alterity

February 12, 2005

Rebecca Schneider - "Hello Dolly Well Hello Dolly: The Double and Its Theatre"

Schneider, Rebecca. 2001. "Hello Dolly Well Hello Dolly: The Double and Its Theatre" in Psycho-analysis and Performance edited by Patrick Campbell and Adrian Kear. New York: Routledge.

Notes:

By juxtaposing Dolly (the sheep clone) with theatrical notions of the 'double', Schneider seeks to expose our fears around cloning, namely that it challenges patriarchy at a core. "This is the fearful potential that the copy will, in the case of clones, literally become the original... The copy will re-place the original even as it founds an original, backward, as having come first" [103]. This calls for a "radical acknowledgment of an insight generally repressed in the name of phallogentrism, that the original is always already mediated, that is, inscribed backward - a (fictional or secondary) effect of mediation. We might be forced to acknowledge, in other words, that the original becomes itself through repetition (disavowed), just as repetition (disavowed) becomes the original" [103].

"The clone becomes a terrifying and feminized body present as the should-be-lost past, a living remain - an oxymoron like an archive of the mother - the father not as dead, but as alive, and born of mimesis" [111]. "If real life is a matter of memory, then the threatening irony of the clone is that it copies our copying too precisely - it 'travels back in time' to become itself" [110].

The power of cloning is that it "adds emphasis by noting an emphasis already there but not acknowledged, indeed disavowed" [98-99]. In other words, the clone challenges the significance of the original, of the root.

In a patriarchal society, the root is the father - "father as original" [103]. Cloning disrupts the hierarchy of fathers because a clone would not be 'true' as it would not have the same father [107]. "The problem with the clone is that the old original/copy divide is threatened not simply by wiggy performance artists, cyber-celebrating computer geeks, or worse smithy theorists - but the threat comes from the antiseptic halls of the laboratory with, as Probio America declared, 'commercial reality' just around the corner" [111]. In other words, the threat comes from the very crux of masculine power. There is a "fear of mimesis, or a feminized realm of replication itself, where Origins are fictions, or if not complete fictions then proton pseudoi, or 'first lies,' and Foundations are outed as performative re-foundations" [103].

All along, theatre has been struggling with the implications of cloning, of doubling. Artists have sought to make "the copy explicitly, again and again beside itself, indeed touching itself... [to recover] the intrinsic queer appeal of a mass-cultural representation which would otherwise disavow the presence of its (admiring) gay male audience" [98]. In other words, artistic doubling shows the problem of the 'original' by forcing situations where one must reflect and recognize the shift in power that occurs with such doubling. "The clone functions to remark 'emphasis in original' and press acknowledgment of what has otherwise been a subject of refusal" [101].

"To parody parody - but that is perhaps part of the clonal point, where appropriation becomes strangely original" [100]. Self-replicas, doubling doubling, parodies on parodies - all of this has been used to expose the underlying assumption that this is and should be an original and that this original has the authentic aura and that authenticity is essential.

Category: performance studies

Posted by zephoria at February 12, 2005 8:17 PM

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