The Bodies of Others

Essays on Ethics and Representation

José A. Sánchez, David Sánchez Cano

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781350250666
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350250635
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre History & Criticism

Available in English for the first time, The Bodies of Others investigates, through a series of close readings of several theatrical and film productions in Europe and South America, the relationship between "representation" (including theatrical representation) and ethics (defined as an ongoing relational negotiation, as opposed to a set of universal moral laws).

The main concepts are exposed through a comparative analysis of historical processes, political actions and artistic works from different periods.

Thus, the dialogue between the film La carrose d'or by Jean Renoir (1952) and Rosa Cuchillo by Yuyachkani (2006) serves to address the problem of the multiple meanings of representation. The dialogue between the play El Señor Galíndez by Eduardo Pavlovsky (1973), the performance The Conquest of America by Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis (1989) and the novel 2666 (2004) by Roberto Bolaño allows the concept of an 'ethic of the body' to be addressed.

Other key concepts such as identity, care, cruelty, violence, memory and testimony are considered through investigation of work such as Angelica Liddel's theatre pieces, Rabih Mroué and Lina Majdalanie's performances, Albertina Carri, Basilio Martín Patino and Apichatpong Weerasethakul's films, and Mapa Teatro's trans-disciplinary creations.

1

Representing ourselves

As I write these words, I try to imagine the situation in which they are read. While you read these words, you can try to imagine the situation in which they are written. In this double exercise of representation, temporality becomes paradoxical. For in my representation the imagination of reading is prior to the writing of the words that you are now reading. And in yours, the present of reading occurs – even if just for a few seconds – before the imagining of the act of writing. In a certain sense, for me the words are the memory of an image. For you, they constitute an invitation to imagine a plausible fiction.

I can imagine the situation in which you read, in your home, sitting on a couch or a chair, holding a book that you have just been lent. I can also situate the scene in a cafeteria, in front of a cup of tea or a glass of beer, beginning with the reading of the book you have just bought while you wait for someone, or simply enjoying a moment of solitude in the company of others. Yet perhaps you are not reading a book, but on a screen, or even some photocopies, which suggests you are a student and someone has recommended reading this book, or even insisted on it. You can also be lying on the grass, while around you people discuss today’s news, or plans for tonight, the weekend, a joint project, a romantic rendezvous or disagreements. Or you might be lying on a stage, maybe sitting against the wall of a studio, at the beginning, at the end or during the break, of a class, workshop, seminar or rehearsal.

‘Representation’ in this case is synonymous with ‘imagination’, the imagination of a situation or a scene. Since we are imagining, let us imagine something at this moment unreal, yet not impossible: that I am writing at the same time that you are reading. This would be a bizarre situation. Because if I existed not here, but yet now, connected, on the other side of the page or the screen, then it would be very strange if you did not respond to me, if you did not interrupt my discourse to agree, differentiate, debate or negate. On the other hand, if we both shared the same time, if the time of writing was the same as that of reading, perhaps with a slight delay between production and reception, then why use the written word and not the spoken one? Why resort to the mediation of the visual code when an aural one would allow more immediate communication? Above all, since it would free our eyes to look at each other. This would provide us with more information on the intentions of each one of us: on my honesty as author and yours as reader. Evidently, the criteria of honesty differ immensely from those of truth.

If in such a situation of co-temporality we would insist on using the written word and if we, moreover, accepted that one of us (in this case, me) writes while the other reads, then we would be condemned to a representation that is apparently useless. It would be a present in which the presence of bodies would be superfluous, since all the attention would be focused on the emergence of words, on the materiality (or virtuality) of the written language.

It is true that we can find in everyday life and in the cultural sphere examples of situations similar to the one described above. In everyday life they generally arise from an intent to establish a distance or ensure protection between persons who do not know each other or are in a delicate situation. In the cultural sphere, they instead arise from the opposite: bringing the writer closer to the readers, forcing a certain spontaneity in the writing. In the first years at my secondary school I had a teacher whose working method consisted of writing the text of his lecture on the blackboard. He did not speak, he simply wrote, with his back to us, and we had to copy everything that he in turn copied from his notes. Only after finishing writing would he turn to us and ask what we did not understand. Perhaps it was shyness that drove him to use such an exhausting method. The fear of presenting himself made him submit to a representation that made it unforgettable; without a doubt his action of writing persists in my memory much more clearly than his words and maybe his teaching unexpectedly passed through the body that he wanted so much to hide. At the other extreme, we could situate the writers who attend improvisation sessions, who write ‘live’ on the stage or in front of a camera, at the request of the audience or following certain rules. In this case, the writer presents themself as a writer, but that which defines them becomes secondary and the spectacularity of the act acquires greater relevancy. A representation once again, not decided by the writer but imposed by the apparatus, it anticipates the presentation: what is written is less important than how one writes.

This is not the intention of this introduction, much less that of plunging us into an abyss of reflection in which you will undoubtedly not accompany me. Yet reflecting on writing does not necessarily have to lead to an abyss, in the same way that reflection in general does not necessarily lead to self-absorption. Are we condemned to representation? Why not forget all of the foregoing and return to the immediacy of discourse? The problem of representations is that once created, they do not disappear that easily. Moreover, I seriously doubt that such an ‘immediate’ discourse even exists.

The imagination that you read about while I write, or that I write about while you read, is a fiction that makes us conscious of representation. I agree to assume the role of writer, offering myself to your imagination to be represented as the author; you accept the function of reader, offering yourself to my imagination to be represented as the reader. The good thing about this representation is that when the reading is over (and the reading can be interrupted, paused or ended at any moment), then you will stop embodying the role of the reader, in the same way that I will cease embodying that of the author when I stop writing. We will only recover those functions, moreover, if at some moment we encounter each other physically. Perhaps then other functions have superimposed or will superimpose themselves on those of the writer and of the reader. The acceptance of this provisionality keeps us from falling into Baroque games, those that very effectively allowed fictional representations to be superimposed on physical or social realities, with the aim of negating the reality until it imploded. Today we know that physical and social realities are likewise representations and we know what interests they serve.

Certainly, we could do without all of the above. Then I should write in the simplest manner possible what I want to communicate. Not ask you to imagine, but only to think. Why not definitively abandon the mode of representation and adopt the much more pleasant one of presentation? In presentation we would be in the present and in presence. Both imply the availability of those who make themselves present; in the present of those who prepare for dialogue, moreover, lies generosity (the present as a gift) and enthusiasm in giving time, as well as each one of us opening themselves to experience.

In recent decades, many artists have attempted to abandon representation to simply present their works or just present themselves. They believed that representation condemned them to insincerity, as well as that temporal, physical and symbolic mediations distanced them from the possibility of sincere communication and of an authentic experience in artistic practice. Representation, moreover, always implies a certain hierarchy: usually there is someone who represents and someone who observes the representation. This exclusivity is coherent with an economic logic based on accumulation, very different to the logic of the gift inherent in the presentational model. In contrast to these models, the goal was a certain immediacy and a certain horizontality in relationships, based on the modesty of the interlocutors: one presents what one has or expresses what one feels, does not pretend to be something else, nor that their representation is worth more than that of others.

Yet, is representation really tied to non-experience, to distance and to arrogance? Would it not be possible to conceive of modes of representation equally based on interchange? When we speak of ‘presence’, are we not actually saying commitment, involvement and not literally ‘presence’? What is more, ‘representation’ is, as has already become clear, a chameleonic word: which of the chameleon’s skins is problematic? Is the chameleon itself the problem or rather is it the light artificially projected on the captive chameleon that provokes intolerance?

What is certain is that these pages could not have been written without a certain confidence in the effectiveness of representation, without the confidence in that your reading will make reflections present and activate new representations, of which I will not be the author. Although, in a strict sense, I am the author of very few of the pages that follow in this book, in which I interpret, quote, comment on and appropriate what has been realized or written by others, who in turn developed, copied or intensified images, ideas and sensations that were seen, read or learned.

I cannot deny that a ludic impulse underlies these pages. One of the reasons that motivates the writing of these texts and the interest in many of these artistic and non-artistic realizations that serve as stimulus for reflection is the recognition of representation as play. It has traditionally been thought that play is what is left after the transcendental nucleus has been extracted from ritual. But the inverse hypothesis is increasingly becoming more productive: that first religions and subsequently art were the outcome of injecting transcendence into play. The critique of transcendence cannot lead to the elimination of play simply because it served as the support for ritual.

All human activity not driven by the necessity of survival, nourishment, defence or protection has a ludic foundation. Culture is play, art is play. We could also add: culture is a necessary game, art is a possible game and sometimes a gratifying one. A few years ago we would have said that the game of culture is necessary to affirm the human condition. Now we know that we share this condition with many animals. Consequently, we should acknowledge that play in culture is necessary to affirm the consciousness that allows us to conceive the human condition. Where there is no play, there is only brutality. Brutality is not a condition of animals, but of animals and humans deprived of the ludic impulse. Brutality is not the result, as determinists believed, of scarcity, ignorance and endogamy; brutality can sublimate itself in barbarism, in the survival instinct, evolve into a will to dominate, colonize, exploit and dispossess. Play is the antidote to brutality; representation based on provisionality, on modesty and on the acceptance of consensual realities, is one of the modes of practising play, without relinquishing experience.

2

Ethics and morality

Ethics operates in the sphere of practice, not in that of representation. One acts in accordance with an ethics. Does representation accept ethics? Only to the extent that representation is conceived as a practice, not as the closure of a practice. That is to say, only to the extent that representation is a moment of thought, of production or of action – not the place where thinking, production and action are detained.

The relationship between ‘ethics’ and ‘representation’ can be considered in various spheres of experience, with special relevance in those where representation implies people, where people represent other people. This habitually occurs in the sphere of theatre and film practices (in both cases taken in a broad sense, ranging from performative practices to television series). It also undeniably occurs, and has become an urgent problem, in the sphere of political action (trade unions, parties, citizens etc.).

I understand ethics as the operation activated when an individual has to make decisions that affect others in a specific social context, as well as the set of values and reflections that condition or justify the making of those decisions. Ethics cannot be reduced to a set of norms dictated by an institution, whether religious, academic or political. Such a reduction, in fact, means its annulment, as it would renounce the debate that arises in the immediacy of practice, as well as relinquish judgement of whether such behaviour is good or evil and of the decisions made in that practice. ‘Ethics’ defined as a normative set would be entirely compatible with ‘representation’ defined as the closure of action. The function of representation then would consist precisely in the fixing of those norms. In this hypothetical case ethics would see itself supplanted by moral science or moral doctrine. Yet this contradicts experience. For ethical conflict does not occur in reflection, but in action. Ethical behaviour, moreover, is more a habit that occurs in the flux of experience, one that cannot be based merely on contemplation or criticism of the acts of others.

If ethics occurs in practice, then one can only speak of ethics in relation to others, in a behaving for others, or at least conditioned by others. Good and evil cannot be regarded as absolute universalities that an individual or a group approaches through thinking or isolated action, but rather as relative terms, solely definable by the consequences that our decisions have on the life, happiness, joy or well-being of those whose lives we can affect.

According to Jean Jacques Rousseau, the human condition is acquired when one is capable of distinguishing between good and evil. Such a distinction, however, only occurs when a human being lives in society, since in isolation the human being’s sole worry would be survival. The distinction between good and evil is not theoretical, but practical. It is not a question of recognizing what is good and what is evil, but of deciding to do one thing or another thing, taking into account the good or evil that result from such actions. For this reason, the moral distinction is inseparable from action. And action is only moral when the individual decides in freedom, not compelled by or submitting to any force or doctrine. ‘To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man’ according to Rousseau’s maxim (Todorov 2009: 126).

Rousseau’s ethical reflection is coherent with a humanist stance. As Tzvetan Todorov observes, it differs from a traditional ethics that situated the individual in relation to nature and is instead closer to Christian ethics, which situated the individual in relation to others. Christian morality justified behaviour towards others in the connection of all human beings with a transcendental being: love of your neighbour is also love of God. The challenge for Enlightenment thinking lay precisely in justifying a humanism shorn of transcendence.

In a democratic society respectful of individuals’ autonomy, ethics can neither be based on transcendental principles nor be imposed as a set of norms. Ethics manifests and conditions the consideration that each person has for others as subjects of rights and feelings. In contrast to transcendental ethics, fixed and represented in a positive morality, the concept of ethics proposed here is more one of an immanent ethics, which does not serve as the basis of morality, but is manifested instead as morality in the time of an individual life and in the time of social life.

Alain Badiou attempted to lay the foundation of an immanent ethics based on his concept of the ‘event’. He reminds us that it was Hegel who established the precise difference between ‘morality’ and ‘ethics’, placing the former in the realm of ‘reflexive action’ and the latter in the realm of ‘immediate action’ (Badiou 1993: 2). Proceeding from this, he elaborates a critique of the ethical models dominant at the end of the twentieth century, beginning with the resurgence of a humanist ethics that strives to ignore poststructuralist criticism and the ‘death of man’ proclaimed by Foucault and Lacan. According to this ethical model, the victim, the object of ethical thinking or doing, is contemplated as a body, hardly distinguishable in its organic animality from the victimizer, both of them equal in their being for death. Badiou therefore proposes that the consequence of the ethical decision must be the manifestation of the ‘Immortal’. Secondly, he criticizes the ethics of transcendent alterity, inherited from Lévinas’ thought, which in itself cannot escape a religious foundation. What is more, it is corrupted in an ethics of sameness that achieves its most reductive formula in ‘become like me and I will respect your difference’ (25). Thirdly, Badiou unmasks the ethics of human rights as a substitute for politics understood as disagreement and as a manifestation of the nihilism concealed behind the announcement of the end of ideologies.

In radical opposition to this new nihilism, Badiou proposes an ‘ethics of truths’, which would be grounded not on the subject, recognized as non-existent, but in the relationship with the event, in the ‘fidelity’ to the event and in the ‘perseverance’ of the rupture created by the event. Each person would enter into an ethical relationship not as a human subject, but as a singularity affected by the event, who takes decisions based on the ‘fidelity’ to the event and to ‘persevere’ in it (71).

Giorgio Agamben formulated the immanent condition of all ethics from another point of view. The ethical discourse exists in return for recognizing that the human being lacks essence and does not have to realize any historical, spiritual or biological essence, that is, that human existence is the possibility and the potentiality of being one way or another (Agamben 1990: 39). The ethical experience occurs in a space of freedom, of free relationships and, what is more, of egalitarian relations: a relationship in which I recognize the other as equal to me in terms of a subject of rights, action and desire, but also of feelings and passions.

Ethics is inseparable from freedom, it manifests itself in the moral decisions that are taken in specific situations. It is consolidated in time, in the succession and in the coherence of such decisions. Yet it always manifests itself in the present, it becomes effective in the present of the making of decisions. Is there an ethics beyond presence in the present? Ethics is not a ‘reserve’ that generates future benefits, it cannot be understood in terms of production, but in terms of practice. Neither is it a knowledge that serves to judge and analyse the decisions of others, but rather something that becomes effective in doing, in action.

I will use the term ‘ethics’ below to refer to a practice dependent on the taking of practical decisions, or on the sum of practical decisions, and the reflection on this practice by a person or a group of persons. I will use the term ‘morality’ to refer to the normative or descriptive dimension, in other words, the study of behaviours proceeding from the judgement of good or evil, or to their deter...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface to the English edition (2022)
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Representing ourselves
• 2 Ethics and morality
• 3 Ethics and artistic practice
• 4 The problem of sincerity
• 5 What does ‘represent’ mean?
• 6 Representation and alterity
• 7 Frauds
• 8 Body and representation
• 9 Ethics of the body
• 10 ‘Putting the body on the line’
• 11 Hell
• 12 Document and monument
• 13 Representation and sacrifice
• 14 Fiction and pain
• 15 Fabrications
• 16 Dis/appearances
• 17 Presences
• 18 Memory and care
• 19 Memory and violence
• 20 Memory and humour
• 21 Histories and memories
• 22 End of the party
• 23 The fascination of evil
• 24 The ethics of the witness
• 25 The apparatus of memory
• 26 The history of this book
• 27 Without / End
• References
• Index
• Copyright