Performance, Identity, and the Neo-Political Subject

Fintan Walsh, Matthew Causey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415509657
• eBook ISBN: 9781136154850
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Teatro

This book stages a timely discussion about the centrality of identity politics to theatre and performance studies. It acknowledges the important close relationship between the discourses and practices historically while maintaining that theatre and performance can enlighten ways of being with others that are not limited by conventional identitarian languages. The essays engage contemporary theatre and performance practices that pose challenging questions about identity, as well as subjectivity, relationality, and the politics of aesthetics, responding to neo-liberal constructions and exploitations of identity by seeking to discern, describe, or imagine a new political subject. Chapters by leading international scholars look to visual arts practice, digital culture, music, public events, experimental theatre, and performance to investigate questions about representation, metaphysics, and politics. The collections seeks to foreground shared, universalist connections that unite rather than divide, visiting metaphysical questions of being and becoming, and the possibilities of producing alternate realities and relationalities. The book asks what is at stake in thinking about a subject, a time, a place, and a performing arts practice that would come 'after' identity, and explores how theatre and performance pose and interrogate these questions.

Part I

Positioning the Neo-Political Subject

1

The Metaphysical Fight

Performative Politics and the Virus of Alienation

Herbert Blau

I don’t know how things stand. I know neither who I am nor what I want, But others say they know on my behalf, others, who define me, link me up, make me speak, interpret what I say, and enroll me. Whether I am a storm, a rat, a rock, a lake, a lion, a child, a worker, a gene, a slave, the unconscious, or a virus, they whisper to me, they suggest, they impose an interpretation of what I am and what I could be.

Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France¹

He who is identical with himself might as well have himself buried, he doesn’t exist anymore, isn’t moving anymore. Identical is a monument. What we need is the future and not the eternity of the moment. We have to dig up the dead again and again, because only from them can we obtain a future.

Heiner Müller, Beyond the Nation²

However the future occurs, let’s back up for a moment, if not the eternity of it, to a play which more than suggests, whoever you are or may be, that subjectivity is a lie and, about what can’t be buried, the dead know more than you. I have in mind Brecht’s In the Jungle of Cities (1927), which I happened on again in the course of writing an autobiography, reflecting there on my directing Mother Courage (1939), the first production in this country, over half a century ago; ³ then Galileo (1938), in which—as my ideas of theatre changed, with Beckett, Genet, then more through the other arts—we turned Brecht’s methods against him.⁴ I’ve written about that before, and if I were still directing today and drawn to Brecht again, it would be to his earliest plays, which are undeterrably closer in their chronic, self-doubting, visceral contradictions, to some fissure of the real or epistemological fault, and what at the nerve-ends of thought, exhausted, you have to think over again—what compels me most in performance and unsettling any politics. Thus, In the Jungle of Cities.

In one of his last encounters with the Malaysian lumber-dealer Shlink—enigmatic, entrepreneurial, buying opinions, identity, teasing out secret thoughts, with a self-humiliating longing for ‘phosphorescent rot’⁵—the once-refractory Garga says, ‘You’re staging a metaphysical fight, but leaving a slaughterhouse behind you.’⁶ However the staging is staged, Garga’s resistance has been undone, if not a sellout, worn out, and unless the acting is simplistic, Shlink remains a mystery. As the metaphysics descends through an all-knowing indeterminacy to a withering promiscuity, and thence, from a hellish brothel of unmeaning, with rats gnawing in a ‘crazy light’ to a wistful ‘golden answer [ … ] buried deep in the ground,’⁷ the reasons are unaccountable. But about this inexplicably sardonic, yet elegiac play, Brecht wrote in a brief prologue: ‘Don’t worry your heads about the motives for the fight, keep your minds on the stakes. Judge impartially the technique of the contenders, and be prepared to concentrate on the finish.’⁸

Yet, as we keep our minds on the stakes, not only then, in the emerging grotesque of a bacterial capitalism, with its insidious competition, but even now, in the midst of our Great Recession, it soon becomes apparent, judge the technique as we will, that alienation is not an effect, but a viral condition of being.

As for The Fight Between Two Men in the Gigantic City of Chicago (the play’s subtitle), this not-yet-Epic provides, through the city Brecht hadn’t seen, a nevertheless proleptic view of what we’re experiencing now, amidst multiple performativities, with gender bendings, mixed-racial casting, and the normalisation of gays (especially in conventional drama), as we try to conceive a reliable activism beyond identity politics. There is also the conundrum of how, in a wired, pixelated, info-saturated world, with its clash, friction, stink, or scrofulous merging of civilizations—like the Asiatic Shlink in Chicago, a depraved version of Upton Sinclair’s—we think politics at all. And that’s so, whatever your disposition, if not neoliberal, otherwise enlightened, as by the residual neo-Marxism in the vulgate of cultural studies, or with whatever tempering rhetoric, like that of Giorgio Agamben, allowing for a ‘state of exception.’⁹

With an addiction to the unholy and the luridly arbitrary, Brecht’s hyper-baffling drama is paradoxically structured as a ten-round boxing match. As for the combative figures, with no sinister holds barred, nor any nefarious gambit, and the illuminations of Rimbaud, his affair with Verlaine, as the source of the homoerotics, you can hardly call them ‘characters,’ nor use the word character morally, since in every material or behavioral dimension, from the libidinal to the economic, reliability is up for grabs. And whichever way you turn, ‘The ground you stand on! It’s shaking! [ … ] Idolatry! Lies! Lechery!’¹⁰—that’s the way of the world. As ‘the generations look coldly into each other’s eyes,’ and the holocaust of dead bodies seems endless—not only in the jungles of cities, their rapacious slums or gangster ghettos, but as a subtext of globalisation, in those genocidal jungles, the Congo or Darfur—the slaughterhouse is defined by Shlink, theoretically, existentially, as ‘the cleavage made by speech’ and ‘man’s infinite isolation.’¹¹ About that isolation, can there be a performative therapy, or anything like a ‘talking cure,’ Freud’s definition of which, in Brecht’s Chicago, might even seem reversed, as the cleavage turns ‘common unhappiness’ into ‘hysterical misery?’¹²

‘The continuity of the ego is a myth,’ Brecht said, in a later conversation,¹³ but with the superior anguish of Shlink—ennobled with despair by childhood torture on the Yangtse river—it’s as if his finally surrendered body, deprived of a spiritual fight, is the mortifying price of the ego’s effort to redeem its loneliness. That task, he learned, was impossible, even with money to back it up, through riddling solicitations and, in the consummation of competition, the illusion of a lucrative enmity. The lust for human contact is, according to Garga, ‘the black plague of this planet,’ but as Shlink says, with reality like ‘a ship full to bursting with human bodies,’ freezing with loneliness, ‘so great is man’s isolation that not even a fight is possible.’¹⁴ Bleak as this vision is, which may not be on stage, but in the imagined reality of theatre—or in some deviant mode of performance, otherwise represented—there’s something life-giving about it, even if it reduces the metaphysics to ‘nothing to show but [ … ] bare life.’ Bare as that may be (more Nietzsche than Agamben¹⁵), and though the planet may not ‘change its course on our account,’¹⁶ there’s still an impossible possibility, with an incipient inaesthetic, as the ground goes under Shlink’s feet. ‘Throw a cloth over my face,’ he says, as if in succumbing to the endgame, he has been transmuted to Beckett’s Hamm. And then, as the lynchers come, the knives cutting openings in the encapsulated tent of being, we’re told at the end of the battle, the drama’s final round: ‘Go away. He just died. He doesn’t want anyone to look at him.’¹⁷ Finished, it must be finished, but how can that be, if we go away thinking of what we saw, that mortifying mortality, as not only there, enacted, but visibly invisible—for all the critique of ‘the gaze,’ that distressing specular paradox, an indemnification of being.

In a disconsolate coda to the vanity of the fight, Garga has the last words: ‘The chaos is used up. That was the best time.’¹⁸ Maybe so, maybe not. Since Brecht was ‘not writing for the scum who want to have the cockles of their hearts warmed,’ Shlink’s desire, which precipitated the chaos, is presumably dramatised with a cold objectivity; however egregious, unconscionable, it is ‘there to be understood.’¹⁹ But how to understand it when ‘man is an atom that perpetually breaks up and forms anew?’ And when Brecht adds, ‘We have to show things as they are,’²⁰ the question must surely arise, as from complexity theory, how do we objectively show the perpetual atomisation? And what, if we conceive a theatricality of the particle physics, is efficaciously political in the showing? Or, not resolving the conundrum about the objective showing and settling for something less, what kind of performance would it be, given the amplitude of the atrocities and enigmas haunting politics today—beyond the scope of contention about a mosque near ground zero—if we also asked the ethical questions raised (not only at Arlington Cemetery, those unmarked graves) by the identities of dead bodies?

This might have come to mind, though I doubt it, when Teresa Margolles, in a performative installation, drew on disinfected water used in Mexico City’s morgue to wash the corpses there?²¹ To what extent were those unconsulted corpses, already victimised by violence, imagined, perhaps, in their vaporised presence—the water run through a fog machine—an issue for the spectators inhaling the fog? Or, as the congenitally depressed, confessional poet Anne Sexton once asked before she committed suicide, ‘And what of the dead? They lie without shoes / in their stone boats. They are more like stone / than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse / to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.’²²

The dead were hardly blessed, nor anything like stone, as the extremities of performance threatened throat, eye, and knucklebone, in what seemed the perpetual atomisation of the Brechtian text, in a recent production called Versus—In the Jungle of Cities, by Teatr Nowy from Krakow, at the Under the Radar Festival in New York. With four actors directed by Radoslaw Rychcik, the exacerbations of performance were such that they were hardly under the radar. When they weren’t self-abusive, the actors seemed at the mercy of each other, in their oversexed sado-masochism, or blindfolded, naked, a woman no more than property, scrubbing the floor to Motown, wheezing, then whimpering, collapsing into a stupor; or we see a demented Garga lacerating his body, like an enlarged penis, in a high-velocity masturbation, brought on by thinking of Shlink, to whom he gives his sister Maria, who then slaps herself incessantly, as if to void herself of identity. And if the audience froze in their seats or were otherwise stoned, it was not from objectivity, but from nauseating images of despicable exploitation, and a choreographed violence that seemed to be at the limits of what an audience was prepared to watch. In that harrowing regard, we might see the collateral damage, as the actors’ corrosive energies abraded on the unnamable, erasing signs of being, and with politics insufficient to a failing metaphysics, the rites of identification.

As for the violence we try to forget, in the paralysing impotency around the daily news, there are legions and lesions, from the genocidal to sadism to the subtlest intimidation, and while from horror movies to Avatar (2009), film has the capacity to visualise the worst, when you get it there in the flesh, theatricalised in extremity, it may in its mortal seeming seem like the realer thing—though in mixed-media performance today, degrees of reality may be perceptual gradients of the filmic or video image. Speaking of gradients, years ago I directed a production of Genet’s The Balcony (Actor’s Workshop, 1964), with tilting and swiveling mirrors around the scenes in the Grand Brothel, where everything was being watched, and if you watched those in the audience, they’d often be watching not the sexual fantasies before them, on the edge of the pornographic—all the scenarios ending in death—but what was happening in the mirrors, as if the actors acting were maybe uncensored there. That split-screen affect, in the audience itself, may increasingly be a function of a mediatised stage, where through multiplied or scattered appearance perception is likely to be accidental. And that’s so, even with the pyrotechnic empyrean of The Wooster Group and the palimpsestic precision of its dramaturgical chaos. With a minimalist rage for order on an emptier stage, there may also be performance that quite methodically narrows perception, as when two barely moving figures—are they actors? dancers? what?—stare into each other’s eyes for nearly ninety minutes, which Maria Hassabi and Robert Steijn did, their bodies trembling, embracing, in a searching-for-love duet, ‘Robert and Maria.’ What they saw, in those staring eyes, and what we’d see if we saw them staring, that may be hard to say, for there may be in the perceptual narrowing, and the baleful endurance of it, something astigmatic. Why, one may ask, aren’t we transparent to e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Performance, Identity, and the Neo-Political Subject
• Part I: Positioning the Neo-Political Subject
• Part II: A/Semiotic Directions
• Part III: Collaborative Practice, Collective Action
• Part IV: Performing Along and Outside the Borders of Identity
• Contributors
• Index