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.

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Philip Auslander - "Tryin' to Make it Real"

Auslander, Philip. 1999. "Tryin' to Make it Real" in Performance in a Mediatized Culture . Routledge, 61-111.

Notes:

This essay tracks the the tension between performance and recording in relation to 'authenticity.' "Rock authenticity resides in a dialectical relationship between recording and live performance" [95]. "I am suggesting that the determination of rock authenticity cannot be made on the basis of either visual or aural evidence alone, but only by considering both, and the relationship of one to the other in light of other knowledge the listener brings to bear" [76].

I should note before i proceed that i have issues with this essay. First, i think that the key factor that generates 'authenticity' in music is missing - social networks a.k.a. "friends." It is referenced briefly (and dismissed) in relation to going to concerts with friends.

Authenticity in music is discussed explicitly in "Club Cultures" by Thornton (preceeds Auslander's book) and does a better job of handling that tension, although does not have the depth of this essay.

Additionally, i think that, frankly, rock is dead. Although Auslander deals with the MTVification, he doesn't deal with what 'alternative' did to rock. Post-alternative, rock fragmented so exceptionally that the only thing that is 'rock' is that which doesn't fit into one of many different subgenres. These subgenres have magnified the authenticity argument and because of their smaller sectioning, they have actually pulled in authenticity notions from punk - small shows, authenticity in fandom, "culture" of bands. Rock is no longer resistant in any of its forms (although indie rock, rap rock, etc. ...) -> MTV has pushed this, marking hip hop and rap rock (i.e. Linkin Park) as the new resistance.

Also, there's no discussion about how rock has always been in a precarious relationship with the production of blackness / badness. Even white artists in rock are often discussed in terms of blackness. And this is a lot of the difference of what is rock and what is pop.

Auslander is basically taking a path down the (de)valuations of live performance, recognizing that a primary purpose is to promote record sales [64]. "Only in live performance that the listener can ascertain that a group that looks authentic in photographs, and sound authentic on records, really is authentic in terms of rock ideology" [78].

Recordings are meant to sound real, performances are meant to sound like records. "Rock fan knows that recordings are representations but hears them as reproductions nevertheless" [65] "Because it is well known within rock culture that the sound is manufactured in the recording studio, the visual aspects of rock music performance do not work merely as a secondary confirmation of authenticity established primarily in the rock sound" [79]

"Authenticity can be heard in the music, yet is an effect not just of the music itself but also of prior musical and extra-musical knowledge and beliefs; that what counts as authentic varies among musical genres and subgenres" [66].

Issues around authenticity:
- Exclusionary [70]
- romantic bent where "rock music is imagined to be truly expressive of the artists' souls and psyches, and is necessarily politically and culturally oppositional [70]
- authenticity is deeply connected to anti-commodification and populism [70]
- effect of spontaneity, amplified sounds, american accents, aggressive vocal inflections and masculine performance [70-71]
- performative [72]
- balance of resistance and sympathies of entertainment business [73]

Authenticity is usually treated as essentialist, but Auslander is interested in the ideological concept and discursive effect [70].

"Rock musicians achieve and maintain their effect of authenticity by continuously citing in their music and performance styles the norms of authenticity for their particular rock subgenre and historical moment, and these norms change along with changes in the prevailing discourse of authenticity" [72]

Auslander argues that "rock listeners do visualize the musicians while listening to recordings" [74] - DO THEY???? Or do they visualize the MTV image?

"Listeners steeped in rock ideology are tolerant of studio manipulation only to the extent that they know or believe that the resulting sound can be reproduced on teh stage by the same performers. When that belief is substantiated, the music is authenticated. When it is shown (or even strongly suspected) to be false, the music is condemned to inauthenticity" [82] REALLY????

Auslander moves to Baudrillard and Benjamin.

"The aura must be seen as existing between the recording and the live performance. The aura is located in a dialectical relation between two cultural objects - the recording and the live performance - rather than perceived as a property inherent in a single object, and it is from this relation of mutuality that both objects derive their authenticity" [85].

"The dialectic of recordings and live performance central to rock ideology was deprived of its traditional authenticating function. Live concerts would become what recordings had always been: simulations - recreations of performances that never took place, representations without referents in the real" [86]. (UH-OH) "The crucial difference is that now one recording (the video) creates desire for another recording (the album), not for a live performance of the music" [92] "While the video authenticates the sound recording by replicating the live production of the sound, live performance authenticates the video by replicating its images in real space" [308].

"Technologies therefore 'place authenticity and creativity in crisis, not just because of the issue of theft [of musical texts], but through the increasingly automated nature of their mechanisms" [105]

Notes by me: Auslander seems to be using Benjamin and Baudrillard to back up his view that there is a dialectic, positioning them to challenge the technological development. The goal of this essay is clearly to emphasize the importance of presence (liveness) in music authenticity, an argument that Thornton tears apart as being a fantasy at best. It is Bourdieu that can be used to challenge utopian fantasy of presence.

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February 11, 2005

Peggy Phelan - "The ontology of performance: representation without reproduction"

Phelan, Peggy. 1993. "The ontology of performance: representation without reproduction" in Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, Routledge: London and New York.

Notes:

"Performance's only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance" [146]

Fundamentally, for Phelan, "The act of writing towards disappearance, rather than the act of writing towards preservation, must remember that the after-effect of disappearance is the experience of subjectivity itself" [148]. She demands an economy "not based on preseration but one which is answerable to the consequences of disappearance" [165].

Phelan is interested in the political act of performance, the ways in which it challenges but also re-inscribes hegemonic structures of power.
- by being nonreproductive, "clogs the smooth machinery of reproductive representation necessary to the circulation of capital" [148]

Performance 1) "implicates the real through the presence of living bodies"; 2) requires consumption; 3) "plunges into visibility - in a maniacally charged present - and disappears into memory" because of lack of copy; 4) offers the "possibility of revaluing that emptiness" [148]

"To acknowledge the Other's (always partial) presence is to acknowledge one's own (always partial) absence" [149].

Performance challenges writing to become performative [149].

Performance is tightly bound to metaphor and metonomy whereby, "metaphor works to secure a vertical hierarchy of value and is reproductive; it works by erasing dissimilarity and negating difference" and "metonymy is additive and associative; it works to secure a horizontal axis of contiguity and displacement" [150]

Phelan uses the work of performance artists to highlight the political element of performance that brings into question presence.

Sophie Calle:

"By placing memories in the place of paintings, Calle asks that the ghosts of memory be seen as equivalent to the 'permanent collection' of 'great works.' One senses that if she asks the same people over and over about the same paintings, each time they would describe a slightly different painting. In this sense, Calle demonstrates the performative quality of all seeing" [147]

"Seeing and memory forget the object itself and enter the subject's own set of personal meanings and associations... forgetting (or stealing) of the object is fundamental energy of its descriptive recovering" [147]

Angelika Festa:

"Appears in order to disappear" [152], "a direct and unmediated Presentation-of-Presence" [162]

"By taking the notion that women are not visible within the dominant narratives of history and the contemporary customs of performance literally, Festa prompts new considerations about the central 'absence' integral to the representation of women in patriarchy. Part of the function of women's absence is to perpetuate and maintain the presence of male desire as desire - an unsatisfied quest" [163-164]

"Festa's performance work underlines the suspension of the female body between teh polarities of presence and absence, and insists that 'the woman' can exist only between these categories of analysis" [164]


Phelan's critique is firmly situated in a feminist approach wile recognizing the performative desires of a feminist critique because "feminist critical writing is an enactment of belief in a better future; the act of writing brings that future closer" [150].

The spectator has dominance, a reality that is often unchecked particularly in American theatre.

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February 10, 2005

Derrida - "The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation"

Derrida, Jacques. "The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation" In Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 232-250.

Notes:

Derrida seeks to define (scope) the theatre of cruelty. He is speaking in direct response to the thoughts of Artaud.

Theatre of cruelty is NOT [243-245]:
- non-sacred theatre
- theatre that privileges speech/verb over the act --> this is simply speech
- abstract theatre
- theatre of alienation
- non-political theatre
- ideological, cultural communicative, interpretive theatre

Theatre of cruelty:
- is about affirmation [232]
- expulses God from the stage, produces a nontheological space [235]
- is not representation, but life itself (to which life is unrepresentable) [234]
- does not allow voyeurism to overcome pure visibility [235]
- theatre of cruel dreams (a.k.a. "absolutely necessary and determined dreams, dreams calculated and given direction... [not] the empirical disorder of spontaneous dreams" [242]) -- law of dreams, not interpretation that must be produced
- takes place one time [247]

Beneath this is a belief that "Theatricality must traverse and restore 'existence' and 'flesh' in each of their aspects.... whatever can be said of the body can be said of theatre" [232].

Cruelty is about recognizing death (and thus life), the point beyond the void. It is about making this active, present, about giving it presence. It is not representation, but life itself whereby "life is the nonrepresentatable origin of representation" [234].

The illusion of representation is that it "creates nothing, has only the illusion of having created" [235].

"The stage will no longer operate as the repetition of a present, will no longer re-present a present that would exist elsewhere and prior to it, a present that would exist elsewhere and prior to it" [237].

The goal is to rid theatre of producing a space that is about absence (representation, interpretation). Visibility and sensibility, not simply representation [238]. Connected to this is the death of the author and director (who is just an artisan of translation anyhow).

"It is less a question of constructing a mute stage than of constructing a stage whose clamor has not yet been pacified into words" [240]

"The subconscious will not play any true rule on stage" [242].

"The theater of cruelty thus would not be a theater of the unconscious. Almost the contrary. Cruelty is consciousness, is exposed lucidity" [242].

"Dialectics is always that which has finished us, because it is always that which takes into account our rejection of it. As does affirmation. To reject death as repetition is to affirm death as a present expenditure without return. And inversely" [246].

"The theater of cruelty neither begins nor is completed within the purity of simple presence, but rather is already within representation" ... thus cruelty must let itself be penetrated. "The origin is always penetrated" [248].

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January 23, 2005

McKenzie: "The Efficacy of Cultural Performance"

McKenzie, Jon. 2001. "The Efficacy of Cultural Performance." In Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance London & New York: Routledge.

Overview: Trapsing through the history of performance studies, this essay frames the discipline through efficacy, liminality and resistance. The goal is to explain the significance of performance studies and to trace its contestations.

Scholars have regularly attributed the following to cultural performance: "1) social and self-reflection through the dramatization or embodiment of symbolic forms, 2) the presentation of alternative arrangements, and 3) the possibility of conservation and/or transformation" (31).

Performance studies inherently challenges, "provokes, contests, stakes a claim" (32). Like cultural studies, it "challenged theory to get real, while also challenging itself with theoretical questions concerning the status of that 'real'" (33). It pulls from a myriad of disciplines ranging from anthropology to cultural studies, linguistics to dance history. Four concepts are often cited as key: "Victor Turner's 'social drama,' Milton Singer's 'cultural performance,' Kenneth Burke's 'dramatistic pentad' and Erving Goffman's 'social psychology of everyday life'" (33).

For Carlson, "With performance as a kind of critical wedge, the metaphor of theatricality has moved out of the arts into almost every aspect of modern attempts to understand our condition and activities, into almost every branch of the human sciences - sociology, anthropology, ethnography, psychology, linguistics" (35).

Schechner: "Performance studies is 'inter' - in between. It is intergenic, interdisciplinary, intercultural - and therefore inherently unstable. Performance studies resists or rejects definition. As a discipline, PS cannot be mapped effectively because it transgresses boundaries, it goes where it is not expected to be. It is inherently 'in between' and therefore cannot be pinned down or located exactly" (50).

One concern: "By focusing on liminal activities, on transgressive and resistant practices, or, more generally, upon socially efficacious performances, we have overlooked the importance of other performances..." (52).

Notes: This framing of performance studies focuses on how the discipline is inherently other, and desirably so. There is contestation over how formal the discipline is and should be, a notable desire to be liminal and marginalized, situated outside of the normal structure of academia. Of course, this desire appears endemic to its self-view as resistant whereby acceptance would mean being a part of hegemonic discourse.

I have no idea how accepted this narrative of performance studies is, but the attempt to describe it is utterly fascinating, revealing many of the quirks of key characters.

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