Disability and Contemporary Performance

Bodies on the Edge

Petra Kuppers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136500404
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

Disability and Contemporary Performance presents a remarkable challenge to existing assumptions about disability and artistic practice. In particular, it explores where cultural knowledge about disability leaves off, and the lived experience of difference begins. Petra Kuppers, herself an award-winning artist and theorist, investigates the ways in which disabled performers challenge, change and work with current stereotypes through their work. She explores freak show fantasies and 'medical theatre' as well as live art, webwork, theatre, dance, photography and installations, to cast an entirely new light on contemporary identity politics and aesthetics.
This is an outstanding exploration of some of the most pressing issues in performance, cultural and disability studies today, written by a leading practitioner and critic.

Chapter 1

Practices of reading difference

In the US TV series OZ (1997–2002), about life in a high security prison in the US, Augustus Hill is the narrator who introduces us to characters, comments on story lines and expounds moral dilemmas. Augustus is a young black man who has a spinal injury and is a wheelchair user. Within the universe of this prison drama, his disability is used as an enabling device for Augustus: he can see events from a different perspective, make links, and act as a chorus for the viewers. Within the narrative economy of the series, Augustus’s wheelchair acts as a prison for his body – allowing his mind to be freer than the minds of his fellow inmates. Augustus’s disability in the prison is a narrative choice: Harold Perrineau, the actor playing Augustus, is non-disabled, and Tom Fontana, one of the executive directors and writer of the OZ series, made a narrationally driven choice to include Augustus in his cast of characters – a choice that can be read as being determined by the meanings of disability in our culture. Fontana explained that he wanted a narrator, a ‘Greek chorus’, and he wanted that person to represent a minority and be in a wheelchair.¹ He wanted ‘somebody who suffered even more than any of these guys … (his) understanding of the universe would be more acute’.² This statement reveals a pervasive attitude towards disability as a metaphor and shorthand: it sums up and presents in an economic way a deep form of ‘difference’ – a difference that creates a distance from the ‘universe’ of ‘normal people’. To open up this world of deep and profound difference, all a non-disabled performer has to do is get handy with a wheelchair.

Performers can perform disability, and this performance has currency, tradition and weight in the social sphere of popular culture: film actors playing disabled characters have carried off a number of Oscars, making it seem that acting disabled is the highest achievement possible. There is plenty of scope for actors interested in taking on this challenge: both our popular and our high art heritage provide many instances of disabled characters, from Richard III to Quasimodo, from the X-Men to Captain Ahab. What we see much less is disabled people as artists and originators of artistic social texts and practices. In this chapter, I want to move from non-disabled certainties about disability to disabled perspectives on these certainties. Starting out from the Augustus character, where a non-disabled person plays out contemporary complexities surrounding disability in a popular cultural text, I will chart a course to one of a series of photographs made by the British photographer Jo Spence titled Narratives of Dis-ease, where a disabled woman uses photography to play with temporality.

Using the location of a prison as a starting point, this strategy allows me to weave together some of the core strands of my discussion: visuality and resistance, center and periphery, blind spots and silence, categories of otherness, common-sense knowledge, popular cultural narratives, and art interventions.

Cultural studies scholars argue that every system has a point from which the system’s organization is invisible, naturalized, ‘normal’: any social organization looks complex and incomprehensible from the outsider perspective (imagine a Martian ethnographer visiting Wimbledon, the British tennis event), but smoothes into a background structure once one is inside, part of the system. In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault emphasizes this inarticulate center in his reading of the Panopticon, where spatial configuration and social structure are interwoven, becoming the source of knowledges about others and self. He discusses the specular indistinctness, the blind spot at the center of the Panopticon, a prison system of total surveillance in which the one who sees is not seen, is invisible to the system. In the panopticon, a central point where the guard sits has visual access to all cells which are clustered around it. The prisoners are on display, and Foucault uses the language of the stage to show how the space of the prison structures social roles. From a heaving mass of the dungeon, the prisoners become individual performers in a social theater: ‘[The cells] are like so many cages, so many small theaters, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible’ (Foucault, 1979: 200). The theater metaphor is extended: like an actor in front of a darkened auditorium, the prison-inmates cannot see whether or not the guard is currently watching them from the command post. This structure allows for the self-surveillance of the inmates: since they cannot see when they are being watched, they internalize the oppressive, surveying gaze: ‘Hence the major effect of the panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power’ (201). Foucault posits this is an example of the historical technologies that created modern subjectivity in the encounter between the visible, individualized subject and the invisible, impersonal institution. The working of the powerfield that binds everybody together is invisible: it is eclipsed by the blind spot that becomes that which is ‘natural’, ‘normal’. To every subject of the system, the location of the system within her own conceptual framework is invisible, and not directly open to intervention.

Foucault’s formulation of the modern subject sees its formation as historically determined by specific technologies and practices. In Foucauldian theory, the subject isn’t hardwired to a life of lack and loss, but is structured into systems through historically specific arrangements of knowledge and discourse. The subject can be seen to be in a complex engagement with agency: the subject acquires a position within the system through acts of repetition, through performance, through practices. Knowledge becomes sedimented into bodies by repetitions, by everyday actions, by learning ‘how to behave’. And through this emphasis on the living, everyday nature of knowledge and discourse, ‘things-held-to-be-true’ as acts of repetition, difference finds entryways into the system. Every act of repetition is minutely different from the previous act. Every citation of the law distances the law from its ‘original’. Foucauldian difference is more powerful than a binary Other/self position in that it has the ability to change the system, rather than affirm it by strengthening its boundaries. There are no fixed positions, but instead power, in itself neutral, flows and aggregates, creating recognizable, but not ontologically grounded, zones of center and periphery. The system isn’t built on a subject’s need for self-affirmation, but on groups and powerstructures. These powerstructures are mobile units, and can shift. If difference accumulates, a qualitative shift can occur. The system lives, and mutates. The technology of prisons changes, although the underlying structure of internalized surveillance is reinforced through an overwhelming number of practices that structure the Western social world: from fashion and discourses of beauty to medical practices that ‘normalize’ people, from classical Hollywood narrative and its coding of the relationship between the visual and the emotional, from colonial scientific practices that read character and intelligence from skin-color and head-shape, to contemporary law enforcement practices such as visual scanners and e-mail surveillance.

The system lives, and therefore changes over time as infinitesimal differences accrue. Resistance to the system is problematic, though: like the Panopticon, it is a self-sustaining system that invades behavior and knowledge structures, and there is no way out. At the same time, the blind-spot of the Panopticon rests in its inability to monitor itself, to be conscious of the many tiny everyday changes that encrust its practices, and that put pressure on its mechanisms.

In cultural studies analyses, a lot of attention is paid to the kinds of resistances that do occur, and to how these resistances align themselves with the larger system, are incorporated and become part of that which is fought against: a periphery practice is investigated, and put into a structural relationship with the center. A study concerned with disability representation needs to acknowledge the structural issues of center and periphery. Disability as a discourse is secondary – it is the invisible, normalized, ‘blind’ spot of the dominant, ‘able’ – note how, in the formulation ‘blind spot’ the negativity of disability as a concept of language becomes apparent. Given this secondary nature of disability as a conceptual category, and the impossibility of stepping outside and embracing the identity marked by ‘disability’, it becomes important to chart resistances, show incremental moves towards change, celebrate the historical march through the system’s institutions, and art’s place within that.

At the same time, for a disabled person, disability is not secondary. A disabled person’s own ‘normality’ can be in conflict with the norm of discursive formation. ‘Disabled’ is the phenomenologically normal experience, but one that is coded as ‘periphery’ rather than ‘center’, as ‘abnormal’ rather than ‘normal’, from the outside by the ascription of the term and social status of ‘disabled’.³ Thus, a disabled person experiences her form of embodiment both as primary and secondary at the same time, as she is structured into the certainties and languages of the system (a form of double consciousness-embodiment that is familiar from post-colonial studies). A gap opens up – one’s own blind spot becomes visible as it conflicts or oscillates with the vision from the center. Here, disability is experiential – a lived experience which resists linguistic structuring. The experiential nature of this knowledge stands in a complex relationship to discursive knowledge formations.

This chapter will move from different readings of Augustus in OZ to a proliferating, baroque unfolding of different reading mechanisms offering themselves to me when contemplating the Spence photograph. The motor for these multiplying readings lies in Foucault’s panopticon, as I align it with the social gaze on disability, accepted, incorporated, and reiterated by disabled people living under its survey. Every time the diagnostic or medical gaze captures the disabled person, every time the social gaze distances her lived experience and substitutes it with a script of ‘proper’ narratives, every time institutions structure the ways that disabled people think of themselves and of their relations to others, the panopticon of social life reiterates itself. The structure relies on visibility and interpretation, and is rigid in its allocation of secondary status to disability. At the same time, though, the structure is vulnerable to encrustation and tectonic shift, as its power axes become overburdened with reading scenarios. Too many desires, stories and slight differences in interpretation stress the certainties that try to keep prisoner and prison guard apart. In the prison of OZ, guards fraternize with inmates. Transgressions abound, and the oppressive systematicity of the prison system is commented on by the story-arc and by the characters. But the wider system that allocates secondary status to disabled characters, to black people, to non-heterosexual people, to women, to people from non-bourgeois social classes, and to drug-users remains firmly in place, as OZ’s characters play out their stereotypes. Against this, I will use Spence’s performance photograph to think about more structural, formal interventions and transgressions. In the wider social system of disease and disability referenced by the Spence image, I will read for seduction machines, for pathways, minor stories, and openings that destabilize her image as Victim’, as subject of a medical gaze, and as the abject other to non-disabled living.

The Prison of OZ

OZ uses visuality and surveillance as metaphors for contemporary life, and comments on it through story lines and formal elements. The episodes consciously comment on the set-up of highly visible surveillance mechanisms, with high-tech desks for prison wards blinking in the backgrounds. Technologies of media surveillance are complemented with equally elaborate behavioral practices within the prison population: signs, rituals, modes of communication are both constructed by and constructed against the system. Within this elaborate rat cage, Augustus’s position as the high-tech, special-effects magic-realism character mediates the different systems of domination and entrapment enacted in OZ. And outside OZ’s narrative universe, the viewer is caught within the ritualistic enactment of weekly TV schedules and within the metaphorical framing of US race relations and their endless production of victims, perpetrators and prisoners.

Into this terrain of surveillance and the law enters disability as a marker of difference, into a position of transcendence, surveilling in turn the narrative scene. An early episode of OZ explains that Augustus Hill was a drug user, that he shot a policeman dead in the course of a raid which surprised him in bed with his wife, and that a number of armed officers chase him naked over the rooftops. After apprehending him, one police officer, learning of his colleague’s death, throws Augustus off the roof.

This episode shows the importance of readings for disability signification. In the course of this brief narrative segment, Augustus’s disability figures in a number of ways. First, it is used as a device that singles him out among the prison population and bestows upon him the position of storyteller of the show. During his soliloquies to camera, Augustus and his wheelchair are often rotating in free space in a glass box, a reconstruction of a prison cell in glass rather than steel and concrete – a narrational no-where land, away from the constantly surveilled reality of the prison, and into the surveiling gaze of the TV audience, instead.

The signification of disability starts to shift gears in the scene where Augustus is thrown off the roof: disability here becomes the just reward for a slothful, violent life, an act of revenge. At the same time, his nakedness on the roofs shows his vulnerability, and the slight, delicate vulnerability of his frame stands in deep contrast to the armed and suited policemen – who are white to Augustus’s black. Vulnerability, victimhood, are further aspects of the signification of disability in popular culture.

In the discussion of sexuality and love, further significations of disability are activated: cultural taboos around the act of ‘lovemaking’ and the physical specificity of disability encounter the curiosity, the staring of the non-disabled at the disabled other. The episode actually shows Augustus’s wife helping him to place himself on the bed of the conjugal visiting room (but not the sexual act itself – the viewer’s voyeurism is not rewarded). In the scenes surrounding Augustus’s pre – and post-disability lovemaking the racial connotations of Augustus’s skin color come most to the fore: the ‘black stud’ stereotype is at work in his persona.

Disability works within OZ’s narrative by making Augustus a more thoughtful lover, one more attuned to the emotional aspects of sex – a narrative that works well with stereotypes of disabled people as ‘feminized’ or sensitive and (often in the case of blindness) ESP-talented.

In all scenes focusing on Augustus in his chair, gazes are foregrounded. In one episode where Augustus is discussing his sex life, the camera cuts back again and again to his friend’s eyes, staring at Augustus through the metal prison bars. In his scenes as storyteller, rotating lynch-pin of the prison, special effects surround his smiling face and the dreadlocks framing it – the metal and glass world of the prison, the rotating wheel of the chair. The physical impossibility of his suspension gives extra weight to his character. He reads the prison and its moral world, and we read him and his disability as a sign of privilege, of access to ‘deeper knowledge’, as the opposite to ‘action’ (that is how Tom Fontana envisaged the scenes with Augustus in the spinning box: ‘a breathing space for the audience after the action’, DVD commentary, 2002). It is from this position apart, yet enclosed, that Augustus can see what others can’t: he can see beyond the blind spots set up by immediacy and the pecking order. Away from the center, the workings of the prison, its social order and its narratives become apparent to him. He can see people’s actions in a larger frame, comment on them with fore- and hindsight or announce events as inevitable given the prison’s dynamic.

Already we see how readings multiply, creating a dense web of inter- and intratextual references that intersect in my reading practice in the image of the wheelchair user. Beginning to read OZ through this lens shows the importance of pre-existing knowledges, discourses, as well as pre-existing emotional values to any act of representing disability – on screen, on the stage, in a photo, in words.

Disability as a concept asks for a thorough and careful analysis of reading practices, the investigation of different blind spots, different ways of making meaning, and an analysis and awareness of the power structures inherent in any acts of performativity, performance and mediation. In the discussion that follows, disability comes to figure not only as a player within an image field, where certain meanings accrue to it, but as a placeholder for forms of difference that do not lend themselves to easy opposition. In Jo Spence’s photography, culture’s exiled other, its pain and its difference, comes into view.

Jo Spence: Performing death

The other trace of a performance I want to discuss in this chapter is Jo Spence’s photo sequence Narratives of Dis-ease (1990), with my main focus on the second photo in the series, called Exiled. I am using this photo by reading it as an intersection between semantic meaning and the embodied reader, focusing on the phenomenology of reading. Phenomenology is a series of philosophical practices that find their founding moment in the observation of enworldedness.⁴ Phenomenology holds that knowledge of the world is constituted in the world: not as a separate mental entity observing the realm of the bodily, but instead in direct interaction and deeply involved in the flesh and the world. And in turn, the world is substance, united in the same field of presence as my own embodied being. In this world, objects do not come to me and my senses as categorized ‘things’ that find their place in a mental storage system, but I encounter them as densities, and as others. In reacting to them, I interact with them, and act in an intersubjective world. Phenomenological approaches to reading practices focus on the openness of the text to the reader, and on the labor necessary to create a temporary whole in the act of reading. Roman Ingarden introduces lacunae, or ‘Unbestimmtheitsstellen’, ‘spots of indeterminancy’ to discuss this intertwining of reader and text. The creation of the text is never finished, but open.⁵ This interactivity is part of the appeal of reading. Filling in the lacunae, making the text part of one’s own world, is the performance of acts of concretization: a dispersal of creativity away from an author to a reader/author field. In effect, this way of focusing on reading practices leads to similar results as poststructuralist reading theories, which posit a radical openness of the te...