practioner and craft, long “subordinate to form and color theory; and to the functionalist logic of architecture” (Smith 2014, xvii), weaving nevertheless has a key role to play in advancing the interpretation of grid medias.

Promoted to the status of the fiber arts after WWII, weaving tests the propensities of material in time and space. The metamorphosis of weaving harness and release the fluidities of matter; geometric patterns dissolve the grid at the same time that it reinstates it. Curating Fiber: Sculpture 1960–present, Jenelle Porter writes, “Adapting age-old techniques and traditional materials, artists working in fiber manipulate gravity, light, color, mass, and transparency to demonstrate the infinite transformations and iterations of their material.” Sculptural and kinetic, in additional to rectilinear, “the opportunity of the art and craft of weaving is not the familiar tool of pictorial weaving (limited by visual or image precepts, for example in tapestries reproducing the image of paintings), but rather the architectural capacities of textile materials in weaving, prioritizing the structure of the fabric” (Smith 2014, xvii). While the diagram is the preferred instrument of architectural formalism, its bureaucratic sign; the grid’s penchant for latent spatiality, however, supplies techniques for

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probing and disrupting order. In weaving, the field is sculptural and dynamic; its folds and drums sound out material culture.

Traditionally, the business of craft and the material limits of matter are one thing; the fine arts of design medias, another. As Craft theorist Glenn Adamson rhetorically asks, “Isn’t craft something mastered in the hands, not the mind? Something consisting of physical actions, rather than abstract ideas?” (2007, 1) It’s well known that the hierarchical division of labor appears in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, as the subjugation of work versus the “free.” “Art differs from handicraft: the first is called free, the other may be called mercenary” (Kant 1914, 184).17 Supplementing divisions of labor that so clearly reverberate in del Rivero’s work—and in Cartagena, a wealthy slave port that attracted pirates and privateers (escaped slaves fled the coast city, settling inland in Palenque, meaning walled city, a city of refuge, the first free African settlement in the Americas that also uses the city grid) —what I want to follow here is the idea that weaving, like seafaring, and marronage, is a cultural technique of the grid that stalls and installs geometricization, making and escaping the system (fugitive lines).

For an installation in the Palacio de la Inquisición, this is a powerful idea. Appropriately, perhaps, it also leads to a digression (elsewhere valued as hyperlink): while visitor attention is invariably drawn to the collection of iron torture instruments assembled in the back gardens of the Palacio, I was more interested in the question of how, exactly, an individual might denounce an enemy to the Inquisition. Motive is easy (control, competition, sabotage), but what is the technique?

From solicitous museum guides, I gather that the living history says anonymous accusations consisted in tossing bundled and weighted paper up into one of the windows of the Palacio. Like an inbox. Not deposition (sworn out of court testimony used to gather information as part of the discovery process; in modern law, hearsay is not admissible at trial) but accusation. Judgments were orally issued from another window, on the other side of the building; the outbox. Each of these windows serves as a threshold in accounting and certification, a good reminder that for Spain the Reconquista at home, and in the New World colonization beyond, are feats of bureaucracy achieved through documents, records, licenses, petitions, certification and verification rituals that reformulated identificatory regimes of the modern age—and the arts of forgery (Siegert 2015, 82). 18 In colonial mediascapes, the grid anoints institutional and other powers. A surplus of supplementarity codes the grid’s pervasive geographies of reason, at the same time that its mutinous capabilities (alongside what I’m short-handing as its neo-baroque capabilities) extend well into the future of other global economic governance regimes.19

Singapore National Gallery, 2016

Extraordinary growth since the parliamentary Republic of Singapore gained independence in 1965 makes it a wealthy country of 5.7 million, with the third largest financial sector in the world, the second busiest container port, the second largest casino gambling market, and, a tax haven for the likes of Facebook cofounder Eduardo Saverin, who renounced his US passport eight months before the Facebook IPO (Tulshyan 2012). I am not a scholar of Asian languages or cultures: I went there

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for the reason many long distance travellers, and Asian talent, do: for work. I was quickly informed that because urbanization eliminated 95% of its forests, Singapore aims to be a ‘smart’ garden city, with 46% greenery cover by 2007 and green building standards mandating sustainability (Clifford 2015, 70). Although the tropical skies are thick and hazy, sometimes with smoke from neighboring Indonesia, it could be far worse: increasingly, Chinese malls to the North for instance advertise the benefits of filtered (if not fresh) air, away from heavy pollution in cities like Beijing (Hornby and Zhang 2017). Spatially aware, Singapore’s first Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew (1923–2015) saw decolonization and independence through to carefully cultivated wealth: “After independence, as I searched for some dramatic way to distinguish ourselves from other Third World countries, I settled for a clean and green Singapore.”20 Combining a strong city-state (that generously supports health, education, housing, the arts, and media) with globally competitive free trade polices encouraging foreign investment and tourism, Singapore recalibrates neoliberal ideologies for its own purposes with monumentalized success.21

Located in the Colonial District on St Andrews Road (another colonial grid city), the new Singapore National Gallery, which opened in November 2015, answers to that monumentality across a variety of medias, most strikingly in its architectural design.22 In the words of its promoters, the Singapore National Gallery ‘occupies’ two national monuments: the former Supreme Court (1939) and City Hall (the 1929 Municipal Building was renamed City Hall in 1951). “Landmarks of Singapore’s colonial past and journey to independence, the buildings have borne witness to many pivotal events in the nation’s history,” including the inauguration of Singapore’s first Head of State, Yusof Bin Ishak, in 1959; and the appointment of Singapore’s first Asian Chief Justice, Wee Chong Jin, in 1963. Overlooking the Padang (the open playing fields in central Singapore, home to the Padang Cricket Ground), the Singapore National Gallery reinvents its identity as a global media city. For some, architecture has always been about creating community. An abstract idea, and a potent one, but I am told architects usually work from the abstract to the real (Holl 2013).

Escaping the rains, I paid the steep price of admission and scaled the enormous complex with plenty of time and room to wander; the spaces are so big and opulent there’s hardly any opportunity for a crowd. Pausing on the upper link bridge, at the very top of the new construction, I am compelled to stop and write: This is ferociously anticolonial architecture. Then I write, This is also Singapore’s enterprise architecture. By creating a canopied space between the adjacent former Court House and City Hall buildings (neoclassical structures of the West and historical landmarks)

Singapore National Gallery. Photograph by Lara D. Nielsen.

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today’s people now walk on air, “a civic plaza in the sky,” lifted up and into a perspective that was never intended for its newly restored pillars of governance. It’s great theatre: if once viewed as an architectural column to look up to, a feat of structural engineering as well as an aesthetic of power, visitors to the Singapore National Gallery are invited to respect the past at the same time that they now literally look down on its old Corinthian columns, peering into its darkened windows of authority like a oversized dollhouse that once schooled the territory. Provincializing the West, no doubt Singapore grew ‘up’ (Chakrabarty). Viewed from the heights of this new perspective, visitors can only regard Singapore’s colonial past as the relic that it is, perhaps even sentimentally, as souvenir, recognizably handsome if quaint in its square standing. Visitors can see the rotundas of the Supreme Court right up close, sheltered from the tropical rains by a glass and metal weave above that looks and feels like a canopy.

This feeling is made possible by the aluminum tree-like support structures that organically ‘grow’ between the two old national monuments, intimating a living web of vertically reaching branches of such natural strength and power, such depth and reach, the networked strength of an arboreal DNA which has, evidently, so quickly overgrown the days of Raffles and the British (to say nothing of the colonial labor that was used to build them, mostly Indian) that it gives the impression that the classical architecture it straddles below and surveys abroad is simply dwarfed by the branching drives up to the platform, miniaturized just as the other colonial buildings are throughout the most of the city’s corporate skyscrapers, like a cabinet of curiosities. Design theorist Manuel Lima explains, “Trees are among the earliest representations of systems of thought and been invaluable in organizing, rationalizing, and illustrating various information patterns through the ages. As the early precursors of modern-day network diagrams, tree models have been am important instrument in interpreting the evolving complexities of human understanding, from theological beliefs to the intersections of scientific subjects” (2011, 21). In the courthouse, rooms that once executed justice function instead as museum display, a place of memory (and its futures) now held in exhibition, stored in a treehouse; leave it to the pruning of curators.

This branchy power is big, beyond animal—making Singapore not so much a city of the lion anymore (the Merlion, in Malay, Singa-Laut), as it is an instance and an utterance of two apparently irreconcilable yet here recombinatory forces, the apex of coopetition: both centralized actual organization (“a system of strata”) and virtual “rhizomatic” management. With its disarmingly familiar arboreal governmentality, presented as a cluster of upward reaching natural branches, the new construction first brings to the imagination a kind of living genealogy. For Deleuze and Guattari, of course, the verticality of the tree specifically models centralized authoritarian power, a structure with hierarchical modes of communication and preestablished paths, which they view negatively. By contrast, the rhizome, they argue, is “anti-genealogy,” and even “antimemory,” with lines generating spontaneous and mobile metamorphosis. At the Singapore National Gallery, this is not the contradiction it appears to be. Like Singapore’s unique neoliberal assemblages, its blend of algorithmic management with strong leadership, materialize in the apertures of the Gallery. In retrospect, if they knew what we know today about trees (see Wollehben 2016) Deleuze and Guattari might not be so hard on trees. Let me explain.

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As architecture, the piece offers a monumentalized still-life—a sculpture of a thing that is indeed structured and organized, and yet also dynamic—the way an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) captures an outwardly visible moment of form, and some of its pulsing circuitries, but cannot fully detect or display the electrical impulses within a brain, or the full extent of its radiant connectivity. Those impulses more closely resemble the kind of rhizomatic movement Deleuze and Guattari advocate, “defined solely by the circulation of states.” Operating simultaneously by deep structure and by variation, “the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits, and its own lines of flight” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 23). Three dimensionally reaching not just vertically but horizontally as well, intimating (if not achieving) the form a sphere, the Singapore National Gallery materializes as both a decentralized and a distributed network, a resilient interlocking of forms articulating macropolitics as well as the micropolitics of assemblages (25). At once an organization and a dispersal, the Singapore National Gallery proposes a neural landscape, or system: as technological mediascape, this Singapore is bigger than the old citadel of City Hall, and badder than Ayn Rand, symbols of antiquated sciences. Visitors can touch the capitol that was once capital, as if it were, yes, museum artifact.

Singapore’s organic reconquest of the colonial city in favor of the once and future smart city-state, gives rise to the order of code itself, signaling not the end of time but the end of old time keeping machines and keepsakes, the age of watches, clocks, and computers replaced by digital grids, syntech, and biotic matter, assemblages of a particularly multicultural national transformation that shows no signs of losing its stride but rather capitalizes spectacularly on contradictory forces, not least Anglo-American capitalism and global algorithmic management, fine tuned with the central controls of the Southeast Asian state. Applying Nicholas Negroponte’s analysis, the staging of Singapore’s “clean and green” futurity at the Singapore National Gallery is on the mark. Biotech is the new digital. The materials revolution enabled by digital technology now makes it possible to program materials (to have sense, logic, and replication capacities). “Yesterday we programmed machines. Today we program matter itself” (Tibbits 2017). Game on.

That said, the architectural design is not exactly unique. The Singapore National Gallery is quite obviously two blocks conjoined by a window, an imaginary trajectory that provides a threshold and a boundary, an enclosure and aperture, an inside and an outside. As modernist fugue, the grid of windows, veils, and windows offers the space of fantasia, a projection back on the practice of perception. Reenacting the perception of form, this is a transformative strategy, describing the autotelic condition of seeing, at the same time that it facilitates a view of oneself (whether nation or city or citizen or alien) as a mediated experience, whether it is to see out of one’s loneliness or to activate a commons (Olk 2014, 57). We’re back in the baroque. But Kitnik (2016) also observes that today’s designed open spaces and working environments articulate an ideology of flexibility, mobility, and sociability that is specific to post-Fordist creative economy production values and processes. In the networked, smartly mediated global city, developing creativity and connectedness is orthodox management strategy.

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The belief that spaces without scripted functions harbor great possibilities is nothing new to the art world, or to the grid; the question is how that belief and those grid spaces can be put to use in particular historical times and places. The history of architecture and modernism rehearses industrial progress, as Kitnick explains: “The primordial spaces of modernism were spaces of labor. It was on the industrial efficiency of the factory that many of the fundamental attributes of modern architecture—the grid, the open plan, the revealed structure—were developed” (2016, 121). Warehouses converted for studio and performance purposes keep the ideology of industry alive so that today, “recent architecture poses such places not as sites of class conflict or encounters with difference but simply as settings for individual interactions. In such designs, a society structured by power, class, or ideology seems hardly to exist, replaced by an idealized possibility for innovation” (122). If all the world is a grid, the Singapore National Gallery’s threshold space stages the dream of cyborg subjects as unbound site of information exchange. “’Creativity’ now trumps craft, and industry has given way to ‘information’” (122). The grid proliferates, and accelerates.

In a 24 November 2014 speech launching Singapore’s “Smart Nation,” Prime Minister Lee Hsein Loong makes it clear that “The Smart Nation is not just a slogan—It is a rallying concept for all of us to work together to transform our future together.” The ubiquitous connectivity of everything recharges urban grid medias in a green dream of utopic efficiency regimes; and yet nobody has to be reminded that futurism has a history. On the one hand ‘technology’ could theoretically facilitate the growth of ecologically sustainable cities, with progressive urban planning informed, perhaps, by the simulations of strategy game SimCity. But cities bear the scars of history, and data are a form of power (Iliadis and Russo 2016). “Smart Nation Singapore” pioneers what some critics have dubbed ‘digital kampongs,’ replacing local community with virtual ones powered (and monitored) by digital services.23 While grid systems like indoor plumbing, running water, and waste disposal are by now widely acknowledged as good for public health, critics worry digital connectivity could jettison urban publics like sacrificial lambs, making cities instruments of tech company trade wars.24

But what’s coming down the pike isn’t just about apps and urban infrastructure as we know it. Focusing on the intersection of physical technology and analytical software to build the industrial internet (rather than all those pesky apps associated with the consumer internet of things), William Ruh, CEO of GE Digital (Boston, MA, and San Ramon, CA), says “There’s going to be a shift in the universe and nobody knows how it’s going to play out” (Dodge 2016). The programmability of the material world—of fluids and the entire flora and fauna of things—revives wild and far-reaching questions about the riotous presence of things.

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Conclusion

A major illusion of the art system is that art resides in specific objects.

Jack Burnham (1969, 50)

What does the grid mean for media ecologies today? For many critics, by the late 1960s the question was no longer how words, subjects, objects, or bodies do things; it was abut how systems do things—and it was exciting. In a techno-utopianism that he would later reject, Jack Burnham’s iconic 1968 and 1969 Artforum writings reach for open systems networks and communications theory to transform the possibilities of art, and the world. Burnham wrote, “We are now in transition from an object-oriented to a systems-oriented culture. Here change emanates not from things but from the way things are done” (1968, 30). Readers in performance theory today may find the language of dematerialized art more familiar, with its anti-modernist emphasis on what Lucy Lippard calls “the ultra-conceptual:” we know the score, the art is not what’s hanging on the wall, or what’s on the stage; it’s what happens, it’s performance (Lippard 1997). Instead, Burnham argues for the recognition of systems as media—seeing information, structure, and seriality as technologies of repetition for the polymath to engage and change those very same processes and systems. In hacker culture, information may be immaterial, but systems never exists without material support (Barbrook and Schultz 1997; Wark 2004).

In my reading, Burnham is both right and wrong. Right, because he recognizes the vitality of systems; and wrong to dismiss the vibrant matter of objects. I’ll stick to our common ground. While grid cities, installations, and architectures, for instance, can be regarded as a conglomerate of arts, for Burnham they potentially make for a rich laboratory for something else: makers of aesthetic decisions, or what Burnham gives the name to the critical function of art in a technocracy, Homo Arbiter Formae. Defined in opposition to Homo Faber (the craftsman), Burnham finds prescient the economist Kenneth Galbraith’s suggestion that in a technocracy, it is the control of information that matters. Because art is a form of information, a system and set of relations, and because “at a basic level artists are similar to programs… they prepare new codes and analyze data in making works of art,” for Burnham art (and artists) function as a kind of double agent in the technocratic state. Burnham’s double agent is a notion Claire Bishop (2008) runs with, in her critique of participatory performance regimes, focusing on artists who “engage in strategies of mediation that include delegation, re-enactment, and collaboration.” 25 For Burnham, however, relationality, happenings and the like are mostly besides the point. Instead, it's about architecture, urban planning, engineering, and communications media. In the era of Homo Arbiter Formae, “Art now challenges the entire art information processing structure, not merely its content” (Burnham 1969). In short, what I gather from Burnham is that performance studies orthodoxy concerning speech acts, or how to do things with words (Austin 1962) instead finds vivid intelligibility in the material cultures and medias of grids, code, algorithmic states, and the programmability of the material world.26

What is to be done? Back at the Cartagena Bienal, at Casa 1537, Eduardo Abaroa’s Proyecto de destrucción total del Museo de Antropología (2012), a fictional documentary series depicting the

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destruction of the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City (an imposingly modernist layout of concrete cubes housing collections of indigenous material cultures, built in 1964), stages a rhetorical intervention against control techniques state and non-state actors deploy (Albaraoa 2012; 2014). As Burnham’s technocratic double agent, the artist explodes edifice and artifice at once. It’s as striking as it is impotent, and not uncommon—making it a critical work. Staging the violence of resistance by any means, the work specifically protests collusions between the state and anthropology. 27 In the context of the Biennial industry, however, the recuperation of state sponsored cultural patrimony is rehabilitated in the name of those very lines of flight that both escape and fundamentally constitute control regimes.

While the kinks and flows of grid architectonics articulate capacious dynamics, the question of how to do things with the grid (and vice versa: how things are using the grid) revives urgent questions of power and migrations of agency. My approach to the grid seeks to open familiar dialogues, about variants of subjectivity and presence, to the materialities and devices of systems, structures, infrastructures, communications technologies, administrations, bureaucratic operations, and biotics. This is to expand and shift attention from the representation of meaning to the conditions of representation; in so doing, the grid offers ways to examine the rigs of repetition, material and otherwise. Whereas closed grid regimes render fixity like the lock of a crossword puzzle, they also suggest the universe is both more capaciously diverse, and, in a state of flux. To riff off László Moholy-Nagy, the illiteracy of the future will be ignorance not of reading, writing, or even photography, but of the grid and its networks (1989, 90). The observation is not necessarily apocalyptic (in conservative arts and humanities terms), if we take the grid for all it’s worth: an equivocal surplus of literacy in agential moves for this kinetic world.

Eduardo Abaroa, Proyecto de destruccíon total del Museo de Antropología,(2012), Cartagena. Photograph by Lara D. Nielsen.

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1 Media archaeology, following Foucault, aims not for linear progression but “tries to establish the systems of transformation that constitute change” (Foucault 1972, 173). Jussi Parikka explains: “Where do you start when you begin thinking media archaeologically? Do you start with past media, like a ‘proper’ historian? Or from our own current world of media devices, software, platforms, networks, social media, plasma screens and such, like a ‘proper’ analyst of digital culture would? […] you start in the middle – from the entanglement of past and present, and accept the complexity this decision brings with it to any analysis of modern media culture” (2012a, 5).

2 A principle of connectivity in graph theory, Menger’s Theorem indentifies flow and optimization problems in networks, necessary for building and sustaining an equilibrium of inputs and outputs in distributive systems.

3 The intimacy between maps and paintings is well-known.

Until science claimed cartography, mapmaking and landscape painting were kindred activities, often performed by the same hand. […] Cartography and landscape painting were also connected by the fact that their practitioners held common conceptions of the earth and shared the problems of selecting phenomena and of representing them coherently on a plane surface. […] So alike were the approaches and the products of painters and cartographers that until the Renaissance there was no terminology to distinguish clearly between maps and paintings. (Rees 1980, 72).

4 See Lippard (1972). Fluxus art historian Hannah Higgins remarks, “Looking at the geometric abstraction, musical notation, choreography and performance formats of the 1950s and 60s, I saw grids everywhere” (2009, 8).

5 I should declare my view, elaborated elsewhere, that performance is a media and that the body in performance, should it continue to retain center stage in the field, is always a remediated entity (Nielsen 2014; forthcoming). The return to media archaeology suggests a handy pointer: “Media are spaces of action for constructed attempts to connect what is separated” (Zielinksi 2006, 7). In Jussi Parrika’s rejoinder, “media archaeology has historically resided in between academic departments (media studies, media arts, film studies, history) and arts institutions and practices” (2012, 15).

6 These days, new approaches to materialism and realism tend to challenge discursive methods of analysis by positing a realism independent of human beliefs and desires, and a materialism constituted purely in terms of physical processes and matter, raising big questions about “thing power,” citizenship, spectatorship, witness, authorship, and representation. Sometimes they tend towards an analysis of value that does not center on capital. See Bennett (2010); Harman (2010); Parikka (2012b); Cox, Jaskey and Malik (2015); Harvey et al. (2014); Tompkins (2016). 7 Deleuze and Guattari (1987); Bergson (1990); Haraway (1991); Grosz (1998); Iliadis and Russo (2016).

8 Elizabeth Grosz suggests philosophy, as art’s “wayward twin,” has a place in assessing the same “provocations and incitements to creation” usually associated with art critiques of signification and subjectification (1998, 2).

9 Michel Foucault explains, "What I’m trying to pick out with this term is, firstly, a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions—in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus. The apparatus itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements” (1980, 194).

10 While the ‘clean industry myth’ persists, the problem of planned obsolescence connected to e-waste have only recently been included in operations and supply chain management literatures. Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller explain that the digital media are “participants in climate change, pollution, declining biodiversity, and habitat decimation—four constituents of the global ecological crisis” (2011, 468–69). On garbage economies, see Nielsen 2002.

11 Today’s ways of seeing (with apologies to John Berger) include, for instance, radiology, as imaging technologies proliferate the arts and sciences. Contra Walter Benjamin (or readings of Benjamin), perhaps it is all for the better,

Notes

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but then maybe Benjamin wasn’t so much against the copy per se but attuned to the transformational properties of mechanical reproduction technologies heading our way. As multimedia artist William Kentridge remarks, “I’m interested in machines that tell you what it is to look, that make you aware of the process of seeing, make you aware of what you do when you construct the world by looking at it” (2016).

12 Vetruvius was a Roman architect and a military engineer. I saw curated excerpts of the notebooks on display at a Minneapolis Institute of Arts exhibit, Leonardo da Vinci, the ‘Codex Leicester,’ and the Creative Mind (2015). Da Vinci’s documented fusions of art, engineering, and military design was purchased by Bill Gates for $30.8 million in 1994 (according to https://new.artsmia.org/press/leonardo-da-vincis-codex-leicester-on-view-at-mia/). An earlier exhibit I saw, the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2003 Leonardo da Vinci: Master Draftsman, is much more forthcoming about da Vinci’s penchant for war technologies, even though he hated war: he drew and designed tanks, cannons, crossbows, clubs, and explosives, rendering soldiers felled in violent battle. See also the drawings in Nicolas Macchivelli’s 1521 Arte de la Guerra (The Art of War).

13 It has to be said, though, that those paralogical suspensions Krauss speaks of involve things that are not limited to periodization, or even to those genres. This reading is uncontroversial: there have been a number of ‘liberators’ of artistic form from chronological confines (Focillon 1989), not least concerning the time-tripping baroque (Maravall 1986; Deleuze 1993; Ndalianis 2004). For Egginton, "The Baroque is theater, and the theater is baroque" (2009, 39).

14 Caroline Levine invites readers to export literary analysis to “new objects,” such as “the social structures and institutions that are among the most crucial sites of political efficacy” (2015, 23).

15 While Pre-Colombian peoples lived there before the founding of the city in 1533, the city’s Spanish name comes from the Southeast Spanish city of Cartagena (or Al-Qartājanna in Arabic), which was named after Carthage in Tunisia (once one of the largest cities of the Hellenic Mediterranean), by the Carthaginian governor of Iberia, Hasdrubal the Fair—brother in-law to none other than the renowned military strategist, Hannibal (247–183 BCE). Cartagena was an important trading port, a slave port and an administrative center.

16 The mission of the Museo Histórico de Cartagena de las Indias is to educate publics through the collection and exhibition of objects of material culture for display, and the site is itself a medium, mechanism, and an object of study.

17 While it is not uncomplicated, when Adolph Loos describes handicraft as corresponding to femininity and degeneracy, in Ornament and Crime (1910), he adapts this hierarchy for the purposes of repudiating the unfreedoms of unwaged domestic labor in the age of industrial waged labor.

18 In Spain today, that bureaucracy of authentication and accreditation is alive and well, where the idea of the original document, the signature, and the seal still count for something (when so often digital technologies makes the hand redundant). See Siegert (2015); Cohen and Glover (2014); Nielsen (forthcoming).

19 This play between movements on and off the record of the grid, from accusation to announcement, from oral to written deed, from street to office, again reminds me of something. The evangelizing work of Spanish Franciscan Fray Bernardino de Sahagun’s 1577 La Historia Universal de las Cosas de Nueva España (Universal History of the Things of New Spain)—aka the Florentine Codex—arranges a codex (book form) of texts and illustrations that seek to translate Coatepec Nahuatl linguistic practices and the cosmological beliefs of Mexico’s New World, into Spanish. The encyclopedic ‘record,’ a document produced under duress of conquest, derived from a diversity of oral interlocutors employed to transfer information into pictorial and written forms.

20 See Yew (2000). The Prime Minister’s words are on public display near the Paranakan Museum. The Peranaken Museum collects arts and artifacts of hearth and home: “In Malay, Peranaken means ‘child of’ or ‘born of’ and is used to refer to people of mixed ethnic origins. Chinese Peranakens are the majority, but there are also Peranaken communities of other ethnicities in Southeast Asia, including Arab, Indian, and Eurasian.”

21 In its first floor permanent exhibits, “The Singapore History Gallery” and “We Built a Nation,” The National Museum of Singapore narrates the city-state’s changes over time, from 14th century port to Singapura, Crown

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Colony (1867), British surrender to Japanese occupation in 1942, the self government of and today’s global city, with over 7,000 multinational corporations and astonishing growth rates. With four official languages (English, Malay, Mandarin Chinese, and Tamil), many more linguistic expat and immigrant communities (including Nokia’s Finns and Norwegians), and a swelling of arts and cultural institutions that make it a global hub by any quantifying measure, the five stars on Singapore’s flag signify the city state’s official values of Peace, Justice, Equality, Democracy, and Progress.

22 Designed by Studio Milou Architecture from France in collaboration with CPG Consultants Pte Ltd.

23 “Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) include radio, television, cellular phones, computer and network hardware and software, satellite systems, as well as services and applications associated with them. According to the European Commission, the importance of ICTs lies less in the technology itself than in its ability to create greater access to information and communication in underserved populations,” prompting attention to the digital divide, and ICT for development (http://searchcio.techtarget.com/definition/ICT-information-and-communications-technology-or-technologies).

24 See Townsend (2013). With many smart ideas, one smart nation, and plenty of trisectoral collaboration, electronic networks, sensors, and apps proliferate the digital service economy, amass the internet of things, build the industrial internet of things – and reconfigure civil society. In the public, digital applications and platforms manage not just buses, trains, planes, automobiles, hospitals, and banks but systems of transportation, health, food, and financial services industries.

25 Bishop hews closely to analyzing modes of subjectification that the rejection of objects (and objectivity) characteristically entails. See Claire Bishop (2008, 111).

26 In cyberwarfare, the 2010 detection of Stuxnet, a self-replicating computer malware capable of autonomous crossings between the virtual and this kinetic world, alerts publics to the reach of algorithmic grid medias. See Gibney (2016).

27 Abaroa’s project speaks to continuity and change in curatorial practices and/as governance. Critics similarly concerned with the role of anthropology in the coloniality of power increasingly reevaluate the regimes that usually inform curatorial authority. For example, Tony Bennett, Ben Dibley and Rodney Harrison express “a concern with the ways the processes of data collection and modes of anthropological expertise on which they are dependent are enrolled in various governmental practices targeting the conduct of colonial and metropolitan populations and subjects” (2014, 145). Their focus is on the assemblages of material culture (including “the human bodies, recording devices, paper techniques, theoretical statements and so on”), which make anthropological data calculable, [as?] in “the museum collection, the photographic archive, the population census, the social survey or the anthropologist’s office” (140). In Bennett’s terms, such fieldwork agencements doubly operate as assemblages at the intersections of museums, fields, publics, universities: all the administrative practices and networks of the research enterprise (142).

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Biography

Writer and Professor Associado Lara D. Nielsen works with transnational arts, medias, and economies. Recent published works can be found in Law and/as Performance; Scapegoat: Architecture/Landscape/Political Economy; and Text & Performance Quarterly. Nielsen's first collaborative book project, Neoliberalism and Global Theatres (2012) studies complex relationships between the arts and free markets, globally.

© 2017 Lara D. Nielsen

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.