The Politics of In/Visibility

Being There

Kath Woodward

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780230302556
• eBook ISBN: 9781137319302
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Visibility matters in contemporary societies; online, in the media and in the public eye. But who is seen and how? Are women still seen through a male gaze? This book explores the politics of looking and being looked at, and the relationship between actual and virtual worlds, for example in sport, art and cinema.

1

Introduction: Are You Really There?

On 4 August 2012, I was at the Courtyard Theatre of the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford on Avon watching Shakespeare’s play, Much Ado About Nothing. I was sitting in row B, just the second row from the front, very near the stage. I know the play well and go to the theatre often. The wedding party of Claudio and Hero was being staged, as a traditional Indian wedding, when suddenly a member of the cast leapt into the aisle and extended a hand to invite me up onto the stage. There is a boundary between being in the audience, however close to the action, and being on the stage, but now I was in a liminal space between audience and cast, between watching and being watched. There is a threshold between actors and audience and one crosses a physical space between the two domains, but this was also a psychosocial liminal space, combining the inner world of desires and fears and my perception and the perceptions of the rest of the audience and outer, social worlds of norms and practices: the internal awareness of being in the in-between space and the social context, with all its rules and expectations, not least those of the audience as well as the (real) actors on stage.

I sat on a cushion on the stage ‘playing the part’ of a wedding guest, looking back into the darkness of the audience from the brightly lit stage. I was both part of the action and yet outside it. My outsider status was acknowledged by the surreal intervention of health and safety concerns when the young actor who had invited me up onto the stage to join the party, offered me sweetmeats, with the whispered comment that they contained nuts, ‘just in case you’re allergic’. Feelings of not really belonging to this cast were subverted by the next step in the play. Was I really there? Was I part of what was going on? The scene terminates with the heart rending and dramatic rejection of his bride by the bridegroom, Claudio, because he has been led to believe that the innocent young Hero is an unfaithful strumpet who has been entertaining other men in her bedroom. It was tempting to join in and challenge the bridegroom’s absurd claim, but my part, like the wedding party, was over.

My removal from the anonymity of the audience onto the stage highlighted for me the ambivalence of the liminal space between seeing and being seen. Whatever the jokes from my partner, a former actor, left sitting in row B, about this being my big moment, although I was suddenly put into a position of being seen, nobody was in fact looking at me and my performance would not be included in any stunning press reviews of the production. As an older woman I am familiar with being invisible or unheard, although the matter of visibility is very differently inflected according to race, ethnicity and disability as well as gender and generation. Skin colour may often be all that is visible or perceived as noteworthy about a person. Or people may see the wheelchair but not the person in the wheelchair. Visibility and invisibility are deeply political.

The actual experience of being ‘on stage’ resonated with some big questions, which I have been exploring, about the relationship between looking and being looked at, seeing and being seen and the relationship between affect, emotion and corporeality; between how we see ourselves and how others see us. Looking and being looked at involves connections between the inner worlds of feelings and emotions and unconscious forces to social worlds of rules, norms, social relations and cultural expectations. I was an embodied presence on the stage, but was not one of the embodied selves actually taking part in the business of the play: there and not there. Audience participation is a risky practice. Reality might always interrupt the performance though. Someone might break the rules, although mostly people know the rules and comply willingly.

Does ‘being there’ have to involve corporeal presence? There was probably only about a metre or two between me and the stage at the RSC, but being on the stage felt very different, even when it was acknowledged as yet another theatrical device for audience participation and troubling the relationship between actors and audience for dramatic effect. As someone who really likes live theatre, I am particularly enthusiastic about the experience of actually being there at a live performance. Live theatre has capacities that go beyond watching a play on television. (I am also a keen fan of several sports and am thus familiar with debates about the authenticity and greater excitement of being in the audience at an actual game rather than viewing it on television).

What is real about the live performance is also subject to degrees of intensity. The relationship between what is real and what is not, for example, the distinction between drama or performance and everyday real life, is not as clear-cut as one might think. It is not a simple matter of real and live versus recorded. Theatre can be too real in that it can be intensely violent, as some productions of King Lear have been with the blinding of Gloucester. The intensity of an act of violence enacted on stage can seem greater than an actual embodied act, which may have contributed to the suggestion that the virtual is more significant than the actual. Some contemporary drama seems to thrive on a violent display, which could extend reality beyond what might be tolerated; rape scenes in Howard Brenton’s play, The Romans in Britain, Edward Bond’s Saved and some of the late Sarah Kane’s work also originating from the Royal Court Theatre in London. Violence, especially against, or involving, the embodied person, invokes a particularly intense and even intolerable, sense of reality. Even though the audience knows that the performance is just that and the violence does not involve corporeal danger or pain because pain too is being performed, violence in the theatre has particularities, which are different from as well as similar to those of the representation of violence on the screen or in cyberspace. Violence also raises questions about the relationship between voyeurism and political purpose, between pleasure and pain which have recently been highlighted in feminist debates, for example, in the context of Theatre of the Abused (de Angelis et al., 2015), and theatre and violence (Nevitt, 2013). Whether one form, the actual or the virtual, is more real is uncertain and may be the wrong question as is the case in some of the instances discussed in the book. Nonetheless one of the troubling questions explored in this book remains the nature of the relationship between the actual and the virtual and the points of connection and disconnection between the two.

The virtual and the actual

The relationship between the virtual and the actual has at other times been conceptualized as involving a relationship between representation and reality (Althusser, 1971; Hall, 1997; Hall et al., 2013). It is clearly not a matter of either representation or reality, as if the two were separate and distinct as has been pointed out by post-modernist critiques (see Jameson, 1992) such as those of Jean-Francois Lyotard (1984) and Jean Baudrillard (1981), within theoretical frameworks which have often placed greater emphasis on the virtual rather than the actual in the making of the hyperreal (Baudrillard, 1995). Baudrillard, for example, argued that the first war against Iraq, the ‘Gulf War’ fought by the United States and her allies was combat in virtual media space. He even went as far as to suggest that ‘The Gulf War Did Not Take Place’, in the title of his 1995 book, insofar as, although there was military conflict, it was an ideological war against the spread of Islam and fought in cyberspace and the media (with singularly unsuccessful outcomes for the United States and her allies in terms of subsequent events and the growth of global terrorism). The war was underpinned by uneven global development with two sides, each operating according to different sets of rules (Baudrillard, 1995). Nonetheless, the loss of life and scale of damage to human beings and living creatures as well as the material environment, suggest that an over emphasis upon the virtual might minimize the part played by the actual in warfare.

Without going as far as Baudrillard in emphasizing the importance of the virtual, it remains the case that representation plays a crucial role in global conflicts and international relationships as well as in everyday encounters. At times the relationship between virtuality and actuality, or the representational and the real is brought into stark relief, again, as in Baudrillard’s example of the gulf war, when different social and cultural worlds collide.

The case of the murder of journalists at the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine in France in January 2015 is one such tragic case. The journalists at the magazine had been under threat for some time and their office had been subject to an arson attack in 2011, but in January 2015, 12 journalists were killed, purportedly because of the magazine’s continued commitment to freedom of speech and its right to publish representations of the prophet Mohammad in its satirical cartoons. The mass protests against these murders and those of police and shoppers in a Kosher supermarket in Paris which took place subsequently, in a total of 17 deaths, were expressed in the language and spirit of the Enlightenment and, in the tradition of Voltaire, by laying claim to the defence of freedom of speech as a basic human right. Thousands joined the ‘Je Suis Charlie’ campaign, accompanied by a ‘Je Suis Juif’ movement, which expressed strong resistance to the suppression of the right to representation of critiques of political, cultural and religious ideas and institutions. Supporters of the attacks justified them in terms of the depth of distress experienced by Muslims, for whom any representation of the prophet and especially one in a cartoon are profoundly offensive. These traumatic and deeply worrying events and the loss of life of journalists, police and shoppers in a supermarket, were framed by a conflict over representation and rights to make things visible through freedom of expression. There has been debate about the media coverage of events in Paris, because the events in France took place at a time when Islamist extremist group Boko Haram in northern Nigeria was murdering many more people, in ongoing violence. Both instances reflect the clash of cultures and terrifying examples of contemporary political conflict, which highlight corporeality and the intensity of being there and of what is visible and what is invisible in the complex processes through which the virtual and the actual intersect. I cite the case of Charlie Hebdo to demonstrate the crucial, enduring importance of the politics of in/visibility in the contemporary world and something of the relationship between the virtual world of representation and the actual world of conflict in which people lost their lives. The debate, and this example are not simply about virtual and actual or real, and the decision to publish was seen by some as inappropriate and inflammatory, although, of course they condemned the murder of the journalists. The issue of intentionality is caught up in the interconnections between the actual and the virtual.

The relationship between material reality and representations, however classified, remains a troubling one and this relationship is one that is central to this book. The idea that there are distinctions between what is real and what belongs to the realm of symbolic systems endures, and erupts at different moments, especially within value systems, but the nature of the relationship temporally and spatially is problematic and subject to change and different inflections and emphases not least of power relations. It is not simply a matter of one set of events or activities being real while another is virtual and by implication less important.

Gilles Deleuze’s work on the relationship between the actual and the virtual offers another more complex explanation which sees the virtual as a dimension of the actual which can indeed be more real even though he distinguishes between what is real and what is actual; virtuality is both the surface of what is and is material in that what is virtual can generate activity even if it is not real (Deleuze, 1986, 1989, 1991, 2002; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). Deleuze draws upon Henri Bergson’s work on perception and memory, and memory is a good example of virtuality, which can shape action and generate outcomes. The virtual is not the real, but it is the capacity of potentiality (Massumi, 1996, 2002). Thus ‘the “virtual” is not opposed to “real” but opposed to “actual,” whereas “real” is opposed to “possible”’ (Deleuze, 1991: 96). What is particularly useful and interesting for my purposes in this book is the emphases about the interconnectedness of the virtual and the real and, for example in the case of cyberspace, the very real outcomes that are generated by web exchanges and representations. As Slavoj Žižek (2003) argues, the outcomes can be more real because human perception can expand the virtual. Žižek is making an important point about perception and the reception of virtual images and text and the unconscious forces, which can shape and influence our understanding.

Feminist critiques have been most powerful in their exploration of the relationship which has sometimes latterly been expressed as that between virtuality and actuality (Gatens, 1996), but in second-wave feminism was more likely to be expressed as that between reality and representation, for example, in the context of the objectification of women’s bodies in the case of (Dworkin, 1981; Kappeler, 1986). Pornography is albeit a highly contested field in which actual bodies, and enfleshed selves, are represented within a frame of violence and violation; the violence has real consequences and involves actual bodies, however you define the real and the actual. Pornography offers an area of study that brings together the virtual and the actual in an assemblage of image, flesh, technologies of representation, gendered axes of power and intentionality in which it is very difficult to separate the virtual and the actual. Some feminist critiques and feminist activism, however, have demonstrated that whatever the complexities and difficulties of the connections between the virtual and the actual there are distinctions which have to be made, for example, in the case of the grooming of children online by paedophiles via social networks. One such campaign, which illustrates the relevance of the virtual real relationship was that initiated by a mother who launched the Play Virtual Live Real campaign after her son was murdered by his online gaming partner in 2014 (Good Morning America, 2014).

The power of representation

Theories of representation were central to cultural studies, for example, in the work of the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies (BCCS) in the United Kingdom in the 1970s and 1980s and in the highly influential work of Stuart Hall. The messy and complex relationship between representation and symbolic systems and material reality was recognized in Marxist explanations, for example, drawing on the work of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1971) not least in the context of how common sense is constituted.

The visual and visibility are central to explorations of representation, which is why I mention the issue of the relationship between what is symbolic, representational or virtual and what is actual or real, which is, for example, central to contemporary political debates and conflicts, as discussed above in the context of Charlie Hebdo. Earlier work on representation, for example in the tradition of the BCCS, emphasized the importance of language and image as semiotic, based on a largely Saussurian, structuralist approach which emphasized the attachment of meaning to words and symbols which do not simply reflect objects in the world; it is through the symbolic that meanings are made and properties attributed to objects. Hall made distinctions between different conceptualizations of representation, which continue to have relevance to the politics of in/visibility, especially relating to the power axes, which intersect in different ways at different times. Firstly, he identified a reflective approach to meaning, which suggests that meaning lies in the object itself, so that language and representational systems reflect and imitate what is in the world mimetically.

Secondly, he suggests that an alternative approach is to place meaning in the eye of the beholder; ‘words mean what the author intends them to mean’ (Hall, 1997: 25) in an intentional approach. This approach to intentionality suggests some control on the part of the author, whereas in other accounts, such as phenomenology, intentionality is more about the relationship between people and objects. Intentionality is important to the discussion because issues of personal responsibility and the ways in which people as social actors are caught up in linking reality and representations and could be seen as implicated in the Charlie Hebdo case.

Lastly, Hall describes a constructionist approach, in which ‘social actors who use the conceptual systems of their culture and the linguistic and other representational systems to construct meaning, to make the world meaningful and to communicate about that world meaningfully to others’ (ibid.: 25). The emphasis upon meaning is indicative of the dominant concerns of cultural studies into the 1990s, but what is important about this work for my purposes in this book is that it raises questions about the material, social, political and cultural relationships between seeing and being seen and what sort of processes are involved in making things and people visible – or invisible. Semiotic and structuralist approaches have some limitations in their omission of some of the affective, embodied and material elements in the representational processes of making visible and of seeing and being seen. My additional question is what is the role of bodies and enfleshed, affective selves in these processes of looking and being looked at. I also suggest that Hall’s three possibilities are interconnected; representation is a process of becoming in which intentionality, material circumstances, subjects, objects, symbolic systems are all constitutive of a relational process.

Different representational systems provide different relationships and different experiences. Live theatre seems to be distinctive for example and offers a different sort of emotional, affective, sensate intensity from the wide screen of the cinema, whatever the technological cinematic advances of the twenty-first century. Things are changing though. Increasingly, live performances, for example of opera, concerts and plays are also staged at local venues such as cinemas where audiences can be immersed in the ‘real time’ of a performance, if not actually in the place where that performance is taking place at that moment. Live theatre, especially when you are invited up on stage, offers a particular sensate experience in which all the senses are implicated. Live sport highlights some of the same issues, which is why some of the examples in this book are taken from the field of sport. Sport is distinctive too, as a field which, I argue, does not only reflect the connections, disconnections and power systems of the wider society, but also generate and re-establish many of these relationships and inequalities, especially those related to sex gender not least because being there and being seen to be there are related to the politics of in/visibility. Visibility involves power relations. Why does it matter and what is the importance of visibility? An explanation of being there contributes to an understanding the specific nuances, connections and disconnections, which make up the politics of in/visibility and the processes which are implicated in seeing and being seen, or not seen, and looking and being looked at, or not.

Being there

Trying to work out quite what does mark out ‘being there’ and especially being seen to be there is not as straightforward as might at first appear. What does ‘being there’ mean? Is it al...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction: Are You Really There?
• 2  Being There and the Culture of Boxing
• 3  The Gaze: Looking at You Looking at Me
• 4  Sex Gender and Sexuality in Virtual and Actual Space
• 5  Public and Private Spaces and Relationships
• 6  Looking and Seeing: Bodies and Images
• 7  Being There in the Zone: Sex Gender and In/Visibility
• 8  Rethinking Affect, Sensation and Perception
• 9  Conclusion
• References
• Index