Ritual and Event
Catastrophic contemporary events challenge ritual’s power to reconcile and heal the destitute, disenfranchised, and dying. The essays in this book reassess and revise the traditionally understood relationships between ritual and politics, ritual and everyday life, ritual and art making, and ritual and disaster in the post-Hiroshima, HIV/AIDS, 9/11 era. The contributions range in subject matter from choreography, film, photography, and visual culture to theatre, religious studies, semiotics and literature. The essays are unified by the question: how can ritual confront the event today? While some essays revisit major thinkers such as Gregory Bateson and Victor Turner in the light of new fieldwork and reflection, others analyze ritual acts in choreography, improvisation, theatre, and spectatorship from the Japanese film series Gojira and its American antidote Godzilla to contemporary Zambian community theatre amidst the raging AIDS crisis. Still others interrogate the ritual efficacy of artistic and media responses to 9/11 and Abu Ghraib in choreography, film, and photography. Methodologies are drawn not only from Anthropology but also Linguistics, Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Literature to make this inquiry truly interdisciplinary in scope. This volume brings together scholars from various academic disciplines to explore ritual in the context of the catastrophic and transforming events in today’s world. Just as rituals are re-activated by contemporary social crisis, so our understanding of ritual is transformed in kind. Ritual and Event takes the world of “the event” as its intellectual testing ground where interdisciplinary inquiry becomes the crisis – if not the event – of academic thought. Mark Franko is a choreographer and performance scholar who is Professor and Chair of the Theatre Arts Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Among his publications are Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body, Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics, The Work of Dance: Labor, Movement, and Identity, and Excursion for Miracles.
Routledge advances in theatre and performance studies
1 Theatre and Postcolonial Desires Awam Amkpa 2 Brecht and Critical Theory Dialectics and contemporary aesthetics Sean Carney 3 Science and the Stanislavsky Tradition of Acting Jonathan Pitches 4 Performance and Cognition Theatre studies after the cognitive turn Edited by Bruce McConachie and F. Elizabeth Hart 5 Theatre and Performance in Digital Culture From simulation to embeddedness Matthew Causey 6 The Politics of New Media Theatre Life®™ Gabriella Giannachi 7 Ritual and Event Interdisciplinary perspectives Edited by Mark Franko
Ritual and Event Interdisciplinary perspectives
Edited by Mark Franko
First published 2007 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2007 Selection and editorial matter, Mark Franko; individual chapters, the contributors This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN10: 0-415-70181-3 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-203-96819-2 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-70181-5 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-96819-2 (ebk)
Contents
List of figures Contributors Introduction: eventful knowledge and the post-ritual turn
vii viii
1
MARK FRANKO
PART I
Critical historiographies/new formations 1
Going back to Bateson: toward a semiotics of (post-)ritual performance
11 13
SALLY A. NESS
2
Performative interventions: African community theatre in the age of AIDS
31
OLA JOHANSSON
3
Ritually failing: Turner’s theatrical communitas
56
ANDREW C. WEGLEY
4
Situation and event: the destinations of sense
75
TYRUS MILLER
PART II
Case studies from the performative and visual archives
91
5
93
The terrorist event BILL NICHOLS
vi 6
Contents Gojira vs Godzilla: catastrophic allegories
109
AARON KERNER
7
Given movement: dance and the event
125
MARK FRANKO
8
Illness as danced urban ritual
138
JANICE ROSS
9
Post-colonial torture: rituals of viewing at Abu Ghraib
159
CATHERINE M. SOUSSLOFF
Index
188
Figures
2.1 2.2 6.1 6.2 6.3 8.1 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 9.6 9.7 9.8 9.9 9.10
Community performance on HIV/AIDS in Sululu Village, Masasi District, Tanzania (2002) Performance on HIV/AIDS at the University of Botswana, Gaborone, Botswana (2002) The Daigo Fukuryu-maru A Keloid victim The monster. “Gojira, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack” Anna dancing before her self-portrait “Hooded Man on the Box,” Abu Ghraib Prison, Iraq Tellett, “The Barbarization of Warfare” “Stop Bush” Naked figure leashed by uniformed figure, Abu Ghraib Prison, Iraq Display of naked figure’s genitalia, Abu Ghraib Prison, Iraq Victim composition, Abu Ghraib Prison, Iraq Grunewald, Crucifixion from the Isenheim Altar, around 1515 Living performance and deathly stillness, Abu Ghraib Prison, Iraq Francisco Goya, “This is Worse” from Disasters of War (1810–14) Francisco Goya, “Heroic Feat! Against the Dead!” from Disasters of War (1810–14)
38 39 111 117 118 144 161 162 163 173 174 175 176 177 181 182
Contributors
Mark Franko, editor, is Professor of Dance and Performance Studies and Chair of the Department of Theater Arts at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is a choreographer whose work has been produced in the United States and Europe since the 1980s. His most recent book is Excursion for Miracles: Paul Sanasardo, Donya Feuer and Studio for Dance (1955–1964) (Wesleyan University Press). Ola Johansson is a Lecturer at Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts, Lancaster University. He defended his doctoral dissertation The Room’s Need of a Name: A Philosophical Study of Performance (Stockholm: Teatron-serien) in 2000. He is currently engaged in African performance studies, with special emphasis on how community theatre in Tanzania, Ethiopia, and South Africa is used in the fight against HIV/AIDS. Aaron Kerner teaches in the Cinema Department at San Francisco State University and works as an independent curator. His exhibitions have featured artists such as: Alejandro González Iñárritu, Katsushige Nakahashi, Masami Teraoka, and Kenji Yanobe. Tyrus Miller is Associate Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of Late Modernism: Politics, Fictions, and the Arts Between the World Wars (1999) and a forthcoming study entitled Singular Examples: Cultural Politics of the Post-War Avant-Garde. Sally A. Ness has been pursuing interpretive research on choreographic phenomena for 25 years. She is currently Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Riverside. Her most well known work on dance, Body Movement and Culture: Kinesthetic and Visual Symbolism in a Philippine Community (1992), received the De la Torre Bueno Book Award, in 1993, and the Outstanding Publication Award from the Congress on Research in Dance in 1995. Bill Nichols is the Director of the Graduate Program in Cinema Studies at San Francisco State University. He has published books on film theory and documentary film, including Introduction to Documentary, and is currently completing The Social History of Film for W.W. Norton.
Contributors ix Janice Ross, Associate Professor in the Drama Department at Stanford University, is the author of Moving Lessons: Margaret H’Doubler and the Beginning of Dance in American Education (Wisconsin University Press, 2001) and Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance (University of California Press, forthcoming). Catherine M. Soussloff, Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture, University of California, Santa Cruz, is the author of The Subject in Art (Duke University Press) and The Absolute Artist: The Historiography of a Concept (Minnesota University Press). She has edited Jewish Identity in Modern Art History (University of California Press). Andrew C. Wegley is a Ph.D. student in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His work primarily focuses on the legacy of religions in contemporary thought. He is currently writing a dissertation on conceptions of love and their figuration of the neighbor.
Introduction Eventful knowledge and the post-ritual turn Mark Franko
[A]n event is neither substance, nor accident, nor quality nor process; events are not corporeal. And yet, an event is certainly not immaterial; it takes effect, becomes effect, always on the level of materiality. (Foucault 1972, 231)1
Although familiar to us from twentieth-century poetics, avant-garde performance practices, and the philosophy of history, “the event” took on a new shape in the wake of World War II. Since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagaski and the discovery of the camps, what happens became historically aligned with what is socially impossible to process, culturally and psychologically unabsorbable, and highly resistant to linguistic, visual, and/or performative symbolization. Although the event’s impact on post-WorldWar-II expressive culture was undeniable, its theorization has proceeded only obliquely. In the above quote from Michel Foucault’s inaugural address at the Collège de France in 1971, for example, the discursive event under discussion has as its determining characteristic a material dispersion that, we note, can also exist outside or alongside language. Indeed, the determining notion of event itself is not linguistic, but acts on language. In the wake of 9/11 the event has taken on a new immediacy: no longer one among a number of possible accidents and/or tragedies to be sequenced and framed as historical, the event now challenges our very reliance on sequence, chronology, and the implicit usefulness of these classifications for either continuity and/or to future change.2 But, the event, which Foucault characterizes as existing at a level of material dispersion, also exists at a level of theoretical dispersion. The event not only challenges representational and theoretical accounts: it challenges ritual. What are the resources of symbolic action, not only for the event’s representation (although this issue is difficult to avoid), but also for coming to terms with “the event” from a social, cultural and collectively psychological point of view?3 Are rituals mutating into “post rituals” in the sense that they are revising our traditional understanding of the means and ends of ritual?4 Does the event today require a post-ritual situation or theory?5
2 Mark Franko These questions emerged from the international interdisciplinary conference “Post-Ritual: Performances/Events/Art” that I organized at the University of California, Santa Cruz in January 2003.6 Why do such questions require interdisciplinary approaches? The pairing of ritual and event seems determined by the problem of finding or creating rituals adequate to the event, and by the necessity that the event imposes for choreographic and/or visual narrative.7 This conjuncture mandates, it seems to us, an interdisciplinary inquiry that no one disciplinary model can adequately encompass. The interdisciplinary nature of ritual studies is not a new idea. The crossfertilization of ritual studies and other disciplines has led to a performance studies approach to ritual (Brown 2003). This has been due in large part to the remarkably productive inquiries of Richard Schechner and Victor Turner as well as to the dialogue between theatre and anthropology in their work since the early 1980s. Within that complex theorization and exchange the focus on ritual as cultural performance relies on a notion of event that is also important to avant-garde theatre practice.8 It places theatre in a context that is no longer in the service of drama as the manifestation on stage of a primarily literary tradition. A body of ritual theory exists whose interdisciplinary qualities are indisputable (Schechner and Appel 1990). What I wish to accent here is the crystallization of event within the space of that theory. What does event bring to ritual that was not so obviously present before? The particular events described in this volume include the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Africa and the United States since the 1980s, actual or imagined ritualizations of 9/11, and the recent mediatization of Abu Ghraib. None of these are privileged as sequential or presented for the sake of chronological order. Rather, each is considered in the light of ritual and from the interdisciplinary perspectives of dance studies, visual culture, film studies, anthropology, literature, religious studies, and community studies. What brings unity to the different authorial voices writing in this collection is the question of “event” itself, but also shared critical methods deriving from important artists and thinkers emerging in the 1950s and 1960s: Fanon, Hijikata, Sartre, Schechner, and Turner, among others. Austin’s speech act theory (1962) was the starting point for influential theories of performativity, and Michel Foucault’s “discursive event” undermined the notions of simultaneity and succession as properties of the archive (1972, 27–8). The essays in this volume show the importance of all these contributions to our present inquiry. They also unearth the relevancy of earlier twentiethcentury intellectual sources – Freud, Peirce, Eliot, and Bateson. Here again it is not a question of studying chronology but of the layering of intellectual traces; evidence that preoccupation with the event precedes the post-WorldWar-II era (Franko and Richards 2000). The reinterpretation of that archive contributes to the construction of “eventful knowledge” in the present. The task of this introduction is to situate for the reader the critical and philosophical sources drawn upon throughout to rethink ritual in the light
Introduction
3
of event. The first four chapters take on a critically historiographic view of the resources and concepts at our disposal. This impulse, however, is present in all of the other chapters as well. Sally Ann Ness illuminates Gregory Bateson’s insights into Balinese corporeal performance of the late 1930s using the terminology of Peircean semiotics. Ness finds in Bateson’s study of what he called Balinese “steady state” from his fieldwork conducted in Bali the elements for an understanding of corporeal performance that are necessary to contemporary performance studies; these have been suggested by, but also blocked in, post-structural thought of the 1960s and 1970s, including Bourdieu’s theory of habitus. Ness discusses the different kinds of symbolism available to symbolic action, made available for consideration through the vocabulary and distinctions of the inventor of semiotics, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914). She foregrounds in particular what in Bateson needs to be rehabilitated or opened up again in order to help us to articulate how corporeal performance renders key Derridian notions, such as spacing and trace, meaningfully and usefully “performative.”9 These constructs are crucial to ritual understood as corporeal performance, in that they introduce avenues to explore contingency, loss, and discontinuity imposed by the event. As Ness makes clear, this potential of corporeal performance, already so profoundly implied in and by post-structural terminology, was misprized or overlooked by that enterprise as a whole.10 If poststructuralist thought nurtured a prescient awareness of the event as a concept that was on its way to fuller awareness over time, it left a theorization of the cultural resources needed to cope with the event by the wayside. It is interesting to turn at this point to Ola Johansson’s chapter for some effects of similarity and contrast. In comparing the relative effectiveness of traditional ritual actions based on close kinship bonds with the post-colonial reality of dispersal and mixing of populations in Northwestern Africa today, Johansson holds out hope for rituals of affliction in the AIDS pandemic in a “multi-sectoral” and “multi-disciplinary” sense. The AIDS crisis imposes “traces” and “spacings” of traditional ritual action, combined with other social processes and approaches suitable to contemporary, pluralist reality. Johansson discerns a post-ritual reality, perceiving the strongest hope for mobilization against the pandemic in speech acts as byproducts of the communal experience of community theatre. Johansson thus draws on the speech act theory first developed by J.L. Austin in the 1955 William James lectures delivered at Harvard University. Austin’s groundbreaking idea was that certain linguistic utterances constitute actions he called performatives. Without engaging in the subsequent debate that occurred between Searle and Derrida in the early 1970s (a debate whose repercussions Mark Franko deals with in his chapter), Johansson draws on the notion of performativity that emerged, historically speaking, from that very debate. More importantly, he opens up the ritual potential of performatives that currently emerge in community theatre, forum theatre, and related public performances/venues. While the rituals of traditional societies have often been
4
Mark Franko
distinguished from those of postmodern Western cultures in the same manner that cultural performance (the liminal) may also be distinguished from aesthetic production (the liminoid), Johansson and others (notably Wegley and Ross) confront the difficulty of maintaining such distinctions. In Johansson’s chapter, this provides the interesting occasion for him to place theatre itself outside and asymmetrically to the assumed differences between cultural and artistic performance. Characteristic of many approaches here is the critical re-consideration of theories of symbolic action. In a close reading of Turner’s ethnography of the Isoma ritual from The Ritual Process (1969), Andrew Wegley probes into the anthropological notion of symbolic action itself. He looks at Turner from within the intellectual climate of structuralism dominant in the 1960s and 1970s. Like Johansson, Wegley discovers the presence of theatricality in the liminal, such as Turner theorizes it. Wegley’s analysis creates, however, a different and unexpected relation between ritual and event. He finds within Turner’s theory of ritual the possibility of the event in a progressive, if still unsettling, sense. This results from his carefully deconstructive reading unraveling of the intricate and troubled interdependency of religio and communitas in Turner’s discourse and in its “archival” sources. Ultimately, Wegley pinpoints what in Turner is post-Turnerian. Post-ritual here gains a dimension toward a future that is eventful. The creativity inherent in this concept of ritual brings it into relation with art making. Tyrus Miller focuses on the promise inherent in the notion of the event in the context of avant-garde art practices. His chapter, “Situation and Event,” shows how the art event or event art that, at least up until the 1960s has been exemplary of avant-garde practice, hovers between programmatic or intentional action and a situation traversed by affect but not rendered as embodied agency. Subjected to revisionary theorization, the art event ritualizes subjectivity so that it can be lived as determined by, rather than determining of, events. Referring to the meaning of event as it developed in post-structuralist thought, Miller reinterprets the “theatrical situation” of avant-garde agency as potentially outside classical avant-garde and Marxist understandings of agency. This is demonstrated in the dance poems of Jackson Mac Low, The Pronouns (1964). This non-Cartesian notion of the subject that Miller ultimately apprehends at the level of the “infinitivization” of affect in the instructions for performed action of Mac Low’s poem scripts – that is, as emanating from textual instructions for the performance of a dance – both orients our reading of Wegley’s post-Turner to a specific performative occasion, and envisions the performative actualization of post-Turner in improvisational structures innovated in the 1960s, the very period of Turner’s intellectual emergence. Thus, critically interpretive readings of the archive generate new visual and performative terms for ritual effectivity. The chapters just discussed form the historiographic explorations of the volume’s first section. A series of “case studies” begins with the case of 9/11
Introduction
5
itself, an event that launched this particular volume. Film scholar Bill Nichols approaches the event as a mediatized phenomenon, and in this way, picks up the thread of thinking on media and event that began in the late 1960s and early 1970s in part around the sensibility of the simulacrum.11 Nichols brings to the forefront a number of important changes in previous views of the event and its representation as such by the media, insights that only 9/11 can afford. A catastrophe of the proportions of 9/11 makes us aware of the difference between trauma and event, inasmuch as Nichols considers the event properly so-called as an effect of narrated experience. The importance of the notion of trauma and the unrepresentable phenomenon that it gestures to underline the relevance of psychoanalysis to this inquiry and also place ritual into relation with the phenomenon of narrative as well as with psychoanalytic theory (see the chapters by Kerner, Franko, and Soussloff). Nichols reminds us that speech act theory is the only philosophical intervention into the social and political question of the event.12 His narrative of how an event became itself by virtue of ideologically invested interpretation brings up psychoanalytic issues of the avowal and disavowal of suffering that have obvious ramifications for ritual action. What Nichols identifies as narrative fetishism (borrowing this term from the work of Eric Santner) in the crystallization of the event as such becomes a form of interested, politicized ritual in its own right. From the point of view of affliction ritual, however, narrative fetishism is a kind of anti-ritual in that it disavows suffering. If narrative occasions the over-valuation that ends in fetishism, there are also more contradictory narratives – or more properly allegories – with significant collective ritual functions in the visual sphere. Aaron Kerner discusses the case of the Gojira films produced in Japan as of 1954. The monster Gojira was the Japanese prototype for what became the American cinema’s Godzilla. Gojira’s ritual dimension for the post-war Japanese public existed in its symbolic contradictions: perpetrator of violence, the monster was also a figure of suffering, notably of the suffering of the most grievously afflicted victims of atomic radiation, the hibakusha. In a carefully tuned analysis Kerner shows how the Gojira series functioned historically as a social “working through” of trauma both through explicit reference and allegorical connotation. In a sense, allegory here becomes the inverse of narrative fetishism since it never settles on one narrative. On the other hand, the Godzilla films fetishize, and initially cannibalize, the Gojira work. Mark Franko brings the issue of the art event together with that of narrative and the speech act. He asks how dance in the wake of 9/11 can respond to the event when disaster has appropriated eventfulness and disarmed performativity. The problematic of trauma is shifted onto the ground of the philosophy of language in connection with choreographic production. Franko examines Derrida’s critique of Austinian performativity through his debate with John Searle over speech act theory in the early 1970s. In this debate, Derrida opposes Austin’s insistence on the “I,” active, and present
6
Mark Franko
for the speech act as an event. He proposes instead the notions of iterability and/or citationality through which a speech act can survive the “I,” active and present characterized by enunciation as well as by live performance. Franko brings this debate into connection with the notion of the gift in the work of anthropologist Marcel Mauss, a notion that Derrida also relates to Heidegger’s idea of time as given (Derrida 1992). By exploring the presence of the anthropological and philosophical notion of the gift, Franko returns to dance the agency – the capacity to respond – that dance seemed to have lost in the immediate post-9/11 world. Also involved with dance, Janice Ross’s intensely biographical chapter on dancer/choreographer Anna Halprin stages for us a form of ritual that derives from 1960s avant-garde practices in dance and theatre, and that has survived and evolved into the age of AIDS via Halprin’s personal encounter with cancer. Halprin’s itinerary is truly remarkable both for the way it bridges therapy and performance as well as for its persistence in a corporeal practice that maintains its developmental continuity across decades. The indistinction between seeing and doing that is implied in ritualized performance and ritualized spectatorship wound into one phenomenon emerges here with force. (This theme is also relevant to the chapters by Johansson, Kerner, and Franko.) In addition, Ross’s claim for postmodern primitivism sidetracks the theoretical debates that move us into the postritual environment by way of rereading the archive. Here, it would seem, all is practice, and Ross obeys this particular trajectory in her writing. Furthermore, Halprin’s practice as Ross describes it undoes Turner’s distinction between liminal and liminoid just as Johansson’s reflections on forum theatre do. The way Halprin’s trajectory between the 1960s and the 1980s takes her from her personal battle with cancer to the workshop performances with and for young men suffering with AIDS in the San Francisco bay area parallels the ritual process. When invested in public performance, this process blurs the distinction between doer and done to, giver and recipient. As with the discussions of a different form of subjectivity (Wegley and Miller), the blurred borders between dance and ritual here also confuse traditionally marked positions of agency without doing away with spectatorship or dance making. In fact, when Ross discusses Halprin’s work with the AIDS victims performing her Carry Me Home, she points out that the ambiguities between choreography and therapy are bridged in a “theatre of illness.” This work, overall, has very much to do with the lived and performative status of the body itself inasmuch as it induces a certain vision of itself among those who behold it. It is, perhaps, the practical work at the articulation of doing and seeing, being and seeming, beholding and participating that is definitive for ritual activity as such. The jointures that ritualize choreography fashion those fundamental ambiguities into a structured experience. It is therefore fitting that the final chapter of this volume treats rituals of seeing with respect to photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Introduction
7
Performance and seeing are here turned around, and considered from a different angle. First, the idea that photographs of torture retain the ability to continue to “perform” torture after the fact, that is, to extend torture to the viewer, raises the issue of a ritual of viewing as the dissemination of social trauma. The photographs’ performativity extends their historical outrage into the present, creating a ritual wounding of the viewer. In Soussloff’s analysis, the performative nature of the photographs not only calls forth indignation, but also wounds: both effects are required by the performativity of these visual documents. Further, not only are the boundaries between seeing and receiving pain blurred, but so are the boundaries between academia and museums (the place of art history) and penal institutions (the sites of pain production). As Soussloff shows, torture is an event and its traumatic aftereffects are psychically and physically prolonged for both torturer and tortured. Through its mediatization, torture accedes to the intangible materiality to which Foucault refers. Many of these insights are gleaned from an attentive reading of Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (1967), a book that is absent, Soussloff points out, from discussions of the Abu Ghraib scandal. Thus she highlights the ambiguity between ritual and event that the notion of performativity enables. The Abu Ghraib photographs extend the event of torture into the present as ritualized experience affecting all those who behold it in images, and regardless of the image’s ostensible purpose. Here as elsewhere, the event weaves itself into the fabric of ritual, making a sharp distinction between the two more problematic than was previously thought. This volume calls our attention to this as the situation of post-ritual and its theory.
Notes 1 Foucault continues: “It [the event] is neither the act nor the property of a body. It occurs as an effect of, and in, material dispersion. Let us say that the philosophy of event should advance in the direction, at first sight paradoxical, of an incorporeal materialism” (231). The leap from the material dispersion of the discursive event to the material dispersion produced by and in events tout court hinges on the elimination of the body as an agent or property of the event, as stressed in the italicized sentence above (my translation), which is omitted in the English edition. 2 For an account of the development of the notion of the event in historical discourse, see Pomian (1978). 3 Hayden White has written of the challenge the “modernist event” poses historical representation. He asks whether it is possible to represent the Holocaust in history and/or fiction. For White, only modernism can provide the aesthetic means adequate for such “representation” (White 1999). 4 This has already been strongly argued by Catherine Bell (1992). Bell defines ritual not according to universal norms of behavior but according to a principle of differentiation of behavior that is always contextualized. There is, writes Bell, “a fundamental strategic and contextual quality of ritual action. By virtue of this quality, what is ritual is always contingent, provisional, and defined by difference” (91).
8
Mark Franko
5 I want to stress that by post-ritual I do not mean ritual’s end. As Richard Schechner has written: “The parallel to ‘postmodern’ is ‘postwar’. Postwar means anything that’s happened since World War II. And maybe truly this is a proper term, for World War II was the war where the atomic bomb was used and demonstrated the human capacity for extinguishing our own species and for totally ruining the biosphere” (Schechner 1982, 95). 6 The conference took place in the framework of the Visual and Performance Research Group at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The project grew out of an informal collaborative exploration of ritual, visual art, and dance between Carlo Severi, Giovanni Careri, and myself that had been ongoing since the mid-1990s. Our collaborative exchanges widened thanks to a grant from the France/Berkeley Fund. I owe to the work of Carlo Severi what I understand as the relation of ritual to art practices, and am grateful for his influential investigation of ritual as a choreographic phenomenon. I am also grateful to Richard Schechner whose impact on the field of ritual studies and performance has been enormous, and who generously participated in the Santa Cruz conference, also generously supporting the idea of publication. At UCSC I wish to thank George Brown, Burnie Leboeuf, and the Arts Division (especially the Departments of the History of Art and Visual Culture and Theater Arts) for their encouragement of and support for the conference. The conference could itself not have taken place without the tireless dedication and resourcefulness of my then research assistant Damara Vita Ganley. Thanks also to Rebecca Wolfe for her assistance in organizing this volume. 7 I am grateful to Carlo Severi for the insight that the narrative proper to ritual is fundamentally choreographic. 8 See Schechner’s (1982, 30–6) discussion of the “performance texts.” 9 For a useful introduction to these issues, see Lepecki (2004) and Noland and Ness (2006). 10 Jean-François Lyotard is perhaps the philosopher of the last 30 years whose work consistently grapples with the notion of the event in a prescient way. The “unpresentable” that Lyotard theorized in avant-garde aesthetics as the postmodern sublime has been connected by Hugh J. Silverman to 9/11 (Silverman 2002, 1–3). 11 The work of Jean Baudrillard comes readily to mind, as well as the 1972 issue of Communications on “l’événement.” In an article entitled “l’événement monstre,” Pierre Nora wrote: “Press, radio, images, do not act only as means from which the event would be relatively independent: media are the very condition of possibility for the event” (162; my translation). 12 David Kertzer (1988) opened up the relation of ritual to politics and power and thus implied that progress in the areas of ritual and event must be conducted on two simultaneous fronts.
Bibliography Austin, J.L. (1975 [1962]) How to Do Things With Words. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Bell, Catherine (1992) Ritual Theory. Ritual Practice. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brown, Gavin (2003) “Theorizing ritual as performance: explorations of ritual indeterminacy,” Journal of Ritual Studies 17: 1, 3–18. Derrida, Jacques (1992) Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money. Translated by Peggy Kamuf, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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Derrida, Jacques, Soussana, Gad, and Nouss, Alexis (2001) Dire l’événement, est-ce possible? Séminaire de Montréal, pour Jacques Derrida. Paris: l’Harmattan. Foucault, Michel (1972) The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse of Language. Translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon. Franko, Mark and Richards, Annette (eds) (2000) Acting on the Past: Historical Performance Across the Disciplines. Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press. Kertzer, David L. (1988) Rituals, Politics and Power. New Haven: Yale University Press. Lepecki, André (2004) “Inscribing Dance” in André Lepecki (ed.) Of the Presence of the Body: Essays on Dance and Performance Theory. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press: 124–39. Noland, Carrie and Ness, Sally (eds) (2006) The Migration of Gesture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nora, Pierre (1972) “L’événement monstre,” in Communications 18: 162–72. Pomian, Krzysztof (1978) “Evento,” in Enciclopedia Einaudi. Turin: Giulio Einaudi editori: vol. 8, pp. 972–93. Schechner, Richard (1982) The End of Humanism: Writings on Performance. New York: PAJ. Schechner, Richard and Appel, Willa (eds) (1990) By Means of Performance: Intercultural Studies of Theatre and Ritual. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Silverman, Hugh J. (2002) “Jean-François Lyotard: between politics and aesthetics,” in Hugh J. Silverman (ed.) Lyotard: Philosophy, Politics, and the Sublime. New York and London: Routledge: 1–19. Soussloff, Catherine and Franko, Mark (2002) “Visual and performance studies: a new history of interdisciplinarity,” in Social Text 73: 20/14 (Winter): 29–46. White, Hayden (1999) “The Modernist Event,” in Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect. Stanford: Stanford University Press: 66–86.
Part I
Critical historiographies/ new formations
1
Going back to Bateson Towards a semiotics of (post-)ritual performance Sally A. Ness
My focus for this chapter is a single period of the anthropologist and cybernetic theorist Gregory Bateson’s work, what might be called his “Balinese period.” The period lasted from around 1936 until 1942, during which time Bateson was first working in, and then writing on Balinese ritual.1 The period ended with the publication of a now-classic text, co-published with Margaret Mead, Balinese Character: a Photographic Analysis. Bateson’s work with Mead, which was ongoing throughout this period and also definitive of it, centered around the project of developing a non-linguistic means (via film and photography) of representing culturally patterned behavior – culture “embodied” as Bateson and Mead termed it (Bateson and Mead 1942, xii). Bateson shot 25,000 still photographs during the course of this work, and shot more than 22,000 feet of 16-millimeter film as well.2 The Balinese period was a time in which Bateson’s insight into the role of corporeal performance achieved a high point, not only in the specific context of ritual performance, but with regard to the more general subject of performance, broadly conceived. It is this high point, and its implications for the contemporary study of ritual and post-ritual performance that I would like to elaborate upon herein. To do this, I will be drawing throughout the chapter upon the semeiotic theory of Charles S. Peirce as an organizing framework. In my view, the Peircean semeiotic theory provides a most illuminating theoretical backdrop, defining in the clearest possible terms how unusual and far-reaching Bateson’s insight actually was for the study of performance.3 When I first read Bateson’s work in 1981, a time when I self-identified primarily as a student of dance and a choreographer-in-the-making, the writings on Bali appealed to me as no other ethnographic writing had. They read as works written from a choreographer’s frame of mind, and I thought of Bateson as a kindred spirit. This was an ironic outcome, since the work I was reading had been carried out by Bateson and Mead in conscious opposition to “literary” and other non-scientific orientations. Nonetheless, after more than 20 years of my working in the discipline of anthropology, Bateson’s writing from this period still strikes me as exceptionally choreographic in its understanding of the symbolic capabilities of the corporeal
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aspects of ritual performance. It is still difficult to imagine how it could have been written by someone who was not a practicing choreographer, or who had not had an extensive, if not life-long, engagement with corporeal performance practice. Even with regard to more recent, embodiment-conscious approaches to the study of performance – phenomenological, radically empirical, or post-structural, to name a few – the work is still outstanding in this respect. And yet, Bateson was by no means a choreographer, or anything remotely like it.4 The reason Bateson was able to achieve this extraordinarily performancefriendly awareness, I believe, is that, in his Balinese period, immersed as he was in the real-time recording and minutely detailed observation of human body movement, Bateson was able to perceive a cultural role and a symbolic capability for movement performance itself, stripped of any verbal interpretation or “story,” as he put it (Bateson 1972 [1967a], 130). This capability has been generally unrecognized by all but performance practitioners. In the terms of Peirce’s semeiotic theory, this would be categorized as an Abductive Symbolic5 capability – the capability of experimenting methodically and creatively in corporeal performance in ways that allow the understanding gained to be applied imaginatively to new contexts of learning. This identification, virtually ignored by anthropologists concerned with ritual performance either before or during Bateson’s time, greatly expanded the conceptual frameworks used to interpret corporeal performance symbolism. It expanded them enough to encompass the kind of intelligence previously limited to practitioners themselves. The expansion continues to illuminate avenues of inquiry that remain largely unexplored today. Bateson’s insight, in a nutshell, exposed an entirely new dimension of performative symbolism, one that challenged the limits of significance previously assumed by crosscultural theorists of ritual performance and symbolic action in general. It is one that integrates ritual practice with a much wider array of cultural practice than was previously conceivable. In what follows, I will focus on Bateson’s unusual identification and show, using Peircean semeiotics, how it is different from more typical analyses of ritual performance symbolism found in anthropological discourse. I will then suggest briefly its significance for the contemporary understanding of corporeal performance, ritualistic and post-ritualistic alike.
The Balinese high point In a festschrift written in 1949 honoring the British anthropologist A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, Gregory Bateson took the opportunity to reflect back on his ethnographic work in New Guinea and in Bali and compare what he had learned about the cultures of the Iatmul and the Balinese respectively. Entitled, “Bali, the value system of a steady state,” the essay provides one of Bateson’s more concise summary statements regarding his understanding of Balinese performance in relation to the whole of Balinese culture. It will
Going back to Bateson 15 serve here as a general representation of Bateson’s work in the Balinese period. The essay begins with a discussion of why Bateson discarded some of the theoretical tools he had developed in his work with the Iatmul when he turned to Bali. In particular, the concept of schismogenesis, the dynamic in social interactions of a regenerative causal circuit or “vicious” circle, did not appear suitable for the study of Balinese social life. To substantiate this claim, Bateson gives a summary of “Balinese character structure” (Bateson 1972, 112), which presents an encapsulated version of the larger work he and Margaret Mead produced in Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis (1942). The summary ranges over examples of mother–infant interaction, adult quarreling, warfare, social mobility, and artistic practice. In each case, Bateson shows how the tendency towards cumulative or climactic personal interaction (schismogenesis) – previously considered a human universal – whether competitive or rivalrous, is discouraged or replaced in Balinese life by alternative patterning. Bateson characterizes this alternative as a “steady state.” The steady state, unlike the climactic schismogenetic type, tends toward establishing an even, ultimately unchanging patterning of interaction. Bateson then goes on to show how Balinese character is alternatively structured, giving examples of non-competitive, non-maximizing patterns of conduct observed in relation to economic behavior (being “penny-wise” but “poundfoolish”), landmark usage, ritual activities (making offerings and staging performances), group membership values, village council policies on money transactions, and abstract notions of right conduct or etiquette. Bateson ends this discussion of Balinese character structure in an extraordinary way. He synthesizes the whole of Balinese character in terms of a corporeal “metaphor” as he terms it. The particular trope he identifies is the persona of a tightrope walker. This performative figure-in-movement serves as a diagram for Bateson’s systematic model of the steady state, the noncompetitive yet dynamic structure organizing Balinese character in general. Bateson writes: “The metaphor from postural balance [the tightrope walker] . . . is demonstrably applicable in many contexts of Balinese culture” (1972, 120). Bateson identifies seven examples of these applications, all but the last of which are documented in detail in Balinese Character: the fear of loss of support as an ongoing basic element of childhood; elevation, and its attendant technical challenges, being coupled with respect in a variety of aesthetic as well as ordinary practices; the conceptual as well as physical elevation of the child to the level of the gods in Balinese cosmological belief and practice; the choreographic design of trance dance elevations; the design of body movements typically depicted in Balinese carvings; the kapar gesture of the Balinese witch, Rangda, in ritual performance; and the standard phrase representing the general understanding of pre-colonial Bali: “when the world was steady.” Each example on the list of diverse “applications” is described as presenting the essential component features of the tightrope walker performative figure.
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Bateson next engages in a brief re-modeling of this argument using Von Neumanian game theory. The point of this exercise is primarily to foreground the fundamental importance that both mobility and multiplicity hold as elements continuously called into play to produce the non-maximizing interactions of Balinese social life. The model of the tightrope walker reappears as a reinforcing metaphor in this section as well (Bateson 1972 [1949], 25). However, its technical design dynamics are now invoked in more graphic detail. Bateson focuses on the manner in which the tightrope walker’s movement style entails the simultaneous assertion of multiple forces in the body’s limbs that work harmoniously in a successful performance to maintain balance while the figure engages in locomotion. Bateson closes his discussion of Balinese character structure by reiterating his argument regarding its dynamic embodied source yet again. He writes: In sum it seems that the Balinese extend to human relationships attitudes based upon bodily balance, and that they generalize the idea that motion is essential to balance. (1972 [1949], 125) The Balinese “steady state” as Bateson defines the character structure – a model of a living, thinking culture that survives via continual strategic reorganizations of non-progressive change – is ultimately understood in terms of a certain kind of performative conduct, a tightrope walker’s locomotion. This performative structure is understood to form the technical and stylistic baseline for the most important ritual performance events in Balinese tradition. This last quotation is one of the high points in Bateson’s writing to which I continually return.
Discussion Let me now move on to elaborate what, in my view, makes Bateson’s insight into the cultural significance of Balinese movement generally, and ritual performance specifically, unusual and potentially productive for contemporary work on the corporeal symbolism of ritual and ritualistic performance phenomena. It is not my intention here to redeem or rehabilitate the whole of Bateson’s structural-functionalist approach. My specific interest is to extract his insight regarding corporeal performance out of the context of his broader culture-and-personality orientation and redefine it, in and of itself, from a Peircean semeiotic perspective that will illuminate its analytical character for the purposes of performance studies. In the first place, Bateson’s interpretation contrasts with those of ritual performance theory that would all be classified, along Peircean lines, as Iconic6 in orientation and interpretive interest. This category covers a very wide and diverse array of research. Common to all of it, however, is a tend-
Going back to Bateson 17 ency to understand the performative aspects of ritual primarily in terms of their ability to produce or make apparent relationships of shared quality or other types of “same-ness,” “like-ness,” resemblance, or “one-ness” between the performed action and some established referent, whatever it is to which the action is thought to be related or to be representing in the given cultural context. Iconic forms of symbolism operate so as to forge and maintain such relationships, between themselves and what they represent, or, more literally, “re-present” in many cases. This is understood to be their primary meaning in semeiotic theory. Theories of ritual performance that have focused on the capacity of symbolic action to bring about states of possession or communion with supernatural beings fall into this Iconic category. So do those that foreground and document the mimetic or imitative capabilities of ritual gestures and dance movements. So also do those that identify in ritual performance the reproduction and/or re-presenting of highly valued qualities or social characters, such as “grace” or “cool-ness,” as the main consequence of a performance. Iconic approaches emphasize, sometimes to the exclusion of all other kinds of meaningfulness, “one-in-spirit,” or “connecting-in-like-ness” kinds of signifying capabilities, as they are observed to be evident in ritual performance. The majority of work on the corporeal aspects of ritual performance in anthropology to date, in one way or another, has opted to take a predominantly Iconic orientation in its approach to interpreting the symbolic action of ritual.7 This Iconic interpretive focus, however, is not what Bateson adopts in his work on Balinese ritual. Although he is by no means arguing against it, Bateson is not identifying the significance of the performance of the Balinese steady-state character structure in terms of any capability to become possessed, to imitate, to personify, impersonate, substitute for, or “be the present likeness/image/body of” someone or something. He is not arguing that the cultural function of the Balinese performance pattern is solely to embody, individually or collectively, a certain state of being (“tightrope walker-hood”) or quality of character (“mobile balancing-ness”) because it is somehow deemed essential to do so, or because it achieves a likeness to a desirable Balinese character stereotype. Neither is he arguing that performances of the tightrope walker metaphor are inherently meaningful as they might present a microcosm of the cultural macrocosm, a kind of Balinesemover-embodies-Balinese-worldview, end of story, interpretation. Nor is Bateson intent on showing how the Balinese movement process is a kind of identity text, akin to the renowned interpretation of the Balinese cockfight made by Clifford Geertz (Bateson 1972). Balinese ritual performances were understood by Bateson to achieve all of this, to be sure, but this is not the main way in which Bateson is in this festschrift understanding the performative figure-in-movement to be acquiring value in Balinese culture. Whatever iconic significations occur to reproduce the tightrope walker character structure in different cultural contexts, including ritual, they are understood
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in Bateson’s interpretation as coincidental, as a means to another end, not as the motivating purpose of the performances in and of themselves. Likewise, Bateson’s interpretation here contrasts sharply with those of ritual performance theory that Peircean semeiotic theory would characterize as Indexical in interpretive orientation.8 These are fewer in number than Iconic approaches, but nonetheless influential. Indexical approaches emphasize the capabilities of ritual’s performative aspects to signal, or otherwise convey information regarding the co-existence of the symbolic action with various aspects of the cultural context. The Indexical relation can operate in relation to both spatial and temporal co-existents. Interpretations of ritual that place a high degree of importance on the particular and constantly changing relationships that individual performances in a tradition make evident to corresponding specificities of historical circumstances adopt an Indexical orientation. Roy Rappaport’s 1979 essay on ritual symbolism, “The obvious aspects of ritual,” published in Ecology, Meaning, and Religion (which was dedicated in part to Gregory Bateson), provides a well-known example of this type of approach. While Rappaport understood rituals as involving both Symbolic and Indexical processes, he attributed to the performative (and even more specifically to the corporeal) aspects of ritual the specific capability of signaling information about the current status of individual participants. Moreover, he argued that this was the primary contribution of corporeal performance to the ritual process (Rappaport 1979, 173–217).9 Stanley Tambiah’s seminal essay, “A performative approach to ritual” (1979), disagrees with Rappaport’s conceptualization of the performative characteristics of ritual as “surface”-like and separable from its symbolic contents. However, it also emphasizes an explicitly Indexical significance for the corporeal aspects of ritual performance as they are recursively implicated in differential relations of power and status. Like Rappaport, Tambiah acknowledges that the Indexical meanings of ritual performance are integrated with Iconic and Symbolic meanings. Moreover, he also conceptualizes the corporeal aspects of ritual performance as being specifically Indexical rather than Iconic or Symbolic, and in the same way that Rappaport observed them to be.10 Indexical approaches to the study of ritual performance tend to be aligned with post-modern approaches to the study of ritual more generally. They emphasize the (sometimes radically) contingent aspect of meaning that any form of cultural practice acquires.11 Again, Bateson’s interpretive interest is not at odds with such Indexical agendas. Bateson does not deny the uniqueness of each individual performance of the tightrope walker model. He recognizes the ever-present potential for signs of difference, uniqueness, and other individuating characters to occur in every enactment of the tightrope walker movement patterning. This occurrence is, in fact, crucial to the interpretive argument Bateson is making. Bateson is by no means objecting to the fact that each performance
Going back to Bateson 19 is a creative act and historical fact unto itself, tailor-made to achieve a fit with the contingencies of each given context. Regardless of this recognition, however, some individualizing, contingency-foregrounding, or differentiating effect of Indexical signaling is not what Bateson is arguing for as the meaningful contribution of the tightrope walker movement patterning to Balinese culture. In contrast, he is proposing that there is a continuity of meaning evident in the performative figure as well. In each instance of performance, this continuity of meaning is re-tried and re-tested with the gradual cumulative result that the ongoing understanding of the patterning tends toward a regular, increasingly general understanding of the Balinese character structure it models. It is this continuity of meaning and the “generalizing” tendency it enables that Bateson foregrounds in his interpretation. In this regard, Bateson is arguing for a different kind of meaning-making capability altogether for the tightrope walker performance patterning, one that cannot be achieved via Indexical signaling or Iconic re-presenting. It is one that can only be achieved by what, in semeiotic theory, is categorized as Symbolic signification.12 Symbols, in the Peircean scheme, are defined by their ability to establish re-occurring, generalizing relationships to that which they are understood to represent by their (changing) community of users. Only Symbols can so “extend” themselves to multiple uses, growing and evolving over time in relation to their various applications. Only Symbols are continuous and habit-forming in this idea-employing way. In his summary argument, then, Bateson can be read as making a case for the Symbolic capability of Balinese performance. He is making this case specifically in relation to the performing of corporeal patterning in the tightrope walker figure, choreographic patterning unassociated with any verbal narrative or any other kind of auxiliary Symbolic definition or elaboration. Bateson is characterizing the tightrope walker’s technique for maintaining balance as principled conduct. It is understood as conduct governed by embodied understandings that are extendable to non-dance, non-ritual, even non-bodily domains of cultural life. This is what makes his interpretation so unusual, and what makes it so familiar from a performer/choreographer’s point of view. Bateson’s interpretation is positing a kind of thinking in bodily performance, a generative intelligence that is primordially corporeal and applicable to a given way of life in general. This kind of Symbolic capability is typically comprehended only by performers themselves, as it is implicated in the everyday work of performance practice.
The Balinese argument A closer semiotic examination of Bateson’s interpretation draws out some additional consequences of the Symbolic claim for the Balinese performative figure. This exercise will show precisely the direct relevance of Bateson’s high point to contemporary theories of performance.
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To revisit Bateson’s statement, with some additional emphasis for the purposes at hand, let it read in this manner: In sum it seems that the Balinese extend to human relationships attitudes based upon bodily balance, and that they generalize the idea that motion is essential to balance. (my emphases, 1972 [1949], 125) Each element here bears scrutiny. First, is the specification that the “extension” Bateson is positing is made to human relationships. Second, Bateson observes that what is being extended is an array of attitudes. Third, in the acts of these attitudinal extensions, it is an “idea” that is generalized. Finally, the idea at issue is characterized, not as a single concept (“Poise,” for example), but as a Symbol that itself asserts a relationship, an essential one, between “motion” and “balance.” Each of these elements of Bateson’s statement further defines the kind of Peircean Symbolic signification that the performance patterning enables in important ways. To begin with the first and most basic point, Bateson’s concept of what kind of an idea it is that the Balinese are generalizing through the tightrope walker figure concerns relationship. “Relationship,” in the sense of “relationship” – the capacity to form, and the general condition of being in, relations – was an all-important concept in Bateson’s overall discourse and must be read in this passage with this larger context in mind. Relationship, or more literally, “relationshipping” – recognizing, creating, modifying relationships – was understood by Bateson to be the foundation of all mental activity. To learn, for Bateson, to gather any kind of intelligence at all, was to comprehend the nature of relationships between previously unrelated phenomena. Bateson’s use of the term in the Balinese steady state argument signals much more than it might seem to at face value, in this regard. To claim that the Balinese movement patterning concerned itself with “relationships,” is tantamount to claiming that it is a form of thought, that the bodily action generating the “attitudes” is itself intelligent. The observation that the understanding gained in the performance of the Balinese movement patterning is of a kind that can be extended to human relationships, from a semeiotic point of view, qualifies it as a particular type of Symbol as well. Peirce labeled this type of Symbol “Propositional” or “Dicent.” He defined it as a kind that can draw a relationship between two or more Symbols of a relatively primitive type, called Terms. Unlike Terms, whose stand-alone signifying capability is limited to the re-presentation of their given meanings, Propositional – or what I will henceforward call Term-relational Symbols13 – have the capacity to generate understanding in excess of whatever it is that their constituent Terms individually represent. They can create and assert new meaning about the understandings of the Terms entailed. The difference between simple Term and Term-relational Symbolism is
Going back to Bateson 21 great in semeiotic theory. In terms of signifying power, it is as great as the difference between a simple word in a language and a sentence employing that word, or between a child who can only utter single words and a child who can speak in sentences. The difference is the difference that makes language possible, as well as logic. This is the difference that Bateson is recognizing in the Balinese movement patterning: a relationship-specifying capability between the performative Terms (the equivalent in Balinese movement practices to their linguistic counterparts), “motion” and “balance.” Bateson’s additional claim, however, that this relationship between bodily Terms can itself be used to understand, or, quite literally, to come to Terms with other not-yet-related relationships moves it beyond what might be characterized as first order Term-relational Symbolism as well. In his assertion that the Balinese movement patterning enables the Balinese to think through human relationships occurring beyond the specific confines of the context of corporeal performance itself, Bateson is characterizing the Symbolic capability as a kind of Symbolism of a third semeiotic class: Argument. Argument is the Symbol type that has the greatest signifying power in the semeiotic framework. Only Arguments possess the capability of governing the understanding of previously “unrelated” relationships. Only Arguments can influence the movement of thought from one Termrelational Symbol toward (or away from) another. The creative relating of Term-relational relationships can happen only by Argumentation, which might be thought of as a second order of relational semeiotics applicable only to Propositional Symbolism. Bateson’s focus on the Balinese tightrope walker performative figure as a model for modeling relationships in general assigns to the performative figure the kind of Symbol status specifically designated for the Argument. His interpretation of Balinese movement performance remains unique in this regard insofar as the anthropology of performance is concerned. There is more, however, to the kind of relational semeiotic Bateson identifies. Bateson’s statement focuses on the specific way in which the Balinese employ the tightrope walker patterning to understand relationships. He describes this as an extension of attitudes “based upon” bodily balance. Bateson’s choice of wording here indicates that the manner in which the application of attitudes occurs (from individual body movement patterning onto various human relationships) is one that he sees involving some measure of experimentation. The attitudes transferred are not exactly those employed in the performance patterning. They are modifications “based upon” them. They might be seen as outgrowths of them – a somewhat looser connection that allows for some degree of play with the performative figure. Moreover, the transference itself is characterized as requiring something of a stretch to bring about. “Extending” is different from other actions of connection or linkage. By definition, such actions reach beyond any established limits of a pre-existing situation. Extensions are the kinds of actions used to
22 Sally A. Ness initiate leaps into new territory. They do not tend to be a particularly safe form of movement, but, rather, generally entail risk-taking of some kind. Bateson might have conceptualized his interpretation of the Balinese application process differently, more conservatively, or more mechanistically. He could have chosen a different concept, such as “transfer onto” or “impose upon” or “apply.” He did not. His terminology here reflects the extensive observation process of human body movement practices he underwent during the Balinese period and the very specific nature of the processes he observed occurring. In positing “extended” acts of application of such creatively modified attitudes, Bateson’s theory of relational Symbolism conforms to a specific kind of Argument, called Abduction. Abduction is defined as open-ended reasoning that enables creative generalization. It applies the reasoning learned from specific cases to cases that are not necessarily related to them, but might possibly be. Peirce characterized Abduction as the most “perilous” brand of logic (Corrington 1993, 46). It must over-reach relatively safe understandings and move into new territories of experimental application. Its fallibility is greater than is the case with other modes of Argument.14 It is this relatively exploratory mode of reasoning that Bateson’s interpretive claim attributes to the performative Symbol of the tightrope walker balancing act. And finally, regarding the “attitudes” based upon bodily balance themselves and the “idea” that the Balinese are posited as generalizing, what is most important here is the link that both of these concepts make to thought processes that are easily available to consciousness and to conscious acts of signification. While neither their extension nor their generalizing is necessarily so in Bateson’s view,15 attitudes are capable of relatively unhindered forms of slippage between conscious and unconscious modes of thoughtfulness. Ideas, for their part, belong more fully to consciousness. In his characterizations of the Balinese as “extending attitudes” and “generalizing an idea” via the performative Symbol, Bateson avoids a depiction of the Symbol’s application as occurring via some kind of automatic repetition or unconscious mechanistic execution of an unchanging structure – as an “ossified” performative figure in Tambiah’s terminology (Tambiah 1979). Instead, Bateson attributes a higher degree of agency and, by implication, possibly conscious intention to the performers while in the act of performing. This characterization of the performative figure as having the capacity to shift into conscious awareness is highly significant, as it supports the idea that the patterning is continually (though not constantly) called into scrutiny as it is re-applied anew. The ongoing trial-and-error re-application Bateson’s interpretation allows prevents the Abduction posited from degenerating into mindless, albeit skilled, conduct. Abduction, as well as other forms of Symbolism, are noted by Peirce as being constantly at risk of such degeneration. They are always potentially subject to becoming relatively
Going back to Bateson 23 thoughtless, petrified, mechanistic, and, in the emptiest sense of the term, ritualistic, if their users cease to employ or revive the Symbolism in an actively thoughtful manner. By envisioning a process of continuous modification in which the Balinese performative figure is being actively re-applied to new contexts of performance, and to new relationships, Bateson indicates that the character of the thinking taking place in performance can be (but is not necessarily) alive to the present moment.16 It is in this last regard – and, perhaps, only in this last regard – that Bateson’s interpretation seems to contrast subtly with the theory of habitus developed by Pierre Bourdieu.17 Bourdieu’s discussion of the embodiment of habitus is so close to Bateson’s observations of Balinese child development and the acquisition of cultural patterning that one wonders why Bourdieu did not cite Bateson in work on this concept.18 In the ritualized embodiments of habitus, however, conscious reasoning over the principle of conduct that is being applied in performance (the internal law to which habitus conforms) is never understood to occur in corporeal performance. The body’s contribution to sustaining cultural practice is assumed by Bourdieu to be unvaryingly an unconscious one. To quote Bourdieu: “It is because subjects do not, strictly speaking, know what they are doing that what they do has more meaning than they know” (1977, 79).19 One can, via habitus, develop an increasingly fine-tuned feel for the game of culture, as Bourdieu sometimes describes it. A body enacting habitus is theoretically capable of improvisation in ongoing practice. Habitus allows for a degree of individual play with the system, for the performance of variations on the themes of culture that are embodied. Embodiment of habitus is not mechanistic for Bourdieu simply because it is not conscious. However, one’s understanding of the reality that determines the habitus (the external structures of culture) is always beyond the grasp of embodied learning. Likewise, the ability to perceive a need to correct the habitus should the structure it conforms to turn out to be dysfunctional or unrealistic, is not accessible to individuals embodying the habitus. Embodied habitus is history turned into nature for Bourdieu because the body is nature. Objective consciousness of external structure is impossible because the body has no consciousness. Predetermined reasonableness is the closest thing to genuine reasoning that the human subjects of habitus can achieve in action. The body is inherently unreasonable. In semeiotic terms, the embodiment of habitus transforms the cultural body-in-practice into an Index or an Icon of external cultural structure, but, because the body is assumed to be outside of or separate from all such structure-making capability, it cannot be an active player in designing or modifying the Symbolism constituting it. In Bateson’s interpretive perspective, however, both unconscious habitus as well as the more error-prone conscious trial and error explorations of Abduction are possible in corporeal performance. The body is not conceptualized as an essentially unconscious, irrational, tool of cultural structure. This is one character it might adopt, and Bateson asserted it was the
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character that produced the most graceful and successful performances, but this is not the only possibility.20 To sum up my reading of Bateson along Peircean semiotic lines, Bateson’s unique accomplishment was to attribute to Balinese physical performance the capacity for conscious Abductive Symbolism, which he saw to be at play throughout Balinese cultural life in a most general way. No other anthropological study of ritual action, before or since, has made such a case for the significance of corporeal performance.
Conclusion Bateson’s unusual interpretation of corporeal symbolism opens up several avenues of inquiry in relation to ritual and post-ritual performance. First, and most obvious, the interpretation recognizes a dimension to the corporeal aspects of performance that is fundamentally experimental in technical (as opposed to aesthetic or spectatorial) character. The risk of losing one’s balance is ever present in the execution of the tightrope walker performative figure, a circumstance that compels continuous experimentation. Embodying the figure, or applying it beyond embodied action, is never a risk-free endeavor. It necessarily entails trial and error. This continuous retesting of the patterning animates the figure. This fallible potential of the figure has as its consequence the cultivation of a methodical aspect as well, a reasoned, if not explicitly logical, understanding that is repeatedly reworked in the ongoing enactments of performances. Bateson’s conceptualization of ritualistic performance, in this regard, defines a new performative ground from which the reasoning of a method, or “methodicality” itself emerges. Simply put, the moving, performing body in ritual becomes capable, from this perspective, of serving as an originative place, literally a proving ground, of logic. This methodical dimension of the corporeal aspect of ritualistic performance is one in which, even in the most liminal, liminoid, or anti-structural cases, and even when the performance context produces the most radically altered, inexplicable, even miraculous, states of consciousness, this dimension is one in which reasonable-ness, if not active reasoning, is nonetheless evident, if not actually present on a corporeal level. The mysterious elements of ritual do not preclude this methodical dimension. It can be co-present with them. The recognition of a corporeal methodicality enables the investigation of relationships between ritual and other explicitly methodical or logical practices, not necessarily aesthetic or religious in character. The examples given in Bateson’s festschrift of the demonstrable applicability of the Balinese performative figure indicate only the beginning of a vast field of inquiry along these lines. Second, Bateson’s interpretation, as noted previously, makes explicit a performative agency which is itself fully integrated into the cultural Symbolism of the performance process. How the performer is coordinating
Going back to Bateson 25 movement becomes culturally significant in Bateson’s analysis. The performer’s experience and understanding of the performative figure is as significant as the performance’s visual or spectatorial meaning. What is from more typical perspectives understood as that which is going on with the performer “behind the scenes,” of the performance, as it were (although this is exactly the wrong figure of speech in this case), the intelligence that produces the performing of the performance is what Bateson’s observation foregrounds. The performer’s instrumental understanding is not constricted in Bateson’s perspective to being of internal significance only to the performance tradition. Instead, the whole of the performer’s practice, the two “sides” as it were, of the performance, the “inside” of the performance process as well as its “outside,” its spectatorial significance (its “obvious” aspect, in Rappaport’s terms), are recognized in Bateson’s view as culturally Symbolic. No aspect of the performer’s subjectivity is by fiat edited out of the cultural interpretation of the performance. This enables the investigation of connections between the performer’s understanding of how the performance happens and a very broad range of other related cultural practices. Third, and, perhaps, most important for contemporary performance theory, Bateson’s interpretation establishes the kind of understanding of the performance of choreographic symbolism that makes it possible to engage in a more graphic (move-by-move) post-structural analysis of it – or a critique of such an analysis. Until the corporeal aspects of performance can be conceived as functioning along the lines of something like the semeiotic Symbol, they cannot be recognized as forms of sign production that may be subject to deconstruction to any meaningful extent. They cannot be posited in anything like a literal sense as comparable to the traces of writing. As long as corporeal performance phenomena are understood only in terms of Iconic and Indexical capabilities, only relatively loose, metaphorical or poetic analogies to post-structural sign production can be drawn. Corporeal performances can be identified, perhaps, as the trace – the presence of nonpresence, past and/or future – of some cruder kind of signification, but their potential to be understood in terms of the multiple and semeiotically complex “detours” (Derrida 1982, 6) that distinguish the traces of language is unthinkable. Their ability to possess anything approximating the complex marked-ness in the sense of a letter’s phonetic and semantic signifying properties (the pyramid in the mute “a” of différance (Derrida 1982, 4)) is erased. Likewise, while it is easy to grasp in a general way how corporeal performance can exemplify Derrida’s concept of “spacing” (1982, 8) (for example, in the way that a temporal movement becomes spatial when a gesture describes a vertical dimension and decelerates as it descends), the understanding of corporeal performance as possibly comparable to the spacing of linguistic sign production remains elusive. In sum, without Symbolic identification, the corporeal aspects of performance cannot be conceptualized as capable of a complex semantic configuration on the order of différance. While they may easily be seen to
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evidence a “play of forms,” even a “play of traces” of some simpler sort (Derrida 1982), they cannot be understood as capable of producing that sort of play that is the necessary precedent of writing – the play of reiteratable Symbolic signifiers. The continuity of meaning Bateson interprets for the Balinese movement patterning, however, with its continuous but everdiffering methodical re-applications that are understood to be contributing to the ongoing definition and application of Terms and their relations, as I have characterized them, is a first step toward enabling a more precise investigation of the ways in which the corporeal aspects of ritual performance might in some cases be understood to bear more concrete relations to the (de-)formations identified in post-structural theory. By the same token, it is difficult to challenge the understanding of corporeal performance emerging from post-structural theories of sign production (that it is the antithesis of writing, for example, as Derrida (1978, 29) has posited) without first recognizing its potential to operate along something like the lines Bateson suggests. Bateson’s interpretation of the Balinese as “generalizing” through the movement patterning presents an entry point for contesting such a post-structuralist theory of ritual corporeal performance. In positing a generalizing capability, Bateson is indicating that the corporeal patterning is “recuperable,” to follow Mark Franko’s argument from his essay on Mallarme’s “Mimique” (1995). It is positing that a corporeal performance has the capacity to be performed successively, never exactly in quite the same way, but nonetheless to repeat itself creatively (1995, 211). This recuperability – and the remembering it entails – call into question the claims of radical ephemerality that typically have been attributed to corporeal performance phenomena, both in post-structural theory as well as in theoretical discourses that preceded it. It calls into question exactly what it means to understand the performance of ritual symbolism as being about the presence of absence, or the disappearing body, or even as tracing, in the sense of dislocating presence. In addition, the way in which Bateson’s interpretation recognizes a form of Symbolism that I have identified as Term-relational also presents another challenge to post-structural theories of interpretation. It introduces something very much like a syntactic aspect to the Balinese movement patterning as well, in its capacity to create relationships, either simultaneous or sequential between performative Terms. The attribution of such quasisyntactic capabilities complicates exponentially the understanding of the meaning-making capabilities of corporeal performance. In this regard, however, Bateson’s interpretation itself does not go far enough into the details of the performative figure and the applicability of its principles of conduct to suggest how the approach might articulate anything comparable to a Balinese “grammar” or “dance game” of mobile balance. Without a much more specific set of technical observations, it is not possible to do more than gesture toward the potential here for showing how the Termrelational semeiotic might conform to, or be opposed to, theories posited in post-structuralism for analogous kinds of sign production.
Going back to Bateson 27 While each of these lines of inquiry would require an essay of its own to flesh out, what they indicate collectively about the potential and productivity of Bateson’s approach should by now be clear. Bateson’s work suggests several areas for the interpretation of corporeal ritual performance that remain largely unexplored today. His work from the Balinese period continues to be generative, in this regard, if not on the leading edge of performance theory.
Notes 1 Bateson worked in Bali continuously from 1936 to 1938 and then returned briefly in 1939 (Lipset 1982, 149–59). His writing on Bali occurred mainly between 1939 and 1942 while he was collaborating with Margaret Mead on the main publication forthcoming from this period, Balinese Character: a Photographic Analysis (1942). However, essays were also published earlier (1937) and later (1944a, 1944b, 1946a, 1946b, 1949, 1967a, 1967b). The essays published in 1944 and 1949 are particularly important for the purposes at hand. However, much of their content is derivative of the writing done before 1942. 2 For examples of Bateson’s still photography from the Balinese period, see Bateson and Mead (1942) and Mead and Macgregor (1951). 3 The nonstandard spelling of the term, “semeiotic,” makes specific reference to C.S. Peirce’s theory of signs. In this chapter, I draw broadly on three sources for characterizing Peircean semeiotic theory: The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume 2 (1893–1913), (The Peirce Edition Project 1998); Peirce on Signs (Hoopes 1991); and The Cambridge Companion to Peirce (Misak 2004). The majority of Peirce’s work on signs can also be located in the first six volumes of The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (Hartshorne and Weiss 1932). 4 Bateson understood himself to be aligned primarily with science as opposed to art in his own work. See Lipset (1982, 101–21). 5 In order to identify technical terms clearly, all vocabulary taken directly from Peirce are capitalized. 6 For an introductory definition of the Icon as it relates to the triadic character of the Peircean sign, see quotes from Peirce collected in Hoopes (1991, 30–1, 183, and 239–40). 7 Radcliffe-Brown’s brief but graphically detailed analysis of Andaman Islander ritual dance is a classic example of this Iconic kind. Radcliffe-Brown argues that Andaman Islanders dance so as to experience in a pleasurable way what it is to be identical to each other, an identification enabled entirely by the actions of ritual dance practices (Radcliffe-Brown 1948). For a particularly explicit contemporary example of such an Iconically-oriented approach, see J. Lowell Lewis (1992). Lewis employs all three Peircean categories in his interpretive study of Brazilian Capoeira. However, Iconic interpretations are predominant. Lewis also draws links between Victor Turner’s symbolic theory (1967) and Peirce’s Iconic category in terms of Turner’s theory of “anti-structure” in relation to the ritual’s cultural significance. 8 For an introductory definition of the Index as it relates to the triadic character of the Peircean sign, see quotes from Peirce collected in Hoopes (1991, 30–1, 183, and 239–40). 9 As he states, “The use of the body defines the self of the performer for himself and others” (1979, 200). Rappaport, however, also stressed the importance of understanding physical/Indexical and verbal/Symbolic aspects of ritual as intimately interconnected. In addition to the Indexing of contingent aspects of
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Sally A. Ness individual status, he also noted that physical acts in ritual could achieve a reidentification of individual performers as conforming tokens of a Symbolic type. All the same, Rappaport conceptualized the role of physical performance along fundamentally different non-Symbolic lines from its verbal “canonical” aspects. Tambiah’s analysis is complicated by the fact that he argues for three different meanings of “performative” as it can be applied to rituals. The third is the only one that invokes Indexicality. However, the second meaning, in which Tambiah explores the performative aspects that achieve a condensation or intensification of meaning in ritual processes, is the meaning in which corporeal performance is most central to his analysis. In this regard, Tambiah’s understanding of the performative aspects of corporeal symbolism in ritual is not explicitly Indexical. His observations implicitly suggest an Iconic orientation toward this performative aspect. Jean Commaroff’s study of South African ritual (1985) is, perhaps, the outstanding example of this approach. Margaret Thompson Drewal’s study of Yoruba ritual (1992) also exhibits an Indexical orientation to the extent that, in focusing on the changes and unique creative aspects of specific performances of ritual, Drewal is arguing for more attention being given to Indexical aspects of the ritual process. For an introductory definition of the Symbol as it relates to the triadic character of the Peircean sign, see quotes from Peirce collected in Hoopes (1991, 30–1, 183, and 239–40). The use of terminology borrowed from logic to characterize the three classes of Symbols is somewhat misleading for present purposes. However, the alternative terminology that Peirce developed is even less helpful. In this regard, I modify the terminology to more neutral expressions when possible. The two other modes defined by Peirce were Deduction and Induction. See Corrington (1993, 27–74) for a discussion of Peirce’s typology of logic with a focus on Abduction. Bateson was, in fact, a great proponent of the unconscious as playing the leading role in both wise thought and action. He argued, somewhat playfully, that consciousness was overrated insofar as intelligent conduct was concerned (see 1972 (1967a), 128–52 for example). The line of argument I make here is opposed to what Bateson would probably have envisioned with specific respect to the degree of consciousness involved in the application of the tightrope walker figure. This presents another unusual aspect of Bateson’s approach with regard to ritual performance theory in anthropology more generally. When ritual performance has been recognized as alive or creative (as opposed to being “ossified” in Tambiah’s terms), it is typically thought to be so with regard to its Indexical capabilities. Bateson, however, is recognizing the vitality of performance with regard to modifications of its Symbolic, generalizing aspects. It is worth noting that Bourdieu’s theory of habitus was published in his work, Outline of a Theory of Practice, in 1972. This was the same year that Bateson’s festschrift was re-published in Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Bourdieu does cite Bateson’s earlier work, Naven (1958), so it is clear that he was familiar with Bateson’s research. He might easily have had access to a copy of the 1949 festschrift prior to its republication in Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Bourdieu may have been put off by the alignment of Bateson’s Balinese research with the “culture and personality school” which he rejects explicitly in Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972, 84–5). Another passage from Bourdieu on this subject bears note as well. He writes, “The principles em-bodied [sic] in this way are placed beyond the grasp of consciousness, and hence cannot be touched by voluntary, deliberate trans-
Going back to Bateson 29 formation, cannot even be made explicit; nothing seems more ineffable, more incommunicable, more inimitable, and therefore, more precious, than the values given body, made body by the transubstantiation achieved by the hidden persuasion of an implicit pedagogy, capable of instilling a whole cosmology, an ethic, a metaphysic, a political philosophy, through injunctions as insignificant as “stand up straight” or “don’t hold your knife in your left hand”(1977, 94). Bateson would probably have supported Bourdieu’s position. However, I read his own as more flexible with regard to whether or not the grasp of consciousness can in some cases be, quite literally, an embodied action. 20 Bateson characterized grace in artistic practice as a condition that resulted from the acquisition of skill through regular practice and the cumulative sinking of knowledge beneath conscious awareness (1967a). I go to some lengths here to read Bateson against Bourdieu in this regard because I believe there is another fundamental difference between their approaches that justifies it. Bourdieu assumes a division between what he calls “internality” and “externality” in his work that is cast as a general given in human experience. This division, which is granted the status of something like a natural law in Bourdieu’s theory of habitus, is not apparent in the same way in Bateson’s writings. Bateson does not predicate his model of cultural structure, on the one hand, and human beings, on the other, as separated by this division. What Bourdieu posits as separate is, for Bateson, continuous. Bateson’s later work in cybernetic theory makes this continuity of the internal and external realms of human awareness explicit and foregrounds it. Consciousness, for Bateson, can be continuously flowing and present throughout a field of information that has both “internal” and “external” aspects in Bourdieu’s terms. Since this understanding is basic to Bateson’s cybernetic orientation, and it is consistently foreshadowed in the writings he authored prior to his engagement with cybernetic theory, I read it into the passage cited here as well, despite the specific views on unconscious processing that Bateson also held, which would seem to align him otherwise with Bourdieu more closely.
Bibliography Bateson, Gregory (1937) “An old temple and a new myth,” Djawa 17: 5–6, 291–307; reprinted in Jane Belo (ed.) (1970) Traditional Balinese Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. –––– (1944a) “Cultural determinants of personality,” in J.M. Hunt (ed.) Personality and the Behavior Disorders, Vol. 2. New York: Ronald Press. –––– (1944b) “Form and function of the dance in Bali,” in F. Boas (ed.) The Function of the Dance in Human Society, a Seminar Directed by Franziska Boas, New York: the Boas School; reprinted in Jane Belo (ed.) (1970) Traditional Balinese Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. –––– (1946a) “Arts of the South Seas,” Art Bulletin 28: 119–23. –––– (1946b) “Physical thinking and social problems,” Science 103: 717. –––– (1949) “Bali: the value system of a steady state,” in M. Fortes (ed.) Social Structure: Studies Presented to A.R. Radcliffe-Brown. Gloucestershire: Clarendon Press; reprinted in (1972) Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine Books. –––– (1958) Naven. Stanford: Stanford University Press. –––– (1967a) “Style, grace and information in primitive art,” paper presented for the Wenner-Gren Conference on Primitive Art; reprinted in (1972) Steps to an Ecology of Mind, New York: Ballantine Books.
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–––– (1967b) “ ‘Person, time and conduct in Bali,’ by Clifford Geertz,” American Anthropologist 69: 765–6. –––– (1972) Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine Books. Bateson, Gregory and Mead, Margaret (1942) Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis, New York: New York Academy of Sciences. Bourdieu, Pierre (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice, translated by R. Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Commaroff, Jean (1985) Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: the Culture and History of a South African People. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Corrington, R. (1993) An Introduction to C.S. Peirce: Philosopher, Semiotician, and Ecstatic Naturalist. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Derrida, Jacques (1978) “Force and signification,” in Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. –––– (1982) “Différance,” in Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Drewal, Margaret T. (1992) Yoruba Ritual: Performers, Play, Agency, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Franko, Mark (1995) “Mimique,” in Ellen W. Goellner and Jacqueline Shea Murphy (eds) Bodies of the Text. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, pp. 205–16. Geertz, Clifford (1973) “Deep play: notes on the Balinese cockfight,” in The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Hartshorne, Charles and Weiss, Paul (eds) (1932) The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hoopes, James (ed.) (1991) Peirce on Signs. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Lewis, John Lowell (1992) Ring of Liberation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lipset, David (1982) Gregory Bateson: the Legacy of a Scientist. Boston: Beacon Press. Mead, Margaret and Macgregor, Frances C. (1951) Growth and Culture: a Photographic Study of Balinese Childhood, New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Misak, Cheryl (ed.) (2004) The Cambridge Companion to Peirce. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred R. (1948) The Andaman Islanders. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press. Rappaport, Roy (1979) Ecology, Meaning, and Religion. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books. Tambiah, Stanley J. (1979) “A performative approach to ritual: Radcliffe-Brown lecture in social anthropology,” The Proceedings of the British Academy 65: 113–69. The Peirce Edition Project, Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel (eds) (1998) The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume 2 (1893–1913). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Turner, Victor (1967) The Forest of Symbols. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
2
Performative interventions African community theatre in the age of AIDS Ola Johansson
In many parts of Zambia the ancient religious ideas and practices of the Africans are dying out through contact with the white man and his ways. Employment in the copper mines, on the railway, as domestic servants and shop assistants; the meeting and mingling of tribes in a nontribal environment; the long absence of men from their homes – all these factors have contributed to the breakdown of religions that stress the values of kinship ties, respect for the elders, and tribal unity. However, in the far northwest of the Territory, this process of religious disintegration is less rapid and complete; if one is patient, sympathetic, and lucky one may still observe there the dances and rituals of an older day. (Turner 1967, 2)
This passage from Victor Turner’s The Forest of Symbols bears witness to a transition period when Zambia along with many other African countries underwent its first years of emancipation from colonial rule and thus faced the consequences of a complex cultural shift from traditional indigenous practices to modern intercultural customs. Relatively unharmed by British authority, the Ndembu had been able to retain their tribal unity, at least while Turner conducted his famous fieldwork a good ten years earlier in what was then Northern Rhodesia (Turner 1957).1 He thus had the opportunity to observe continuous and still efficacious rites of affliction and life-crisis rituals; the latter type has subsequently become a paradigmatic example of anthropological discourse in line with Van Gennep’s (1960) master trope, rites de passage. From a contemporary perspective, it is remarkable that precisely those geopolitical changes Turner associates with the waning conditions of tribal life today are perceived as key factors in the spread of HIV in Africa. The idea of redressing the affliction by reinstating traditional practices is not, however, a feasible option at this time. The virus challenges the cultural dynamics of modernity like an ill spirit of old and yet no instituted or otherwise known form of policy or practice has been capable of tracing or pursuing its complex mutations in contemporary African societies. Stemming the onslaught of HIV/AIDS has been impeded by a number of factors. Among
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them have been an official reluctance to acknowledge its existence, an interpersonal hesitancy to speak about its risk factors, a difficulty to see its asymptomatic bodily condition, a widespread discrimination and stigmatization of the sick, a resistance among governmental and non-governmental organizations to coordinate prevention programs, and a corporate aversion to allocate biomedical means to treat opportunistic diseases. The result is a general paralysis before the spread of the disease. The AIDS syndrome thrives on traditional life, and thus expands through modern life, threatening the future of millions every day. As long as no vaccine is in sight and the anti-retroviral drugs are too expensive or distant, social changes and behavioral counteractions are the only ways out of the maelstrom. In this chapter, a quite recent type of cultural performance is outlined in terms of an auspicious preventive action in the African AIDS epidemic, namely community theatre and, especially, the movement called Theatre for Development. I shall argue, in light of ritual traditions and discourses, that this kind of theatre not only invents new ways of acting out and then talking about hushed up and hidden aspects of the epidemic, but also represents a viable alternative to former ritual practices as well as to daily discourse. In fact, its possibilities lie precisely in combining these formal and informal activities through social mobilization, group consolidation, and certain modes of performative speech acts.
Topical uncertainties of traditional practices When Turner compared theatre with ritual in his last book, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, he contrasted the Ndembu rituals with Western theatre (Turner 1982, chapter 2). Rituals are thus heeded as the “work of gods,” obligating “communal participation” in liminal passages of the whole society through crises, while the leisure habit of theatre pertains to “liminoid genres” of industrial societies where “great public stress is laid on the individual innovator” (43). This distinction would not be very useful in a comparison of ritual and African community theatre under the present circumstances. Ritual is, of course, still a sacred and consolidated practice as compared with the more temporal and eclectic theatre; however, when it comes to preventive efforts in the AIDS crisis, it is far from certain which performative practices serve more efficient communal and redressive functions. Turner somehow anticipates this situation, not by referring to African theatre in his later work, but by recognizing the breakdown of “ancient religious ideas and practices” in a book like The Forest of Symbols. The bestknown ritual in Turner’s exploration is, of course, the Ndembu boys’ initiation rite called Mukanda, which belongs to a class of puberty rites in various Bantu speaking communities of sub-Saharan Africa. This category of life-crisis ritual is indeed still performed although on a more syncretistic foundation in most places. Hence, if Turner’s analyses of the Ndembu
Performative interventions 33 rituals hinge on the “tribal unity” of their society, yielding a “total system” for the anthropologist to “work out” (Turner 1964, 21, 29), as opposed to the more or less “rapid and complete” geopolitical changes affecting most other communities in “the world’s fast disappearing ‘tribal’ societies” (Turner 1982, 44), then his prime example of a life-crisis ritual may accurately be understood as a historical instance – perhaps even an “extreme case” in a contemporary ritual typology (Gerholm 1988, 196) – rather than an exemplar of how cultural predicaments arise and are coped with in cognate African societies today. In his introduction, excerpted above, Turner links external factors to the religious disintegration that leads indigenous people to “nontribal” places.2 This process of cultural displacement has increased continually with seasonal work markets, modern transport systems, demographic urbanization, and other post-colonial living conditions. Long absences from homes due to migrant labor jobs along busy routes in densely populated regions have given the spread of HIV alarming prevalence rates in nations such as Botswana, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Swaziland, Lesotho, and indeed Zambia. In the 1980s it became clear that AIDS was characteristically a disease of modernity, apparently unaffected by the natural milieu but responsive to the man-made environment of the twentieth century. This was because it was mainly transmitted sexually, often in association with venereal diseases, and therefore correlated with towns, transport routes, and labour migration networks where sexual partners changed rapidly. (Iliffe 1995, 270) Some commentators have thus proposed nostalgic ideas about going back to traditional forms of sex education and other life skills informed by tribal regulations (Iliffe 2002, 224; Roth Allen 2000; Eyoh 1986, 17). However, while particular ethnic regimes could possibly gain temporary control of local epidemic varieties, it is difficult, if not impossible, to generalize longterm prospects of such a restoration on a large scale, and, moreover, to know how severe the civic backlash would be for particular social strata. A crucial argument against the traditionalists is that many communities not only face an unsettling external form of communicable syndrome, but that some of their traditional practices function as social vectors for the viral transmission. In discussions of HIV and AIDS, a variety of traditional customs have been criticized, such as the multiple use of bloodstained knives in circumcision rites, unreliable witchcraft, sexual cleansing of widows, and gender biased commands of sexual and marital conduct in rites of passage. The latter criticism has also been leveled – albeit not specifically relating to AIDS – against Van Gennep and Turner due to their sparse attention to girls’ initiation rites – i.e., in Turner’s case, the Nkang’a as opposed to the Mukanda of the Ndembu (Bynum 1984; Lincoln 1991).3
34 Ola Johansson Consider, however, that condemnations of traditional practices often mask power motives of political and/or religious establishments that seek to win people over to their own particular agendas. In the AIDS context, traditional doctors are ignored by Western medical practitioners as well as by their African associates, denigrated by churches, and marginalized by governments who advocate progressive modernity. Dilger emphasizes, along with Gausset (2001), that decontextualized criticism against cultural practices “is not only unethical but also counterproductive” as it risks “alienating the target communities” (Dilger 2002, 2) in AIDS campaigns. Moral-religious discourses and practices may build the foundation for blame, stigmatisation and exclusion – and often for further HIV infections. However, they may also be a path for maintaining the dignity of the sufferer and his or her family in coping with the strong stigma attached to HIV/AIDS. In addition, cultural conceptions of illness may offer hope of being healed to HIV-infected individuals, and they have also become a means for families and communities “of pulling together local worlds that are increasingly in danger of falling apart.” (Dilger 2001, 11)4 African societies need to consolidate now more than ever. Whether informative discussions take place in/as theatre or through other public forums, ritual elements are in fact almost always part of prevention programs. They serve as a means to gather people together with drum-based songs and dances (called ngoma in several Bantu languages), which everyone recognizes as a summons to a public meeting. However, ritual elements generally function as parts of, rather than as the monolithic agency for, such assemblies, and thus figure as “multivocal” and “polysemic” symbols, although not “dominant symbols” to speak with Turner (1964, 32–5). It has become increasingly clear that no particular kind of action can assuage or resolve the complex issues of the AIDS epidemic. Multi-sectoral approaches are necessary to meet the challenges of contemporary pluralist societies, just as multidisciplinary approaches are needed in research about culture-specific epidemics. Ritual theorists such as Van Gennep and Eliade tended to overlook the critical gap between the cosmic and societal when attributing all-inclusive cultural values to ritual. Thus a long-lasting disciplinary fissure was established between ritual phenomena and other modes of cultural performance. Grimes argues that imposed patterns of cultural orders and practices were “treated as if they were discovered,” which gave way, in turn, to prescribed models functioning “as if they were laws determining how rites should be structured” (Grimes 2000, 107). “Rites of passage can seem perfectly magical,” he writes, “but only if you keep your eyes and ears trained on what transpires center stage. Backstage, there often seethes a morass of spiritual stress and social conflict” (Ibid, 11).5 Viewed this way, ritual studies are
Performative interventions 35 predicated on the same secular conditions as performance studies, just as ritual performances are set on the same societal stage and in relief against the same circumstantial setting as are theatrical performances. The significance of this shared scene of inquiry is not a disciplinary issue per se; in the AIDS epidemic it is crucial that all performative actions be assessed by equally critical means. Before suggesting the merits of community theatre, something more needs to be said about the justifications of comparing theatre and ritual.
The ritual function of performative speech acts Rites of passage certainly represent a venerable case of how changes in personal status can be instantiated through communal events. Ritual does not merely show and tell, it makes things happen in the local and cosmic world. A comparable, yet somewhat more discreet, example of such changes is established in speech acts. John L. Austin’s (1962; 1979) conception of explicit performatives, the constitutive utterance “I do,” enacting wedding ceremonies, is a case in point, and is analogous to the notion of rites of passage insofar as both theories deal with situations where people’s official status is changed through the performance of certain ceremonies. However, Austin’s speech act theory does not deal with ritual per se, but with the possibilities for speakers to perform various social functions with language in particular circumstances. This eventually gives way to implicit performatives where modest statements like “I’ll see you tomorrow!” brings about a commitment by binding the interlocutors to an impending event. To realize the social pertinence of implicit performatives, consider a speech act exercise in a recent school workshop in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa. The goal of the workshop was to promote the ability of female students to say no to casual sex through forum theatre techniques.6 The speech act in question turns on the proposition “I’ll see you at 7” uttered by the male student Sipho, to which the female student Hazel replies, “Oh! No, Sipho, my father would kill me.” Nevertheless, Sipho manages to convince Hazel, and she eventually gets pregnant, a fact that rules out further schooling for female students in South Africa as well as in many other African countries. The point of the exercise, then, is to go back to the proposal and find out how to turn down sex for one’s own reasons. However, the project title of the workshop (instructed by the local organization DramAidE) was “Mobilising Young Men to Care.” Thus being able to counter an implicit performative is contingent on the assertive interlocutor’s disqualification of it as a subjective turn of phrase masquerading as a negotiable action. Hence, speech acts may be “highly developed affairs” (Austin 1962, 32) or quite ordinary events where someone wants to influence, warn, or encourage someone else, or perhaps just wants to “let off steam in this way or that” (Austin 1979, 234). Austin views language as a binding means of intersubjective knowledge and trust, made to be performed for various purposes on
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the basis of more or less established habits (doing philosophy is incidentally only one of those habits). Like Wittgenstein’s language games, Austin’s speech act theory presupposes a culture-historic “stage-setting” (Wittgenstein 1996, 257) for utterances to take effect, even if the spoken performances appear mostly on the commonplace stages of daily life. With this return of the everyday voice into philosophical discourse (Cavell 1994, chapter 2), performative utterances can be perceived as “a rare verbal form” (Barthes 1977, 145) only if the ordinary is somehow excluded from philosophical inquiry. Something similar can be said about the way theatre has been disregarded in anthropological discourse, even if a performance theorist like Richard Schechner (1988, 2002) has attempted to prove otherwise with historical reflections and intercultural models. Very roughly, then, the idea of speech acts indicates a common ground of the ordinary, theatrical and ritual inasmuch as all three areas of routine are more or less contingently based on, and geared to, performative conditions in particular situations.7 And as with all conventional states of affairs, any form of use can be abused or used abusively. The credibility of performatives depends on factors such as who the utterer is, in whose interest he or she is speaking, where and when the speech acts take place, how it is done, and, not least, what possibilities addressees have to respond to or act on the appeals the speech acts addressed to them contains. All these factors, each of which has the potential to impair the political and ethical reliability of a speech act, pertain to the cross-disciplinary field of performativity, which in the wake of speech act theory has elaborated analyses of power-laden regimes nestling in bodily and discursive practices, not the least of which pertain to speech act situations (cf. Butler 1997). Speech acts are highly relevant in African community theatre, even if what will be argued in favor of such an application does not sit easily with some theorists of bordering disciplines. Theatre appears to have become stuck in a functional continuum between the stream of direct interactions of daily life and the repetitive and more closed structures of formal ritual. For anthropologists and sociologists respectively, theatre seems to have something in common with both fields and yet not enough of either to qualify as a genuine disciplinary example. On the one hand, a sociologist like Goffman makes a distinction between face-to-face interactions (1974, 8, 133) in daily situations in opposition to theatrical events, a distinction which hinges on a highly generalized theatrical frame (ibid.: chapter 5). On the other hand, an anthropologist like Rappaport (1999) separates ritual from theatre on account of an equally rigid opposition based on a presupposition that has been summarized as follows: “While theatre confines itself to saying things about social relationships, ritual also does things with them; and what it does is to reinforce or change them” (Green 1995, 923). In other words, ritual does things with social relations, just as speech acts do things with words, while theatre is merely capable of commenting on people’s status and relations.8 In an additional move away from both everyday situations and
Performative interventions 37 theatrical events, Rappaport claims a prominent status for rituals by using Austin’s taxonomy: [I]f performatives are understood to be conventional acts achieving conventional effects then ritual is not simply performative, but metaperformative as well, for it not only brings conventional states of affairs into being, but may also establish the very conventions in terms of which those conventional effects are realized. (Rappaport 1999, 278–9) Rappaport is right in saying that ritual establishes its own conventions for performative effects, but he is incorrect in suggesting that this also makes it meta-performative, for that would mean that it could control the need and effects of its actions. That is, of course, up to people to decide in reciprocity with their current living conditions, given that they reside in a democracy. It is obvious that a performance cannot (re)establish its own action more than an explicit performative; to enunciate and concurrently enact the conventions of a speech act is the very idea of Austin’s doctrine.9 There is no doubt about ritual ruling as long as it controls the conventions and state of affairs it enacts. Trouble arises, however, when traditional systems lose coherence and validity in major crises. Examples are colonial rule, times of warfare, demographic shifts leading to multicultural societies, or, when rites of affliction not only must cope with “internal changes” (Turner 1982, 21) but with the very endurance of districts and regions as in the AIDS epidemic. Even Turner, who outlines in great detail the antistructural order of creative processes in the subjunctive mood of communitas during the liminal phases of initiation ceremonies (Turner 1969), acknowledges that there are limits to what ritual can change. Innovation in ritual societies can take place in legal and customary spheres, “but most frequently it occurs in interfaces and limina, then becomes legitimated in central sectors” (Turner 1982, 45). For many societies, AIDS has entailed a critical discontinuity, which in turn motivates a need for what may be called “ritual change” (Bell 1997, chapter 7). This brings me to the discussion of African community theatre as performative intervention in the AIDS epidemic.
The performativity of theatre for development Due to its junctions betwixt and between the sacred and the profane, orality and the written word, theatre is, according to Ousmane Diakhaté, “one of the cultural elements that best exemplifies Africa” (Rubin 1997, 17). As Nigerian playwright Ola Rotimi has put it, “[theatre is] the best artistic medium for Africa because it is not alien in form” (Gilbert and Tompkins 1996, 8). Yet drama with a fictional plot and narrative closure is a relatively new mode of public performance on the continent. Up until the independent states adapted its forms for their own purposes, theatre was perceived as
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a colonial habitus. In its “Africanized” styles, theatre has been and still is used in combination with a number of traditional expressions containing many ritual connections. Dialogues between characters as well as between characters and spectators have been an integral part of traditional gatherings, as, for instance, at the indigenous community forum of kgotla in Botswana (Banham 2004, 292). Village meetings have been narrated by clan leaders and elders, while fictional dramatizations have been performed through ritual mimes and skits or by storytellers impersonating mythic characters. In a sense, Africa had theatre before “theatre” was brought to Africa. Regardless of questions of typology, the reality is that theatre is a forum for popular struggle both in national freedom drives and as a shaper of public opinion in post-colonial circumstances. One of the most well-known theatre of the latter kind is Theatre for Development (TFD). TFD is commonly described as a set of varied performative practices predicated on communal initiatives free from any consensus or authority beyond popular participation. It is certainly not a substitute for ritual, but it may be considered as an alternative to it. This is because it copes with communal issues by identifying the immediate needs of local populations prior to the hardening of public policy decisions. Theatre as a forum for redressive actions allows community members themselves to re-negotiate the validity of policies and practices, even if this comes down to substituting new actions for traditional rituals.
Figure 2.1 Community performance on HIV/AIDS in Sululu Village, Masasi District, Tanzania (2002) (photo: Ola Johansson).
Performative interventions 39 When TFD was first tried out in the 1970s, it did not quite live up to these standards. With historical influences as disparate as colonial propaganda theatre (putting on edifying dialogues with Mr. Wise and Mr. Foolish type characters), the traveling university theatre of some independent states, and Paulo Freire’s “pedagogy of the oppressed” (1970), the pioneering Laedza Batanani movement (Kerr 1995, chapter 8) in Botswana was well aware of which historical misconducts to eschew and which good practices to pursue when facilitating relations with rural communities. And yet the projects turned out to bear features of academically motivated top-down approaches. However, the basic concept of TFD was established by the mobilization of local residents around public performances that would trigger audience discussion and lead to their active participation in sitespecific resolutions of social and material predicaments. Kerr understands the start of the movement in light of a post-colonial aftermath, and calls the performances an “induced” popular theatre in that they have often been created in cultures like that of Botswana and Zambia where the migrant labour system or rapid urbanization has eroded most “organic” forms of indigenous popular theatre, creating a vacuum which popular theatre “induced” by intellectuals has been able to fill. (Kerr 1995, 152)10
Figure 2.2 Performance on HIV/AIDS at the University of Botswana, Gaborone, Botswana (2002) (photo: Ola Johansson).
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It is interesting to note that the geopolitical changes, which Turner relates to the breakdown of religious life, and which I, in turn, associated with contemporary epidemic patterns of AIDS, reappears here in the 1970s as a need for community theatre. Given waning indigenous traditions and weak civil societies of centralized post-colonial states, alternative local fora were needed to raise awareness and encourage participation on governmental land reforms, youth unemployment, health problems, and so forth. These are, of course, immense developmental challenges and soon the themes of the projects took on more manageable proportions suited to postperformance discussions and follow-up actions. Since then it has been common to view TFD as a means for pragmatic solutions, a confident view that had to be reconsidered in the imminent AIDS epidemic. Digging a latrine is one thing, changing human relations or social habits are quite different. Even to implement a seemingly simple procedure like using contraceptives against venereal diseases, which motivated some of the early Laedza Batanani projects (Kerr 1995, 152), has proven to involve highly intricate cultural ordeals in HIV prevention programs. Due in part to local needs for cultural regeneration and in part to the complex challenges of AIDS, TFD gradually shifted from an intellectually generated to a popularly conceived modus operandi. This shift over time roughly corresponds to two different modes of TFD, which have been employed concurrently in AIDS campaigns: the first may simply be described as performative events, characterized by one-time performances of visiting theatre troupes or by individual appeals for particular media, occasions and audiences. The second kind may be called community processes and is distinguished by long-lasting collective projects involving local participants in social change. It is especially the latter mode of TFD that will be argued for as an alternative to ritual in contemporary African communities. However, the first mode, i.e., the performances of group or individual appeals to people at risk, have played and continues to play an important role in certain epidemiological circumstances, especially in areas that have not yet broken the silence on AIDS. In what follows, I will give a few examples of performative events which have served to inform, persuade, and warn people of the dangers of HIV and sorrows of AIDS,11 only to conclude by elaborating on the merits of community processes as a viable succession to former ritual and syncretistic performances.
HIV prevention through performative events Individual appeals are not necessarily bound to theatre events, but may be expressed in classrooms, town halls, in bus stands, on murals, and through various media. Hence they could be a lyrical depiction of private experiences, like Philly Lutaaya’s “Alone and Frightened,” a song that broke the AIDS taboo on the radio and gave the affliction a human voice in 1989 when Uganda was at the epidemic’s epicenter (Frank 1995, 152–5). (Sadly, the
Performative interventions 41 artist died of AIDS-related diseases later that year.) Invocations like Lutaaya’s are cases of performative speech acts offered in the first person and the present tense by an individual who is living through that of which he speaks, i.e., someone who embodies the status of doing things with words. Due to widespread stigmatization and discrimination, few African countries have had prominent people willing to reveal their sero status.12 Still, there have been a few in South Africa, for example the young boy Nkosi Johnson and the AIDS activist Zackie Achmat. Achmat, however, refused to take anti-retroviral medicine until it became available in public hospitals in the autumn of 2003. However, there have also been reports of violence against individuals who announce their positive status, such as the activist Gugu Dlamini who was stoned to death by a mob after World AIDS Day in 1998. In contrast, Lutaaya’s lyrical testimony was encouraged by the uncommonly open and tolerant attitude of the Ugandan political leadership. More commanding pleas have been voiced with illocutionary force through belligerent metaphors by political leaders such as Nelson Mandela and Kenneth Kaunda,13 both of whom have lost sons to AIDS. Kaunda, expresident of Zambia, has declared “total war” on HIV/AIDS, claiming that it ought to be “not a national war that only appears in speeches at conferences and meetings but a war that becomes part and parcel of the life of this continent” (Sithole 2002). The epidemic has indeed killed more people than all the wars combined on African soil in the twentieth century. If rhetorical artillery is fired too often and forcefully, however, there is a risk that it may avert attention from the already subdued voices and complex discourses among the most vulnerable social strata of the epidemic. One example of such complex and vulnerable discourse can be found in a performance I witnessed in the Tanzanian town of Kamachumu, where an orphan group performed the Omutoro, an aggressive warrior dance with spears that was once performed after battles for leaders in the old kingdoms of the Kagera region. Today the choral lyrics of the dance take on an emotional dimension when voiced by orphans in the local language of Ruhaya who cry out phrases like “We have to kill AIDS!”14 Even if few of those who use belligerent metaphors spell out what kind of war is being waged, let alone who the enemies or allies may be, it somehow makes sense to see orphans piercing an imaginary enemy of old in the streets of Kamachumu. President Kaunda’s reference to conferences also makes sense, as they constitute a special performative site for valuable updates on research and policy making, but just as often come down to nothing but excessive spectacles of inert politics and detached science. In a number of counter-performances, action groups of HIV-positive people have interfered in meetings with demands for anti-retroviral drugs, as at the 2002 National AIDS Conference in Uganda (Wendo 2002). More recently, the 2004 World AIDS Conference in Bangkok, entitled “Access for all,” was recognized more for its disruptive protests than for its authoritative reports. A more subtle protest occurred at
42 Ola Johansson an international AIDS meeting in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania by Frowin Paul Nyoni’s play Judges on Trial. In line with traditional parables, the virus was invoked in this play as a supernatural entity that is constantly dissected and discussed by experts. In the end, the analytical paralysis of the scientists appears as a pathological side effect of the syndrome itself. Like most pieces on AIDS, the performance gravitated towards a tragic end as the characters ponder whether anything can be done at all, although with a unexpected twist as the final question addressed directly to the experts in the auditorium was: “But what should be done?” (Nyoni 2000). An equally burning and open-ended performance took place at an AIDS conference at the University of Botswana in 2002 where Ghetto Artists staged a play by Vuyisele Otukile called Salty Minds. The performance begins with the rape of a young woman and her vain attempts to seek consolation from her father. Torn by generational conflicts, it is not until his daughter has died of AIDS that the old man regrets his conservative views in the face of his grandchild, who was spared at birth owing to a medicine (and a little luck) that prevents a mother-to-child transmission of the virus. Although the play reflected mainly male perspectives in critical scenes of attitude changes and decision-making, it did manage to cut across legal, religious and cultural patterns through its daring depiction of risky behavior in a country with a prevalence rate of almost 40 percent HIV-positive adults. The thematic accuracy of the drama was substantiated in the UNAIDS/WHO epidemic update, which reports that “young women aged 15–24 years . . . are about three times more likely to be infected than young men of the same age” (UNAIDS/WHO 2004, 7). It is increasingly clear that these data are partially explained by sexual coercion or violence (7–18). In countries with limited official information channels and media outlets, long-standing public events such as drama contests and cultural festivals have played important roles in raising HIV/AIDS awareness. A typical drama contest took place in 2003 at the Bahir Dar Cultural Centre in Ethiopia. The event brought together four so-called Anti-AIDS Clubs from as many Ethiopian cities to compete for a place in the finals on World AIDS Day. Four themes had been specified by the organizers of Save Your Generation and UNICEF: HIV prevention, stigma and discrimination, promotion of voluntary counseling and testing, and community care and support. Adopting a blend of comical skills from the Ethiopian tradition of kinet, each performance was given 20 minutes and a minimum of stage props. What struck me was how Ethiopian community theatre corresponded in plot, style and characterization to performances at various youth centers elsewhere in Africa. Ethiopian theatre does not derive from a ritual tradition as is the case in many other sub-Saharan countries (cf. Rubin 1997; Plastow 1996) and yet popular theatre becomes clearly recognizable across ethnic divides and national borders when young people relate its depictions to actual epidemic risk scenarios. One difficulty with Ethiopian theatre, however, is that it is tightly bound by authoritarian restrictions, which is
Performative interventions 43 detrimental to any theatre on AIDS. Restrictions are due to an entrenched alliance between the orthodox church and the government (arguably the most passive AIDS regime among the hardest hit countries of Africa).15 At the drama contest in Bahir Dar, sexuality and other taboos were conspicuously absent on stage. Despite a good act by a group from Debre Marcos that intertwined all of the optional themes, a troupe from Dessie came first with an unsuitably optimistic performance about a group of people who decide to take a test together and come out of the clinic HIV negative. To show and speak about the most precarious behavior of the epidemic means to lay open closeted and intimate situations in the very act of underscoring their ramifications for a general tragedy. Theatre that enjoys freedom of speech and freedom of assembly often offers critical ways of perceiving intimate acts in performative stagings against multi-layered strata of historical and societal censorship. The presentation of sensitive topics – which has been and still is vital in areas with negligent governance, high rates of illiteracy, little or no access to impartial public opinion – by their very enunciation provides the conditions for what Austin calls locutionary acts, which, in turn, may have illocutionary and perlocutionary effects on those who are ready to respond to the epidemic risk scenarios. Despite the grim topics and motives, performances in community settings are regularly enlivened by eager audience comments and roaring laughter. One can always hear the spirited events from a distance. To a Northern spectator, they resemble comedies in the tradition of Menander, Plautus, Molière, and Dario Fo, except for the mournful conclusions they engender when what appear to be stock characters run into economic and amorous trouble after having challenged communally accepted ethics. Uncharacteristically for classical theatre, this leads them to existential crises, weakening bodily states and, ultimately, to scenes of death and funerals. According to AIDS Education through Theatre (1995), a study by Marion Frank that examines the so-called “campaign theatre” of Uganda in the 1980s, plots were almost always motivated by themes such as promiscuity, alcohol, and alienated women and men in urban settings. These issues certainly had a dramatic effect on the present onlookers, even if it is fair to assume that the reactions were ephemeral due to the cultural distance between audiences and the visiting troupes. There is no doubt, however, that the traveling performances have promoted a shared sensibility for what lies behind abstract relations found in the extreme AIDS statistics, both for outside aid workers and local audiences. This sensibility is engendered by intimate love scenes wrapped up in burning political scenarios and the private experiences of true sorrow. Urgent issues of human and women’s rights are embedded in local pockets of such intense depictions in ways that reports or papers seldom manage to convey. They are indeed ingenious inventions of action research – tender explorations in practical ethics.
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The performances have a special way of playing with situational conditions. Even if some plots are simple and straightforward, the combination of role distancing and performance sites coalesce intricate contexts. Both TFD and rites of passage set secrets in play although in reverse ways. In initiation ceremonies liminal phases turn social order upside down in a carnivalesque manner by including “subversive and ludic (or playful) events” where “people ‘play’ with the elements of the familiar and defamiliarize them.” Here “[n]ovelty emerges from unprecedented combinations of familiar elements” (Turner 1982, 27) whereas TFD turns social order inside out by familiarizing taboos that have been defamiliarized in public. In unreliable political circumstances, to take a conspicuous example, the theatrical role distance can serve as a critical protection for actors impersonating powerful social actors. It can also protect those who sense the need to enact the role of themselves as another individual. This is especially important when it comes to acting out gender conflicts in public settings. Types stand in for tokens and yet it is the bodily presence of individual actors that make claims for civil and human rights. This performative convolution is evident in the form of TFD which I earlier called community processes, long-term projects where local volunteer groups tease out context-specific risk behaviors for and with fellow community members through forum theatre and cognate interactions.
HIV prevention and community processes of TFD The ultimate objective of TFD and other HIV preventive schemes is to effectuate perlocutionary acts, i.e., performative speech acts that not only express matters in a convincing way, but also persuade interlocutors to take subsequent action for their own and other’s sake. Ironically, this objective does not seem attainable either by result-oriented performances or by didactic methods. I would not go so far as to say with Setel that preventive actions ought to be “service oriented rather than educational” (my emphasis), even if it is fair to assume that “the impact of targeted interventions such as those promoting condom use may be very limited” and that the notion of “behavior change” is subject to manifold “situational constraints” (Setel 1999, 245–6). It is clear that superimposed educational projects rarely reach the cultural profundity of behavior change. AIDS has forced development workers to realize that cultural changes can only transpire through people’s own initiatives and actions. Some TFD practitioners appreciated this epidemiological fact long before most aid workers and thus altered their interventions from being nomadic and ephemeral to culture specific and long-lasting. In the 1980s, TFD spread across sub-Saharan Africa through annual international workshops, which gradually improved its initial methods. The Laedza Batanani projects conceptualized and implemented its prototypical model, but also met with criticism on a number of counts. A few crucial elements had been overlooked, such as the use of local languages, indigenous
Performative interventions 45 performance traditions, and gender issues (Mlama 1991; Kerr 2002). Byam (1999) has also criticized the participatory deficiency in the early projects, especially in terms of Freire’s “conscientization,” which claims that liberating changes can only come to pass if subjects actively relate a critical awareness and dialogic praxis to the societal and historical conditions of their environment.16 Artistic development workers dwelt amid villagers or urban squatters, composed skits based on characters and scenarios narrated by the locals, and then performed them before the community for discussion and, ultimately, for action. Hence, the ethnographic pertinence of their performances needed further consideration. This led to an advanced phase of sustainable TFD which developed in countries like Lesotho (Mda 1993) and Tanzania (Mlama 1991), which still typifies the crucial methodology of theatre projects on AIDS. Freire’s “pedagogy of the oppressed” and Boal’s “forum theatre” had built-in methods and techniques for audience participation (Kerr 1995, 161 ff.) and made a big impact on TFD. Combined with African performance traditions, these practices created serious theatrical sites at the interface of artistic and social actions where interchangeable role-playing could take place (Feldhendler 1994). To work well, the process should not only be long-lasting, but also involve a considerable segment of the concerned community. One project in the Tanzanian region of Iringa went on for several years (Nyoni 1998). Another 18 month project in the Mwanza region focused on older men impregnating young women, “which precipitated a crisis in the village leadership (because the story cut so close to the bone), leading to the dismissal of the chairman and secretary of the . . . drama core group” (Kerr 1995, 158).17 The Boalian “shift of emphasis from theatre as a finished ‘product’ to theatre as a continuous and alterable ‘process’ ” (Kerr 1995, 160) became crucial for TFD programs. Ross Kidd puts it this way: It is the drama-which-is-never-finished, constantly being restructured to extend the insights of the participants. Nothing is presented as a final statement: each new scene is questioned, challenged and probed for deeper meaning. (Kidd 1984, 13) The critical turn from pre-encoded performative events to open participatory community processes eventually coincided with an analogous alteration in AIDS interventions. After a long period of largely unsuccessful prevention programs in sub-Saharan Africa, a paradigm shift transpired in the late 1990s whereby self-reliant community development programs displaced policy driven by experts and biomedical campaigns. Previous efforts had suffered from misconceptions about the complexity of the syndrome and thus the premises of countermeasures. Conveying information on behavior change predicated on rational choice models from geopolitical contexts in the North
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brought about a fundamental distrust in target communities and had little effect as the epidemic spread to general populations. Ultimately the gap between expert knowledge and conventional behavior compelled a change from information campaigns to action programs that streamlined prevention projects with broader agendas on poverty alleviation, gender equity, and lifestyle negotiations (Kalipeni 2004, chapter 1; Campbell 2003; Holden 2003). And in order to cope with these challenges, it turned out to be unfeasible not to hand over more managerial responsibility to people within the communities. This is where the advanced forms of TFD meet the contemporary criteria of HIV prevention. Theatre mobilizes the most vulnerable risk groups, namely young people who represent more than half of the new infections in Africa. It activates these people in gender-balanced groups and allows them to express their experiences of AIDS through dialogues, which, in turn, invites spectatorial participation. Furthermore, TFD initiates a responsive space for local languages, habits, stories, humor, traits, issues – mimetic qualities which are integral in traditional rites and story telling (Vansina 1985, 35), but which are also put in critical perspective by post-performance activities. For many young Africans, TFD offers a unique bottom-up approach to AIDS, especially if it is accommodated in community centers with connections to out-of-school youth. By entrusting them with this creative and edifying modus operandi, those most at risk become subjects rather objects of projects, which is exactly what is required in HIV prevention. An up-to-date implementation of effective community theatre projects thus involves: • • • • • • • • •
social mobilization of local participants seminars lead by specialists on target issues training of dramatic skills lead by artistic trainers “community mapping” and other forms of situation analysis by virtue of the participants’ local knowledge, preferably in gender- and age-specific groups script writing based on scenarios as analysed and propounded by the stratified groups practical rehearsals of the scenarios, involving traditional as well as contemporary performance styles presentations of performances between the groups and to the community post-performance discussions among actors and with present spectators follow-up programmes for the purpose of a sustainable forum – in the case of AIDS projects preferably in cooperation with parents, schools, orphan groups, people living with HIV or AIDS, elders, health facilities, other non-governmental organizations, local governments, regional and national policy makers.
Performative interventions 47 The basic idea is to empower vulnerable groups by letting them suggest social changes through self-reliant action research and performance practices. They must ultimately take redressive action so that all concerned become involved, including those who cause the crisis and pose the risks. Needless to say, this does not always work out as planned. I will not go into detail about all the possible pitfalls, but a few examples will help show how performances can drive the experimental process to the limits of a fair local democracy and genuine prevention strategies. When young people have a sanctioned space for licensed criticism, they arguably come closer to the driving forces of the epidemic than any other group. The main reason for this is that they share a window of opportunity to convey first-hand experiences before being cast in rigid gender roles, taboo inhibited speech behavior or defensive social rivalry. In most places, the epidemics are driven by sexual routines framed by blurred kinship regulations, prohibitive church directives, biased gender obligations, transactional agreements on sex and, not seldom, coerced sex. This is difficult to bring to light for older generations, particularly for men due to their close association with prevailing sexual regimes (Foreman 1999). It is also difficult for foreign stakeholders due to the risk they run of stereotyping “African sexuality and AIDS” (Arnfred 2004). Young people get involved because they usually have little to lose in terms of social status or political rank. They are by no means innocent with regard to sexual experiences or lifestyles, but they are the first ones to admit this while making attempts to work out negotiation skills across communal divides. In Tanzania, like most other sub-Saharan countries, people gather when they hear the abiding traditional cue for meetings, that is drumbeats and local dances (ngoma) in public hubs. The audience will likely enjoy choral songs (nyimbo) and perhaps also poems (mashairi) and acrobatics (sarakasi) before the theatre (michezo ya kuigiza) is announced. A leader may open the meeting by declaring the purpose of the occasion. There follows one or several performances that are well known to the audience, probably in the farcical vein of Vichekesho or Vivunja Mbavu, perhaps a local form of satire (tashtiti, for more on specific forms see Salhi 1998, 115–33), or a dialogic verse drama in the vein of Ngonjera (Banham 2004, 242), which is every so often swapped for its contemporary stand-in, hip hop. The format of these occasions resembles minor festivals. Once the open-ended performances lead to debate, however, the event turns toward a community meeting. This is also where it should become clear that the dramaturgical research on plot and action engages each and every spectator. For every laugh, sigh, snort, glare, shout and comment there is a tacit answerability, which should be spelled out in discussions after the performances. These talks sometimes last longer than the shows and may involve local fundraising for widows and orphans. Various techniques and methods can set off a post-performance discussion, but two decisive questions generally trigger audience response: is it true that what we
48 Ola Johansson have just seen is happening here among us? And, if so, what can we do about it? The appreciation of the plays obviously hinges on more than local performance styles. Spectators identify with the familiarity of the plots, since both the actors and their behavioral patterns are usually well known in the local setting. This is a rough theatre with stories based on collective impressions and received ideas, with the sequencing of events agreed on spontaneously and always with plenty of room for improvisation. The liminal interface of the social and artistic is enacted with a negligible representational distance. It is as though particular strips of daily behavior are grafted onto a shared arena and set into play at a slightly elevated tempo and heightened mood: the manner of speaking, the allusions, the jokes, the clothing, the props, the intrigues, the site and all the rest of the elements are, to say the least, lifelike – a situation where and when people play people, to paraphrase Mda (1993). There is indeed public agreement on the fictional frame, some actors are no doubt very talented, and there are lots of ingenious uses of Swahili proverbs and other witty colloquial expressions in the plays. At the end of the day, however, the familiar theatrical qualities are less significant than the open-ended performative effects, which entail a demand for a progressing social drama with the spectators. The performativity of TFD, i.e., the coinciding effects of artistic innovations and social regulations, enact contentious negotiations on ruling manners and customs. Beyond the participatory methods, there are also indirect appeals to governmental authorities by the bystanders.18 As mentioned earlier, unlike rituals, TFD turns social order inside out by familiarizing taboos in public. This pertains to public opinion on initiation rituals in southern Tanzania as regards, for instance, the careless use of sharp instruments in circumcision rituals, which was forcefully exhibited in a mime I saw in Mikangaula village, or the sexual tutoring of female initiates. On some occasions, elderly people have openly protested the disclosure of ritual secrets through theatre by young people. This hints at the conflicts that loom backstage of ritual. In almost all theatre pieces sexual encounters wed the social and epidemiological dimensions. Men approach women (rarely vice versa) in bars, in guesthouses, in their home, along the road, by the well, on the schoolyard, at the market, on the bus, often with a gift or a pledge of a better future, and, when turned down, occasionally with ensuing forceful conduct. Gender conflicts are seldom verbalized as such, but unmistakably revealed through thinly veiled manners of clumsiness, ardor, fury or just drunk jesting. Some groups consume these scenes but miss out on post-performance discussions because of critical and creative laxness. The interesting performances are the ones that do not necessarily revel in sexual innuendos and encounters, but enact the incidents leading to risky behaviors. One performance in the village of Likokona19 exemplified a notoriously vicious circle of epidemic risk factors relating to traditional regulations,
Performative interventions 49 topical policy making and youth as well as women at risk. A widow has just endured 40 days of mourning, but still shows signs of distress. It turns out that her brother – the lawful guarantor in what was once a functioning matrilineal kinship system – has appropriated the inheritance to the detriment of his sister’s welfare and her children’s prospects for a decent education. The drama thus wanders between instances of legal and personal encounters. The widow knows that the law is on her side, but she is also well aware of the dilemma of taking legal action against a man with cash. In an attempt to solve the conflict in person, the children are sent to their maternal uncle to explain their need for school fees and uniforms. The uncle maintains that their mother went to school for seven years to no avail, and that he will instead arrange marriages for the boy and the girl (Likokona is located in a Muslim part of Masasi district). The affair is then brought to a civil court, although the chances of winning the case comes down to who is bribing the judge with the most money. The brother offers the judge a half month’s salary, while the destitute woman is not even familiar with the idiomatic jargon of approaching him with “long sleeves.” What follows is a pig show where litigation is declared settled at a higher governmental level, and so the brother is cleared. Some senior people suspect corruption, but do not openly voice their protest. This taciturn attitude at the end of the performance is intended as an entry point to the post-performance discussion. But there never was a discussion in Likokona, most likely because the performance came too close to the communal predicament, or, put differently, to the impasse of being onlookers at an ongoing social drama that implicated political higher-ups. Even if the performance in Likokona, which typifies one of countless cognate community dramas in terms of plot and style, could be described in greater culture-specific detail, its basic course of events nonetheless points to a number of performative conditions of HIV-preventive theatre. Stagings do not have to spell out the issue of “AIDS” (ukimwi) for spectators to see that women and children are put in harms way by being subject to unreliable governance. It is not just any kind of poverty that will force the mother into transactional sex and the children onto the streets, it is also a lack of legal and civil rights. The erratic order of things is indicative in turn of a disintegrated kinship system, negligent law practice, corrupt politics and, consequently, a defeatist stance towards education. Without trust in education, the social status of young people is likely to perpetuate the status quo, which moreover sustains discriminatory gender relations.20 Paradoxically, the vicious circle of the Likokona performance comes back to the theatre initiative as such, since the redressive possibility of TFD is to provoke a public response with a perlocutionary efficacy that can lead to social change. In lack of a public discussion and official reaction, the doublebind with the man who buys his liberty with appropriated means, overrules his sister, and refuses schooling for the children, epitomizes a performative quandary of TFD, namely its difficulty in changing a social order despite, or
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rather owing to, its way of staging decisive problems in the very place and by virtue of the people at issue. If TFD goes far enough in its own undertaking it enacts its own subjugation. Community theatre indicates in this way both the possibilities and limits of HIV prevention for young people. AIDS is the greatest democratic challenge in Africa since the time of independence. It is a bodily syndrome that breaks down a person’s immune system, but it is also a societal set of symptoms that weakens any community’s immunity to critique. This may seem like a far-fetched analogy between particular corporealities and general regimes. In terms of a communicable disease, however, HIV is a virus that always runs the risk of spreading if the right to one’s own body and mind is violated. This applies not only to the current African state of affairs, but also to local governments, religious authorities, educational systems, non-governmental organizations, and (post)colonial ramifications of global trade policies. There is no way to get around this complex body of influences if one traces and pursues the cultural causes of the disease. TFD performs both daily situations and ritual practices by entertaining genuine speech act circumstances. Dialogues are taken from face-to-face encounters in daily life, yet with a role distance that permits critical depictions of public officials. Thus, taboo-laden issues can be opened up. At the same time an organized process is established, epitomizing site-specific features of particular communities, not by means of a prescribed order but rather by a participatory popular command in which self-reflective discussions develop in medias res by actors as well as spectators. TFD may not possess the ruling order of traditional ritual or engage the variable course of everyday life and yet this may not be a disadvantage if the preventive prospects of intervening and redressing the afflictions of AIDS lies in bringing these realms and procedures together.
Notes 1 This is obviously a qualified truth; see, for instance, Turner’s remarks about British interference among the Ndembu in connection with the Ihamba cult (Turner 1977 [1967]: 359–93; esp., 374). 2 This also concerned the Ndembu to a certain extent. Just to give one example, Turner writes that he came upon a Ndembu man in the Copperbelt mining town of Chingola who asserted that “he was never going back to village life” (Turner 1977 [1967], 391). For an updated account on the life of the LundaNdembu, see Pritchett (2001). 3 For further discussion of gendered aspects of Turner’s ethnography see the essay by Andrew Wegley in this volume. 4 There are some traditional medicines that mitigate the effect of AIDS related opportunistic infections and diseases. Hence, medicine is certainly an area where traditional knowledge should be combined with modern biomedicine (for more on this, see “Collaboration with traditional healers in HIV/AIDS prevention and care in sub-Saharan Africa” (UNAIDS 2000)). Most people in Africa still consult traditional rather than modern doctors. In light of this fact and the widespread lack of antiretroviral medicines, people’s hesitation about
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taking a HIV-test is quite logical. Reynolds Whyte (1997) writes: “In 1995, many people spoke of the need to have AIDS testing in Bunyole [Uganda]. I suspect that this idea is attractive as a way of resolving the uncertainty about others. However, it is not clear that worried people would choose to resolve the uncertainty about themselves by seeking a test – at least not without persuasion and counseling. It is better not to know for sure that you are doomed” (214). The question here is not only how the identity of individuals is transformed – or even mystically transfigured – by being guided through transcendental passages in initiation rites, but also how such metamorphoses conform to onlooking visitors and their conceptual means of access. Seen through the ideological screens of Clifford’s ethnographic allegory, where fieldwork is recognized “as a performance emplotted by powerful stories” (1986, 98), one is lead to examine the secular stage to which novices return and upon which the ethnographer stands waiting, as it were, to interpret their stories. Bloch (1992, 6) considers this return, from separation to reintegration, to be a quite violent step that displays the political outcomes of religious action. Forum theatre is an interactive form of performance, in which spectators – or “spect-actors” – can intervene both verbally and physically in critical scenes and suggest alternative solutions. It was invented by the Brazilian theatre pedagogue Augusto Boal in the 1960s and has had a great influence on popular theatre in Africa due to its adaptability to local modes of story telling, dialogue, and improvisation. I will not comment on Jacques Derrida’s or anyone else’s criticism of Austin’s speech act theory here, but simply suggest that readers look up the most clarifying arbitration of the arguments involved, namely in Stanley Cavell’s A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises (1996, chapter 2). Nor will I comment on Austin’s exclusion of theatre from his reasoning in How to Do Things with Words, which I am positive was made for the sake of philosophical clarity in his Harvard lectures; I am also confident, however, that the above-mentioned performance in the South African school workshop would have appealed to Austin to such an extent that he would have found it impossible to exclude due to its, at once, ordinary and ceremonial case of performative speech. I have criticized both the sociological and anthropological stereotypology of theatre elsewhere (Johansson 2000; 2002). See the six conventions for an explicit performative to take effect (Austin 1962, 14–15; also Austin 1979, 237). It should be clear that Kerr uses the word “theatre” in a very wide sense, namely “to cover drama, many forms of ritual, dance, and other performing arts such as acrobatics, mime and semidramatized narratives” (Kerr 1995, 1). To inform, warn, and persuade someone typify certain kinds of Austinian speech acts, namely, respectively, locutionary acts (simply by uttering something meaningful, such as the term “AIDS” in a site where it is rarely enunciated), illocutionary acts (e.g., alerting people of a danger), and perlocutionary acts (by convincing people of a hazard). An individual’s blood serum converts after exposure to the virus, from HIV antibody negative to antibody positive. For the use of metaphors on AIDS in the West, see Sontag (1988). The Kamachumu orphan group performed the Omutoro dance on a short documentary, which I worked on with a team from the TV network CNN. It was one of a series of documentaries broadcasted on World AIDS Day, December 1, 2004, entitled “Staying Alive.” The political-religious fallacy is also a problem in Tanzania. In Mtwara region, where I conducted part of my fieldwork, it is not unusual too see Catholic
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Ola Johansson public posters with explicit messages like, “Don’t Use Condoms!” At a convention in Dar es Salaam in 2002, 70 representatives from a variety of religious faiths – not only Catholics but also Lutherans, Anglicans and Muslims – made a joint public statement asserting that they will continue to discourage people from using condoms. This runs counter to Tanzania’s national policy on AIDS, which emphasizes “the overwhelming evidence about the efficacy and effectiveness of condoms” and the need for making them “easily available and affordable” (National Policy on HIV/AIDS: sec. 5.10, 2001). Meanwhile, Tanzanian politicians are making statements that advise people to observe religious leaders. In September 2002, president Benjamin Mkapa gave a speech in Masasi in which he stressed that “the disease could be avoided if people observe traditions, religious teachings and change behavior” (Guardian, September 21, 2002). It is quite understandable that politicians advocate religious organizations since the latter possess both the compassion and the medical facilities to care for people living with HIV/AIDS and for orphans. Their moral stance on HIV prevention is, however, the cause of misfortune, and this ought to be made perfectly clear when national AIDS programs are designed and coordinated. Apart from the informative undertaking, then, an important task of community theatre is to clarify ambiguous official policies on HIV prevention. Paulo Freire is one of the most influential educationalists in the twentieth century, especially for his theories on progressive practice for impoverished and oppressed people in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) inspired fellow Brazilian Augusto Boal to develop the methods for his so-called “theatre of the oppressed.” The project was lead by Penina Mlama, Amandina Lihamba, and Eberhard Chambulikazi from The Fine and Performing Arts Department at The University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, who are among the chief innovators of the TFD community process (for a detailed description on the project, see Mlama 1982, chapter 7). It is indeed a scandal that the deployment of community theatre lacks coordination with other HIV preventive initiatives. The need for coordination is a special issue that cannot be dealt with in detail here, but relates to unfeasible governmental action programs, impervious faith based organizations, and clusters of unrelated and competitive non-governmental organizations. Likokona lies in the district of Masasi, a rural area in the southern Tanzanian region of Mtwara where I have conducted research on community theatre and HIV/AIDS (in addition to the Kagera Region). In correlation with performance analyses and epidemiological situation analyses, I have carried out participatory and gender divided focus group discussions where active members of youth centers themselves decide which topics to discuss as regards how the epidemic affects their site-specific living conditions and how it can be prevented. Education was the primary requirement for counteracting the AIDS epidemic, according to the young people of Masasi district that I spoke to in focus group discussions.
Bibliography Arnfred, Signe (ed.) (2004) Re-thinking Sexualities in Africa. Sweden: Almqvist & Wiksell. Austin, John L. (1962) How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press. –––– (1979) Philosophical Papers. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Banham, Martin (ed.) (2004) A History of Theatre in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Performative interventions 53 Barthes, Roland (1977) Image Music Text. London: Fontana Press. Bell, Catherine (1997) Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bloch, Maurice (1992) Prey into Hunter: The Politics of Religious Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Butler, Judith (1997) Excitable Speech. London and New York: Routledge. Byam, Dale L. (1999) Community in Motion: Theatre for Development in Africa. Westport, Conn.: Bergin and Garvey. Bynum, Caroline Walker (1984) “Women’s stories, women’s symbols: a critique of Victor Turner’s theory of liminality,” in Robert L. Moore and Frank E. Reynolds (eds) Anthropology and the Study of Religion. Chicago: Center for the Scientific Study of Religion. Campbell, Catherine (2003) “Letting them Die”: How HIV/AIDS programmes often fail. Oxford: James Currey. Cavell, Stanley (1994) A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Clifford, James (1986) “On Ethnographic Allegory,” in James Clifford and Gregory E. Marcus (eds) Writing Culture: Experiments in Contemporary Anthropology. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Dilger, Hansjörg (2001) “AIDS in Africa: broadening the perspectives on research and policy-making,” Afrika spectrum, 36 (1). –––– (2002) “Silences and rumours in discourses on AIDS in Tanzania: on the meaning of culture in the growing epidemic,” paper presented at the conference “Language, Literature and the Discourse of HIV/AIDS in Africa” at the University of Botswana, 24–28 June 2002. Eyoh, Ansel (1986) Hammocks and Bridges. Workshop on Theatre for Integrated Rural Development, University of Yaoundé: Yaoundé. Feldhendler, Daniel (1994) “Augusto Boal and Jacob L. Moreno: theatre and therapy,” in Mady Schutzman and Jan Cohen-Cruz (eds) Playing Boal. Theatre, Activism, Therapy. London and New York: Routledge: 87–109. Foreman, Martin (ed.) (1999) AIDS and Men: Taking Risks or Taking Responsibility? London: Panos/Zed Books. Frank, Marion (1995) AIDS Education through Theatre: Case Studies from Uganda. Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies. Freire, Paulo (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum. Gausset, Quentin (2001) “AIDS and cultural practices in Africa: The case of the Tonga (Zambia),” in Social Science and Medicine. Vol. 52. Gennep, Arnold Van (1960 [1909]) The Rites of Passage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Gerholm, Tomas (1988) “On ritual: a postmodernist view,” Ethnos. No. 53. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International. Gilbert, Helen and Tompkins, Joanne (eds) (1996) Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics. London and New York: Routledge. Goffman, Erving (1974) Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Green, A.E. (1995) “Ritual” in The Cambridge Guide to Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grimes, Ronald L. (2000) Deeply into the Bone: Re-Inventing Rites of Passage. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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Guardian (2002–09–21), article by Deodatus Mfugale. Dar es Salaam: Tanzania. Holden, Sue (ed.) (2003) AIDS on the Agenda: Adapting Development and Humanitarian Programmes to Meet the Challenge of HIV/AIDS. London: Oxfam Publications. Iliffe, John (1995) Africans: The Story of a Continent. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. –––– (2002) East African Doctors: A History of the Modern Profession. Kampala: Fountain Publishers. Johansson, Ola (2000) The Room’s Need of a Name: A Philosophical Study of Performance. Stockholm: Teatron-serien. –––– (2002) “Performative Speech in African Community Theatre on AIDS,” paper presented at the conference “Language, Literature and the Discourse of HIV/AIDS in Africa” at the University of Botswana, 24–28 June 2002. Kalipeni, Ezekiel, Craddock, Susan, Oppong, Joseph R., Ghosh, Jayata (eds) (2004) HIV & AIDS in Africa: Beyond Epidemiology. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Kerr, David (1995) African Popular Theatre: From Pre-Colonial Times to the Present Day. Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers. –––– (2002) “Art as tool, weapon or shield? Arts for development seminar, Harare,” in Biodun Jeyifo (ed.) Modern African Drama. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Kidd, Ross (1984) “Popular theatre, conscientization and popular organization,” research paper, International Council for Adult Education. Toronto: Canada. Lincoln, Bruce (1991) Emerging from the Chrysalis: Rituals of Women’s Initiations. New York: Oxford University Press. Mda, Zakes (1993) When People Play People. London: ZED Books. Mlama, Penina (1982) Culture and Development. Uppsala: Uppsala University Press. National Policy on HIV/AIDS (November 2001) Dodoma: The United Republic of Tanzania, Prime Minister’s Office. Nyoni, Frowin Paul (1998) Conformity and Change: Tanzanian Rural Theatre and Socio-Political Changes. Leeds: University of Leeds. –––– (2000) Judges on Trial. The Fine and Performing Arts Department, The University of Dar es Salaam. Plastow, Jane (1996) African Theatre and Politics: the Evolution of Theatre in Ethiopia, Tanzania and Zimbabwe: A Comparative Study. Amsterdam and Atlanta, Ga.: Rodopi. Pritchett, James A. (2001) The Lunda-Ndembu: Style, Change, and Social Transformation in South Central Africa. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Rappaport, Roy A. (1999) Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reynolds Whyte, Susan (1997) Questioning Misfortune: The Pragmatics of Uncertainty in Eastern Uganda. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Roth Allen, Denise (2000) “Learning the facts of life: past and present experiences in a rural Tanzanian community,” Africa Today. 47 (3–4). Rubin, Don (ed.) (1997) The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre. Volume 3: Africa. London and New York: Routledge. Salhi, Kamal (ed.) (1998) African Theatre for Development: Art for self-determination. Exeter: Intellect. Schechner, Richard (1988) Performance Theory. New York and London: Routledge. –––– (2002) “Ritual and performance” in Tim Ingold (ed.) Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology. London and New York: Routledge.
Performative interventions 55 Setel, Philip W. (1999) A Plague of Paradoxes: AIDS, Culture, and Demography in Northern Tanzania. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Sithole, Jabulani (31 March 2002) Afrol News (internet news service). Sontag, Susan (1988) AIDS and Its Metaphors. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Turner, Victor (1964) “Symbols in Ndembu ritual” in Max Gluckman (ed.) Closed Systems and Open Minds. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd. –––– (1969) Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. –––– (1977 [1967]) The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. –––– (1982) From Ritual to Theatre: the Human Seriousness of Play. New York City: Performing Arts Journal Publications. –––– (1996 [1957]) Schism and Continuity in an African Society: A Study of a Ndembu Village Life. Oxford and Washington D.C.: Berg. UNAIDS (2000) Collaboration with Traditional Healers in HIV/AIDS Prevention and Care in Sub-Saharan Africa. Geneva, Switzerland. UNAIDS/WHO (2004) Epidemic Update. Geneva, Switzerland. Vansina, Jan (1985) Oral Tradition as History. Oxford: James Currey. Wendo, Charles (2002) “Patients storm HIV/AIDS conference,” in New Vision. Kampala, Uganda. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1996) Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell.
3
Ritually failing Turner’s theatrical communitas Andrew C. Wegley
The archive always works, and a priori, against itself. (Derrida 1996, 11–12)
A social anthropologist indebted to structuralism, Victor Turner pioneered the study of ritual as performance or theatre in the 1960s and 1970s following from Arnold van Gennep’s work on rites of passage. Turner’s Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1969) is still considered a seminal work in the fields of religious studies, anthropology, and even sociology. In 1966 Turner delivered the Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures at the University of Rochester, a significant portion of which became Ritual Process. In this performance, he laid out his thesis on ritual suggested by the title as a process, a thesis still invoked in emerging fields like ritual, theatre, and performance studies by figures such as Richard Schechner, Lawrence Sullivan, Ronald Grimes, and Catherine Bell.1 In this chapter I hope to thicken debates around the meaning and utility of ritual by suggesting that this meaning and utility fails to be consummated in ritual. By focusing on Turner’s description and analysis of Isoma in Ritual Process, I shall propose a theory of ritual as failure.
Ritual, myth, religion: archives Turner’s subtitle “structure and anti-structure” indicates that, although certain actions are part of ritual proper, the context determines whether these can be read as significant enough to be named ritual.2 The three main steps of separation, liminality, and return outlined by Turner provide the contextual clues with which to identify ritual action. Ritual is involved in some sense in a dialectic between separation and return or structure and anti-structure. Ritual is effective because it provides a container for the expression of repressed, socially hostile or anxious feelings. By expressing these emotions while allowing change to occur, everyone can return to society anew. Ritual stands apart from other actions in that ritual is a highly circumscribed process producing a liminal, threshold, or “in-between” state
Ritually failing 57 where the crises of transitions are dramatically rendered, overcome, and reconciled through symbolic actions. In short, ritual is likened to a form of theatre. In addition to successfully venting socially unacceptable affect, ritual also enables communitarian bonding, or what Turner calls communitas. Another important concept for Turner, communitas is not an identifiable location, but rather a feeling or quality of commonality where each member looks and is looked upon as involved in an I–Thou relationship.3 In this relationship, there is the communal recognition of “an essential and generic human bond, without which there could be no society” (97). Through mutual recognition, each individual identifies with the group, and, inversely, the group symbolizes the individual. Ritual actualizes the conditions of possibility for communitas by creating liminality. After all, liminality too is about leveling and forgetting differences. Turner says that the proper content of liminality is communitas, while also noting that communitas is not limited to liminality (96–7). Although ritual may or may not contain the harmonious spirit of communitas – a quintessentially 1960s construct – ritual resembles communitas in that it opposes the order of things with a form of dramatic/poetic license. Within the study of ritual, Turner is situated between two dominant approaches to ritual, myth, and religion that have been called – like so many other approaches – the essentialist and social construction camps. Turner eschews the essentialist tendency found in Mircea Eliade’s program for religious studies. While ritual symbolizes forces in conflict within the social, Turner does not believe ritual to purely and totally provide communion with the sacred across space and time. But he also does not follow the social construction of Durkheim or Weber. Instead, Turner was indebted to the work of the Cambridge ritualists – Jane Ellen Harrison, Gilbert Murray, and Francis Cornford – from whom he extracted the idea of ritual as a significant cultural activity, while not going so far as to find its origins in the history of humanity.4 The Cambridge ritualist school stressed ritual’s anteriority to myths, but also showed that ritual activity inspired myth, which was the misinterpretation of past ritual necessities. Turner neither subscribed to the idea of ritual as myth’s brainchild or myth’s origin. Rather, for Turner ritual is, like myth, the product of social drama. Ritual may be a symbol, but it is a symbol dramatically constructed by social forces. Like theatre, ritual is composed of symbols contested by protagonists and antagonists and, thus, not singular, but polysemous and multivocal: ritual unfolds in a relational and dynamic manner. This concentrated focus on symbols warrants attention. Broadening out from the specific study of ritual to its intellectual milieu, we can locate underlying desires and needs that organized knowledge practices in the 1960s. Symbol is one of those organizers that demands our interpretation today. Recall that Turner is writing during structuralism’s heyday. Structuralism is about the search to find rationality in the murkiest of places – such as religion – and to diagram the logics that undergird the absurdities
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of culture, calling this buried logic, if anything, unconscious. Behind superstitious beliefs and ineffective practices, structuralism claims to find the power of thought and to recover the governing laws of thought.5 Structuralism also has the tendency to view these laws and their signification as stable and perfect operations – as if they existed in some sort of utopia. Structuralists, accordingly, tend to see the letter as always arriving at its destination, to paraphrase Lacan; they see meaning as decoded, signifiers joined to their respective signifieds, and a successful communication resulting between agents and/or institutions.6 Levi-Strauss was the anthropologist for whom the structuralist method – the ability to find laws governing the production of meaning based on relations of similarity and difference – was applicable everywhere. For him, cultural institutions establish and mediate these relations in order to make meaning. Structuralism works to decode and make explicit the rules of these structures: how meaning is produced, how people signify, how communication results. Clifford Geertz examined how structures form embodied and lived signifying processes. Whereas Levi-Strauss focused on myth and Geertz on religion, Turner re-evaluates the supposed irrationality of ritual by focusing on its formal logic. Within this intellectual milieu ritual is often seen as an inheritance of religion – usually the enactment or expression of religion or myth, both of which constitute absolute world-views.7 Turner wants to show that ritual operates according to its own formal logic and in this sense he can be considered structuralist. But he also holds that ritual is not reducible to the conceptual tyranny of religious or mythic thought and in this sense he deviates from structuralism. Whether religion itself is ever intelligible and redeemed from mystery in Turner remains a question, but he does not exalt religion as reason in symbolic garb. He shares with his structuralist predecessors and contemporaries a tendency to read behind things man the unconscious actor, but still believes in poetic and liminal spaces of rupture and excess holding the interpretive key to ritual. In sum, Ritual Process both is and is not the product of its intellectual milieu. Grimes characterizes Turner’s contribution as an example of “broader views of ritual”: The broader views of ritual treat it as synonymous with symbolic actions, deeds for which one can predicate not just consequences but meaning. In such definitions, ritual is a kind of communication, thus not so much one activity alongside others as an implicit dimension of all human interaction. (Grimes 2000, 261, my emphasis)8 Grimes helps to pinpoint the crucial move in Turner’s theory: its attention not on real actions, but on symbolic actions. Turner’s focus on theatre, process, polysemy, and structures of signification are all innovative ways to shift from what and when meaning results to how meaning results. While
Ritually failing 59 Turner’s emphasis on the performative, dramatic nature of ritual is powerful, there are still lingering questions about his work – and by extension about the work of his followers in their emergent fields. Is ritual applicable to all historical and cultural contexts? How “anti-structural” is ritual? What makes ritual different from the everyday, profane world of the social structures? Finally, ritual seems to have a perfect success rate, but when does ritual not work? When does the structure of signification embedded in ritual fail? Caroline Walker Bynum has already addressed the first question. She was concerned with Turner’s universal claims particularly as they relate to gender. In order to test the scope of his theory of ritual, Walker Bynum applied the theory to medieval women’s lives. Turner looks at women; he stands with the dominant group (males) and sees women (both as symbol and fact) as liminal to men. In this he is quite correct, of course, and the insight is a powerful one. But it is not the whole story. The historian or anthropologist needs to stand with women as well. (Walker Bynum 1996, 75) Walker Bynum shows that Turner’s ritual does not account for women’s experiences. Instead, his theory is only speaking for those in power, particularly for the elite, educated males of the Church. I want to extend Walker Bynum’s insights along the lines she gestures towards: that is, to provide an internal reading of Turner’s theory. I want to explore whether or not Turner’s gendered oversight is perhaps more fundamental to his theory of ritual than being simply, as Walker Bynum suggests, an error. Is there some sort of failure lodged within the heart of his theory? Is failure, in fact, the constitutive possibility for Turner’s theory? I want to turn Turner’s text back on itself, to see how it performs its own concepts. I read his theory as a theatrical event that, while attempting to bridge the ambiguities in ritual as regulator of society, actually confirms such ambiguities. My arguments are as follows: 1. Ritual is not solely anti-structural because liminality repeats the structure of the social in displaced ways; 2. The concept of ritual is a theory of representation that is potentially at odds with Turner’s emphasis on liminality; 3. Ritual is tied to religion – a presumed Christianity. What holds these arguments together is my contention that ritual is born out of failure. That is, Turner’s ritual as a symbolic, cultural practice is constituted out of multiple failures: it forgets its own moorings; it remains bound to religion; and it can never remember, represent, or reproduce what it intends. And this leads to the theatricality of Turner’s theory: it pretends or acts as if meaning results.
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Memento mori Turner begins his Ritual Process with an invocation concerned with the theatrical context and performative mode of his original lectures. As already mentioned, Ritual Process was originally written for the Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures and delivered at the University of Rochester in 1966. Turner’s invocation of Morgan introduces what I call Turner’s two prominent themes of forgetful rupture and remembered continuity. These themes of remembrance and forgetfulness get to the heart of whether or not ritual can successfully create the efficacious symbols necessary to re-structure society. Referencing Kierkegaard, Turner indicates Morgan’s challenge and blindspot from which his lectures commence: Rather will I try, in fear and trembling, owing to my high regard for his great scholarship and standing in our discipline, to withstand Morgan’s challenge to posterity, and demonstrate that modern anthropologists, working with the best of the conceptual tools bequeathed to them, can now make intelligible many of the cryptic phenomena of religion in preliterate societies. (Turner 1969, 4) Turner takes up the “casual challenge to posterity” that Morgan had bestowed on his progeny by attempting to explicate “the cryptic phenomenon of religion in preliterate societies” (4). He adheres to Morgan’s methodological principles of explanation, intelligibility, and rationality. However, “Morgan, though he faithfully recorded many religious ceremonies, had a marked disinclination to give the study of religion the same piercing attention he devoted to kinship and politics” (1). Turner is writing from Morgan’s inattention to the ritual content of religious ceremonies. Morgan’s disciplines of kinship and politics have not “unearthed” ritual’s “imaginative and emotional” logic. Turner attempts to correct his predecessor’s oversight: “Yet religious beliefs and practices [are] the main subject matter of my talks” (1). Turner takes up the charge in terms other than the charge: ritual and religion are structurally and internally coherent, not reducible to politics or kinship. Turner draws out the two concerns of what is remembered and forgotten. He shifts and expands the methodological and theoretical attention that Morgan bequeathed to the traditional discipline of anthropology. By making this shift, Turner attempts to establish or re-establish the proper framework for the study and knowledge of the cryptic phenomena, or, what remains irrational to Morgan’s study of kinship and politics, namely, ritual. By accounting for the coincidence of his remembrance of and break from Morgan’s discipline, I ask how these themes are not only enmeshed, but also how they inflect Turner’s founding formulation of ritual. How is memory or obsolescence central to ritual rather than just coincidental to it? Whose
Ritually failing 61 memory gets to found ritual? What is the difference between religion and ritual? How does one outdo Morgan without reverting to his game? Does one remember it or forget it? I want to explore what is “post-Turner” in the theorizing of ritual and its related concepts like structure and symbol. I read and understand such concepts through Turner to see how and where they are continuous and discontinuous. Ritual in this light is risky business, and his theory, I am arguing, bears the weight of these risks. His gamble is that this theory will explain the logic peculiar to ritual. I want to sketch out this logic in order to get a sense of what he is betting on. Again, is Turner’s concept successful? Or does it fail in its stand against and with Morgan? How does this ambiguity affect the ritual process itself?
Turner’s Isoma: a mnemonic crisis Turner heads to the field with this attachment to and critique of Morgan in mind, to explore African ritual – particularly that of the Ndembu, a tribe living in Zambia, Northwestern Africa.9 I want to show how Turner’s theory was prefigured before he arrived at conclusions or even before he wrote his ethnography. My focus shall be his description of the Isoma ritual, a class of women’s ritual falling under the genus of ancestral rites. The name “Isoma” means “to slip out” and “to leave one’s group.” In this case, the name designates the cause for the ritual – that is, a woman has failed to have children either through miscarriage or abortion. By not having children, the wife has “left the fold” of her matrikin because she does not respect her matrilineal duties, and she has become too close to her husband and his lineage. This bereft state for the women is afflicted by maternal ancestral shades. According to Turner, Isoma is concerned with the restoration not only of procreation for women, but also of the proper relations between patrilineal and matrilineal lines. Does the Isoma give birth to a conceptual brainchild? On the one hand, this rite arises from a failure to remember, a forgetting of tradition. Here, the ritual is performed by a woman who has failed to meet the obligation of begetting. She has not lived up to her social-sexual role and not maintained her matrikin allegiance. This failure is then manifested in the lack of children and subsequent crises between the husband’s and wife’s lines. On the other hand, Isoma arises from an obligation to remember. The Ndembu are under obligation according to Turner to venerate ancestral shades. Her deceased grandmother afflicts the woman. In such a way, she is “caught,” or caused to remember. Turner summarizes this ambivalence between forgotten duty and remembered past: “The crisis brought on by this contradiction between norms is resolved by rituals rich in symbolism and pregnant with meaning” (13). Let us linger on this phrase, “pregnant with meaning.” The problem lies precisely here: if there is no fruitful pregnancy, how can there be meaning?
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Inversely, if there was a fruitful pregnancy, would there be a ritual? The ritual is motivated by and enacts this simultaneous forgetting and remembering of a living, ongoing, and shared meaning. Turner uses pregnancy as a metaphor, already an invocation of pregnancy’s absence. Ritual becomes a substitute birth, a potentially fertile site for the continuity of the lives of the individual, society, and tradition. Turner’s whole signifying practice of ritual rests on how meaning is produced through what we could call a failure to give birth. In other words, his theory is generated from his perception of a failure to repopulate or re-member the society, in this case, the tradition of the Ndembu. The ritual itself is a collaborative effort. Once a woman has been diagnosed as cursed and in need of expiation, the community begins the ritual preparations. The priest, the ritual headmaster, divines the water source from which the curse sprang. Around this river a burrow is hunted out and found. At this point, some members of the community help dig a second hole ten feet away in the opposite direction of the water; others collect herbs, medicines, and plants that resonate with fertility; some bring the red cock and others the white pullet; while still others tend to building a hut out of clippings from the clearing made to designate the ritual site. Finally, a tunnel is dug between the two holes. After the site has been constructed, the afflicted woman arrives under her husband’s care; both descend into the first hole designated as of life. The woman holds onto the white pullet as the husband leads her by the hand. The priest directs the proceedings from above the hole. The rest of the tribe, divided according to gender, stands alongside the holes and the pathway of the underground tunnel and sings. The ritual during this liminal stage consists of the couple’s shuttling back and forth from the hole of life to the hole of death. Each cycle of separation and return occurs a total of six times. At each hole, however, the herbs, medicines, and plants as well as water and song are poured over her. However, since each cycle also consists of a return back to the hole of life, the hole of life is privileged twice as many times as the hole of death. The aim of the ritual is to reconcile ancestors, tribal groups, and structures. Through this trial by fire and by sacrifice of the red cock, the woman rids herself of her amnesia, her blocked memory, allowing her to return to her role as mother for her matrilineal descent as well as remain wife for her husband’s patriline. The woman’s forgetting of her maternal duty is precisely her failure and the Isoma ritual re-enacts her forgetting by reliving the failure of a successful conception. In addition to the forgetting of tradition, the ritual also contains another act of forgetting. That is, the afflicted woman’s failure is being forgotten. In this way, the ritual’s success is predicated on its failure to remember the illicit act of rebellion. By negating this failure, Isoma produces a different kind of meaning, a symbolic kind in that Isoma produces a figurative brainchild, the substitute for the unborn child. Both of these acts relating to memory – the initial failure and its subsequent forgetting – attest to the power and centrality of failure as the ritual’s constitutive possibility. Equally important, the ritual for Turner is pregnant, a re-membering,
Ritually failing 63 a reconstituting of that which is resistant through discursive and performative symbols. Isoma remembers the important role of birth and the failure of conception. Like the theme pertaining to forgetting, we see with the theme relating to memory a tendency to deliver meaning. In this light, conception becomes another constitutive possibility of ritual. The following questions remain: what is produced out of ritual? What material bears this fertility? In other terms: how does one remember the forgotten? Turner elaborates this paradox: “It is the ‘hidden’ that is dangerous or noxious. Thus, to name an inauspicious condition is halfway to removing that condition; to embody the invisible action of witches and shades in a visible or tangible symbol is a big step toward remedying it” (25–6). Embedded within the symbol is remembrance and forgetting; in other words, the symbol is the placeholder for presence and absence. It is a contradictory enactment. Turner fleshes out ritual as an embodied lack. Ritual, through its performance, preserves this failed memory and the forgetting of the forgotten. “The rites,” he says, “involve symbolic reference to all these agencies [of sickness, death, and lack of success]” (19). Hence, the ritual is not just pregnant with meaning, but also pregnant with the lack of meaning: no visible “fruits” are born, but rather symbols.10 Isoma, as a site of memory, forgets its living tradition and forgets the forgetting of the indiscretion, and Isoma as a site of forgetting remembers its ghostly past and remembers the ritual as a forgetting. In Turner’s hands this ritual enacts a crisis of representation clothed in reproduction and a crisis of reproduction clothed in representation. In short, ritual as the site where the word becomes flesh and the flesh becomes word is suspended by the symbol. I pair Isoma’s remembrance of tradition with Turner’s own remembrance of Morgan, as well as Isoma’s forgetting of tradition with Turner’s own forgetting of Morgan. This pairing enables not only a demonstration of the reciprocal influence between Turner’s invocation in Rochester and his field work in Zambia, but also serves to question the demarcation of ritual’s origins and the production of his theory. In short, I inquire about the separation and return of meaning: its symbolic forms. On the one hand, I have the suggested relationship between types of remembrance. Through Isoma, ritual was seen as an act of remembering for propitiation, and hence for reproduction and continual sustenance. Turner views this remembering as the act of identification with tradition. Meaning is essentially aligned with pregnancy since both are conceived as the state of filling up a body with thought, spirit, and life and the potential arrival of a singular delivery. Turner too is hailed to act, haunted by the shade of Morgan; he attempts to live up to his ancestry and posterity by attending to Morgan’s call to make ritual intelligible. In Turner’s hands, ritual becomes a midwife, or better yet, birthing itself. Ritual becomes a unique stage for the fortuitous occasion of thought becoming embodied. On the other hand, I propose to pair types of rupture. Just as an ancestral shade appears with the Ndembu context, an ancestral shade – Lewis Henry
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Morgan – returns in Turner’s text. Both shades are explicitly invoked and addressed as a symbol for what is not present. In both cases, invocation serves the function of indicating failures. Just as the shade revealed that the Ndembu tradition was forgotten, Morgan serves the role for Turner of showing that the proper anthropological tradition was forgotten. Just as transgressive behavior was ascribed to the female subject of Isoma, Turner’s transgressions consist in defying past claims by introducing conceptual tools to explain religion different from those of Morgan. Both of these transgressions leave each participant faced with the unknown, faced in fear and trembling with the presence of no meaning. Morgan’s theory is that ritual cannot be remembered intelligibly, just as the Isoma enacts ancestral obligation to the tribal archival that was not being reproduced. So just as we had an attempt to overcome failed procreation, we have a parallel theoretical attempt to overcome religion’s ban on meaning in Turner’s text, a ban that is based on religion’s grotesque and unintelligible nature. Hence, Turner’s attempt to theorize imaginative and emotional actions defies and dismembers his own archival tradition. Both performances – Turner’s invocation and his case study – suggest the double bind constitutive of ritual. Countering Morgan’s claim that religion and its acts were inexplicable, Turner holds that ritual in its performance is not religion. It is through this performed negativity that we witness Turner’s most explicit disavowal of religion, and it is here that we see how meaning is birthed through religion forgotten. Turner reinstantiates Morgan’s divide between religion and thought. Through remembering, through literate cultures, religion can be forgotten as ritual; and ritual theory can supersede it. What we see throughout are the parallel connections between both sites of meaning: just as men trump women in procreation, theory trumps ritual as the site of meaning. Yet it is this forgetting which also prevents the formation of a total and rational theory of ritual. The inability to fully name the dangerous, the liminal, the resistant that ritual reiterates actually preserves religion. Ritual may be a form with a structural logic but Turner’s ethnography and theory also reveal that this form has a content, namely, religion. By complicating and extending Morgan, Turner orients his archive on grounds similar to Morgan’s. Ritual, like other anthropological activities, is born from religious identifications. To sum up the parallel between the ethnography of ritual and theory, Turner’s theory capitalizes on a site rendered unfertile, showing that through this lack abstract thoughts can produce meaning. Just as the afflicted woman’s aborted pregnancy can be cured by tradition, the apparent indiscretions of religion can for Turner be cured by ritual theory.
Form and content: structures of the archive Ritual’s form is what the content of religion purportedly moves beyond. But ritual has content. We can extract it by turning back to Turner’s tripartite process of separation, margin, return. The middle stage, margin, not only
Ritually failing 65 preoccupies Turner, but furnishes his model for ritual. Ritual gives shape to marginality, or, in Turner’s terms, to liminality, a Latin derivative for “threshold.” Turner provides a further definition for that which is “betwixt and between,” namely, what “eludes or slips through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space” (95). Liminality comprises the revelatory function that Turner alluded to earlier in relation to Isoma as symbolic birth because it helps make manifest that which is unknown. During the liminal stage, a state of humility and tabula rasa rather than order and differentiation emerges as in Isoma where the participants are humbled before and learn from the matrilineal shades. Structure is suspended while equality, homogeneity, and creativity become immanently palpable. Ritual’s liminality gives birth to communitas, the recognition of “an essential and generic human bond, without which there could be no society” (97). Moreover, this recognition on Turner’s part of communitas as the proper subject matter of anthropology accords with Morgan’s views. The generic human civilization, the generic human bond, and for that matter the generic human are the privileged objects of the anthropological archive. By orientating himself with this concern over the generic man disguised as a concern for humanity, Turner reveals his fidelity to this traditional anthropological kinship. Returning to Walker Bynum, it is not simply a matter of correcting his theoretical vision and including women in his line of sight, but rather that his theory is predicated on the absence of women. It thus fails to signify what it undertakes to understand and reproduce. In this light, to nuance Walker Bynum, we might say: Turner, following Morgan’s protocols, only looks at women and stands with men. I want to examine this quasi-universal bond inevitably bound to be forgotten. On the one hand, communitas is central, an I–Thou relationship that exalts the bond between each human as sacred. On the other hand, communitas is marginal. Because it is used to renew society’s structure, this essential aspect of ritual’s process must be forgotten. Turner writes, “For me, communitas emerges where social structure is not” (126). In communitas we detect a dialectical play similar to that found in Isoma, a play between remembering and forgetting. As the site of memory communitas is bound to forget, and as the site of forgetting communitas is bound to remember. Or, more importantly, Turner’s account already has re-membered this fundamental human bond differently. Inasmuch as Turner writes from both memory and rupture, he leaves behind and/or misrecognizes this bond between equal human beings. Perhaps we can suggest a more accurate word to translate the idea of binding that Turner neglects. Perhaps this society in the throes of ritual is not necessarily engaged with a sensibility of communitas – community or fellowship – but more accurately religio, meaning literally in Latin a “binding.” Religio characterizes how the community is held together in a way reminiscent of structure’s reliance on the margin. Religion is what gives shape to
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the substance of communitas, that I–Thou reverence. In not remembering its marginal status, ritual reiterates religion because religion is the forgotten remembrance. Since it forgets as much as it remembers, ritual makes present what is forgotten and what needs to remain forgotten. In this sense, ritual presents us with religion. In other words, precisely because Turner does not remember religion in his concept of ritual, ritual unknowingly repeats religion. Although religion can thus be seen to express the substance of liminality and thus to form the basis of Turner’s theory, his communitas attempts to replace and assume this binding in his concept of ritual at religio’s expense. Thus, what makes ritual particularly liminal is its bond to religion that gets not only remembered, but renamed as communitas.11 Turner’s characterization of communitas as an I–Thou relationship both obscures and exemplifies the connections between ritual and religion of ritual. Instead of freedom, ritual bestows shackles; instead of equality, inequality; instead of presence, absence; and instead of meaning, undecideability. For Turner betrays ritual’s retention of something signified, fostering instead a form for an empty center, just as communitas displaces religio. As we have seen before with his invocation and case study, ritual’s possibility is based on its failure to materially conceive or, in positive terms, its ability to symbolize. Religion is what Turner’s concept of ritual cannot signify. So if religion is the content of ritual’s form, then how does this religious content inflect that form? First, Turner suggests that ritual helps religion become manifest; ritual is an accompaniment, a prop to make religion stand, for otherwise there would be no difference or order to render visible (129). Second, Turner draws a line between ritual and religion, making them opposed entities. Although bound together, they play different roles, almost as antagonists upon the same stage (130). Communitas for Turner was, after all, not about place, location, or context. It was instead the substitute ground for this meaningful bond of humanity. Hence ritual is a utopia, a nonplace, and is not religion, but is instead theatrical, the acting out of an unattainable, inarticulate, and in Turner’s terms, liminal bond. “There is a mystery of mutual distance,” specifies Turner, “what the poet Rilke called ‘the circumspection of human gesture,’ which is just as humanly important as the mystery of intimacy” (139). To sum up, with his focus on the gesture, the seen, the public, and the visible, that which is not the thought, the hidden, the private, and the invisible, Turner’s religio is a theatrical communitas. Even though communitas is forgotten, its repetition ensures the return not of the mystery and sensuality of its presence, but of its displacements, namely, memory and symbol. The structure of ritual is the shell of a once present, living human bond.
Ritual’s truth: “pregnant with meaning” Through this path of crooked leads and seeming digressions, we can now elaborate on the two processes of remembering and forgetting posed earlier.
Ritually failing 67 Ritual is actually a more intensified remembrance of religion, not the liberatory practice of moving beyond the conceptual tyranny of religion. Whereas religion remained ensconced within the mysterious realm of speculation, ritual encapsulates thought and practice, all that is sensible and sensual albeit in absentia. Turner goes on to compare ritual’s dramatic effect in terms of identification: “one of the most effective defense mechanisms utilized by the ego against such unconscious fear is to identify with the terrifying object. In this way it is felt to be robbed of its power; and perhaps power may even be drained from it” (174). Identification with the terrifying object is effective because the mimetic process of identification forgets the disruptive power of the external object. Thus, when Turner speaks of the comedic and tragic effects of ritual, we are in a position to understand that ritual provides a framework for identification because it defensively attempts a forgetting of religion. In this case, ritual is a theatrical event that acts out of religion; it is an identification that attempts to replace religion, to usurp its place, ultimately with theory. Identification works because it repeats without remembering: it takes the place of the loss, assumes its lack in symbolic form.12 Thus, whereas we started with ritual as a movement out of disciplinary and religious parameters, we actually find ourselves again confined in these disciplinary and archival bonds. Turner himself concludes, “Society seems to be a process rather than a thing – a dialectical process with successive phases of structure and communitas. There would seem to be – if one can use such a controversial term – a human ‘need’ to participate in both modalities” (203). Ritual accordingly becomes a form that does not liberate from contexts, structures, and, now, from needs. Ritual, in its last appearance on Turner’s stage, takes on the guise of its nemesis, religion. But that is all it can do: play, dress up, act, imitate – or be “pregnant,” but not “fruitful.” Whereas once religion provided the mysterious basis of communitas, now ritual can only bequeath a ghostly form of preliterate religion. Thus, ritual imitates religion’s demands for a bond both reducible and excessive to human meaning. Ritual pretends to be the tyrant handing down seemingly arbitrary laws regarding what gets to count as a legitimate or interpolated subject. Ritual becomes resigned to its own failure to forget religion in its performance of communitas. In Turner’s text, this (theoretical) revelation acknowledges not only that ritual is very much internal to social structure, but also that this distinct state of the social – communitas – is no longer the master term determining what gets staged. Rather, communitas itself is subject to the specific constraints of ritual’s form. Turner’s theatrical communitas is the fiction he needs and denies in order to make ritual labor as the product of social logic, thought, and reason. This “theatricality” means two things. On the one hand, precisely by failing to actualize communitas, ritual only further binds us to the law of social process. Ritual is always staged for an audience dressed in the guise of equals, and this assumption, in turn, permits the temporary possibility of resignification. Its break from order
68 Andrew C. Wegley affords ritual a chance to play with, but not to eradicate, those normalized relations that get reinstated – a play that is observed by and performed for this fictional communitas. Through its subsequent return to order, ritual overrules the plethora of signification found at the margins. (I am reminded of Marx’s biting words in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: “Instead of society having conquered a new content for itself, it seems the state only returned to its oldest form, to the shamelessly simple domination of the sabre and the cowl” (Marx 2000, 331)). On the other hand, although ritual may be the negative foil for social structure, it is not simply bound to duplicate this structure. As Turner himself appreciated, ritual is somehow distinct from the social. It opens up the possibility of a form never remembered, reiterated, or reified the same way. And in this sense, too, communitas is theatrical. Ritual is not just subject to this imagined communitas, it actually produces its possibility. Ritual is both a performance determined by communitas and a performance determining communitas. In short, ritual assumes and subsumes the absolutism of religion. Turner excludes ritual’s potential to be socially normative in its obedience to the patriarchal, symbolic register. But he also excludes the theatricality of social structuring and meaning manufacturing. We are haunted by a specter that never truly was. Its truth only emerges afterwards, in the aftermath or in the wake of its not being here: the theatrical spirit of communitas forming and figuring the social body. Paradoxically, social structure works on its inability to reproduce itself. Structure itself is a symbol of failure: to have structure is to indicate that society is not continuously and autonomously present to itself. Society fails to give birth to itself. Ritual commemorates this failed conception, and, conversely, ritual fails to successfully symbolize. Turner wants in the end two opposing modalities where symmetry exists between each, where terms cross over, and where each has a unique role to play. I have been questioning how these processes occur in his own theory. My main goal was to see what is at stake and how the text bears these stakes. Accordingly, I have been urging a parallel between his ritual theory and Isoma where his readings essentially revolve around successful second births. That is, following Walker Bynum, I want to suggest that Turner’s theory of ritual stands on and appropriates women as its signifying and, hence, absent medium. In effect, ritual as both act and theory follows the tripartite process of separation, margin, and return. Both for Turner are liminal and deal with dramatizations of labor and material workings. Consequentially, structure absolves itself of this “dirty work.” Yet, structure can appear unfazed by this materiality. Ritual shows the labor in material form that structure already knew abstractly. Yet the social, invested in the reproduction of new subjects to bear witness to its performance, was implicated in this birthing metaphor from the very beginning. The social structure, too, is a performance of a certain kind that dramatically engenders and genders its subjects. Turner’s theorization of ritual is one of those sleights of hand making the pregnancy
Ritually failing 69 metaphor primary over and above the actual material process. Turner too has been implicated in setting the stage upon which thought can appear to be an immaculate conception.
(Re)positing a conception of ritual One of the stakes of this chapter has been to find a post-Turner. In so doing I have taken precautions in the promises of such an endeavor. Following Turner’s own promising steps in his break from Morgan, I found the difficulties such moves actually engender: they ensconce the disavowed theory and method, bringing along with it some unfortunate, but necessarily linked oversights. They repeat a host of ideas associated with Western logics of duality, exclusion, kinship, hierarchy, memory, presence, and representation. To begin to think of an outside to ritual or of a post-ritual theory that does not repeat these logics, we must begin to think what ritual is not. To begin to understand activities deemed to be ritual we need to devise alternate readings that favor less Turner’s ideas, but rather ideas that are unmoored from representational paradigms. Through reading Turner against the grain, this chapter has shown that the very logics he utilizes can engender a different account, one marginalized or repressed within his own ambit. Instead of seeing ritual as successfully reproducing and realigning social conflict for the efficacy of society, we should see “ritual” as an aporia for a certain community. To be “post” Turner would mean to take the potency of ritual as a metaphor for pregnancy seriously. We should see “ritual” then as a figure that both literally and metaphorically produces – gives birth to – the social. But the question of this chapter has to been to query what exactly these terms, like presence and absence, thought and matter, are. Not only did ritual imitate the social, but ritual also showed the mimetic function of the social. The social too was theatrical: its basis was an imagined event. But even as the positivity of the social and ritual are subject to question, their absences as well are not guaranteed. The structure and anti-structure of representation – Turner’s ritual process – were found to partake of each other’s terms. Both were about making visible a certain order of signification; however, this order of signification was shown to be interrupted, suspended by the failure to remember and reproduce the social properly as the self-same entity it claims itself to be. It is the failure of ritual to make present this communitas that potentially relegated ritual to a conceptual and practical absence. Yet, even in this state of failure we should preserve patience and behold neither presence nor absence, but rather something else. It is this state of being neither present nor absent – the “post” – that should preoccupy our attention in positing a theory of ritual. Post-ritual reiterates structure in a way that produces difference, not representation. Ritual, then, is not a simple configuration of presence or absence, but rather the complex commingling of the present and absent, real and symbolic, visible and invisible, flesh and word. In this sense, post-ritual imitates the event.
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This gesturing toward the possibly present and impossibly spoken gets at what ritual conceives and produces. This quality of making present but eluding the grasp of theory evades the claims of traditional anthropology that Morgan and Turner advocate, and makes ritual a dangerous and liminal knowledge practice. As a figure, ritual is relieved of the burden of bearing life or death. Ritual is less about conception in its theoretical or practical connotations, less about birth or labor, less about parilineal or matrilineal kinships than it is about symbolizing lack, marking nothing, bearing witness to the impossible. Ritual paradoxically reveals that nothing can have a positive function. Ritual gives birth to a ghostly spirit. And the production of lack also cautions us against insisting that ritual speak a language of representation, meaning, or value. Ritual communicates to us in its failure to represent and signify. We should not force meaning and value into its performances. By asking about the efficacy of ritual, we resituate ritual in a realm that re-appropriates ritual deeds into a logic of profits, values, capitals. Ritual as a ghost birth is not about making profits, fruitful meaning, or more effective actions for the good of the social. We cannot bet on ritual; we cannot be expectant progenitors; we cannot talk about more effective, practical, or economized processes that ensure the delivery of meaning. Ritual activity calls for neither work nor play, but for attention to future pasts, to what has not yet been. We need to shift our attention away from a logic of actual or symbolic effectiveness to a logic of the inactualized, the ineffective. Theorizing ritual in this light as the dramatic performance of a community fractured and split asunder by a mnemonic and representational crisis may suggest, if not a more profitable, at least a more rigorous inquiry. But just as we inquired about the intended community of Turner’s work, we need to ask about the reception and audience for my theory of ritual. To be sure, Turner banks on the reproductive potential of his theory of ritual, on its ability to figuratively and literally re-conceive the society in question. After all, his interpretation of Isoma rests on what he perceives to be a tension around “pregnancy” – what and who will bear the fruits of society. Isoma is meant as a substitute birth, a substitute for an afflicted woman’s failure to bear the offspring necessary for the Ndembu’s future. Whether or not this birth is actualized, Turner’s focus on this substitute birth raised the problem of who gets to count in society; how does culture reproduce itself; to what sort of meanings and logics must one submit in order to be recognized as legitimate members of a given society. That is, ritual serves the necessary role of delimitating kinship: who is within the fold of the family, tribe, even humanity. In this light, ritual is given the precarious and nefarious burden of impressing its subjects with the imperatives inscribed by its respective society. While acknowledging the ambiguous elements of this signifying practice, I want to also stress an equally important element. Alongside of and simultaneous with the aporia at the heart of ritual, this element of the
Ritually failing 71 location of ritual as intellectual archive is another mode of inquiry urgent for theorizing “post-Turner.” Regardless of the role of Isoma for forging the bonds of Ndembu society, Turner’s reading of ritual speaks directly to the audience he inculcates. The logics he employs – logics that favor binaries, contradictions, hierarchization, presence, representation, subjects, theory – comes from a specific intellectual trajectory, one that has its own imaginaries, kinships, legitimization, in short, its own ways of recognizing what gets to count as knowledge. As Derrida and Foucault have pointed out, these knowledges are productive, creating practices that shape the institutions and subjects that sustain and imbibe their discourses. Ritual – both as theoretical and practical activity – sustains Western configurations of mind and body, primitive and civilized, male and female, social and individual, theory and practice, disorder and order, politics and spirituality, real and symbolic, breach and reconciliation, and, last, continuity and discontinuity or, what we called, memory and forgetting. Even without establishing the boundaries and certainties between and among these terms, ritual brings to light indeterminacies. The displacements and the forms of lack at work in ritual are determinate. These ambiguities, which I discussed as central to Turner’s theory, constitute the habitus of the West. Ritual is a potent concept because it is more than a mere concept; rather, ritual is a technology for the formation and maintenance of community. To conclude, I think it is important, to pose most explicitly what community uses this particular concept of ritual or, even more forcibly and provocatively, whether ritual as such is always already the formulation and utterance of this community in question. That is, how might ritual indelibly bear the birthmark of its engendering community? Drawing from the works of Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood, we could begin to answer these questions as we also think of a “post-ritual.” Asad and Mahmood have separately and convincingly argued for the development of an “anthropology of the secular” and an “anthropology of ritual.”13 Shifting their attention from the generic human, these anthropologists ask after the different configurations and uses of religiously inflected concepts and about their formative role on the social. Their analyses direct us to tend to the geopolitical context in which we read ritual. Extending their insights, we too need to ask how ritual proscribes certain politics and modes of subjectivity. Furthermore, we need to ask how ritual as methodological and theoretical problematic reproduces not just any politics, but Western politics. Seeing, then, ritual as one such critical technology of the West, we should pause to question the efficacy and success of ritual. This chapter has been an attempt to give shape to what such a pause might look like, to gesture toward a set of questions intent on the impossible project of producing what is not yet born, and to raise a challenge to contemporary critical theory. Is ritual the best way of remembering actions? Does ritual fail to appreciate other modes of communitas? Does the archive itself ritually repeat, and not remember?
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Notes 1 See Schechner’s The Future of Ritual, which extends Turner’s idea of liminality to performances ranging from ritual to theatre to performance art. His work is mainly interested in demonstrating how the aesthetic is politically effective across borders, cultures, and times. Likewise, Grimes’ Marrying and Burying focuses on the central role of ritual in people’s lives in its productivity and creativity. Sullivan stresses the interdisciplinary nature of ritual and its embodied aspect. He draws from Turner in that ritual is a paradigmatic form of the social. Catherine Bell draws from Turner in her poststructuralist reading of ritual, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, in that for Bell ritual is less liminal than it is a staging of social drama, her concept of “ritualization.” 2 This idea foreshadows Bell’s discursive analysis of ritual: “When analyzed as ritualization, acting ritually emerges as a particular cultural strategy of differentiation linked to particular social effects and rooted in a distinctive interplay of a socialized body and the environment it structures” (7–8). 3 Turner gets the concept of the “I–Thou relationship” from Martin Buber. For Buber and Turner, the I–Thou relationship is one where each individual sees the other in her singularity and not as a projection and desire of the individual self (Turner 1969, 126–7 and 136–7). 4 For a good introduction to the Cambridge ritualists, see Robert Ackerman’s intellectual history: The Myth and Ritual School: J.G. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists. 5 Turner’s ethnography of the Isoma ritual, which I shall examine at length in what follows, claims that the ritual sorts things out, undoing and correcting what should be remembered and forgotten as well as mapping out binary oppositions. The choreography of the ritual gets reduced to a “schematic representation” (30) and three columns composed of binaries (39). Ritual’s process is captured in abstracted geometric models. For this reason, Turner focuses much of his attention on the elaborate techniques, classifications, and symbols involved in the Isoma. As the rite is essentially propitiatory – here, a plea to the forgotten – the rite is organized around an ambivalence between such classifications as “slips/resistances,” concealment/revelation, and forgetfulness/memory. 6 In this light, Turner’s focus on symbol is to show how meanings are communicated and negotiated between ritual participants through underlying formal conditions or processes. 7 To be sure, Geertz (1973) defines religion as the absolute world view for a culture, its ethos: “(1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, persuasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic” (90). 8 According to Grimes, the narrow views “often identify ritual with actions predicated on a theistic, mysterious or animistic premise, or performances by religious functionaries in sacred places. In this view, ritual is one kind of work alongside other kinds, for example, the deeds of midwives, dressmakers or morticians” (261). 9 The Rhodes-Livingstone Institute for Sociological Research, located in the administrative capital of Zambia, made possible and funded his research (Turner 1969, 5). The type of research encouraged and sponsored by the institute had direct political consequences. Turner reflects on both concerns: “As Lucy Mair (1960) has pointed out, the contribution of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute to the shaping of policy, like that of the other research institutes in British Africa, lay not in ‘prescribing the action appropriate to specific situations’ but ‘rather in
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the analysis of situations in such a way that the policymakers (could) see more clearly the forces with which they were dealing’ ” (5). The research was of direct importance for establishing knowledge about the research subjects – knowledge used to inform policy decisions. Turner himself acknowledges this correlation: “the study of tribal ritual would certainly have been in the spirit of the institute’s initial aspiration ‘to study . . . the problem of establishing permanent and satisfactory relations between natives and non-natives,’ for ‘satisfactory relations’ depend on a deep mutual understanding” (6). This quotation specifically attests to how his study was directly and knowingly involved in the shaping, making, and enforcing of policy with all its colonialist logic: the acquisition of “tribal” ritual knowledge in order to assume and subsume it under Western epistemology. The ultimate goal is the creation of (colonial) subjects, a theme that shall echo throughout this chapter. But this also poses questions to us about the legacy of colonialist thought in contemporary structures and imaginaries of thought: how does the separation of ritual from myth and religion support hegemonic modes of dualisms, hierarchization, categorization, etc.? Staal offers a similar analysis regarding the ineffectiveness and meaninglessness in all ritual (1979, 6). In this case, Turner’s vision of communitas shows the limits of the 1960s hopes and dreams, the underside and dangers of its utopian thought. “Psychological processes whereby the subject assimilates an aspect, property or attribute of the other and is transformed, wholly or partially, after the model the other provides” (Laplanche and Pontalis 1973, 205). See Asad (1993; 2003), and Mahmood (2001).
Bibliography Ackerman, Robert (1991) The Myth and Ritual School: J.G. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists. New York: Garland. Asad, Talal (1993) Genealogies of Religion. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. –––– (2003) Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bell, Catherine (1992) Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. New York: Oxford University Press. Derrida, Jacques (1996) Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Geertz, Clifford (1973) Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Grimes, Ronald (1995) Marrying and Burying: Rites of Passage in a Man’s Life. Boulder: Westview Press. –––– (2000) “Ritual,” in Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon (eds) Guide to the Study of Religion. London: Cassell: 259–70. Laplanche, Jean and Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand (1973) The Language of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Norton. Mahmood, Saba (2001) “Rehearsed spontaneity and the conventionality of ritual: disciplines of Salat,” American Ethnologist 28: 827–53. Marx, Karl (2000) “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in David McLellan (ed.) Karl Marx: Selected Writings, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schechner, Richard (1993) The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance. London: Routledge. Staal, Frits (1979) “The meaninglessness of ritual,” Numen 26: 2–22.
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Sullivan, Lawrence (1998) “Coming to our senses: Religious Studies in the Academy,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 66: 1–11. Turner, Victor (1969) Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Walker Bynum, Caroline (1996) “Women’s stories, women’s symbols: a critique of Victor Turner’s theory of liminality,” in Ronald Grimes (ed.) Readings in Ritual Studies, Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall: 71–86.
4
Situation and event The destinations of sense Tyrus Miller
I The terms “situation” and “event” are familiar terms from the vocabulary of art and performance theory, as well as from the particular lexicons of such diverse discourses as existentialist ethics, action theory, and historiography. Within the limitations of this chapter, I cannot begin to provide an exhaustive account of the multitudinous contexts in which these terms have been used, nor a philological survey of their development in the history of ideas. My aim will be more modest: to consider a limited number of theoretical sources with an eye towards their application in the arts of performance, and in turn, to sketch some revisionary perspectives on performance that a new understanding of these terms in light of the problem of avant-garde exemplarity might open up. In particular, “situation” and “event” allow me to specify in theoretical terms the inventive, proleptic function of exemplification in avant-garde works: their ability to elicit from a given background of artistic materials and context a new quality or concept of which the work itself is the singular example. Before passing on to more explicitly philosophical contexts, I would like to consider briefly a few examples from “applied” art criticism as foils for the theoretical reconceptualization I will eventually, by the end of this chapter, propose. The first comes from Julie H. Reiss’s excellent study From Margin to Center: The Spaces of Installation Art, which traces the trajectory towards the installation art of the late 1960s to the present through three other topoi: environments, situations, spaces (Reiss 1999). For my purposes, it is the second term that is of interest. “Situations” in this study refers primarily to the performative and embodied aspects of minimalist sculpture, which, as Reiss and others have noted, received theoretical treatment by theoristartists such as Donald Judd and Robert Morris, as well as by hostile critics such as Michael Fried. Fried famously attacked this whole body of work in his essay “Art and Objecthood” by claiming that the minimalist artwork functioned literally, as a real object among other objects within a spatialtemporal situation of the spectator (Fried 1998). It could hence be understood to exemplify its own qualities as object, thus functioning
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“theatrically” – a pejorative term for Fried – rather than through mobilizing the medium in artistically legitimate ways, to create significant form, texture, or shape. Robert Morris in particular would in turn embrace the transgressive potentials of the performative dimension of objects and spaces, simultaneously engaging himself with minimalist sculptures that confronted the bodies of spectators with body-scaled entities in space, Duchampian works with puns and other uses of language at their basis, and dance-performance works such as Arizona or Site. Notable in all these works, however, was the phenomenological underpinning and hence the focusing of the notion of “situation” on a singular, embodied center of consciousness and feeling that “situated” radially about it the objects and other subjects of its environment. Agency in the situation, accordingly, emanates from this center in modifying the environment that encloses and includes it: for instance, the continual manipulations of the board in relation to the positions of the masked construction worker in Morris’s Site. In anticipation of some of my later arguments, I would here like to note that this view of agency as situated in and centered on the subject extends into the Marxisttinged political activism of such minimalist artists as Morris and Carl Andre. A corollary use of the paired term “event” appears in Hannah Higgins recent study of Fluxus, Fluxus Experience. Like Reiss with “situation,” for Higgins “event” designates a new artistic “genre,” a way of making art typified by George Brecht’s “event scores” and widely influential among the avant-garde in the 1960s. “In the Event,” Higgins writes, “everyday actions are framed as minimalistic performances or, occasionally, as imaginary and impossible experiments with everyday situations” (Higgins 2002, 2). Notably, the “Event” genre is traceable to John Cage’s activity as a teacher at the New School for Social Research in 1958–59. Higgins relates the characteristics of the Event to Cage’s musical aesthetics, which take the metric of time as a basis for establishing density (sounds) or emptiness (silence) as constitutive elements of musical works, irrespective of the “musical” or “non-musical” character of the sounds and of their intentional or non-intentional production. For Higgins, the common denominator of both Cage’s works and Fluxus Events is a quality of attention: “Attentiveness and concentration (the listener’s intentionality) are required, or the sound is mere noise. Similarly, in Brecht’s Events, the minimalist structure and reduced format elicit the participants’ focus on the activity at hand” (53–5). Though elsewhere Higgins persuasively presents Fluxus works that break down the division of subject and object, it is clear that here the Event is subject-centred. It is a special quality of a listening, attending consciousness that conveys the status of “event” onto an otherwise ordinary, even meaningless happenstance. A notable instance of the term “event” in contemporary art criticism is Stephen C. Foster’s edited volume entitled “Event” Arts and Art Events (1998). By placing the word “event” in quotation marks, Foster points to a
Situation and event 77 special use of the term, in which “event” designates a special genre of art and/or medium of art activity. Foster, in fact, explicitly links this special sense of event and the concept of situation in his introductory essay for the volume, “Event structures and art situations.” Foster understands “event” art as a manifestation of the avant-garde’s impulse to break down barriers between art media and between artistic and more general, non-artistic, everyday culture; Berlin Dada provides him with his major historical example. The “everyday and historical structure of the event, real or imagined,” he writes, becomes “a vehicle of artistic and/or critical purpose. The arts began to present their content through the structure of outside, nonart events rather than to represent the world’s events through traditional art genres” (5). In going on to specify the sense of “event,” Foster notes that “events are intimately linked to our concepts of historical causation. . . . Events imply occurrences worthy of a cause-and-effect explanation” (7). In a further move that does not necessarily follow from the connection of event to causation, however, Foster suggests that “events,” in his sense, follow causally from the intentional, programmatic agency of actors: [Events] require a purposeful action or an intentionality (in the acting or in the perceiving of an action) that matters as a point from which one explains and that has the capability of identifying what appear to be consciously worked out causal chains between reasons and actions. For our purposes, events might, in fact, be defined as the form taken between programs and actions. (7) In short, event art is, for Foster, an activist and/or actionist art. Following from this activism is the notion of historical context that must be consciously grasped as a transformable occasion for the event, or, to put it otherwise, a “situation” of action: While the success of the artists’ use of events may be arguable, what is clear is that its possibilities rested . . . in situations prerequisite for their sympathetic reception. That is, the use of the event operated best out of contexts in which they not only could be created but understood; where the initiation of events was imaginably possible or where the conditions for its operations were favorable. (7) To sum up, events result from consciously initiated actions in historical circumstances grasped as situations, which in turn facilitate or constrain the realization of the intentions and goals of the events. Art events are, perhaps, at most special cases of this general structure, insofar as they allow a more playful, fanciful employment of the imaginary dimensions of both situation
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and the staging of the event. Notably, then, in his conception of “art events” Foster retains a notion of artistic agency that is classically avant-garde. Art embodies a programmatically chosen orientation of action and exemplifies for its audience the rules of this action as one of the ways it brings about real effects. As a counterpole to this classically avant-gardist view of artistic agency, and anticipating my later argument, I would like to conclude this section in what may be a surprising way, with a quotation from a modernist literary critic who is very out of fashion, and from his most well-known essay at that: T.S. Eliot in “Tradition and the individual talent.” In this essay, however, amidst the much-quoted, once admired and now discredited passages about depersonalization and the ideal canonical order of great literary works are some very canny and surprisingly advanced views about the complex relations between what we might call the dramatic signified, the individual dramatic speech-events, and the meaning-events of the language used by the playwright. Referring to examples such as Dante’s Canto XXVI of the Inferno (Ulysses canto), Agamemnon, and Othello, Eliot suggests that there is a specific affective intensity ascribable to the quasi-events of language that may, but need not correspond to the emotions of either the spectator or the dramatic character. No matter how narrow or wide the divergence, however, the events that constitute the “artistic emotion” are ontologically distinct, being surface effects of language rather than affects in the depths of bodies. Hence, Eliot writes, “the difference between art and the event is always absolute” (9) (Eliot here uses “event” narrowly, to mean the dramatic incident). He goes on to discuss a passage from Cyril Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, noting that this passage depends dramatically on its balance of negative and positive emotions, attraction towards beauty and fascination by ugliness. The passage’s language reflects this overall structure of contrasts, yet exceeds it as well: The balance of contrasted emotion is in the dramatic situation to which the speech is pertinent, but that situation alone is inadequate to it. This is, so to speak, the structural emotion, provided by the drama. But the whole effect, the dominant tone, is due to the fact that a number of floating feelings, having an affinity to this emotion by no means superficially evident, have combined with it to give us a new art emotion. (Eliot 1950, 10) Eliot’s critical idiom is traditional, including his use of “event” to mean dramatic incident and “situation” to refer to the emotional and narrative whole; his thought, however, is not. For implicit in his brief discussion is a kind of double articulation of both event and situation. “Floating” (Eliot’s term) over the surfaces of the dramatic image – the fictions of dramatic personae, the images of voice and action that actors embody on the stage – is a
Situation and event 79 modulated flux of simulacra, a textual quasi-situation that emerges from the play of quasi-events in language. The shape and syntax of this “art” – or “compositional” – plane of the drama need not resemble those of the dramatic events/situations. In fact, Eliot all but suggests that actualization of the dramatic plane always involves divergence and differentiation from the plane where the events of language are situated and composed. Those instances in which the linguistic dimension of dramatic works (e.g. Agamemnon, Othello) exhibits a closer mimesis of affects located in a subject – in the spectator or in the dramatic character – are merely special cases of a more general set of cases in which the linguistic and dramatic planes diverge. Eliot’s remarks on drama relate back, of course, to a broader argument about personae, personality, and poetry. The poet, he suggests, needs to give his attention to the compositional events of the poem, rather than, first and foremost, the psychological and emotional events of his soul. Eliot conceived of this process in famously sacrificial, even sacramental terms: “What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual selfsacrifice, a continual extinction of personality” (7). This view of lyric poetry, as it was understood by Eliot’s successors, led to a range of dogmatic assumptions of the New Criticism and prescriptive exclusions of a whole spectrum of new writing. As a theoretical precept applicable to performance, however, it has some interesting implications. For it suggests, first, that in the drama, prior to the doling out of positions to actors and spectators, and the distribution of “roles” among actors, there is the ritually repeated sacrifice that constitutes the theatrical situation as such. That sacrifice, moreover, is not an event of bodies and persons – a subjection, for instance, of the players and spectators to the director or even to the playwright – but rather a yielding to the inhuman destinies of language, its combinations, its soundscape, its syntax. The virtual space of the theatre is thus more a site of the undoing of programmatic action by language than a place in which action is realized. Theater is rather a place for exhibiting and learning the exemplary passions that traverse action and divert it fatally from its effective course: joy, rapture, resignation, rage, exhaltation, exhaustion, love. Were I to conclude here, it would seem as if I were suggesting that drama, as Eliot conceived it, would be something like a staged version of a Paul De Man essay, wherein the gaps between bodies, language, and characters passionately enact the breakdown of dramatic figuration into the arbitrary figural and positional powers of language. But that is not at all the conclusion I want to advance. Rather, it is a more affirmative one about the creative possibilities that lie in the theatrical crossing of these gaps. I want to suggest that the “sacrificial” relation to language that Eliot proposes holds out an alternative conception of fate, of the interaction of event and situation, than that which is centered on subjective agency and consciously explicated material circumstance. Instead, it points to a space in which the
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destinies of language form the situational field for possible subjects, exemplary instances of subjection to a passion of simulacral “events,” whose intensities are not those of consciousness or a natural body, but of grammar, sound, and inscription. Viewed in this perspective, theatre would not, then, have primarily to do with fulfilling of a dramatic role with words, nor with an act of communication through words from actor to spectator, but rather with a shared passion of sacrifice unto a prior order of signs, a situationconstituting sacrifice involving both actor and spectator.
II With this backdrop of performance in mind, I would now like to consider some theoretical texts that employ the notions of “situation” and “event.” I wish, moreover, to suggest that these terms involve more than just a general applicability of theoretical discourse to problems of theatre or performance. Rather, they are themselves tied to the context of theatre by bonds of filiation that are both historical and conceptual. Together, they map out a common field of problems of how to understand freedom as action within a preconstrained field – or more classically speaking, the problem of “fate,” destiny, necessity as the temporal precedence of context over action. At least implicit, but often explicit in this issue is the correlative problem of the ritualization of acting under constraint. For example, in Jean-Paul Sartre’s use of the term “situation,” he sought to consider how ritualized action might be avoided or at least confronted consciously as contrary to the subject’s freedom of nihilation. Sartre’s term, which he applied equally to the contexts of his philosophical essays and to his plays, were central to his dramatic conception of human choice. Thus, in his 1947 essay “For a theater of situations,” he argued for a primacy of situation over “character,” which was simply a hardening and confirmation of individual free choices made in situations: [I]f it’s true that man is free in a given situation and that in and through that situation he chooses what he will be, then what we have to show in the theatre are simple and human situations and free individuals in these situations choosing what they will be. The character comes later, after the curtain has fallen. . . . The situation is an appeal: it surrounds us, offering us solutions which it’s up to us to choose. And in order for the decision to be deeply human, in order for it to bring the whole man into play, we have to stage limit situations, that is, situations which present alternatives one of which leads to death. (Sartre 1976, 4) The situation does not, however, just frame the choices of the protagonist of drama or of historical life. It is also a medium of communication with the spectators and on-lookers:
Situation and event 81 [S]ince there is theatre only if all the spectators are united, situations must be found which are so general that they are common to all. Immerse men in these universal and extreme situations which leave them only a couple of ways out, arrange things so that in choosing the way out they choose themselves, and you’ve won – the play is good. It is through particular situations that each age grasps the human situation and the enigmas human freedom must confront. (4–5) Sartre’s term “situation” takes over the conceptual work already staked out by Heidegger in Being and Time, who punningly connects the German term for fate, Geschick, with both the verb for sending (schicken) and the noun meaning history, Geschichte; the Heideggerian situation, we might say, is defined as a destination of an individual’s existence from and towards a history into which it is thrown. In his later work, the term “event” (Ereignis, happening) replaces that of the Geschick, as Heidegger shifted his emphasis from the latent humanism still implicit in the focus on Dasein towards the epochal character of Being in its modes of appearance. In Heidegger’s later work, then, the epochal event of Being is a sacrificial enactment in its essence, insofar as the event is something that befalls humanity and demands proper response. Rather like the gods in tragedy, the Heideggerian event appropriates human capacities and limitations to distribute cosmically the concealed and unconcealed, the speakable and the silent, the necessary and the contingent, the immanent and the transcendent.1 Finally, certain post-structuralist thinkers, especially Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze, have concerned themselves with how repetitious, ritualized frameworks might autodifferentiate in/as time to open the possibility of freedom as invention within constrained, often explicitly theatrical play. In what follows, I will focus especially on Foucault and Deleuze. For Michel Foucault, in The Archaeology of Knowledge, the “event” as an historiographic concept is closely linked to that of “statements,” on the one hand, and “the archive,” on the other (Foucault 1972). Statements occur within a system of rules that govern their division and grouping into larger formations. However, the archive has a special function more akin to what we have already discussed in relation to “situation.” The archive refers to the fact, according to Foucault, that historical statements do not simply appear as a uniform surface, but rather in a complex hierarchy and horizontal dispersion. It is within this structured “volume” that statements can function in two ways, he writes: as events and as things. Statements as “things” means simply that the performances of speech and writing take on a material endurance with definite and different time-spans; they accumulate and disappear in time. Statements as events, however, must be understood in two frameworks: the instant of their enunciation, and their efficacy as they endure or recur. Foucault writes:
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Tyrus Miller The archive is first the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events. . . . The archive is not that which, despite its immediate escape, safeguards the event of the statement, and preserves, for future memories, its status as an escapee; it is that which, at the very root of the statement-event, and in that which embodies it, defines at the outset the system of its enunciability. (129)
Put somewhat more simply, Foucault is suggesting that for a statement to become an event that will be able to endure in the archive and hence be granted historical existence, it must conform to a set of rules of formation. The archive is the “situation” of the statement-event that confers the status of historical “event” on the statement, by taking it up into a larger, distributed framework of meaning. Yet the archive is also the means by which the event is effectuated within different domains and time-frames. Again Foucault: Nor is the archive that which collects the dust of statements that have become inert once more, and which may make possible the miracle of their resurrection; it is that which defines the mode of occurrence of the statement-thing; it is the system of its functioning. . . [F]ar from being only that which ensures that we exist in the midst of preserved discourse, it is that which differentiates discourses in their multiple existence and specifies them in their own duration. (129) The archive, then, is the situation of the event, in the sense that it provides the system of sites where statements may uniquely occur, may function efficaciously, and may live out their durations differently. Foucault employs this concept within the particular concerns of his studies of the human sciences. Yet they can be referred to our concerns with theatre, performance, and ritual as well. Foucault formulates the consistency of a historical field as related to performances of speech and writing, as language-events that occur singularly and function within the archival situation. Moreover, his meditations on historiography in The Archaeology of Knowledge paralleled his engagement with the philosophical writings of Gilles Deleuze, which culminated in Foucault’s important essay “Theatrum Philosophicum,” a long, sympathetic review of Deleuze’s Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition, in which Deleuze formulated a novel philosophy of difference based on an idiosyncratic mélange of Stoic and Epicurean logic, Nietzschean semiology, and psychoanalytic theories of the phantasm. Both Foucault’s historiography of the statement-event and Deleuze’s philosophy of the event had at basis a shared goal upon which Deleuze and Foucault cultivated an intellectual and personal comradery. This goal was to displace phenomenology, in its assumption of a centered individual subject of con-
Situation and event 83 sciousness and affect, and the philosophy of history, especially Marxism, with its analogous privilege to a collective-individual subject of history as labor and action. Both Foucault and Deleuze shared a Nietzschean suspicion of the very idea of a continuous, substantial subject, and hence both laid emphasis on the power of language and more generally signs to generate effects of meaning that flee from verification: “fictions,” “masks,” or “simulacra.” The archive on the one hand, the theatre on the other, are key models of a system of sites, or “situation,” in which performances of speech may function as simulacra, affecting bodies, creating the turbulence of passion, projecting hypothetical experiences, generating phantasms, rising into appearance and passing into nothingness again. The event, Foucault writes, is in Deleuze’s thought “not a state of things, something that could serve as a referent for a proposition” (1977, 173). To understand the event, one must distinguish between “designation” of states of things, “expression” of an opinion or belief, “signification” of an affirmation, and a “sense” that appears as a neutral, infinitive vector. The event relates to the dimension of “sense,” which is an “incorporeal effect” of change registered by the statement, a series or sequence paralleling the designated states of bodies but not equivalent to them. The event, as Foucault and Deleuze define it, is that which in sentences escapes the grasp of subjects as cognition or bound affectivity. “We should not restrict ‘sense’ to the noematic core that lies at the heart of a knowable object,” Foucault writes, “rather, we should allow it to reestablish its flux at the limit of words and things, as what is said of a thing (not its attribute or the thing in itself) and as something that happens (not its process or its state)” (1977, 174). Put otherwise, we can say that “sense” is an intensity that exceeds the limits that stabilize the meanings of subjects and objects and tends towards their disintegration and dispersion. “Sense” is thus a passion that subjects and objects undergo, a passage to and beyond the limits of their being. Following Deleuze, Foucault also specifies the affinity of the event of “sense” for the grammar of the verb in its present tense and the infinitive: “The grammar of the sense-event revolves around two asymmetrical and insecure poles: the infinitive mode and the present tense. The sense-event is always both the displacement of the present and the eternal repetition of the infinitive” (1977, 175). The event of sense occurs within a theatrical time: a present that is the simulacrum of a present and the presence of a simulacrum; with an iterability that occupies this fictive present at its very core and empties it of thickness.2 Neopositivism, Foucault suggests, fails to conceptualize the event adequately, because it confuses the event for a state of affairs or corporeal process, making it equivalent to objects. Phenomenology, he writes: reoriented the event with respect to sense: either it placed the bare event before or to the side of sense – the rock of facticity, the mute inertia of occurrences – and then submitted it to the active processes of sense, to
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Tyrus Miller its digging and elaboration; or else it assumed a domain of primal significations, which always existed as a disposition of the world around the self, tracing its paths and privileged locations, indicating in advance where the event might occur and its possible form. Either the cat whose good sense precedes the smile or the common sense of the smile that anticipates the cat. Either Sartre or Merleau-Ponty. (175)
Philosophy of history, finally, encloses the event in a necessary relation with the past, in which it was prepared, and with the future, in which its identity will be preserved. Against these disciplines, Foucault holds up psychoanalysis and the theatre as the “two privileged stages” on which will be undone this centering of the event in the depth of bodies, its separation from the logic of sense, and its closure in a continuous substance of time. Psychoanalysis, he suggests, should be understood as “a metaphysical practice since its concerns itself with phantasms” (171). The theatre, in turn, “is multiplied, polyscenic, simultaneous, broken into separate scenes that refer to each other, and where we encounter, without any trace of representation (copying or imitating), the dance of masks, the cries of bodies, and the gesturing of hands and fingers” (171). In Deleuze’s name, and through the examples of psychoanalysis and theatre, Foucault evokes a thought “completely freed from both the subject and the object.” Replacing these polarities is the “phantasm” (whether psychoanalytic or theatrical) and the event: Thinking . . . requires the release of a phantasm in the mime that produces it at a single stroke; it makes the event indefinite so that it repeats itself as a singular universal. . . [I]f the role of thought is to produce the phantasm theatrically and to repeat the universal event in its extreme point of singularity, then what is thought itself if not the event that befalls the phantasm and the phantasmatic repetition of the absent event? The phantasm and the event, affirmed in disjunction, are the object of thought . . . and thought itself; they situate excess being at the surface of bodies where it can only be approached by thought and trace the topological event in which thought is itself formed. (178) In other words, theatre does not simply become an occasion for thought, or even a privileged model of thought. It is a form of “aconceptual” thinking, that conjoins phantasm and event in a new logic of sense. Sense, as reconceived by Foucault and Deleuze, is then the (non-objective) “situation” of what may “eventually” befall a subject, but does not originate with it and tends towards the dissolution of its given form. It is not an action emanating from a subject, but a passion of hypothetical experience it may undergo, embody, and exemplify.
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III I now arrive at a performance work that might be seen to exemplify – unprogrammatically, of course – some of the relations between event and situation that Foucault and Deleuze describe. I believe that Jackson Mac Low’s “collection of forty dances,” The Pronouns, composed using a variety of chance operations and other procedures, may be profitably considered in light of the conception of event and situation I have outlined above.3 Mac Low composed The Pronouns in February and March 1964, along with a number of related dance and performance works, using packs of filing cards on which one or more basic actions were written (Mac Low 1979). These provide a limited repertoire of actions, of which the dance-instruction poems will be composed. In the case of The Pronouns, specifically, Mac Low used a pack of 56 filing cards with one to five actions on it, drawn from the 850-item Basic English word list. In creating the action repertoire, Mac Low performed an interesting grammatical operation as well, what he called “generalizing” the action: changing a specific action, such as “kiss nearest woman” to “kissing.” In choosing to work with the gerundial or progressive form of the verbs, Mac Low provides something akin to the infinitive form of the verb that Deleuze and Foucault, in their discussion of the event, tied to the movement of “sense.” Another intersecting list-component of the work was the pronouns themselves, of which Mac Low compiled a list by going through his Merriam-Webster dictionary. Mac Low then proceeded to compose the poems as follows: “I would shuffle the pack & then cut it & point blindly to one of the actions on the card cut to. This action became the title of the dance. Before or after determining the title, I would also choose which pronoun was to be the subject of all the sentences in that dance-poem” (72). Hence, too, not only was the action rendered neutral and infinitivized through a grammatical procedure, but also the typically situational features of discourse and action – the pronominal marking of enunciation and positionality – are subordinated to a prior procedural choice. One further aspect of language also affects the final shape of the actions the dancers will perform. The title word, the name of the action selected from the card, then served as a nucleus for determining further selection of words and formal features of the text to be composed. Mac Low employs a method he calls “diastic,” wherein the placement of the letters in the title word determine the selection of words having those letters. The number of letters in each title word determines the number of words in a line or in a verse stanza, while the number of words in the title determines the number of lines or of stanzas. Following the terminology of Jean Starobinski and Julia Kristeva, I call this a paragrammatic procedure, an artistic mobilization of a productivity in the play of the individual graphic signifiers that compose the written word, an unleashing of the excess of potential relations between letters, independent of the significant boundaries of words and phrases.
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It is easiest to visualize this method by considering a brief example, the fifth dance, entitled “Numbering.” In this case, the letters of the seed-word govern the selection of the action-words in each line, and the number of letters in the word “numbering” determine that there should be a total of nine lines in the poem: FIFTH DANCE – NUMBERING – 17 February 1964 All of you begin naming things. Then each of you jumps, comes on as a horn, numbers anything or anyone, darkens something, & then hammers on it. Then one of you starts fingering a door. Soon another one of you begins rewarding someone for something or going up under something. At the end all of you are numbering things. The letters of the title word not only appear somewhere in the word for the selected action, but also in the same position in both title-word and actionword. Mac Low concludes his description of the procedure as follows: As the method “selected” each action-word or – phrase, I made it, or a modified form of it, part of a sentence of which the pronoun chosen for that dance was the subject. While punctuation (& thus sentence length & the number & often the kinds of clauses in sentences) was largely determined by the punctuation already on the filing cards, the various conjunctions & adverbs used to connect the action-lines into sentencestrophes & to connect the sentence-strophes with each other were freely chosen. In short, although systematic chance determined many features of each dance, a few crucial features, such as which pronoun was to be the subject of all sentences in that dance & how the actions were to be connected – thus, incidentally, the time-relations persisting between the actions of the dance – were matters of free choice. (72) Thus, in sum, the dance-instruction texts represented a complex result of the interaction of three sets of constraints of different types – the lexical lists of actions and pronouns on the one hand, the configuration of letters in the title word on the other – with free choice and chance. In performance, the dance movements emerge out of the dancer’s inter-
Situation and event 87 pretation of the verbal instructions, which at once subject the movements of the body to a rigorous constraining framework and sequencing and, at the same time, allow the dancers considerable choice in how the dictated events are to be realized as specific bodily movements. In some cases, the instruction-poems appear to dictate fairly determinate sorts of actions, transactions, or gestures that can be conventionally mimed by the dancers. In other cases, however, the pronouns and actions work together to block conventional translation, as in the thirtieth dance, “Printing,” which is based on the pronoun “what”: What has curves or has to put weight on a bird though reacting to orange hair? What writes with a bad pen while doing something as in the West, such as harboring poison between cotton or going from breathing to a common form, & making decisions? & what finally’s cleaning something by sponging it? (52) How is the dancer to conceive of “going from breathing to a common form,” while observing also that it is an “object” or perhaps an indefinite entity, a “what,” that performs this putative action? And how should he or she preserve the interrogative mode of all this in the dance gesture? Here the text asserts its relatively high degree of autonomy as a situational field of language-events and its resistance to mimetic embodiment, highlighting in turn the parabolic divergence of any danced realization of it from the “infinitive” events of the instruction-text. Mac Low, in his remarks to the dancers of The Pronouns, lays a great deal of emphasis on the discipline implicit for the dancers in the text: In realizing any particular dance, the individual dancer or group of dancers has a very large degree of freedom of interpretation. However, although they are able to interpret the successive lines of each of those poems-which-are-also-the-dance-instructions as they see fit, dancers are required to find some definite interpretation of the meaning of every line of the dance-poems they choose to realize. Above all, no line or series of lines may be left uninterpreted & unrealized simply because it seems too complicated or obscure to realize as movement (&/or sound or speech). In addition to finding the concrete meanings as actions for each line of each dance-poem realized, the dancers must carefully work out the time-relations between the various actions, as indicated by their
88 Tyrus Miller positions in the poems & by the particular conjunctions & adverbs used to connect them together within the sentence-length strophes, and to connect these strophes together. (67) Mac Low’s insistence that the time-relations of the dance actions closely observe the articulations of the verbal events by adverbs and conjunctions indicates the priority of the linguistic plane, itself the trace of a complex set of procedural events, to that of the body and consciousness of the dancers, who actualize the text in singular, exemplary but non-exclusive realizations. In no way, however, do the situations that result “originate” with the dancers. This complex of choice and constraint, I would argue, can be connected to Mac Low’s anarchism and his interest in exploring art situations as spaces in which one can try out and learn exemplary modes of anarchist sociability. Mac Low’s poems and texts for performance represented what Nicolas Bourriaud has called a “social interstice,” a special, temporal site in the “arena of representational commerce” and a duration “whose rhythm contrasts with those structuring everyday life, and it encourages an inter-human commerce that differs from the ‘communication zones’ that are imposed upon us” (Bourriaud 2002, 16). Mac Low’s editor, the poet and anthologist Jerome Rothenberg, concludes about this political dimension of Mac Low’s works and performances: The politics . . . move him . . . towards “a society without a coercive force pushing everybody around” – in which the world can be accepted with least interference; in which “the poet does not wish to be a dictator but a loyal co-initiator of action”; & in which performance together establishes a social bond or serves as model for “the free society of equals which it is hoped the work will help to bring about.” Put this way, Mac Low’s art returns to something like the stance of an earlier avant garde (Russian Futurism, Dada, etc.) for which artistic, spiritual & political renewals were all part of a single impulse. In no contemporary does it show through as clearly, movingly, this vision of experimental/ language-centered art as social action. (Rothenberg 1986, 24) As Rothenberg suggests, Mac Low’s work is related to the earlier avantgarde through his desire to link art situations/events to utopian social or political ends. However, it also differs from this earlier avant-garde. Mac Low rejects any doctrinaire ideological stance in favor of an open-ended set of exemplary actualizations of situations in which social experience and learning can take place. In fact, I want to suggest it is also a misnomer to describe what happens in the exemplary actualization of such procedurally scripted work as “social
Situation and event 89 actions.” Rather, what we have is quite akin to Deleuze’s double articulation of events and situations, on the surface plane of sense and in the depth plane of bodies and their affects. The bodies of the dancers are not so much acting as being affected, by a set of events and a situation that have, in a sense, already virtually taken place in the neutral, infinitivized forms of the verb-actions of the instruction poems. It is in submitting themselves to the hypothetical experience implicit in the language-events, incorporeal events of sense, that they come to occupy and facilitate the exemplary actualization of “something happening” in a singular, embodied performance. While the dancers are the vehicles of events and actions, as bodies, they themselves take on an analogous “infinitive” status as the verb forms of the poems. We could thus better speak of passion, of a paradoxically affective “action,” an exemplary activity of actualizing passions, of being affected, than of acting and action.
Notes 1 Heidegger’s most sustained meditation on the “event” was his unpublished work, written 1936–38, entitled Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis). This was posthumously published in 1989: Martin Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (Frankfurt Am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1989); in English: Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). 2 “The Verb is the univocity of language in the form of an undetermined infinitive, without person, without present, without any diversity of voice. . . As it expresses in language all events in one, the infinitive verb expresses the event of language – language being a unique event which merges now with that which renders it possible” (Deleuze 1990: 185). 3 These procedural texts derived from the “event” works that George Brecht and LaMonte Young introduced in the early 1960s and that Mac Low and Young had collaborated in collecting in their “exemplary” anthology, An Anthology, first published in 1963 and in a second edition in 1970. As Mac Low explains, these works of the late 1950s and very early 1960s were later to become associated with Fluxus as one of its characteristic “generic” forms: “What later became known as ‘Fluxus pieces’ had two main models: La Monte’s Compositions 1960: musical and performance works whose scores – many of which were written in California before he came to New York – were short descriptive paragraphs . . . and George Brecht’s card pieces, composed from 1959 to ’62 and – beginning sometime in ’61 – mailed to friends. . . . Brecht’s most characteristic card pieces are extremely laconic, and ‘demonstrative’ rather than descriptive.” (Mac Low and Zurbrugg 1997, 277–8). The common matrix for all these works was, most likely, John Cage’s 1957–59 seminar in experimental music at the New School for Social Research, which Brecht, Mac Low, and Young, among many other artists, attended for a greater or lesser period of time.
Bibliography Bourriaud, Nicolas (2002) Relational Aesthetics. Translated by Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods. Dijon: Les presses du réel. Deleuze, Gilles (1990) The Logic of Sense. Translated by Mark Lester, Constantin V. Boundas (ed.). New York: Columbia University Press.
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Eliot, T.S. (1950 [1919]) “Tradition and the individual talent,” in Selected Essays. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company: 3–11. Foster, Stephen C. (ed.) (1988) “Event” Arts and Art Events. Michigan: University of Michigan Research Press. Foucault, Michel (1972) The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books. –––– (1977) “Theatrum philosophicum,” in Donald F. Bouchard (ed.) Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Translated by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. Fried, Michael (1998) “Art and objecthood” (1967), in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Heidegger, Martin (1989) Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis). Frankfurt Am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. Higgins, Hannah (2002) Fluxus Experience. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Kotz, Liz (2001) “Post-Cagean aesthetics and the ‘Event Score,’ ” October 95: 55–89. Mac Low, Jackson (1979) The Pronouns. Barrytown, New York: Station Hill Press. –––– (1986) “A Word Event for George Brecht.” Representative Works: 1938–1985. New York: Roof Books. –––– (1997) “Jackson Mac Low, Interviewed by Nicolas Zurbrugg,” in Andrew Levy and Bob Harrison (eds) Crayon: Festschrift for Jackson Mac Low’s 75th Birthday. Brooklyn, New York: Crayon. Reiss, Julie H. (1999) From Margin to Center: The Spaces of Installation Art. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. Rosenberg, Harold (1959) The Tradition of the New. New York: Horizon Press. Rothenberg, Jerome (1986) “Preface,” in Jackson Mac Low Representative World: 1938–1985. New York, Roof Books, pp. v–x. Sartre, Jean-Paul (1976 [1947]) “For a theater of situations,” in Sartre on Theater. Translated by Frank Jellinek. New York: Pantheon Books: 3–5.
Part II
Case studies from the performative and visual archives
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The terrorist event Bill Nichols
White House officials see a pattern of terrorism which they believe may be an attempt to test the will of . . . the American people. (Leslie Stahl, CBS News, regarding hostages on TWA Flight 847 held in Beirut, June 1985) More and more American servicemen are going peacefully about their peaceful rounds and being murdered for it. (Bruce Morton, CBS News, regarding six Americans killed in El Salvador, June 20, 1985)1 Brutus: Let’s to the Capitol, And carry with us ears and eyes for th’ time, But hearts for the event Coriolanus, II, i
Viewing disaster The eleventh of September, 2001 introduced the United States to the experience of domestic terrorism as no other event has ever done. For most people, word of this event first arrived as live television news. We are at home, or work. We see images of disaster of an extraordinary magnitude. As the morning of September 11, 2001 unfolds, television news anchors interrupt regular programming to speak to us from their studio chambers as they report what eludes their comprehension. Their reports and images offer evidence of a catastrophic event but provide no context or perspective. It is as if live television coverage rips the flesh from the face of the world and hurls it into our living rooms. Shocking, grotesque, obscene – this should not be conceivable. And yet it occurs – as rippled relays of incomprehensible destruction, catastrophic ruin. Live television coverage tumbles forward as interminable flow. The usual interruptions for advertisements and changes of program disappear. “Breaking news” gives an irregular rhythm to the syncopated, postmodern mix of images and comments, conjecture, summaries, descriptions, repetitions, and interviews that tumble forward. News anchors in the studio, reporters in the
94 Bill Nichols field, witnesses and survivors, news footage taken and transmitted, amateur footage found and recycled, still images and maps – this work of our media bricoleurs confounds, compels and terrifies. In this case “news” occurs outside any context. Background information does not exist. No one can narrate the unfolding of a plot when the sheer existence of a story remains uncertain. Mayhem refutes narrative. Chronology is all we have. What is happening? What does it mean? In what sense is it an event? When did it begin and when will it end? Can we stop watching before we know? What happened on September 11 began unburdened by such considerations. They began, retrospectively, in medias res. A plane crashes into the World Trade Center. The crash and our remote viewing of it are terrible examples of the new order of magnitude that modern technology provides to the accident. How many are injured and what can be done? Such questions abruptly shift with the sight of a second plane slicing through the other World Trade Center Tower; news of a third plane crashing into the Pentagon; bulletins of a fourth plane crashing in western Pennsylvania, and reports that the President of the United States is aloft, aboard Air Force One, his response and location, unknown. What is known is that no accident could present so vivid but unfathomable a pattern.2 Hours after the first occurrence, the near certainty of attack looms large. But by whom? For what purpose? As part of what plan? No one knows. Telecasts paper over this fundamental ignorance with hypotheses and speculation. Viewers – as well as survivors, witnesses, political leaders, and military commanders – grope for a frame within which to place this affront. Comprehension lacks a foothold. Understanding falters. News of this event catapults the nation into the grips of a trauma, a shock without meaning.
Making meaning “Since the disaster always takes place after having taken place, there cannot possibly be any experience of it” (Blanchot 1986, 28). This remark by Maurice Blanchot pinpoints a paradox: occurrences coalesce into an event after the fact. Henceforth what seemed utterly confounding will bear a name and at least partial meaning. This phenomenon bears kinship to what Derrida discusses in terms of signs that lack meaning, that exemplify sinnlosigkeit, or meaninglessness (Derrida 1977, 184).3 The paradox is that such signs still bear meaning – as examples of the meaningless. This creates a radical dilemma; how to understand that which cannot be understood within the usual rules of discourse or action but which serves the key role of exemplifying where the borders of the illogical, irrational and inhuman begin. Our initial encounter with disaster cannot, therefore, stand as an experience of what has yet to be named. Experience is retroactive; encounter is traumatic.
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But once a disastrous occurrence is identified as an event, as 9/11 was to be, it becomes a candidate for topical address and historical placement. “Is it an event?” yields to a yet more politically fraught question, “What kind of event is it?” Every answer carries moral, political and ideological implications. Agreement about the fact of the event converts a series of incidents into a conceptual whole. This whole identifies and frames. Debate about the kind of event recruits this episode to a larger discursive chain. This is narrative. The “event unit” enters into discourse that embeds the event within an unfolding process of interpretation and response. Time, arrested by trauma, unwinds toward interpretation. As a tele-mediated crisis, September 11 was exceptional. The instantaneous transmission of its stupendous monumentality, its horrific trauma, coupled to profound initial uncertainty about its nature, extent or purpose collapsed a process that took infinitely longer for those who bore the brunt of the events that took place at Hiroshima or Nagasaki in 1945. It immediately put the process of making sense of what first appeared as senseless annihilation to the test for all who saw and heard, regardless of geographic proximity. Passing this test meant finding an identifiable shape in something looming at the boundary of all those events that constitute a culture, a civilization, and a history. Both these operations – identification of a shape and narration of a sense – serve vital functions, but at what price do our media, commentators and politicians deploy them when the occurrence exposes the phantasmagoric underbelly of any response that must incorporate barbarism into the discourse of the body politic?
In search of a pattern Identification with and narratives about the attack of September 11 invite consideration of “the modernist event.” The modernist event involves those technologically assisted events of such scale and horror – genocide, nuclear warfare, mass starvation, “ethnic cleansing,” and so forth – that the very notion of an adequate historical narrative fall into question.4 Since the term “modernist event” is Hayden White’s, further discussion of it might as well also be his: [modernist events] function in the consciousness of certain social groups exactly as infantile traumas are conceived to function in the psyche of neurotic individuals. This means that they cannot be simply forgotten and put out of mind, but neither can they be adequately remembered; which is to say, clearly and unambiguously identified as to their meaning and contextualized in the group memory in such a way as to reduce the shadow they cast over the group’s capacity to go into its present and envision a future free of their debilitating effects. . . . It is the anomalous nature of modernist events – their resistance to inherited categories and conventions for assigning them meanings – that
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Bill Nichols undermines not only the status of facts in relation to events but also the status of “the event” in general. . . . [One result is the difficulty] felt by present generations of arriving at some agreement as to their meaning – by which I mean, what the facts established about such events could possibly tell us about the nature of our own current social and cultural endowment and what attitude we ought to take with respect to them as we make plans for our own future. In other words, what is at issue here is not the facts of the matter regarding such events but the different possible meanings that such facts can be construed as bearing. (White 1996, 20–1)5
Unlike coronations and military campaigns, legislation and uprisings, the modernist event resists the traditional forms of realist narrative. Our customary ritual for making meaning – tell a psychologically plausible, psychologically coherent story – proves inadequate. Causation, plot, subjects, heroes or narrative agents – all these seem insufficient to the task of addressing events of modernist magnitude. Nonetheless, the media and American government have concurred, for the most part, on what the events of September 11 mean but they have done so, I would argue, by treating the event as a traditional rather than a modernist one. They have, that is, attempted to impose plausibility and coherence on the event, and in doing so have exposed something of the phantasmagoric underbelly to our traditional rituals for making meaning. The difficulty leaders have experienced in acknowledging the traumatic nature of the event and the work of mourning relative to the prosecution of a “war on terrorism” against an ill-defined, extra-territorial and extragovernmental enemy is one indication of the failure of this imposition. The doubtful application of categories of agency, responsibility, policy or purpose to an enemy whose location and even existence remain uncertain, coupled with the vigorous desire to apply such categories to an enemy of known location and conduct, such as Saddam Hussein, is another. In the case of 9/11 tele-mediated sensory impressions arrived as an ebb and flow of shock and sensation, spectacle and information, without division into clear and distinct signifying units. Narrative structure proves elusive. We respond to this initial disturbance with a violent launching of narrative energy, but with what heroes and villains, with what sense of agency and responsibility, suspense and resolution shall we populate this narrative? The desire to answer such questions is intense but the modernist event thwarts them at every turn.
What’s the story? As a word, “event” harbors the difficulty of assigning meaning in its very definition. Dictionary definitions such as “occurrences of some importance,” “something that happens,” or “that which follows from a course of proceed-
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ings,” make it clear that events lack a consistent, internal structure; their identification follows from the retrospective impression that an “occurrence of some importance” has taken place. The etymology – from L. eventus, fr. past part. of evenire, fr_ ⫹ ven_re [out ⫹ to come, hence, to come out] – also suggests an origin that serves to define the event. And yet this origin in a prior moment proves elusive since it is only after its occurrence that the event proves identifiable. The sense of an origin is, perhaps, the fiction necessary to disavow the impression that events occur sui generis even if this is how they may be initially experienced, especially traumatic ones. Ritual or predictable events such as a parade or birth might appear to have specific causes or origins, but even these points of origin dissolve into larger and longer chains of preconditions that do more to establish the possibility of the event than to guarantee its occurrence.
Framing things There is no satisfactory meaning to a traumatic event; this is what makes it traumatic. Bestowing form enacts a misrecognition of the fundamental nature of the experience itself, what Blanchot termed our inability to experience a disaster that is always defined as a disaster after the fact. The emergence of a gestalt – a sudden “aha experience” that assembles parts into a conceptual whole – betrays the very thing to which it retroactively refers. This infidelity to staggeringly hurtful experience is what, I take it, those who stress the unrepresentability of catastrophes and traumas such as the Holocaust wish to emphasize above all.6 A preliminary type of differentiation – the identification of a figure/ ground relationship, a covering gestalt image (“accident,” or “terrorism,” for example) – generates the discrete units necessary for discourse. Once accomplished, identifying the event by kind requires a narrative that will make sense of it, that will explain its importance and locate it in relation to that from which it comes out. “This is an act of God,” “This is an accident,” This is social trauma,” or “This is terrorism,” propose different stories of origin and meaning. One telling example of gestalt recognition comes from William Langewiesche’s chronicle of the event in The Atlantic Monthly. Sam Melisi, an assistant in the engine room of a New York City fireboat, was reading when the first plane struck. He stopped reading. He prepared the boat to get underway. Then, Langewiesche writes, “When the second airplane hit, he understood it meant war, and he had a strange impression of feeling every possible emotion all at once” (Langewiesche 2002, 58). Such frames or proto-narratives build upon the recognition and misrecognition involved in the identification of the event itself. In the case of 9/11, the dominant story told by the media and U.S. government tends to reassert the primacy of individual subjects as victims, survivors, and perpetrators, the centrality of terrorist activity, the need to intensify homeland security, the
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combination of innocence and righteousness that characterizes the American ethos, and the necessity of retaliation against an anti-American, anticapitalist, anti-democratic enemy. Once named, the mourning of a traumatic event can commence. But once named in this particular way, within this particular narrative frame, the work of mourning may find itself minimized or subordinated to goals other than the actual acknowledgment and working through of loss. Such subordination of emotional reflection may very well spill over into a prolonged disavowal of suffering or the infliction of suffering, loss or the imposition of loss, turmoil or the creation of turmoil. The “terrorist event” takes its place within a larger narrative chain that classifies it and gives it meaning. This amounts to labeling or framing – a metacommunication that has great operational significance since it is what allows the launching of a narrative. As Gregory Bateson remarks: In many instances, the frame is consciously recognized, and even represented in vocabulary (“play,” “movie,” “interview,” “job,” “language,” [conference presentation, terrorism], etc.). In other cases, there may be no explicit verbal reference to the frame, and the subject may have no consciousness of it. The analyst . . . infers its existence in the subject’s unconscious. (Bateson 2000, 186–7) Framing establishes the rules of the game; it identifies the most plausible narrative genre. Whether implicitly or explicitly recognized by the framer, the frame possesses psychical reality. Psychical reality is the zone occupied by fantasy.
Frames and fetishes When Lacan discusses the gestalt image of a coherent, powerful Other that characterizes the mirror-stage, he makes clear that the Other does not, in fact, possess such qualities.7 The search for those gestalts that yield coherence and wholeness signifies the work of desire. And in constructing the “mise-en-scène of desire,” the definition of fantasy proposed by Laplanche and Pontalis (1973, 318), we produce the frames and categories that grant our collective dramas powerful but imaginary coherence. The impression of coherence amounts to an over-valuation or misrecognition. A “click of recognition” or “Aha Erlebnis” snaps a sense of meaning or identity into place, such as occurred for Sam Melisi and many others like him in the moment when a second plane struck The World Trade Center. A frame suddenly coheres. The over-valuation of wholeness and coherence goes hand-in-hand with a disavowal of partiality and fragmentation. When we over-value, we fetishize. To look more closely at the framing of trauma, a slight excursion in the debates occasioned by efforts to represent or historically account for the
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Holocaust will prove helpful. One invaluable reference point is the volume of essays edited by Saul Friedlander, Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution.” One essay in particular offers a critique of a certain mode of German historiography that has sought to minimize the trauma, downplay the question of responsibility, and, hence, displace the whole question of responsibility to an “elsewhere,” that is somewhat peripheral to the overall story of German national history. Eric Santner analyzes Andrea Hillgruber’s Zweierlei Untergang: Die Zerschlagung des Deutschen Reiches und das Ende des Europaischen Judentums (Two Kinds of Ruin: the Shattering of the German Reich and the end of the European Jews) as an example of these tendencies. The book attempts to commemorate the devastation of the Nazi army under the advance of the Soviets while paying scant attention to either the huge number of Russian fatalities sustained during the war or to the extermination of six million Jews. For this and other works, Santner proposes a distinction. Recounting traumatic historical events must either engage in the work of mourning or resort to what he calls narrative fetishism (Santner 1992, 318). Mourning begins with the acknowledgment of trauma and its destabilizing effect on the psyche; narrative fetishism begins with the disavowal of trauma. Narrative fetishism is Santner’s attempt to give name to an unnamed, unconscious framing device used by some historians like Hillgruber in relation to the Holocaust. For Santner, “[narrative festishism] . . . is the way an inability or refusal to mourn emplots traumatic events; it is a strategy of undoing, in fantasy, the need for mourning by simulating a condition of intactness, typically by situating the site and origin of loss elsewhere.”8 This is a special type of origin story. It is an account of loss that proposes traumatic events come from outside the field of social relations in which we constitute our own identity. They come from elsewhere. Narrative fetishism cannot be recognized for what it is, a fantastic story of disavowed trauma, and still achieve its desired effect. The unconscious, however, affords it a psychical reality so that its benefits can be enjoyed while its actual existence as a framework can be denied. This is a case where, as Bateson noted, the analyst infers its existence in the unconscious. Narrative fetishism is a political, moralizing strategy of framing, one that exonerates the narrator, and reader, from complicity or devastating trauma. As a strategy it transforms the modernist event into a traditional one, available to representation in conventional terms. This strategy has played itself out both in domestic news coverage and commentary and in the Bush administration’s post 9/11 foreign policy of pre-emptive strikes against those who may intend to strike us and of a declared war on terrorism. A mass-mediated government framing of the event that has minimized mourning and forestalled melancholia by its insistence on a righteous, crusading triumphalism against a barbarous axis of evil. Mourning has certainly occurred for the trauma of September 11, but the bulk of the subsequent political response and media coverage displays more
100 Bill Nichols of the characteristics of narrative fetishism than of mourning, especially through its focus on the President, and his fantasy of an invincible, implacable America that will remain intact to the extent that the villainous enemies (the site and origin of loss) are located in the radical “elsewhere” of an alien religious fanaticism and nihilistic political philosophy completely at odds with American principles and conduct. Naming this event a terrorist act by Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, his stateless network, and at least rhetorically linking this network to a trio of states constituting the axis of evil (North Korea, Iran, Iraq – none known to be primary havens for Al Qaeda), clearly affirms the intactness of a sovereign, national identity for the United States. It locates the origin of terror decisively elsewhere, in a realm of anti-democratic, anti-capitalist, fundamentalist fanaticism. It simultaneously disavows alternative frames and places from which events such as 9/11 come, such as “the injurious effects of oppression,” “colonialism, globalism, and the subaltern response,” “national liberation struggles,” “resentment,” or the “paranoid style” of some form of national politics. Richard Hofstadter’s comments in “The paranoid style in American politics” on the thought processes of the political paranoid, written over 30 years ago, appears to have the Bush administration (and certainly Bin Laden) in mind: He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, the quality needed is not a willingness to compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Nothing but complete victory will do. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated – if not from the world, at least from the theater of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for unqualified victories [for which the administration continues to struggle mightily to find a functional objective correlative – bn] leads to the formulation of hopelessly demanding and unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s frustration. (Hofstadter 1966, 33) Narrative fetishism rules out-of-bounds the complicity that might be understood to follow from the history of U.S. foreign intervention, often by means of military or paramilitary assistance in Latin America, Africa and Asia; support of the Saudi Arabian royal family and the perceived corruption of Saudi national culture by both fundamentalist and democratic segments of the Saudi population, and U.S. support for Afghanistan’s war of resistance against the Soviet Union, waged primarily by forces that gave rise to the Taliban government that would give terrorists a base and hence require ouster. The Bush administration’s identification of the attacks of 9/11 as a “terrorist event” from elsewhere has centered public response on the eradica-
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tion of an evil that lurks beyond the pale of diplomacy, international relations, or the rule of law. Through the disavowal achieved by narrative fetishism, terrorism takes on a phantasmagoric and absolutist existence entirely distinct from its quasilegitimate counter-part, state terrorism. State terrorism outside the Arab world remains unidentified and unnarrativized, certainly in relation to 9/11. It takes on a phantasmagoric appearance of the purely fictional rather than asserting itself as the mise-en-scène of a desire for control that rejects hegemonic dominance in favor of amorphous but pervasive violence. State terrorism deploys a distinct technology in the Foucauldian sense. The State deploys a technology of semiotic diffusion: anonymous technocrats of violence produce signifiers of threat and violence. Fragmentary occurrences – a disappearance, a torture that leaves no signs, a decayed corpse – serve as ellipses for an event that cannot be identified and a narrative that cannot be told. Such occurrences border on the meaningless but contain hints of pattern and meaning. The perpetrators allow the modern media to discover these signs and disperse them, intensifying a reign of suspicion and fear. The terrorist event, on the other hand, deploys a technology of destructive concentration: Promethean martyrs to a belief beg, borrow or steal the power of modern technology from its creators to maximize the catastrophic event. Shards and fragments of what once was become metaphors of disaster. To summarize the difference, state terrorism as a covert implementation of the power of the nation-state favors: 1) invisibility (as embodied in the Nazi policy of “nacht und nebel” or the Argentine government’s policy of “disappearing” suspected dissidents); 2) camouflaging or suppressing overt signs of its own violence; 3) denying governmental involvement with or knowledge of any identifiable subject to whom accountability can be assigned and, often, of any victim to be identified, arrested or tried (the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib remains, in these terms, an exceptional event caused by low-ranking, sadistic personnel); 4) cultivating a state of diffuse anxiety by minimizing the identification of specific actions as events; 5) stressing a general condition of extraordinary threat that legitimates counter-measures, which, to be efficacious, must remain clandestine; and 6) utilizing the media to report fragmentary accounts of unidentifiable and unexplainable occurrences that serve to reinforce a diffuse sense of continuous anxiety. This is terrorism as non-event, as that which does not happen, that comes out of nothing, and cannot, therefore, be confronted or altered. It is the terror of Kafka’s universe rather than that of Bin Laden’s. Terrorism against the state, such as the attack of 9/11, sets out to induce a sense of powerlessness. What characterizes non-state or anti-state terrorism are: 1) instead of invisibility, visibility. Violence is less strategic, as it would be in a revolutionary movement, than dramaturgical. Such violence calls less for a military strategist than an impresario; 2) instead of covert violence,
102 Bill Nichols overt violence staged as spectacle; 3) instead of denying responsibility, nominating perpetrators (this ranges from groups who “claim responsibility” to suicide bombers or the 9/11 hijackers who become indissolvable from the event itself) and, often, expressing indifference to the identity or guilt of actual victims; 4) instead of minimizing the identification and narrativization of discreet events, cultivating a wide-spread state of immediate shock by maximizing the traumatic event as mass catastrophe; 5) instead of stress on a threat that requires extralegal response, stressing the full legitimacy if not sacred quality of a law beyond the law since the Law is understood to have already denied the terrorist any hope of success; and 6) instead of utilizing the media to diffuse anxiety, using the media as a means to intensify immediate trauma across vast geographic spaces and populations. In The Believer, a film by Henry Bean (2001), the anti-Semitic Jew, Daniel, confides in his friend, Curtis that he wants to kill a Jew. Curtis asks how and Daniel answers: In broad daylight, in the street, with a small caliber hand-gun, without a silencer. Why without a silencer? Because I want it to be an event. And in Kevin Macdonald’s documentary film, One Day in September, one of the surviving terrorists from the capture of the Israeli Olympic team as hostages at the 1972 Munich Olympics, Jamal Al Gashey, proclaims, at a news conference, “I’m proud of what I did at Munich because it helped the Palestinian cause enormously. Before Munich the world had no idea about our struggle, but on that day the name ‘Palestine’ was repeated all over the world.” Al Gashey fantasizes that this strange, incomprehensible distortion of the usual process of identification achieves terrorist goals in a way that no state-sponsored act of terror would ever dream of doing.
Fetishism and fantasy The story of terrorism is not fantastic in the sense of unbelievable – in the case of September 11 it is all too believable – but in the sense that as an event it, like other fantasies, represents the fulfillment of a wish: the wish, in this case, for a category or story to encapsulate and thereby give coherence to modernist trauma. This fulfillment is, on the level of the unconscious mechanism of fantasy propelling it, real, regardless of whether the occurrences narrativized belong to the imagination or history.9 As a framing device, the prevailing story of the “terrorist event” has served to assert mastery over trauma by situating the origin, if not the site, of loss elsewhere. The story of terrorism has been used to focus attention beyond the traumatic event and the work of mourning, and still carry out the resolution of trauma described by Freud:
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[Following a trauma] there is no longer any possibility of preventing the mental apparatus from being flooded with large amounts of stimulus, and another problem [rather than self-defense] arises instead – the problem of mastering the amounts of stimulus which have broken in and of binding them, in a psychical sense, so that they can then be disposed of. (Freud 1955, 30) Disposition, for Freud, meant mourning, in a successful case, and melancholic neuroses in unsuccessful ones. Narrative fetishism proposes yet another route. In their discussion of fantasy, Laplanche and Pontalis note that Freud regards fantasies as answers to an unconscious wish that is incapable of attaining consciousness but which nonetheless betrays itself. Laplanche and Pontalis cite a quite shocking analogy used by Freud himself. It is, though, one that may itself “betray” the unconscious work of narrative fetishism. Fantasy, Freud asserts, shares a common property with a person of mixed race! Such a person may seem like us, but they inevitably betray a difference: We may compare [fantasies] with individuals of mixed race who, taken all round, resemble white men, but who betray their coloured descent by some striking feature or other, and on that account are excluded from society and enjoy none of the privileges of white people. (Laplanche and Pontalis 1973, 317) Certainly fantasies can quite often be identified and differentiated, but the implication that they can or should be segregated from an uncontaminated field of social reality is, at best, an extremely unfortunate by-product of Freud’s choice of a racial analogy. For Freud, fantasy is different from social reality, or its stand in, “white men,” as women are different by dint of “castration” or a person of mixed race different by dint of “some striking feature or other.” What seems more plausible is that fantasy as psychical reality is not so fully separable from social reality and that the attempt to effect such a separation betrays its own fantastic premises, rather starkly in the case of this quote. Freud wanted to stress the process by which we exclude fantasy from considerations of reality. What betrays the phantasmagoric dimension to the Bush administration’s story of the “terrorist event” is the effort to make its origin wholly foreign. The “striking features,” whose presence Freud assures us will betray the fantasy, appear here in an Orientalist rather than racist guise. The crime, however, continues to bear resemblance to the miscegenation at the root of Freud’s analogy; the penetration of an alien fanaticism into our midst has betrayed itself by the disaster it has wrecked. Evil has undone the work of good.
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Fantasy, continued: the doer of the deed The authors of a collection of essays, Formations of Fantasy (1986), try to make the political importance of fantasy clear in their introduction by reminding us of the separation so vigorously upheld under the law between thought and deed. This protection accorded to thought, and to most forms of speech, they argue allows the political left to dismiss the realm of thought, and fantasy, as irrelevant to political struggle. They argue: The imperative to maintain this particular limit to the jurisdiction of the state (to protect thought from the law until manifest in concrete deeds) has no doubt contributed to that climate of hostility which today prevails, on the democratic left, against any consideration of psychology in connection with the political. One consequence (perhaps most conspicuously displayed in the consistent failure of the left to understand nationalism) has been that the mobilizing force of fantasy has been effectively ceded to the right. (Burgin et al. 1986, 1) The surveillance nature of homeland security and a military policy of preemptive strikes rather than deterrence, and war on terrorism reject the protection of thought that the left wished to rule out of bounds politically. The aggrieved becomes the aggressor, acting out what he fantasizes someone else has in store for him before that someone can convert thought to deed. Our government vows to destroy the cause of this grievous attack and to seek out those “striking features” (fanaticism, secretiveness, isolation, mysterious sources of funds, and so on, even, for some “Arabness” of any kind and Islam of any stripe) that “betray” an alien presence wherever it might be found. The mainstream media and the Bush administration have created an unfinished story of terrorism, offering a vantage point from which the event’s origin can be traced, and a vanishing point toward which the event recedes (“elsewhere”). The event, indeed, proceeds from something, and what, in this scenario, it is made to “come out” of is a fantasy of terror – a vast, annihilating, alien force. Recognizing the identifiable figure of the terrorist, and naming him, provides a doer for the deed. “A being is hurt, and the vocabulary that emerges to moralize that pain is one which isolates a subject as the intentional originator of an injurious deed. . . . [T]he subject is not only fabricated as the prior and causal origin of a painful effect that is recast as an injury, but the action whose effects are injurious is no longer an action, the continuous present of ‘a doing,’ but is reduced to a ‘singular act’ ” (Butler 1997, 45). Furthermore, “the subject appears only as a consequence of a demand for accountability; a set of painful effects is taken up by a moral framework that seeks to isolate the ‘cause’ of those effects in a singular and intentional agent, a moral framework that operates through a certain economy of paranoid fab-
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rication and efficiency” (Butler 1997, 46). These comments by Judith Butler, regarding legal debates about injurious speech, describe a mechanism that comes into play to identify a concrete perpetrator so that a story of justice can unfold. A similar story has evolved since September 11. Trauma converts to injury, injury requires redress; redress demands finding the subject responsible. The name “terrorism” gives a face and a figure to an excess that typically escapes the categories of history, narrative and meaning. It disavows the complicities involved in such a framing device (the continuous present of a global, capitalist “doing”) and postpones indefinitely the work of mourning trauma demands. The Bush administration can address its future intentions toward that figure to which they assign responsibility for the unconscionable in the very moment when they misplace this figure – “elsewhere.” We are asked to accept undemocratic, unconstitutional forms of recourse (i.e., state terrorism and the suspension of civil liberties) since that which we oppose occupies a liminal space between the human and inhuman. In other words, the official American response requires a mise-en-scène of desire populated by inhuman subjects against whom the normal democratic rituals and hegemonic processes need no longer apply.11 What is at stake is whether the form of narrative given to the event by the Bush administration disavows the striking features of the fantasy involved in individuating the doer and singularizing the act, in segregating the doer and the deed out from a continuous stream of historical consequences, and of constructing a special category of agent out of whom comes the rejection of law, the nullification of being, the rule of terror. Narrative fetishism freezes a traumatic moment into a mythic binary of Manichean struggle: them/us, love/hate, good/evil, civilization/barbarism. (“You are either with us or against us,” as President Bush has put it.) These binaries mask a hierarchy. “Us, love, good, civilization” define the limits of the human. What lies beyond (“them/evil/hate/barbarism”) lies beyond the bounds of human conduct. Historical narratives require human agents – be they individual or collective. Human agents are those who possess a conscience and stand morally responsible for their actions. And yet the story of the terrorist event frames as non-human these emanations of hate and violence beyond the pale of law or reason. How can the terrorist be assigned responsibility when, by definition, he exemplifies the one who acts unconscionably? How can we think we can identify a traditional historical agent of any kind in the terrorist? Modernist events in all their guises, including terrorism, continue to invite narratives of cause/effect, agent/action, and yet their technologically amplified magnitude forces such stories to betray their own “special features” as alien impositions on that apparent sinnlosigkeit that defies the categories and representations of traditional narratives or a moral human order. Evil terrorists and good Americans confront each other across the chasm between historical progress, on the one hand, and eternal evil, on the other.
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Attention turns to the crusade ahead and away from the iterative pattern of occurrences in which a recognition of the complicity of state power replaces a fantasy of the innocence of human goodness (here, not necessarily “elsewhere”). Civilization disavows association with the ground of barbarism from which it must consistently distinguish itself, not come out from. It directs attention to a future time populated by revenge, triumph, and memorialization. “Terrorism” allows “civilization” to assert itself as the crusading force of Good at war with the terrifying face of Evil. Mobilized under the banner of September 11, the terrorist event carries forward the paradoxical logic of a fantasy in which the nation strives to eradicate that which simultaneously belongs to the disavowed ground of its own being.
Notes 1 Cited in Dan Hallin, “Network News: ‘We Keep America on Top of the World,’ ” In Todd Gitlin (ed.) Watching Television (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 12, 10. 2 The difference between accident and attack is akin to the difference between Célinian outbursts (of anti-semitism) and Nazi excesses discussed by Julia Kristeva in her Powers of Horror. As Aaron Kerner notes, there is a significant difference between an outburst and excess, “and the difference is catastrophic.” I am generally indebted to Kerner (2001) for his insightful discussion of trauma, catastrophe and their representation. 3 Derrida here engages with the most common focus for the discussion of events in modern philosophy, the speech-act event. Events of a social or political nature do not seem to have prompted a great deal of philosophical consideration in recent decades. 4 A flexible sense of technology in relation to the modernist event allows for both hi-tech devastation such as the deployment of atomic bombs against the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and low-tech devastation such as the genocide of hundreds of thousands of Hutus in Rwanda by means of little more than machetes, clubs and, sometimes, handguns and rifles. This latter example clearly implicated institutions such as the Catholic Church and technologies such as those of the mass media but it relied for its efficacy on a Malthusian technology of populations: a large segment of the Hutu population itself acted as an instrument of terror. 5 I have rearranged the order of White’s comments the better to fit their adaptation here. 6 The best-known articulation of this infidelity or betrayal of experience by expression is Theodore Adorno’s statement “Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarisch” (“Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”). Adorno, “Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft,” Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 10 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974), 30. Berel Lang (1992, 316–17) also acknowledges the challenge art, and historical narrative, face: “The denial of individuality and personhood in the act of genocide; the abstract bureaucracy that empowered the ‘Final Solution,’ moved by an almost indistinguishable combination of corporate and individual will and blindness to evil, constitute a subject that in its elements seems at odds with the insulation of figurative discourse and the individuation of character and motivation that literary ‘making’ tends to impose on its subjects.” Lang goes on to consider silence as an inevitable limit rather than necessary prohibition. Whether Adorno and Lang remain within the grips of a
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traditional, realist aesthetic or acknowledge the potential for representation of modernist and post-modern strategies may be an important question to pursue. Whether the act of writing poetry must be counterbalanced against the act of forgetting the Holocaust also deserves consideration of the sort Lang’s comments make possible. My own account of September 11, in its focus on the mass media and popular response, also addresses realist strategies and attempts to demonstrate how they are both adequate and inadequate to the experience of the event. Lacan adopts the term “gestalt” as well as that of the “aha experience” in his discussion of the mirror-stage. “The fact is that the total form of the body by which the subject anticipates in a mirage the maturation of his power is given to him only as Gestalt, that is to say, in an exteriority in which this form is certainly more constituent than constituted . . .” (1977, 3). Lacan, as I understand him, is acknowledging the role of misrecognition or fantasy that comes into play when the child imagines its body to have the wholeness and integrity it “sees” in the gestalt that the child assigns to the image reflected back to him. “By narrative fetishism I mean the construction and deployment of a narrative consciously or unconsciously designed to expunge the traces of the trauma or loss that called that narrative into being in the first place . . . [It contrasts with the work of mourning in that] “narrative fetishism, by contrast, is the way an inability or refusal to mourn emplots traumatic events. . . . Narrative fetishism releases one from the burden of having to reconstitute one’s self-identity under ‘posttraumatic’ conditions; in narrative fetishism, the ‘post’ is indefinitely postponed” (144). Fantasy, as the staging of desire, occupies a complex position in relation to reality. The idea that fantasy and imaginary gratification eventually yield to a reality principle and delayed gratification may oversimplify. As Laplanche and Pontalis note in their commentary on fantasy, the psychoanalyst seeks to unearth fantasies on multiple levels. “As the [psychoanalytic] investigation progresses, even aspects of behavior that are far removed from imaginative activity, and which appear at first glance to be governed solely by the demands of reality, emerge as emanations, as ‘derivatives’ of unconscious phantasy. In the light of this evidence, it is the subject’s life as a whole which is seen to be shaped and ordered by what might be called, in order to stress this structuring action, ‘a phantasmatic’ (une fantasmatique)” (1973, 317). Butler is paraphrasing Nietzsche, upon whom she bases much of her argument. Subjects, of course, retain the “fantastic” ability to contest their very status and to institute those forms of transformation that alter the institutional frame that necessitates their interpellation in terms of the need to locate the one accountable. Subversion and resistance turn accountability against those who judge the judged. Such actions are revolutionary rather than terrorist and lie beyond the scope of this chapter except to note that the U.S. response to September 11 has given authority to several nations to name armed opposition and revolutionary movements as ipso facto terrorist.
Bibliography Adorno, Theodore (1974) “Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft,” Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 10. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Bateson, Gregory (2000) “A theory of play and fantasy,” Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Blanchot, Maurice (1986) The Writing of Disaster, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
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Burgin, Victor, Donald, James and Kaplan, Cora (eds) (1986) “Preface” in Formations of Fantasy. London and New York: Methuen. Butler, Judith (1997) Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, New York: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques (1977) “Signature Event Context,” Glyph 1: 172–97. Freud, Sigmund (1955) “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works. Translated and edited by James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, Vol. xviii, pp. 7–64. Friedlander, Saul (ed.) (1992) “The representation of limits,” in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hallin, Dan (1986) “Network News: “We keep America on top of the world,” in Todd Gitlin (ed.) Watching Television. New York: Pantheon. Hofstadter, Richard (1966) “The paranoid style of American politics,” in Paranoid Style in American Politics and other Essays. New York: Alfred Knopf. Kerner, Aaron (2001) “Representing abjection in the catastrophic experience: bearing witness to the past in ourselves,” diss.: Macquarie University. Kristeva, Julia (1982) Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Lacan, Jacques (1977) Ecrits: A Selection. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Lang, Berel (1992) “The Representation of Limits,” in Saul Friedlander (ed.) Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution.” Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Langewiesche, William (2002) “American ground: unbuilding the World Trade Center,” Part II, “The Rush to Recover,” The Atlantic Monthly 290 (2) (September) Laplanche, Jean, and Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand (1973) The Language of Psychoanalysis. New York: W.W. Norton. Santner, Eric (1992) “History beyond the pleasure principle: some thoughts on the representation of trauma,” in Saul Friedlander (ed.) Probing the Limits of Representation Nazism and the Final Solution. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. White, Hayden (1996) “The modernist event,” in Vivian Sobchack (ed.) The Persistence of History. New York: Routledge.
6
Gojira vs Godzilla Catastrophic allegories Aaron Kerner
The most terrifying monster lurking in the darkness of Hiroshima is precisely the possibility that man [sic.] might become no longer human. (Oë 1996, 182) [R]ather than regard every historical narrative as mythic or ideological in nature, we should regard it as allegorical, that is, as saying one thing and meaning another. (White 1990, 45)
Americans tend to assume that Godzilla: King of the Monsters (Terry Morse, 1956) is the original in the longest running film series of cinema history (29 films spanning 50 years). The original Japanese film, Gojira (Ishiro Honda, 1954), was first seen in the United States in 2004. Morse’s Godzilla is actually a re-edited version of Honda’s Gojira. Morse inserts an American journalist (Raymond Burr) who accidentally stumbles on the mysterious disappearance of boats off the coast of Japan, caused by the monster Godzilla. In the 27 Japanese versions since 1954, Gojira frequently stages its appearance by emerging from the sea; the monster is typically seen as an “alien” entity puncturing the borders of Japan, transgressing the boundary between that which is inside (land) and outside (the sea).1 In the original 1954 film American nuclear testing in the Pacific awakens the prehistoric monster. A research team dispatched to discover the source of the disappearing vessels reveals that Gojira is indeed to blame. In a presentation to government officials, the public and the press, Doctor Yamane explains that Gojira has been awakened by hydrogen bomb testing, as evident in the presence of Strontium 90 (one of the isotopes associated with radioactive fallout) in his samples. The monster eventually emerges from the ocean and destroys Tokyo, crushing vehicles under-foot, pushing buildings over, and setting the city ablaze with its radioactive/fire-breathing abilities, and despite human ingenuity and the application of military force nothing seems capable of stopping it.
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Emmerich grafts Burr’s voice-overs onto the original Japanese footage and shoots stand-ins of Japanese actors from behind to create the impression that Burr was part of the original film. The 1956 Godzilla transforms Gojira into a run-of-the-mill Cold War science fiction film.2 I shall argue that Gojira adopts an allegorical approach to Japan’s catastrophic history while American Godzilla films counter that allegory, attempting to neutralize its historical poignancy. Most important, atomic anxieties with a ritual dimension are woven into the visual allegory of Gojira’s body. On August 6 and 9, 1945, the United States detonated atomic weapons over Japan with terrifying results. A survivor described the experience: “Even those . . . [who survived] were nothing but ghostly skeletons with their inner parts blown away by the terrible blast, as if trampled all over by a crowd of gigantic monsters” (Sasaki 1954, 11). Gojira was truly born here from a catastrophic experience that exceeded linguistic capacity. Other events to follow the atomic catastrophe, however, brought the film’s monstrous metaphor to the surface. Kenzaburo Oë uses the metaphor to explain the shocked silence of the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: “The great mysterious monster conquered the city [Hiroshima] in an instant” (Oë 1996, 187). Film critic Donald Richie has characterized the Japanese response to Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a solemn lamentation notable for its apparent absence of resentment or anger (Richie 1996, 22). “During most of the ten-year period from the 1945 atomic bombings to the First World Conference in 1955,” adds Richie, “the Allied Occupation enforced silence on A-bomb matters” (22).3 The occupational government of Japan imposed strict censorship laws that remained in effect from September 19, 1945 until April 28, 1952, the official end of the occupation.4 Oë finds “the silence of the citizens following the bombing” striking, but clarifies that “the 1954 Bikini test sparked new interest that led to the First World Conference in 1955” (1996, 175). Most importantly for us, the Bikini test is closely related to the premiere of Gojira.
Gojira in historical context During the closing years of the occupation the United States began testing a new generation of atomic weaponry, the hydrogen bomb. Testing in Nevada and the Bikini Atoll was fairly routine in the post-war era and went relatively unnoticed. All this would change however when, at approximately 4 a.m., on March 1, 1954, the 23 crewmen of a Japanese fishing vessel, the Daigo Fukuryu-maru, witnessed the detonation of the Bravo Test Blast.5 Bravo, 750 times greater than the detonation over Hiroshima, remains the largest nuclear device ever detonated: the flash of light was seen as far away as Okinawa. The Daigo Fukuryu-maru was 148 kilometers away from the test site. The crew nevertheless witnessed a brilliant flash of light and heard a
Figure 6.1 The Daigo Fukuryu-maru. Photo: Aaron Kerner (reproduced with permission of the Daigo Fukuryu Maru Foundation).
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thunderous rumble seven or eight minutes later (Tanaka 1955, 36). They pulled in their lines and set course for Japan. At 7.30 a.m., still unaware of the grave danger they were in, they were showered with radioactive dust. Upon their arrival at the Yaizu fishing port in Shizuoka Prefecture on March 14, 1954, no one was aware of the events that had unfolded on the open seas. After the news was made public an American medical team offered their services, but the crewmen refused because “the stricken patients themselves were afraid that American doctors might be more interested in their symptoms than their prompt recovery” (Tanaka 1955, 38). The 328 metric tons of tuna on board was highly contaminated, which increased the radioactive effects upon the crew because they had consumed some of the contaminated fish. The catch, in light of the events that transpired, was buried in deep trenches.6 Despite this measure some of the catch had already been shipped to markets in Tokyo and Osaka. News of the contaminated tuna immediately sparked fear about a significant portion of the Japanese diet and environmental concerns. Japanese officials were prompted to take environmental samples, which subsequently revealed detectable traces of radioactivity from Russian nuclear tests. The chief wireless operator of the vessel, Aikichi Kuboyama, died on September 23, 1954 of radiation illness. Shinjiro Tanaka wrote: “the death of Kuboyama-san caused nationwide grief and outbursts of opinion advocating prohibition of atomic weapons” (Tanaka 1955, 41). Although censorship restrictions had been lifted two years previously, only Kuboyama’s death brought atomic matters to the forefront of public discussion. It is no small matter then that the premiere of Gojira on November 3, 1954 took place nine months after the Daigo Fukuryu-maru incident, and a bit more than a month following Kuboyama’s death. Gojira starts with a re-enactment of the Daigo Fukuryu-maru incident. The crew playing folk music on the deck of a ship that is clearly modeled after the Daigo Fukuryu-maru – a life preserver is inscribed with “No. 5” – witnesses an atomic flash, which the Japanese call “pika.” This flash and the thunderous roar following it are all attributed to the unseen monster Gojira. The chief wireless operator frantically sends a distress call, and melodramatically dies. A Japanese audience viewing the film in 1954 would immediately recognize the references to the Daigo Fukuryu-maru incident and to Kuboyama’s subsequent passing. While Japanese films with atomic bomb themes were made prior to 1954 under the close scrutiny of American censors, the quality of public response changed in the wake of the Daigo Fukuryu-maru incident. A palpable resentment typical of this response manifests itself in the Gojira tradition.7 This response dovetails with Japanese militarism, nationalism and antiAmerican sentiments, which had also been suppressed in the immediate postwar era (Tsutsui 2004, 35).8 The 1954 film channeled not just the emotions associated with atomic issues, but also the “spirits of Japan’s war dead” (Tsutsui 2004, 37). Gojira, already in the works at the time of the Daigo
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Fukuryu-maru incident, tapped into this groundswell of emotions. Indeed, we can attribute its popular success to its emotional resonance with the historical context of late 1954. Before Gojira the prevailing Japanese attitude towards the atomic attacks was, “This happened; it is all over and finished, but isn’t it too bad?” (Richie 1996, 22). The atomic attacks were considered not so much an act of war as an act of God. The absolute destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and of many other cities by so-called conventional means) was an unfortunate event that could not be helped, and, although sad, did not warrant any undue attention. Richie suggests that this attitude mirrors in some way Japan’s Buddhist traditions: This awareness of evanescence and the resulting lamentation has a term in Japanese: mono no aware. It indicates a feeling for the transience of all earthly things; it involves a near-Buddhistic insistence upon recognition of the eternal flux of life upon this earth. This is the authentic Japanese attitude toward death and disaster (once an interval has passed), and the earliest films as well as the latest, in part at least, insist upon it. The Hiroshima rallies shown in newsreels, the “peace processions” shown in Hiroshima mon amour, the polemic-filled sequences in films by Fumio Kamei and Hideo Sekigawa are all essentially alien to it. (Richie 1996, 22–3) The newsreel footage in Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959) documents the events following the Daigo Fukuryu-maru incident: the burying of the vessel’s catch of contaminated tuna, the fear of radioactive rainfall, and the massive protests. Also in Resnais’s film is the staged “protest procession” which might be emblematic of the annual World Conference in Hiroshima, which only begins in 1955. Richie refers to these cinematic moments as “alien” because they mark a general shift in attitude away from what he deems properly Japanese. Although there certainly are films prior to the Daigo Fukuryu-maru incident that do not conform to this idea of mono no aware – Richie cites Hideo Sekigawa’s documentary-like dramatization Hiroshima (1953), parts of which are also seen in Hiroshima mon amour – the incident marks the advent of forceful and even openly angry popular sentiment. Despite Richie’s characterization of this response as “alien,” the emotional charge associated with these events seems to fuel the Gojira allegory, and to echo the swelling of Japanese popular sentiment. Richie discounts Gojira too quickly in favor of films such as Akira Kurosawa’s A Record of a Living Being (1955), also known as I Live in Fear. While the latter might ultimately be more nuanced in its approach to the theme of atomic bomb cinema, it cannot match – especially in the historical context of late 1954 – the immediate visceral response Gojira elicited. What retards the development of the atomic bombings as a cinematic subject for Richie is:
114 Aaron Kerner a disinclination on the part of many filmmakers to deal with the theme because to do so involves committing themselves to the political left, at least in the eyes of their audiences. The Party has so frequently used the bomb as a political weapon that any sympathetic rendering of its victims has come to mean in Japan that the director or producer is probably Communist. (Richie 1996, 28) And although this was not an entirely “unpopular” moniker in the public’s eyes per se, what it did mean is that distributors either did not release the films at all, or they were “released in such a manner – in suburban theaters without publicity – that few people” would ever see them (28).9 I would argue that this politically sensitive environment also contributed to the success (or perhaps even the need for) the cinematic allegory. Treating atomic bomb themes through allegory avoids the dubious distinction of being labeled agitprop. Moreover, as a science fiction (or horror) feature, the film easily circumnavigates issues of political commitment, delivering a political or social message in a narrative form that is not commonly associated with any particular political affiliation. Gojira offered, and probably still offers, a site to discharge the emotive energy associated with Japan’s catastrophic history. The popularity of the 1954 film and the subsequent films in the series is arguably rooted in its ritual capacity to work through traumatic history. While historical discourse, in conjunction with censorship, tended to disavow the emotional charge associated with the atomic attacks, Gojira facilitated a discharge of emotions central to the working through of trauma. For Hayden White, the catastrophic events of the last century “function in the consciousness of certain social groups exactly as infantile traumas are conceived to function in the psyche of neurotic individuals”: This means that they cannot be simply forgotten and put out of mind or, conversely, adequately remembered, which is to say, clearly and unambiguously identified as to their meaning and contextualized in the group memory in such a way as to reduce the shadow they cast over the group’s capacities to go into its present and envision a future free of their debilitating effects. (White 1999, 69) Whereas the monster appears at first to embody the destructive force of atomic weapons, it can also be seen to signify the suffering of the atomic bomb survivors. One of the most significant sites of the social anxiety Gojira films work through is the presence of hibakusha, atomic bomb survivors.
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Hibakusha: abject referents One must allow the patient time to get to know this resistance of which he [sic.] is ignorant, to “work through” it, to overcome it, by continuing the work according to the analytic rule in defiance of it. (Freud 1960, 375)10 While the Daigo Fukuryu-maru incident catalyzed public outcry against the atomic attacks, atomic testing, and nuclear proliferation, it also brought public attention to the cultural implications of interaction with atomic bomb survivors. In Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima, Robert Jay Lifton writes: “Early censorship contributed to a ‘delayed explosion’ of atomic bomb emotions” (Lifton 1967, 290). This applies to both hibakusha and to the general population.11 Kuboyama’s death was prominently featured in Japanese news media, capturing the nation’s attention and initiated nationwide protests, which only escalated after the United States accepted responsibility for Kuboyama’s death, and “gave his widow a check for one million yen: about $3,800” (Pringle and Spigelman 1981, 245). Almost instantaneously the Daigo Fukuryu-maru incident “revived a buried interest in their [Japan’s] own nuclear victims. For the first time in nearly a decade, the condition of the survivors of Hiroshima became a national preoccupation” (Pringle and Spigelman 1981, 245). Empathizing with Kuboyama’s suffering, and not unlike the more recent public outpourings of grief at the tragic death of Princess Diana, the Japanese public allowed their repressed anguish to resurface. Oë observes that there is a mutual humiliation figured in our “curious glances” (Oë 1996, 105) at the keloid-scarred hibakusha (keloid scarring is characterized by its grotesque inflammation of the skin). Hibakusha were subjected to the immediate destruction of the initial blast and to a lifetime of suffering as recorded by The Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission. The ABCC “was established by Presidential order, under the direction of the National Academy of Sciences, with general support of the Armed Forces and funds from the Atomic Energy Commission” (Lifton 1967, 344). Its professed mission to serve the medical needs of hibakusha, the ABCC was “bound to be interested in the political and military significance of this [medical] knowledge” (Lifton 1967, 345). ABCC policy was to conduct “research without treatment.”12 Burdened with keloid scars, hibakusha often live as outcasts, ascetics, lepers, and are plagued with a high suicide rate. Hibakusha are routinely cast as outsiders; exemplary of this is a passage found in Toshiyuki Kajiyama’s 1954 novel Jikken Toshi (Experimental City), where a journalist describes the lobby of the ABCC: “Look at the Japanese [hibakusha] who come to be examined, with their confused and timid expressions, holding their babies or exposing their ugly keloids. They seem to be foreigners here. . . . This place might well be a foreign country” (Lifton 1967, 415). Lifton compares the plight of hibakusha to burakumin (the
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Japanese untouchable class), and to “America’s victimization of her own ‘colored race’ ” (353). In Strangers to Ourselves, Julia Kristeva suggests that an encounter with a foreigner can challenge subjective and social structures. “Confronting the foreigner whom I reject and with whom at the same time I identify,” Kristeva writes, “I lose my boundaries, I no longer have a container . . . I lose my composure” (Kristeva 1991, 187). This ambiguous situation of identification and rejection evokes a passage from Kajiyama’s novel where the subject may “feel ‘lost,’ ‘indistinct,’ ‘hazy,’ ”13 as though in a foreign country. Encounters with hibakusha often elicit a simultaneous feeling of fascination and repulsion. The prevailing response, as Lifton notes with Kristevan inflections, is to “view the survivor as a kind of vampire who feeds on death, or even as part of a monstrous force which threatens to destroy all proper relationships between life and death” (Lifton 1967, 520–1). To figure hibakusha as the undead, a monstrous force, or ghostly entities straddling the boundaries of life and death, is to place them in the territory of abjection.14 Hibakusha, unlike foreigners “marked” by their language, dress, skin pigment, are branded. Their strangeness is constituted as evidence of the atomic bomb (e.g., keloid scars, skin scarred by burns, birth deformities). Even more frightening is the possibility of a hibakusha without the telltale markings, and indeed, not all survivors have keloid scars. Hibakusha are conceived as other, strangers, because their keloid scars mark points of entry where their skin was penetrated by radioactivity; their skin, their borders have been compromised – their keloid scars are physical evidence of this breach – and this situates them in a logic of abjection: they are impure. Hibakusha alone have the “knowledge of death,” a forbidden knowledge, but this also makes them completely “ ‘untouchable’ bearers of death taint and ‘carriers of death’ ” (Lifton 1967, 524). Hibakusha is the Japanese word created to name this unspeakable fate. To say, “I am hibakusha,” is to say, “I am a leper,” “I am an outcast,” “I deserve your pity” regardless of whether pity is desired or not. Hibakusha occupy the earth as the living dead. Their children are thought to inherit their parents’ monstrous genetic code just as one inherits racial characteristics. In Japan, hibakusha and their children are treated like mutants, an omnipresent threat to the structure and health of Japan itself.15 Such foreignness is also inscribed on Gojira’s body, and it is the monster’s corporeal form that sets it apart from any other monster, most especially from its American reconfiguration, Godzilla. Although Gojira has had a number of face-lifts, three essential elements have remained relatively consistent: 1) the monster’s ability to breathe fire (or radioactivity depending on who you talk to); 2) its distinctive roar; and 3) its skin. The texture of its skin has remained its most consistent feature: it is curiously rough, and not particularly reptilian as we might expect. Far from being smooth and scaled, Gojira’s skin is leathery and marked by a chaotic web of raised areas and depressions. The monster’s skin is suggestive of keloid scars. Throughout its 50-year history this crucial feature of the
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Figure 6.2 A Keloid victim (by permission of the Atomic Disease Institute, Nagasaki University).
monster is never altered, keeping Gojira true to its original allegorical content and ritual function. Another unchanging feature is the use of a rubber suit – suitmation – worn by the actor playing Gojira. Despite advances in cinematic technology that made it virtually obsolete, suitmation is necessary to Gojira’s allegorical relationship with hibakusha and is used in every Japanese production. A stock Japanese criticism of the American Godzilla (1998) is the absence of a person in the rubber suit, which disrupts the firmly established Gojira allegory. The Toho Company announced in 1995 that it was ending the monster’s half-century reign. But in 1999 Toho released Gojira ni-sen mireniamu (Godzilla 2000: Millennium) “in a direct response to Hollywood’s blockbuster computer-animated version of Godzilla” the year before (Sims 1999, E1). Shogo Tomiyama, producer of many Gojira films, declared he wanted to restore Gojira’s prestige and invincibility following the disappointing 1998 American film. “I want people to leave the theater,” Tomiyama commented, “totally overwhelmed by Godzilla’s [sic.] force” (Sims 1999, E2). In relation to these comments perhaps we should not think exclusively of Gojira’s “force” as that which permits the monster to destroy an urban center, but rather as the emotional charge associated with working through trauma.
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Figure 6.3 The monster. Gojira, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack (© 2001 Toho Pictures, Inc. All rights reserved).
Gojira as allegory Films remain the supreme art of the apocalypse, no matter what the refinements, because the image has such an ability to “have us walk into fear,” as Augustine had already seen. (Kristeva 1989, 224) We can characterize Gojira as an allegory because it represents the suffering of hibakusha through a monstrous narrative. To recognize that an allegory is a parallel text – one narrative superimposed on another – is to recognize that the 1954 Gojira configures many of the characteristics attributed to the atomic blast and to the plight of the hibakusha. Gojira itself is an abject referent, and in this double allegory – of hibakusha and the horrors of atomic warfare – the monster’s skin and the use of suitmation are visual keys to the historical events. Despite Gojira’s abject qualities audiences tend to identify with it because it generates “meaning” where there was only a monstrous void of incomprehensibility; it negotiates the ambivalent sentiments woven into postwar Japanese identity. Gojira’s popular appeal is attributable in part to the allegorical form of the narrative, which as Julia Kristeva notes, has “the ability to transfer meaning to the very place where it was lost in death and/or nonmeaning” (Kristeva 1989, 103).16 For Angus Fletcher the allegorical device shares some common elements with the ritualistic response to ambivalence or the abject. The allegorist, Fletcher notes, “creates a ritual which by virtue of its very repetition and symmetry ‘carries off’ the threat of ambivalent feelings, and shows this same process of displacement occurring in the fiction” (Fletcher 1995, 343–4). Repetition – insofar as the film can be viewed multiple times, and as there are a multitude of films in the series,
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in which we can identify repeated motifs – works through the trauma of Japan’s catastrophic history (Wood 1985, 205). Hibakusha returned from a catastrophic experience, surviving something that no one should have survived. Hibakusha have transgressed the taboo of death, returning from the catastrophic brink, but this has also left them untouchable, abject. Among its abject characteristics, however, we begin to recognize its sublime ones, figured in its awe-inspiring powers and transgression of death, created by, causing, and itself surviving, catastrophic force. As John Whittier Treat notes: “The most creatively ambitious hibakusha writers have insisted that they must fill these unspeakable spaces with new words or even a new language” (Treat 1995, 30, my emphasis). Gojira’s body speaks this new language.
The American appropriation of the Gojira allegory Emmerich, whose other films include Stargate (1994) and Independence Day (1996), dismantles the Gojira allegory, making it virtually meaningless by severing its relationship to the catastrophic history of the Second World War. Although Emmerich is German, he clearly makes films that cater to American sensibilities. His Godzilla is designed to satisfy American audiences and consequently a number of narrative tropes are revised, ultimately undermining the Gojira allegory. First, the monster’s appearance in the 1998 Godzilla is conveniently the result of French atomic testing. Second, Emmerich, apparently concerned with capturing what he takes as the “original concept” of Gojira, focuses on the ecological motif evident in some of the Gojira films. For example, in Gojira tai Hedora (Godzilla vs the Smog Monster, 1971) rampant pollution leads to the genesis of the monster Hedora, an amorphous monster with the appearance of industrial sludge. The destruction of the natural environment also leads to Gojira’s awakening, and in this particular film, it is Gojira who is the hero, defeating Hedora, the product of a human ecological disaster. While the 1954 Gojira does pertain to environmental concerns, every American reconfiguration of the monster neglects to acknowledge that those environmental concerns are inextricably linked to the American Bravo test. The 1998 Godzilla severs these historical allusions to the atomic attacks by attributing the origin of the monster to a French ecological disaster that only the Americans are capable of fixing. The monster makes its first appearance in Emmerich’s Godzilla (1998) by emerging dramatically from New York Harbor, producing a tidal surge as it breaks the water’s surface. Its appearance in New York is explained as a “nesting instinct,” which might be forgivable if there were any historical resonance to the location. Why not Washington, D.C., the seat of American military and political power? Why not the Nevada Test Site, or the Trinity test site? Emmerich’s narrative permits the wanton destruction of a familiar urban center, which prior to 9/11 had never witnessed a catastrophic attack,
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but nothing more. His Godzilla film “hollows out” the monster by placing it in an urban center devoid of historical significance, finding instead in the images of destruction an unencumbered euphoria. As if to “reclaim” the monster for its proper historical context Shusuke Kaneko, in Gojira, Mosura, Kingu Gidora: Daikaiju sokogeki (Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters’ All-Out Attack) (2001), has it emerge at the mouth of Yaizu Harbor, the homeport of the Daigo Fukuryu-maru. In both films fishermen witness the emergence of the monster from the sea, and in both cases fishing boats are tossed about like toys. Immediately following Gojira’s entry into Yaizu Harbor the camera cuts to an interior shot of a harbor-side office. There the camera focuses on the profile of an office-worker and from there to a poster of the Daigo Fukuryu-maru as it is currently exhibited in Yumenoshima Park, Tokyo. The poster reads, “ ” (“memory of fallout, no more hydrogen bombs”). This self-conscious re-appropriation of the monster re-contextualizes it in a particular historical and cultural matrix. Kaneko takes us back, literally, to where the Gojira narrative originates: the Daigo Fukuryu-maru as the metonymic sign of atomic warfare burdening the Japanese collective memory. The transformation from Gojira to Godzilla effaces the Japanese resentment for Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Daigo Fukuryu-maru incident and hibakusha, and transforms the monster into something that promotes the military, political, social, and economic superiority of the United States instead. Gojira is the hibakusha’s allegory that the Americans would prefer to ignore, undermine, usurp, or assassinate as in the anti-climatic conclusion of the 1998 Godzilla, where American fighter planes quickly dispatch the monster with a couple of missiles. Unlike the Japanese Gojira characterized as invincible because virtually impervious to human weaponry, the 1998 Godzilla is slaughtered by the American military with relative ease. It follows, then, that to completely undo the Gojira allegory, beyond the narrative motifs (e.g., ecological motifs, motifs of “foreignness”), the 1998 incarnation of the monster too needs a semiotic face-lift. The monster’s roar and “fire-breathing” capacity are altered significantly. The use of computergenerated images transforms Gojira’s keloid-like skin into smooth and glistening reptilian skin. The computer-generated Godzilla shows no evidence of keloid scars, nor is there a person in a rubber suit. The smooth skin and human absence negates the social anxiety in the presence of hibakusha; it completely undoes the allegorical structure of Gojira by severing it from historical human suffering. Whereas Gojira is a visual allegory of hibakusha’s catastrophic history (as well as American aggression and the horrific violence of atomic warfare), Godzilla is a target to annihilate. Kenzaburo Oë notes that when a survivor from Hiroshima was selected to be the last runner to carry the Olympic flame for the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games the Americans were disappointed by the “choice because it reminded” them “of the atomic bomb” (Oë 1996, 108). Gojira does much the same. Ironically, the atomic attacks on Japan were designed to send the
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same message to the world, specifically to Moscow; atomic diplomacy as it has been called. Given the obvious power of the cinematic medium, it is unfortunate that the Americans could not instead have shown a film on August 6 and 9, 1945. When the original 1954 Gojira film was released in the United States for the first time in 2004, it was fascinating to see that American audiences were truly enthusiastic to see it. At every showing I attended at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco, I was surprised to find a large audience. It was satisfying to know that American audiences finally had the opportunity to discover the ritual power behind the longest running film series in cinematic history.
Notes 1 The word Gojira ( ) is a composite of the words “gorira,” the Japanese phonetic for “gorilla,” and “kujira,” the Japanese word for whale. While the latter connotes sheer size, the former is an appropriation of the “original” big cinematic monster: King Kong. The name thus recalls King Kong (1933), which was successfully re-released in Japan in 1952. 2 I shall expand on how Godzilla transformed the physical form of the monster and its allegorical content into something virtually unrecognizable in Japan. There was also a short-lived American animated cartoon series, The Godzilla Power Hour (1978), in which an American marine research team takes Godzilla’s son, Godzooky, as a pet/crewmember. 3 The World Conference is an annual event held in Hiroshima to campaign for world peace and to advocate for the destruction of nuclear arsenals. 4 It was agreed that the censorship laws would be rescinded following the signing of the September 8, 1951 peace treaty. However, not surprisingly, the same day Japanese and American officials also signed a security treaty, securing the right to establish American military bases in Japan. 5 The English translation of Daigo Fukuryu-maru is the Lucky Dragon No. 5. The Daigo Fukuryu-maru is exhibited in Yumenoshima Park, Tokyo. The large wooden vessel is dry-docked within an A-framed metal building just beside Tokyo Harbor. After the March 1, 1954 incident it was painted over and used as a research vessel, but later discarded in a Tokyo landfill in what is now called the Yumenoshima district of Tokyo. After the vessel was “rediscovered” by a newspaper reporter in the 1970s it was partially restored and placed on exhibition. The engine was only recently discovered and is currently displayed just outside the Daigo Fukuryu-maru Exhibition Hall. 6 A very brief clip of this can be seen in the opening “documentary” sequences of Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959). 7 Some films about the atomic bombings released prior to 1954 include: Nagasaki no kane (The Bell of Nagasaki, Hideo Oba, 1950), Genbaku no ko (Children of Hiroshima, Kaneto Shindo, 1952), Karumen Junjosu (Carmen’s Pure Love, Keisuke Kinoshita, 1952), Hiroshima (Hideo Sekigawa, 1953), and Nagasaki no uta was wasureji (Never Forget the Song of Nagasaki, Tomotaka Tasaka, 1953). For a discussion of the occupational authority’s supervision and censor policies see Kyoko Hirano, Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo: Japanese Cinema Under the American Occupation, 1945–1952 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992). For a discussion of the policies regarding the representations of the atomic bombings and Oda’s The Bell of Nagasaki, see pages 59–66. Also of particular note, Shindo, the director of Children of Hiroshima, goes on to make – among a long list of other
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films – a film about the Daigo Fukuryu-maru, simply entitled Daigo Fukuryumaru. To my knowledge this film has never been subtitled in English, and perhaps never even released in the United States. It is available on DVD in Japan, without English subtitles. (The Daigo Fukuryu-maru Exhibition Hall sells Shindo’s film on DVD, contact the Director of the Daigo Fukuryu-maru Foundation, Kasuya Yasuda,
[email protected].) Japanese ultra-right-wing nationalists, besides announcing their nationalistic agenda over loud-speakers mounted on top of their vehicles, also broadcast musical themes from the Gojira film series, especially the theme commonly associated with the preparation of the Japanese Self-Defense Force when confronting Gojira. It is also interesting to note that in 1953, a year prior to Gojira, the American film The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms was released. This film deals explicitly with the subject of atomic testing, but the treatment of this topic makes it more a fact-of-modern-life than a moral dilemma. Sigmund Freud, “Recollection, repetition and working through.” In Collected Papers Volume II. Translated by Joan Rivière (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1960), 375. Robert Jay Lifton, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (New York: Random House, 1967), 290. Also see Oë, Hiroshima Notes, 42–3. Mick Broderick, “Introduction,” to Hibakusha Cinema, 3 (my emphasis). Shapiro applies the concept of the apocalypse to atomic bomb cinema, including Gojira. “The apocalypse does not bring about the end of the world,” he says, but rather constitutes, “a period of intense suffering that cleanses the world of evil” (1998, 130). If we follow this logic, is then America to be praised for dropping the atomic bombs on Japan, which although causing great suffering brought about a cleansing of Japan’s “evil empire”? I find such a configuration deeply troubling. Gojira in Shapiro’s terms might be conceived as a monster of the apocalypse; I however prefer to read it as an abject referent. I believe Kristeva’s concept of abjection is more productive and less problematic than Shapiro’s application of the apocalypse, which is inextricably tied to Judeo-Christian beliefs and presumptions of “moral cleansing.” While abjection is no stranger to apocalyptic discourse (e.g., catastrophes, ends of the world), it is not the apocalypse, and moreover, while Kristeva’s concept of abjection offers the possibility for a cathartic exit – similar to Shapiro’s apocalyptic cleansing – theoretically at least it is not bound to specific cultural or religious discourses. Shapiro continues to explore these ideas in Shapiro (1998) and Shapiro (2002). David J. Skal (1993) arrives at a similar conclusion from a different perspective. For Skal survivors of the atomic blast are “transcendental resurrection figures, beings who couldn’t die” (278). Skal highlights the abject qualities of the “monsters,” helping us to locate not only the audience’s ambivalent feelings for Gojira, but for hibakusha as well; the conflicted feelings of love and hate, of pity and fear, of fascination and revulsion. “Monsters,” he remarks, “provide an element of reassurance” (278). Monsters and hibakusha alike “did more than survive the Bomb; like Gojira (and his many clones and cohorts), they were usually created by it” (278). The mysterious child-like mutants, Tetsuo, and of course the title character Akira, in Katsuhiro Otomo’s animated feature, Akira, seem to be manifestations of the anxieties surrounding hibakusha offspring. In addition to acknowledging Akira’s place within the tradition of monstrous postwar narratives, Gojira actually makes a cameo appearance. During a flashback sequence Kaneda and Tetsuo draw a cityscape under siege by, among other things Gojira, with colored chalk on playground pavement.
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16 It is for this reason that allegory figures as a thoroughfare to the sublime and, for Kristevan psychoanalysis, also to sublimation. Allegory “endows the lost signifier with a signifying pleasure,” Kristeva writes, “a resurrectional jubilation even to the stone and corpse, by asserting itself as coextensive with the subjective experience of a named melancholia – of melancholy jouissance” (Kristeva 1989, 102, my emphasis).
Bibliography Broderick, Mick (ed.) (1996) “Introduction,” in Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film. New York: Kegan Paul International, pp. 1–19. Fletcher, Angus (1995) Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Freud, Sigmund (1960) “Recollection, repetition and working through,” in Collected Papers, Volume II. Translated by Joan Rivière. New York: Basic Books, Inc., pp. 366–7. Hirano, Kyoko (1992) Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo: Japanese Cinema Under the American Occupation, 1945–1952. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. Holden, Stephen (2000) “He’s back! And there goes Tokyo once again,” New York Times (18 August): E12. Kristeva, Julia (1982) Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press. –––– (1989) Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. –––– (1991) Strangers to Ourselves. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. –––– (1995) “Women’s time,” in Toril Moi (ed.) The Kristeva Reader. Translated by Sean Hand and Leon S. Roudiez. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 187–213. Lifton, Robert Jay (1967) Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima. New York: Random House. Napier, Susan (1993) “Panic sites: the Japanese imagination of disaster from Godzilla to Akira,” The Journal of Japanese Studies 19, 2 (Summer), 327–51. –––– (2000) Anime: from Akira to Princess Mononoke: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation, New York: Palgrave. Oë, Kenzaburo (1996) Hiroshima Notes. Translated by David L. Swain and Toshi Yonezawa. New York: Grove Press. Pringle, Peter and Spigelman, James (1981) The Nuclear Barons, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Richie, Donald (1996) “ ‘Mono no aware’: Hiroshima in film,” in Mick Broderick (ed.) Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film. New York: Kegan Paul International, pp. 20–37. Sasaki, Yuichiro (ed.) (1954) Scenes of A-bomb Explosion Hiroshima Photograph. Hiroshima: publisher unknown. Shapiro, Jerome (1998) “Atomic Bomb Cinema: Illness, Suffering, and the Apocalyptic Narrative,” Literature and Medicine 17: 1, 126–48. –––– (2002) Atomic Bomb Cinema: The Apocalyptic Imagination on Film.New York: Routledge.
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Sims, Calvin (1999) “A curtain call for Godzilla, back from the dead (again),” New York Times (2 December), E1. Skal, David J. (1993) The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror, New York: W.W. Norton and Company. Tanaka, Shinjiro (1955) “ ‘Death ash’: the experience of 23 Japanese fishermen,” Japan Quarterly 2: 1 (January–March), 36–42. Treat, John Whittier (1995) Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Tsutsui, William (2004) Godzilla on My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. White, Hayden (1999) Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect, Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press. Wood, Robin (1985) “An introduction to the American horror film,” in Bill Nichols (ed.) Movie and Methods Volume II. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 195–220.
7
Given movement Dance and the event Mark Franko
“Life exchanged for [literally: given back to, rendue à] death is the very operation of the symbolic.” (Baudrillard 1976, 201)
This chapter progresses from the question of artistic responses to 9/11 – the lack of which represented a kind of secondary civil crisis for New York in 2001–02 – to a consideration of event theory and the philosophy of the gift in relation to the dilemma of response.1 This shall entail a discussion of the post-structuralist critique of speech act theory. The actual performance materials to which I shall refer do not issue from the contemporary moment. They are, nevertheless, theoretically and historically relevant. To approach the question of movement’s transmission I shall turn to the Bateson/Mead film Learning to Dance in Bali (1936–39), and I shall conclude with Tatsumi Hijikata’s buto performance in the film Navel and A-Bomb (1960). I am concerned with the obverse of heroic response and the possibility of dance as a ritual of incorporation. As is well known, in a classic text of ritual analysis, The Rites of Passage, Arnold Van Gennep determines “the necessity to express by actions the idea of passage from one state to another” (Van Gennep 1960, 91, note 4). Rather than envision incorporation as the enlistment of the individual in a corporate identity, I wish to imagine the incorporation of the event into the individual and collective body. Here again, I shall find the notion of the gift, with and since Mauss, useful with respect to movement as incorporative donation.
1 “The event,” writes Stephen C. Foster of art practices, “was adopted as a theoretical reference point, or medium of artistic action, and became a major component of twentieth-century aesthetic activism” (Foster 1988, 3). Indeed, twentieth-century aesthetic activism also managed to blur the boundaries between performance and other arts as a way to underline its own eventfulness. But, what constitutes an event for avant-garde practice may
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require revision in the post-9/11 world. “The event,” specifies Foster, “served the artists as an instrument for achieving, in reality or by illusion, a positioning of themselves and their audiences in a hostile and selfdestructive world and as a potential instrument of change.”2 Because the performative event has been turned against itself as the disaster, has not its instrumentality for performative positioning been indefinitely suspended? How can performance respond to events while abandoning the essential engagement to itself as an event? Calls for performative response to the events of 9/11 have been issued in profusion. But have they been acknowledged, let alone acted upon? The subject came up for discussion, albeit not directly in the context of dance, at the Performance Studies International conference “Theatres of Life” (New York University, April 11–14, 2002). Coco Fusco cited the “calls from so many sectors to make art about the tragic events.” She sketched the possibilities for performance as testimony and acts of witnessing (Fusco 2002). Anne Cubilie recounted the gathering of testimony of female survivors in Afghanistan as an ethical obligation, and counterposed it to (mediatized) spectacle and other forms of viewing (Cubilie 2002). Barbara KirshenblattGimblett’s analysis of the phenomenology of reception at the World Trade Center and across Manhattan Island envisaged the disaster as always already spectatorship through the tropes of snapshots and flashbulbs. “Photography,” she stated, “was one of the most powerful responses to the attack” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2002). Kirshenblatt-Gimblett restored a performative dimension to event as spectacle entailing its own replay. The impact of viewing could not be detached in this case from the reception of the event itself, which seemed to have been “designed” for vast visual consumption across Manhattan Island and the surrounding areas, as well as in the media. Without precluding mourning, testimony, and witnessing, my question is tangential to these axes of inquiry. I address the call for and to dance. Can dance “respond” to these events? Is “response” (in the terms of a dance) actually what is called for?3 Has 9/11 ushered in the place of “the event” as that which “comes after” – in the sense of supercedes – the performative.? And I ask specifically: Can dance render (perhaps better than “respond to”) the disaster? What kind of “giving back” would this rendering be? What kind of logic of performative exchange are we engaged with here, in the wake of the event? Here I would recall Baudrillard’s statement: “Life exchanged for [given back to] death is the very operation of the symbolic.” The need for performance to re-appropriate eventfulness as a condition of response, is the very problem posed by the gift. There is a kind of debt at work in this call for response that seems to stand between the event that is owed and the performance as some kind of payback. From Marcel Mauss and Georges Bataille to Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jean-François Lyotard the gift has obtained a contradictory status between performance and event. This chapter attempts to think the place of dance between performance and event.
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2 This place, this will be precisely what happens, what we are arriving at or what happens to us, the event, the place of what takes place, which mocks the performative, performative power. (Derrida 2001a, 24) These words of Jacques Derrida, first pronounced in a 1998 lecture but published only in September 2001, take on an almost prophetic tone in the wake of September 11.4 The arrival of “what happens to us” as the events of 9/11 and its pressure on performance and performance theory invite a reconsideration of Derrida’s work on performativity, the gift, and the event. A brief review of these topics can help us to situate the gift in its pivotal position between performance and the event. Derrida’s progress from the examination of performative power to event theory is framed by the period of the early 1970s (the Iran hostage crisis) and the present moment (the war against terrorism). To examine this intellectual “progress” suggests that some historical necessity or causality leads from the performative to the event, a suggestion that is disabling for the power of performance. But I wish to show that its lost power can be recaptured through the gift whose contradictory status re-opens to question the relation between performance and event. Any such historical or causal progress would necessarily begin with J.L. Austin’s speech act as “something done” by an intending subject. “If issuing the utterance is doing something,” wrote Austin, “the ‘I’ and the ‘active’ and the ‘present’ seem appropriate” (Austin 1975, 67).5 Derrida critiqued Austin in 1971 for restricting the effectiveness of the speech act to the context vouched for by the I, the active, and the present of the performative enunciation.6 Instead, he aligned the performative utterance with writing as a mark inevitably severed from its original context of enunciative production. His critique is founded on the conventional nature of the performative utterance duly noted by Austin. “But this relative purity [of the performative for Austin] does not emerge in opposition to citationality or iterability, but in opposition to other kinds of iteration [such as theatrical performance] which constitutes a violation of the allegedly rigorous purity of every event of discourse or every speech act” (Derrida 1977a, 192). The speech act, as Austin states, relies on conventionality for its effectiveness.7 But Austin will not allow that this conventionality endows the speech act with the structure of writing as an inscription because such an admission would compromise the speech act’s intentionality. The Derridean inscription is a mark that exists in the wake of I, active, and present. It is something like a relic of the I, the active, and the present conditions. Its afterlife is its iterability, generally referred to in the literature as citationality. The citation is a kind of verbal artifact, no longer enunciation, but thing. I shall return shortly to the important way that iterability
128 Mark Franko becomes associated with expressive action in Derrida’s second intervention on speech act theory, “Limited Inc” (Derrida 1977b).8 The next stage in this progress is the “event.” The event engages neither with intentionality guaranteed by the context of the speech act’s live enunciation (Austin) nor with the performativity of the mark as defined by Derrida, a mark whose conventionality guarantees a chain of citations reaching beyond the immediate context of its original production. The event which “happens to us” “mocks” both such understandings of the speech act. The event is neither conventional, subjective, nor iterative. The singular presence of “what takes place” takes the place of the performative, and mocks it, displaces it, and supercedes it. The event, in other terms, disarms the performative by effectively removing its capacity to respond. The event leaves the act “speechless.”
3 Before it is there, no one awaits it; when it is there, no one recognizes it: for it is not there – the disaster. It has already diverted the word “be,” realizing itself to such a degree that it has not begun. (Blanchot 1986, 36) This third historical moment (our own) when the event supercedes both the speech act and the performativity of the mark is also that of the gift. To be “arriving at” “what happens to us” is to arrive at what Heidegger called the giveness of being. “To think Being,” he wrote, “explicitly requires us to relinquish Being as the ground of beings in favor of the giving which prevails concealed in unconcealment, that is, in favor of the It gives. As the gift of this It gives, Being belongs to giving” (Heidegger 1972, 6).9 By the same token, “Time is not. There is, It gives time” (16). The English “There” as subject of the verb is the equivalent of the German “es” (es gibt die Zeit) and the French impersonal “il” (il y a le temps). The capitalization of It indicates this impersonal and fundamentally mysterious agent Es or Il that “gives” Being and time. Derrida began his first seminar on the gift in 1979–80 at the Ecole Normale Supérieure with this quote from Heidegger: “Die Zeit is nicht; es gibt die Zeit” (“There is no time; time is given”). The power of the event is its giveness as it arrives, which power is sustained by the secretiveness surrounding its original intention (it is “concealed in unconcealedness”).10 The source and intention of 9/11 are at the time of this writing far from being unequivocably identified in political discourse. Just as it is difficult if not impossible to respond to Being and time by subjecting them to representation (they do not exist as the ground of beings), so the event poses an analogous crisis. The event is in some way transparent or invisible. The gift’s contradiction or impossibility (Derrida calls it “the very figure of the impossible”) is that it must not call forth reciprocation if it is to sustain its
Given movement 129 being as gift (Derrida 1991, 7). Derrida: “If he recognizes it as gift, if the gift appears to him as such, if the present is present to him as present, this simple recognition suffices to annul the gift” (13). Derrida derives this dictum not from Heidegger, however, but from the sociological and anthropological investigations of Marcel Mauss. As Mauss observed through his fieldwork in Polynesia, Melanesia, and the American Northwest in the 1920s, the gift incurs debt in that it obliges the counter gift. Despite this systemic process suggesting circulation and therefore exchange, Mauss also discussed the impossible impulse in gift giving. The potlatch shared across these cultures is sumptuary and agonistic gift giving whose excessiveness (even madness) attempts the foreclosure of reciprocation. For Mauss, the cultural logic of giving in archaic societies is not the precursor of economic logic in mercantile exchange, because its actions do not prefigure the restricted economy of circulation. The philosophical problem of non-subjective donation and the socio-anthropological evidence of potlatch as sacrifice and destruction together recast the gift as variety of event. Every gift aspires to the structure of the event in its aspiration to disable response, to block the impulse to reciprocate. Indeed, Mauss accrues evidence showing how reciprocation entails competition, sumptuary destruction, and thus profound antagonism (Mauss 1950, 143–279).11 The gift aspires to escape the political economy of any gesture. I emphasize now an aspect of Mauss that Derrida does not accentuate. There is always an obligation to return the favor, an obligation that is imposed by rank and power but also – and most importantly according to Mauss – by virtue of the force in the things that circulate. This force – something I wish to highlight here – is the result, according to Mauss’s analysis, of non-differentiation between persons and things. It is precisely such nondifferentiation that could be useful in grasping the inscription as relic. The force of the gift is not based on the I, the active, and the present. What does the force circulating in gifts mean? As Lyotard has written: “There is a dimension of force that escapes the logic of the signifier: an excess of energy that symbolic exchange can never regulate, excess that ‘primitive’ culture thematizes as debt” (Lyotard 1993, 64). Lyotard goes on to theorize the event as follows: “One could call an event the impact, on the system, of floods of energy such that the system does not manage to bind and channel this energy; the event would be the traumatic encounter of energy with the regulating institution” (ibid). An event happens by passing through the body without the body’s ability to contain, bind, or channel its energy, either physically or psychically. The force of this passage works on the body – dead or alive. I suggest we consider this process as transmission. First: transmission in/as communication. As Derrida establishes in “Signature event context,” communication cannot be limited to “the transmission of a meaning” (Derrida 1977a, 172). “To say that writing extends the field and the powers of locutory or gestural communication presupposes, does it not, a sort of homogeneous space of communication?” (Derrida 1977a,
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173). Inscription and transmission become interchangeable sites of verbal and kinetic communication. Some communications occur without evident intention: “A tremor, a shock, a displacement of force can be communicated – that is, transmitted” (Derrida 1977a, 173, my emphasis). The process of transmission itself is what links the force of the event to the force of giving. Further, transmission links dance and writing, as we shall see. Dance as expressive communication is also rarely if ever thought (at least in contemporary Dance Studies) to correspond to “meaning” or “signification.” That dance “communicates a movement” (what this means awaits determination) has been theorized as occurring outside the discursive field, even if many logocentric qualities can be associated with the production of its gesture: immediacy, presence, and often the seriousness concomitant to “liveness” (Auslander 1999). Much postmodern dance has responded to, or perhaps itself prompted, the post-structuralist critical perspective wherein dance as mark can be seen to emerge: “the non-present remainder of a differential mark cut off from its putative ‘production’ or origin” (Derrida 1977a, 183). But what are the historical conditions of the production of dance as mark? As my final example shall suggest, the conditions may be those of Hiroshima in 1945. The transmission of dance movement is generally apprehended within a strictly pedagogical perspective. But movement contains the double property that distinguishes the gift: it is personal as it does not exist without a personal manifestation, but it is also a cultural object in that it derives from a tradition. Transmission is rarely – if ever – thought about from a theoretical let alone from a hermeneutic perspective. That dance can perform this marking in/as transmission (even in/as the transmission of an aesthetic tradition) may remain divorced from the fact that its means of production rely on the logocentric qualities involved of liveness. There is sometimes a need to distinguish between the dancer and the dance. But this is the very tension explicit in the encounter between performative action and the event. The event implies a hyperbolic reduction of agency such that the event’s status as gift appears to negate dance as communication. But what of the transmission of dances, which refers primarily to the performance of their learning? What of their learning as gift? And what in the structure of this pedagogical transmission corresponds to eventfulness? How does the reception of an aesthetic (even a newly invented one) imply the learning implicit in the radical sense we are giving to the term response? Can we resolve the contradiction between gift and iterability, event and mark, by thinking of dance as transmission? Consider first transmission in its most prosaic instance as dance pedagogy.
4 Margaret Mead introduces a remarkable Balinese dancer in Gregory Bateson’s film Learning to Dance in Bali (1936–39): “This is Mario, the most famous dancer in Bali who already was reputed more as a teacher than a
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dancer. . . .” (Bateson and Mead 1942, 87). We are shown Mario dancing the kebiar solo form in a short sequence, after which we see him instructing a young boy, Murda, whom he meets “out for a stroll” and who has “never had a lesson before.” I wish to pause over this “informal lesson” – a gratuitous gift – of the dancer/teacher to the unsuspecting student. The narrative setup is transparently fictional, but this does not invalidate what the film has to tell us about the transmission of dance techniques, which we can see with our own eyes. In fact, the fictive elements may be precisely there to convey a point of view on technique and its transmission. Mario positions himself behind his pupil whose arms and torso he manipulates into the positions and through the trajectories of the choreography he imparts. As Sally Ann Ness noted of a Balinese dance lesson she took in Bali in 1992: “I felt like a tree with branches that she [the teacher] arranged” (Ness 1996, 131). In the film as in Ness’s more recent experience, the teacher “gives” the choreography to the pupil in a way that renders giving difficult to visualize, as giving means shaping the other’s gesture while remaining unseen. Invisible, Mario offers no image to mimic. According to the film’s narrative, this instruction is an unexpected gift, and the sense of that fortuitousness is echoed in the pedagogical technique through which it is imparted. Murda is fortuitously enlisted to receive Mario’s instruction on a whim as the film would have it. Mario transmits the gesture’s shape to Murda inasmuch as this shape is realized directly in/by Murda’s body. This gesture, derived from an aesthetic tradition personified by the teacher’s movement, is not transmitted across a mediating space of observation and interpretation. Whatever doubts one may have about the documentarity of the film itself, there can be no doubt that the performance and pedagogical techniques are closely hewn to one another. Using Laban Movement Analysis terminology, Ness remarks that “the amount of Bound/Quick needed for these actions was extraordinary” (Ness 1996, 131). This lesson, however fictional, contains marks of technical communication that cannot be falsified. We should also say that Mario gives Murda nothing, and, following Derrida, that he preserves in this way the integrity of his gift. Mario’s movements are presenced in Murda’s body at the very moment Murda “learns” them, or is given them to learn. Other eyewitnesses noted: “The dancing teacher in Bali does really communicate himself and not merely his instruction. He literally inspires the body he is training” (de Zoete and Spies 1939, 32). Teaching a movement is giving something of oneself, and this gift of movement indexes the force inhabiting the gift as described by Mauss.14 This force – the motor of non-economic circulation – involves the circulation of self as mark, which is analogous to the philosophical necessity of abandoning the “I,” the “active,” and the “present.” Paradoxically, this is the way a dance form is transmitted and is able to survive culturally. With this pedagogical example I am proposing that we think of this “selfforce” as transmission. Learning to Dance in Bali provides a striking image of this transmission, which it sets up as the communication of a dance as gift.
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The two figures hover close to the ground. Mario is positioned behind Murda to manipulate the pupil whose “will and consciousness,” as Mead notes, are almost “in abeyance.”15 It would seem he is poised to receive the gift of the other. But this is not in reality a manipulation in the conventional sense because the teacher, unlike the puppeteer, uses no analogical code. Both bodies move fully and share the same kinaesthetic experience: an impulse is transmitted. In this way, movement is given from one body to another. This same pedagogical method is displayed later in the film with some of Mario’s more seasoned pupils. As the teacher sits on the sidelines, an older student manipulates a younger trainee. In this tripling effect of transmission, what emerges is a danced figure of performativity in the realization that fixed gestures are passed down to sustain the dance form’s fragile cultural identity. I call attention to the interaction in this example between gift/event and performativity that the film allows us to glimpse in the transmission of a dance in Balinese culture. In this transmission, we can also glimpse a possible structure of “response” to the event whose potential is grounded in the operations of transmission. But they are not limited to Bali in the 1930s. The process of transmission contains within it the structure of the event. It is the performative basis of dance (and to this extent of performance in general) that the event cannot mock. Aesthetic traditions, more than any other kinds of movement, are generated by the It of It gives.16 However, their transmission from body to body is the mode of their re-inscription, which is itself a kind of event constitutive of the inscription of tradition on bodies – that is, of cultural traditions. This part of the film allows us to see and understand, in other terms, the reception of the event as an unsolicited form of transmission qua training. The disciplining imposed by the event generates its own performativity, “a tremor, a shock, a displacement of force can be ‘communicated.’ ” What this account of transmission makes evident is that dancing can be a particularly efficacious form of giving in the philosophical sense. What the philosophical tradition (even that of deconstruction) underplays, however, is the simultaneous self-donation required to render this giving efficacious, and which, in the absence of any object, fills the role of intentionality that Derrida sees as inseparable from the gift.17 The invisible intentionality of the event resides in (its) movement and in the transmission of its movement.
5 To make gestures of the dead, to die again, to make the dead reenact once more their deaths in their entirety – these are what I want to experience within me. A person who has died once can die over and over again within me. Moreover, I’ve often said although I’m not acquainted with Death, Death knows me, (Hijikata 1987, 127)
Given movement 133 I will conclude with a brief discussion of the film shot by Eikoh Hosoe in 1960 with Tatsumi Hijikata, Navel and A-Bomb.18 Hijikata (1928–86), one of the originators of the post-war Japanese dance form ankoku buto (dance of utter darkness) establishes a visual relationship between the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the Second World War and buto. Early in the film we see a flash in the sky followed by a plume of rising black smoke. The film is in a sense an agglomeration of marks – white on black, black on white – by virtue of the cinematography, the formality of framing, and the relation of composition to montage. Buto undoubtedly entertains a privileged relation to the status of dance as mark. The first shots of Navel and A-Bomb suggest an ambiguity of forms: an apple perched on one of five mounds of earth resembles the fleshly contours of a supine body, with the crashing waves of the sea as backdrop. Into this scene come two hands from either side of the frame that dialogue over the apple. Here, as elsewhere in the film, the frame acts to isolate parts of the body and to give them autonomy as moving objects, whether they be a back, a stomach, hands, an elbow, or feet. The first scene establishes a conversation between a hand and an elbow in which these body parts are endowed with intentionality, yet deprived of organicity. As with the headless bodies seen repeatedly in the film, relation is presented as intentionality without subjectivity. As with the apple, each body part appears self-contained. The frame never suggests isolation, as if these body parts were extensions of a proximate and adjoining whole. The dancers’ partial bodies belong to the organic world of the apple and the sand mound except for their autonomous mobility. Movement itself is a gift whose source is obscured by the bodyobject. The performing partial bodies stand in stark visual contrast to the cow on the beach. The partial bodies are organic forms with smooth surfaces and orifices whereas the bovine body is “complete,” but for that reason a static and weighted body almost devoid of motion and consciousness. Of course, the dancers have feet, but we see them tied together and only below the knee; they have heads but these are wrapped in white fabric or out of view thanks to the composition of the shot; they have arms but these are never seen connected to shoulders. The partitioned totality is dead although still in motion, like the white chicken carcass that floats in the waves and “gestures” involuntarily with its claws in the air. The dancer’s arms iterate these clawing gestures. The human body is “iterated” in/as the organic but inanimate object, and in the dead animal. The dying carcass describes white marks or blots against the dark sea, intercut with a close-up of Hijikata’s headless chest inscribed with white marks. Given the chicken’s claws in the surf, this marking seems to be a transmission visualized by association through editing. “Even as it consigns,” remarks Derrida, “inscription produces a new event” (Derrida 2001b, 314). Inscription as event is the performative act of response we are inquiring after. Hijikata’s torso is scratched with white chalk marks. His hands do the marking and re-organize or re-inscribe the marks. His is a body of the event
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in the sense that it is at once a witness to atomic explosion and a body already in pieces. His fingers discover his navel and appear blindly to seek entrance there. This body fragment, site of the mark, displays the intention to rediscover itself in a process of its own decomposition. Transmission occurs between parts with no governing subjectivity; it occurs as the advent or occurrence of self-inflicted marks. The mark stabilizes a set of connections (a communicating network) between body and event, navel and A-bomb. In the end, a child’s navel is marked with a black X: a navel both crossed out and reinscribed on the skin’s surface. A rope is pulled from the navel, the child shields its eyes from the glare in the sky, and the nuclear explosion reappears in a blinding white flash. The body in Navel and A-Bomb is marked by the event and becomes the mark of the event. It lies on the shores of time. But that mark, like the navel, is also a place: the place of performance. The experience of dying takes place again, as Hijikata said, “within me.” In saying, “a person who has died once can die over and over again within me,” he refers neither to mourning nor to witnessing. Instead he describes the giving of movement to disaster as event. This is the performance of what Jean Baudrillard has called “symbolic exchange”: “une mort donnée et reçue, donc réversible dans l’échange social” (Baudrillard 1976, 203).19 I shall venture to say in conclusion that transmission is necessary to the production of “responsive” dance, and thus that the performative cannot be severed from the way dance is “given.” That is, dance as an event has always already preceded its (Austinian) performativity. It takes place before and after the I, active, and the present. Without feigning to prescribe any particular imaginable response (who could possibly do so?), I would also venture this hypothesis. Response can be said to require a form (mark) – not just a choreography but a dance form, even if (and indeed especially if) – as in the case of ankoku buto – it was invented uniquely for the purpose of response.20 To perform a response to the event is to bring forth the contradiction of the gift as a reappropriation of eventfulness. Perhaps the problem has been in calling for a response when what should be called for are gifts of a sort – gifts whose marks are choreographic. Such choreographic gifts might serve to redefine the meaning of the event in the wake of 9/11.
Acknowledgment “Given movement: dance and the event” reprinted from Of the Presence of the Body: Essays on Dance and Performance Theory, edited by André Lepecki. Copyright © Wesleyan University Press. Reprinted by permission.
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Notes 1 I wish to thank André Lepecki, Catherine M. Soussloff, and Giovanni Careri for their helpful comments as I prepared this chapter, which was first read at the seminar “Symbolic actions: dance, games, rites,” Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris (June 2002) as part of a France/Berkeley Fund collaborative research project. 2 Ibid. 3 For one of many such calls, see Anne Midgette, “Responding to crisis, art must look beyond itself,” in New York Times (Sunday, March 3, 2002), section 2: 1 & 8. See also Bill T. Jones, “The aftermath: a louder public voice,” at the following web address: http://palmbeachica.org/Louder%20Voice.htm. 4 The subject of Derrida’s talk, published as L’Université sans conditions, was the future of the university, and the event referred to is what can supercede the performativity of the Humanities. 5 As Derrida recently paraphrased Austin’s position: “Pure performativity implies the presence of a living being, and of a living being speaking one time only, in its own name, in the first person. And speaking in a manner that is at once spontaneous, intentional, free, and irreplaceable.” (Derrida 2001b, 279). 6 “Signature événement contexte,” a talk given in 1971, was first published in French in his Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972), 365–93. The English translation appeared in Glyph 1 (1977), 172–97. John Searle published a reply to Derrida in the same issue, and further debate ensued in Glyph 2 (1977). Also in 1971, Jean-François Lyotard undertook his influential theorization of the figure as event in Discours, Figure (Paris: Klincksieck, 1971). 7 “We must notice that the illocutionary act is a conventional act: an act done as conforming to a convention” (Austin 1975 105). 8 The French text was published in a supplement to Glyph 2 (1977). 9 With Heidegger, the concept of the gift moves toward the inclusion of time and being in the event (Ereignis). 10 Indeed, 9/11 has all the earmarks of a “meaningless event that seems all the more present for its defying comprehension” (Bielik-robson 2000, 74). Bielikrobson discusses the event in terms of the classical concept of fate. I thank Karen Bassi for calling my attention to this article. 11 “Essai sur le don” was originally published in 1923–24. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Translated by W.D. Halls (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990). In 1933 Georges Bataille replaced Mauss’ gift (don) with expenditure (dépense), thus connecting sumptuary destruction with class and religious warfare. From Bataille’s perspective one can conceive of homicide bombing as a kind of potlatch. See Georges Bataille, “La Notion de dépense,” in La part maudite (Paris: Minuit, 1967), 23–45; “The notion of expenditure.” In Allan Stoekl (ed.) Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 116–29. 12 I would note in passing that the value of absence in the instrumentality of writing does not necessarily “risk introducing a certain break in the homogeneity of the system” (176) of communication. The volume Acting on the Past is designed to demonstrate this important point (Franko and Richards 2000). 13 “Mario of Tabanan,” notes Mead elsewhere, “is the dancer chiefly responsible for the evolutions of kebiar dance which has become very popular in Bali in the last twenty years. The dance is performed sitting in a square space surrounded by instruments of the orchestra, but though the principal emphasis is upon the head and hands, the dance involves the whole body, and Mario has introduced a great deal of virtuosity into the difficult feat of rapid locomotion without rising from the sitting position” (Bateson and Mead 1942, 87).
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14 “Hence it follows that to make a gift of something to someone is to make a present of some part of one self. Next, in this way we can better account for the very nature of exchange through gifts, of everything we call ‘total services’ (‘prestations totales’), and among these, potlatch.” Mauss, “Essai sur le don,” 161. 15 “Learning to walk, learning the first appropriate gestures of playing musical instruments, learning to eat, and to dance are all accomplished with the teacher behind the pupil, conveying directly by pressure, and almost always with a minimum of words, the gesture to be performed. Under such a system of learning, one can only learn if one is completely relaxed and if will and consciousness as we understand those terms are almost in abeyance. The flexible body of the dancing pupil is twisted and turned in the teacher’s hands; teacher and pupil go through the proper gesture, then suddenly the teacher springs aside, leaving the pupil to continue the pattern to which he has surrendered himself.” Ibid., 15. This commentary accompanies a set of photographic plates of Mario teaching entitled “Visual and kinaesthetic learning.” 16 It is through Derrida’s reading of De Man in “Typewriter ribbon” that he intercepts the language of Heinrich von Kleist’s essay “On the Marionette Theatre,” a locus classicus of dance theory. Derrida asks: “How is one to think together the machine and the event, a machine-like repetition and what happens?” (2001b, 307). Dance traditions can furnish one answer to that question. 17 It is in line with these considerations that an important and easily overlooked point emerging from Derrida’s reading of Heidegger and Mauss deserves emphasis: what we mean by gift must be linked to intention and intentionality. “There must be chance, encounter, the involuntary, even unconsciousness or disorder, and there must be intentional freedom, and these two conditions must – miraculously, graciously – agree with each other” (Derrida 1991, 123). Intention and intentionality must operate as extraneous from subjectivity, but they still must operate. It is to this double condition of irruption and intentionality that the events of 9/11 seem uncannily to correspond. Though hardly through “gracious” agreement, this double condition is realized in the name of a secret, or of the inexplicable, as well as of the unrepresentable. 18 I am grateful to Patrick de Vos for introducing me to this film. 19 The term symbolic for Baudrillard regains its anthropological dimension at the expense of its linguistic connotation. The term symbolization resists the meanings attributed to the symbolic register by post-structural psychoanalysis. 20 Indeed, it is perhaps this very idea of transmission and inscription that defines what we mean by form in the case of dances. When I read this chapter at the UCSC conference some exception was taken to my use of the word “form” in the phrase “dance form.” The word was taken to signal a return to an idealism. Once could of course recur to the alternative formulation: dance type. Whatever term one uses, however, the point is that dances tend to be identifiable and transferable by their marks. Certainly the whole issue of training and transmission implies there is something of a formal or typical profile that requires mastery. Even buto displays marks without which it may no longer be recognized as buto despite its continuing evolution: partial or near-total nudity, white face and body paint, dilated reddened eyes, and so forth.
Bibliography Auslander, Philip (1999) Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. London: Routledge. Austin, J.L. (1975 [1962]) How To Do Things With Words. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Given movement 137 Bataille, Georges (1967) “La Notion de dépense,” in La part maudite. Paris: Minuit, pp. 23–45. Bateson, Gregory and Mead, Margaret (1942) Balinese Character, a Photographic Analysis. New York: the New York Academy of Sciences. Baudrillard, Jean (1976) L’échange symbolique et la mort. Paris: Gallimard. Bielik-robson, Agata (2000) “Bad timing: the subject as a work of time,” Angelaki 5/3. Blanchot, Maurice (1986) The Writing of the Disaster. Translated by Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Cubilie, Anne “Grounded ethics: a center/field discussion of testimonial witnessing from rural Afghanistan to the United States,” paper read on the panel “Responses to 9/11 and its aftermaths,” New York University, April 11, 2002. Derrida, Jacques (1977a [1971]) “Signature event context.” Translated by Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman. Glyph 1: 172–97. –––– (1977b) “Limited Inc.” Translated by Samuel Weber. Glyph 2: 162–251. –––– (1991) Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. –––– (2001a) L’Université sans conditions. Paris: Galilée. –––– (2001b) “Typewriter ribbon: limited ink (2) (‘within such limits’),” in Tom Cohen, Barbara Cohen, J. Hillis Miller, and Andrzej Warminski (eds) Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. de Zoete, Beryl and Spies, William (1939) Dance and Drama in Bali. London: Faber & Faber. Foster, Stephen C. (ed.) (1988) “Event Structures and Art Situations,” in “Event” Arts and Art Events. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. Franko, Mark and Richards, Annette (eds) (2000) Acting on the Past: Historical Performance Across the Disciplines. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Fusco, Coco. “Performative Interventions and the Politics of Witnessing,” paper delivered at the panel “Responses to 9/11 and its Aftermaths,” New York University, April 11, 2002. Halls, W.D. (1990) The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. New York: W.W. Norton. Heidegger, Martin (1972) On Time and Being. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. New York: Harper Colophon Books. Hijikata, Tatsumi (1987) “Speech,” Tokyo, February 9, 1985, reprinted in Mark Holborn, Yukio Mishima and Tatsumi Hijikata. Butoh. Dance of the Dark Soul. New York: Aperture. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara (2003) “Kodak moments, flashbulb memories: reflections on 9/11,” The Drama Review 47:11–48. Lyotard, Jean-François (1971) Discours, Figure. Paris: Klincksieck. –––– (1993) “March 23,” in Political Writings. Translated by Bill Readings and Kevin Paul Geiman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mauss, Marcel (1950) “Essai sur le don. Forme et Raison de l’Echange dans les Sociétés Archaïques,” Sociologie et Anthropologie. Paris: PUF: 143–279. Ness, Sally Ann (1996) “Dancing in the Field: Notes from Memory” in Susan Leigh Foster (ed.) Corporealities: Dancing, Knowledge, Culture and Power. New York: Routledge: 129–54. Stoekl, Allan (ed.) (1993) “The notion of expenditure,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 116–29. Van Gennep, Arnold (1960 [1909]) The Rites of Passage. Translated by Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
8
Illness as danced urban ritual Janice Ross
Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place. (Sontag 1990, first published 1978, 3).
In the late 1950s and early 1960s the California dancer and teacher Anna Halprin pioneered the nexus of affective behaviors and psychological states of the body. Her insights helped provide the impetus for what was to become post-modern dance, avant-garde theatre and eventually a deployment of ritual in the broader social spectrum. By the 1970s Halprin was also using dance to support her own recovery from cancer, as art, play, ritual and healing became increasingly united in her participatory performance work. It was this belief that dance could be simultaneously expressive to the spectator and healing to the performer that led her in the late 1980s to the invention of urban ritual as a path for emotional and physical repair. Initially by addressing socially charged issues like political repression, violence and racism, Halprin had discovered how emotional distress and psychological turmoil became mapped on the body. Historically in dance the physical display of psychological illness was the most comfortable dimension of the kingdom of the sick because illnesses of the mind rarely disfigured the body as other diseases did. Indeed, as Felicia McCarren has chronicled, in nineteenth century ballets, the illness of hysteria even took on an erotic charge, becoming aestheticized as an alluring choreography of pathology. The signature example is the Romantic ballet “Giselle,” a tale of female descent into melancholia and madness. “Dance and illness construct new realities for the body, new understandings of what the body does,” McCarren has written, noting the strong parallel between dance of this period and “Nineteenth century French medicine (and its) concern with how the body expresses itself in and through illness” (McCarren 1998, 16). This early wedding of dance and (mental) illness focused on
Illness as danced urban ritual 139 the visible and performative qualities of pathology. Working a century later, and in the genre of modern dance rather than ballet, Halprin would also associate dance with illness, in this instance its public disclosure. More radically, she would use ritual to attach dance not just to diagnosis but to cure as her performers revealed bodies that were visibly and truthfully ill. Since the symptoms of psychological illness often play out as exaggerated behaviors on bodies that are otherwise unmarked, they are well suited for expression in dance. Physical sickness, in contrast, marks the body but leaves the mind untouched, and often it makes the body too vulnerable, too uncontrollable and too inscribed to be neutral as a medium for performance. What the body in disease performs relentlessly is its own citizenship in the kingdom of the sick. Halprin had launched her career in the post-war period by repudiating the hotly psychological dances of Martha Graham’s work in the 1940s and rendering herself in comparison stylistically homeless in much the same way Merce Cunningham had. However, Cunningham remained in a more consistently adversarial artistic dialogue with Graham’s work, whereas Halprin’s dances resonated with certain aspects of Graham’s ritualism, particularly her primitivist stylizations invoking myths and ceremonies in her Greek dances. Roger Copeland refers to Cunningham’s achievement in response to his experience with Graham as having “(M)odernized modern dance by repudiating its primitivist heritage” (Copeland 2004, 122). Halprin’s achievement was similarly to modernize modern dance, but she did this by contemporizing its primitivist heritage rather than disavowing it. More importantly, her later work did the same for modern dance’s offspring, the strain she helped initiate, post-modern dance. Halprin did this by working in the inverse, recuperating primitivism as a response to the aesthetics of indifference (Roth 1998). She recast modern dance as a vital agent for community expression and social change. Halprin was working with a conception of primitivism compatible with that of Marianna Torgovnick who writes of primitivism as a frame whose presence allows us to recontextualize modernity. “Primitivism is not a ‘subtopic’ of modernism or postmodernism,” Torgovnick says. “When versions of the primitive show specific historical and cultural variations, they expose different aspects of the West itself” (Torgovnick 1990, 193). Halprin was drafting a contemporary urban variation of the primitive through dance and in the process she was about to reveal to the West some of its own most deeply worked metaphors of illness. Halprin’s yoking of illness and ritual begins with a story of personal transformation, her own ritual conversion from sickness to health where dance was the catalyst. Having traced a path over the previous four decades from investigations of the structural logic of movement, to task performance and then ritualized group encounters, Halprin was now at the threshold of using “postmodern primitivism” to lead her into dance as healing. In the autumn of 1972 she began a yearlong weekly workshop for her Multiracial Dance Company through the Reach Out program, funded for 12 years
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(1968–80) by the Expansion Arts program of the National Endowment for the Arts. In building her workshop approach to choreography on what she did not want to happen (lockstep duplication), as much as what she did (personalized solutions), Halprin was pushing dance making toward the realm of the remedial and at the same time hovering on the boundaries between the liminal and the liminoid and cultural practice and aesthetic production (Turner 1982). In the period following the Kennedy and King assassinations, this took on the added valence of social honesty as Halprin encouraged workshop participants to tell their own stories. Most critically, Halprin was increasingly working this way not because it made better art for audiences, but because it made for a deeper and more salutary experience for the performer. This approach personalized dance and also framed a conception of dance that bordered on the ritualistic. In Halprin’s theatre of the 1970s, a performer’s health as something other than robust, tireless, and perfectly formed could now be disclosed. It would be a short step from this to a broader agenda of using dance to heal. Starting in the late 1960s and early 1970s Halprin had favored beginning her group workshops by leading her adult students through a process of making what she called “visualizations,” life-sized self images each participant was asked to draw as a first step in recovering their stories (Kaplan 1995, 126). In Halprin’s schema, visually displaying one’s beliefs was conducive to physical responses. The direct path into both was through the senses and a considered display of emotional reactions. The drawn visualizations were the maps for this journey. Much more than just a visual approximation of oneself, these were intended as site plans of the psyche, synecdoche of the anxious soul, splayed graphically across the paper. In Halprin’s process, these drawings were critical first steps in externalizing sentiment and sensation before they could be given kinesthetic form, and danced as art. In the 1940s, when she had first introduced drawing in the dance studio as a way of assisting preliterate children in scripting plots for their dances, Halprin trusted in a romanticized coupling of the body and emotional states, the heart and the hand. She saw this affective display of beliefs as a way to render topical issues in dance. Halprin used this approach in a series of workshops she taught in South Central Los Angeles in 1968, in the wake of the Watts Riots there, and also in summer workshops she taught on the outdoor dance studio, the deck, at her home in the San Francisco suburb of Marin County. Initially, in the 1960s, these drawings had served as prompts for movements. By the following decade Halprin discovered tasks could have diagnostic and treatment use as well. Perhaps the aesthetic could be remedial and curative. One afternoon in the 1970s Halprin was leading the Reach Out performers in a collectively drawn group self-portrait in which each person took a turn adding to one large drawing, a practice she called the totem dance
Illness as danced urban ritual 141 (Paludan 1994, 268). When her turn came, she was surprised to find herself drawing a dark circle the size of a tennis ball in the pelvic area of the crayon figure. At first she told herself this was just a symbolic embryo to which she was giving birth. The image troubled her, however, because earlier in the workshop when everyone had drawn individual self portraits, she had drawn a similar dark circle in the pelvis of her image of herself. In the future she would often recount how her drawing this image, twice, both surprised and frightened her. The first time, she dismissed the image: I drew a rear view of my body with an “X” going through it, slashing it. In the region corresponding to the pelvis – where the two lines of the “X” met, I drew a circle like “X” marks the spot. I remember hesitating to take the group’s time to dance my self-portrait. Then finally, with time running short, and being the workshop leader, I allowed my personal needs to slip by. (Kaplan 1995, 65) When the dark circle with the “X” through it appeared the second time, Halprin responded differently. Like the ritualistic two stumbles that condemned the virgin to death in Vaslav Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring, an event that occurs twice loses its spontaneity and takes on the force of something fated. Now the reappearance of the dark area in the group’s collective portrait left me feeling uneasy, and reminded me of my earlier drawing. The next day I went to the doctor and asked him to examine my pelvic region. He did so and found a malignant tumor of the same size and shape as the one I’d drawn the previous day – and in the same place. (Halprin 1991a, 1–3) With her second drawing, Halprin dismissed her original rationalization of the circle being an embryo as she recalled how a participant’s self-portrait two years earlier in this same Psychokinetic Visualization Process had presaged his health crisis, and she was troubled. Halprin viewed what she called this “imagistic language” of the self-portrait as a way of “receiving messages from an intelligence within the body, an intelligence deeper and more unpredictable than anything I could understand through rational thought” (Kaplan 1995, 65). Just as the Living Theater had chanted lines from the writings of the existential therapist R.D. Laing in their 1967 play, Paradise Now, singing about madness as a visionary experience as they danced, Halprin too had begun borrowing from psychology, systematizing elements from Gestalt therapy in her workshops and performances (Landy 1985, 27). Connections between performance and the human potential movement begun in the 1960s were becoming more clearly established in this period of the early 1970s. The critical piece for Halprin had not been the drawing’s deformity but
142 Janice Ross rather her inability to act out in dance this image of a figure with a mass in its abdomen. She said later, “It was because I couldn’t put the drawing into motion that I felt blocked” (Anna Halprin, interview with author, December 12, 2001). For her, giving shape to a feeling or understanding through movement was how she metabolized experience. If it could not be danced, it had not been truly experienced. Sontag describes the horrible fear and dread that accompanied a diagnosis of cancer in the 1970s when the disease was thought to be uncontrollable, intractable and incurable: “Cancer is the disease that doesn’t knock before it enters. It fills the role of an illness experienced as a ruthless, secret invasion,” Sontag cautioned (Sontag 1990, 17). Adding to this assault on the body is the fact that the only cure for Halprin’s cancer was mutilating surgery. Ten days after she received her diagnosis Halprin underwent extensive surgery, having a length of her lower intestine removed as well as one ovary. She came out of surgery with a colostomy, what is described in medical literature as “an artificial anus on the abdomen” (Postel and Localio 1965, 1–25). Halprin reported that at her request, her physician agreed that rather than opening a new incision in her abdomen he would use her navel as the new exit point for her colon, a practice that has since become routine in this kind of cancer surgery (Sontag 1990, 40). Halprin remained in the hospital for three weeks following her operation. She was in considerable pain and was frail, having lost 25 pounds, and her spirits were low. She wrote later about this period that she wanted to get out of her body, to crawl out of her skin, the room, the hospital and the world. Then one afternoon Halprin’s mother, Ida, came to visit. She sat simply and quietly by Halprin’s bedside, holding her daughter’s hand as Halprin sobbed. “Connecting again to my feelings of love was the beginning of my restoration,” Halprin said of the epiphany this quiet act of handholding brought her (Halprin 1991b, 84). Halprin’s body, as she had known it, was changed irreparably, as was her relationship to it. Several months after the cancer surgery, she began to work with Dr. Robert Hall, a Gestalt therapist who had been a protégé of Fritz Perls, in order to focus on her emotional residue from the operation. One day she recounted to Dr. Hall a dream she had in which she was back on the operating table and a team of six faceless physicians were mechanically cutting away at her body, removing hunks of her anatomy. Halprin responded with fury. “Please don’t harm my body. Dear God, please don’t harm my body,” she recounted praying and screaming as they continued cutting. “This is my dancer’s body and if you harm it, what will become of me” (Halprin 1991b, 81). Indeed, the cancer surgery revealed to Halprin just how deeply set in her body her identity as an artist was and how any strategy to reclaim it would have to be physically based as well. Halprin’s doctor informed her that she could dance again and that if the cancer did not recur within the next five years she could consider herself healed. Within a few weeks she returned to teaching, but it would be nearly
Illness as danced urban ritual 143 20 years before she took to the stage again publicly as a performer. As her strength returned, Halprin studied her students’ self portraits, and now she noticed how the images tended to polarize into a dark side and a light side, the repressed and the accepted halves of oneself. Intuitively she was now beginning to rethink the body whose unity had been severed by disease. Three years after her surgery, in 1975, while on an individual retreat at the oceanfront weekend home and studio she and her husband maintained at Sea Ranch, California, Halprin once again drew an image of herself that she was unable to dance. This time, however, what blocked Halprin was that the portrait was too young, and too healthy. “When I looked at the picture after drawing it, I knew I couldn’t even begin to dance it; it just didn’t feel like me. I turned the paper over and furiously began to draw another image of myself. It was black and angular and angry and violent. I knew that this back side image of me was the dance I had to do” (Kaplan 1995, 66). As Halprin was drawing this “shadow side” of herself on the back of the paper, she became aware that she had begun bleeding internally, one of the emergency signs of the cancer’s return. She returned to Kentfield and called her doctor, asking him if she could wait one more month before undergoing another colonoscopy. Now, she decided, she needed to dance. On a quiet afternoon in 1975 she summoned ten witnesses from among family members, students and friends to a big empty studio at 321 Divisadero Street, San Francisco. The number was a minyan, the minimum required for a Jewish prayer session, and the number necessary to get God’s attention. Wearing a loose and flowing tie-dyed caftan covered by a black full-length hooded cape, she stood in front of her life-sized sketch of herself, with her back to the witnesses, and danced. Halprin asked a friend, filmmaker Connie Beeson, to film the dance at the last minute. The resulting film document opens with an image of Halprin in her hooded cape, standing before her drawing of a towering monster woman who is nude except for black corset-like armor, high black boots and bikini panties. Halprin begins by kneeling on the floor in front of this drawing and raising her hands upward as she emits a strange guttural groan that grows louder as it rises from deep inside her crouching shrouded form. Halprin called Beeson’s film record Exorcism and she also referred to it later as her “Dark Side Dance,” naming it literally for the drawing she had made of her malevolent and repressed hidden side. In battling with the sexualized hidden side of herself the Dark Side dance depicts, Halprin literalized the common metaphor that cancer is a fight waged inside one’s own body (Sontag 1990, 15). It is not difficult to read a highly eroticized female into the image of a dominatrix-like woman Halprin has drawn, someone who scripts and choreographs dangerous sexual encounters. If cancer, as Sontag asserts, is conceptualized as a disease that is the result of the wages of repression, then this Dark side dance unleashed waves of pent-up feelings. The film is difficult to watch: Halprin howls, shrieks and sobs at her own image while intoning “Kaddish,” the Jews’ ancient Aramaic prayer for the
Figure 8.1 Anna dancing before her self portrait (by permission of Anna Halprin).
Illness as danced urban ritual 145 dead. In essence, the one praying in Kaddish is holding an audience with God, and at the conclusion of the prayer one is supposed to step back respectfully, signaling an end to this act of holding God’s attention as a witness. Halprin’s emotional outpouring is raw and unmediated. As she recites the sacred prayer text of Jewish funeral services that asks God to remember and hold dear the departed, her hands claw desperately at the air. The funeral seems, to her, to be her “dark side” of ego satisfaction, carnal pleasures and vanity and she is anguished by the act of releasing it as she tries symbolically to flush this part of her character and the cancer out of her body. Even though it was a private dance ritual about cancer, it was also a lens into social views of the disease in mid-1970s America. “When I did it I was overwhelmed by the release of rage and anger. I kept stabbing at myself and howling like a wounded animal,” Halprin wrote later. “Witnesses said it sounded like I spoke in tongues” (Kaplan 1995, 66), she also said, supporting the trope of channeling a side that has not been allowed to speak. Halprin’s rectal cancer and her surgery presented her with the ultimate challenge to her faith in the body as the basis of performance truth. One of the prevalent beliefs about cancer in the 1970s was that it was a malady caused by “insufficient passion,” and a “result of the wages of repression” (Sontag 1990, 21). By detonating emotions, Halprin was purging herself of repressed feelings and, she hoped, the disease itself. Halprin had discovered the performative and salubrious qualities of dancing near death. Her cancer went into spontaneous remission, spurred, she believed, by this intensive visualization and physical enactment of its destruction. The supposed incurability of rectal cancer made her dance-activated remission all the more remarkable. Borrowing from a wide range of aesthetic and therapeutic traditions, she imagined the cancerous part of her body cleansed by flowing waters. When she finished dancing she felt drained, and also strangely purified. One month later Halprin saw her doctor, who ran several tests and determined that the bleeding had stopped. In 1975, after two more years without symptoms, she was pronounced cancer-free. Ann marked her return to health after her 1972 surgery by changing her name to Anna, as a way of returning closer to her given name of Hannah. During her three-year experience with cancer, Halprin had read about alternative medical and healing practices, both ancient and contemporary, and across a wide range of cultures. She was locating her role now as an instigator of communal rites and her work as community ritual. Years later, summing up her invention of this mode of urban ritual Halprin defined it as the constitution of a community specifically focused on healing and repair: Ritual is another word that needs a new definition. The dictionary places its emphasis on the more traditional religious rites and this can be misleading. Ritual, as I use the term, refers to an artistic process by which people gather and unify themselves in order to confront the
146 Janice Ross challenges of their existence. In this definition, ritual dance can be a transformative force in healing. Art is an idiosyncratic form, but unlike ritual, healing is not always its primary intention. (Halprin 2002, 157) With her daughter Daria Halprin she co-founded the Tamalpa Institute in Kentfield, California, in 1976. Daria describes Tamalpa as an important developmental link bridging the emotional and psychological elements stirred up in Halprin’s dance teaching of the mid-1970s when the need for a stronger structure emerged. “I felt so strongly that the ways in which the work had been so provocative needed to be reframed,” Daria said. “There needed to be a more conscientious responsibility taken for the places participants were being taken. The result, which took many years of tumultuous confrontations and transformations, was a real training program and a successful ‘grounding’ of Halprin’s absolutely unique experimental work,” Daria said, describing in essence a workshop for training ritual-makers. “Tamalpa led to the reconciliation and ‘proper’ bridging between life and art that was Halprin’s original vision and hope.” Halprin’s teaching practice, begun 30 years earlier as an anti-establishment gesture, was now institutionalized. Systematizing her experience as an emotional methodology, Halprin identified and taught a five-part process to aid others in “looking at their dark side.” She now had the credentials of a shaman for the terminally ill, and what had started as her personally desperate and spontaneous reaction to her own illness was now recycled as a patterned process others could trace. The “Halprin Life-Art Process,” a formula for the ritualistic use of dance for healing was born. Most importantly, however, Halprin’s emotional journey to her own heart of darkness signaled an important aesthetic breakthrough. She had envisioned and performed her vulnerable self, the monstrous side that is usually repressed in each of us. Margaret Shildrick has identified this contact with the liminal in each individual as “embodying the monster,” a practice of acknowledging the insecurity at the borders that frame normative identity (Shildrick 2002, 3). “Monsters evoke opposition to the paradigms of a humanity that is marked by self possession,” Shildrick explains. “The monster is not just abhorrent, it is also enticing, a figure that calls to us and invites recognition” (5). Halprin’s dark side figure was her monster within, enticing in its open sexuality. For a dancer, the monstrous is associated with physical disfigurement and illness, changes to the corporeal self the dancer cannot control in a life premised on willful physical control. In her Exorcism solo, Halprin sought to exorcise the malevolent half of herself through a dance performed by her new surgically disfigured body. She was using this dance to mark the transformation of her once healthy body into one that was diseased, damaged, broken. This is the body, Shildrick cautions us, which forces itself into our consciousness, and perception, as “other” (Shildrick 2002, 49). Historically
Illness as danced urban ritual 147 moral deficiency has been linked with non-normative bodies (Shildrick 2002, 52). In addressing her recurrence of cancer, Halprin traces this link in reverse, reclaiming, through a spontaneous choreography of the grotesque, new moral strength in her dramatically altered form. One of the realities of Halprin’s post-colostomy body is the possibility of real leakiness, a terms that also has strong metaphorical associations with bodily degradation, vulnerability and with the advent of HIV/AIDS, danger. Halprin used these extreme challenges as additional corporeal knowledge to be assimilated into her conception of dance teaching and performance. She was inaugurating a radical practice that would eventually grow into the major concern of her post-Cancer decades – the acceptance of a different body, the body re-contoured by disease, as the subject, the medium and the messenger of her dance. Halprin reported having had a vision when she was convalescing from her cancer surgery. She was lying in her bed overlooking the redwood trees in her yard when a black raven flew in and sat on her bed. In Jewish legend this bird is the herald of death, and Halprin, feeling that he had come to take her, began to protest. She insisted that she still had work to do and the bird agreed to let her stay if she devoted herself to using dance to promote personal, social and environmental harmony (Kaplan 1995, 184). As a ritual offering she would begin with Citydance and then, by 1986, settle in to an annual public healing rite she called Circle the Earth as her gift for her life having been spared. This was the key to the most critical link between Halprin’s having been a cancer patient and the shift in the kind of dance events she created afterward. Most critically, Halprin had recovered a meaning in life through this bargain she made with death’s messenger, the crow. While physicians’ viewpoints and popular belief divulge widely on the role visualization and optimism play in healing, the one point on which they agree is that those who manage an illness like cancer most successfully do so by using it to find meaning in their lives. Halprin used her cancer to find meaning in her dance as well. Citydance was the first installment of that reconnaissance. It would be another five years before Halprin found a social issue around which she was again compelled to construct a public dance. In the meantime, she continued her workshop classes and, in October 1978, assembled a group of 28 workshop participants and staff and initiated the first ten-week intensive training program the Dancers’ Workshop had offered. Halprin had received funding from the NEA’s Expansion Arts program to train her Multiracial Company members as teachers who, she hoped, would return to their communities and teach. The Training Program, as it was called, met for eight hours a day, five days a week at the Halprins’ Kentfield home and dance deck. Classes continued on Yom Kippur and Thanksgiving, with special prayer and food rituals incorporated into the activities on these days. Not just the duration, but also the content of these sessions was intense, and Halprin, Daria, Jasmine Nash, Norma Leistiko and G. Soto Hoffman took
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turns leading the 24 participants through scoring, visualizations, warrior dances, and more, moving from a concern with self to relationships and finally groups. One morning in the middle of the fifth week of the workshop it was Halprin’s turn to teach. Halprin announced her theme as “Relationships through looking at bodies.” When the group assembled at 10 a.m. she stepped forward matter-of-factly, removed her clothes and showed the assembled students and staff her colostomy opening in her navel (Park 1979, 108). Although she no longer had pain from her surgery, Halprin was still in the process of reclaiming her injured body as her medium of teaching, and this full disclosure of its external wounds was as much for her acceptance of her new self as for giving her students a new way to regard their perfect bodies as unmarked canvases for their art. “I wanted to create a more trusting environment for the women and men,” she said. “I especially wanted to make the women feel they were not sex objects” (Halprin 2004). She was reversing the practice of keeping the diseased and mutilated body of cancer surgery hidden, and making it instead a focus of spectatorship, and thus an art medium once again. Then Halprin turned to the group and asked each of the students to undress and find a partner. “The objective is not to get into your feelings,” she cautioned those who started hugging. “It is to look at your feelings. Notice them, and then go on.” One of the participants, Reverend Sandy Park, documented the workshop; her notes record the curious bluntness of Halprin’s instructions for this surveying of individuals’ bodies. Halprin proceeded to lead the assembled students through a tour, at first visual and then tactile, of each other’s bodies. “Don’t stroke. Touch objectively. Select a hairy spot, or a rough spot. Touch. Hold. Let go. Absorb,” she commanded. “Breathe into your rib cage if you’re anxious” (Park 1979, 108–9). There is an EST-like edge of confrontation and teasing interrogation of one’s most private recesses in the sequences of actions Halprin instructed the participants to follow.1 “Your hand is like a stethoscope. Palm gives information. Take your time. Look at some place you’ve avoided. Touch there. Guys, if you’ve got a hard on that’s fine,” she said (Park 1979, 108). Next, a curious choreography of body parts and a spectatorship of them began as Halprin ordered the men to line up “according to penis size” and the women to “move down the line looking at each penis.” Sounding like a drill sergeant she said, “OK guys, stop chattering. This is an initiation. You won’t get this opportunity again. This is a trust opportunity. Don’t miss it.” The women were then instructed to line up according to “boob size” and it became the men’s turn to eye them and then touch three places on each woman’s body. “You’ve performed a beautiful ritual. Give yourselves a hand,” Halprin said at the conclusion of the exercise. Reminded of this workshop episode in her 80s, Halprin laughed with rare embarrassment. “I was trying to disengage personal sexual response and to free people to work with the body without censoring. I wanted them to
Illness as danced urban ritual 149 begin to appreciate the body objectively. I wanted to neutralize the body,” she said. “I wanted to say ‘look, if I can accept this – you can accept your bodies’ ” (Anna Halprin, interview, January 23, 2004). The body Halprin was seeking acceptance for in this exercise was her own surgically remade one. When we speak of bodies, we are always speaking first of our own and it was her immediate body that Halprin was seeking to reclaim, precisely this part that had disappeared. She had long sought emotional health through dance and now, she was suggesting, a physically repaired body might also be claimed, virtually, through dance. The quest for health, individual and collective, and the acceptance of a diminished body had been launched as a topic of Halprin’s work. It would become, in one way or another, the ritualized subject of every dance she would make for the remainder of her career. In the spring of 1981 Halprin gave the first performance of the communal dance that would come to be known as Circle The Earth, the dance that over the next ten years would become her signature ritualized statement about dance, collectivity and health. In this work Halprin inaugurates a new kind of tourism. She begins to make dances that collectively constitute audiences as witnesses, students of information whose presence serves the performers. This is the inverse of the customary relationship in which the performers provide scopophiliac pleasures to the audience. Instead of untrained dancers, the performers in Halprin’s collective dances of the 1980s were drawn from a less visible segment of society – the ill – and their movement vocabulary was shaped around the task of recovering health. From January 31 to May 2, 1981, Halprin and her husband, Lawrence Halprin, taught a joint series of public dance and environmental workshops at the College of Marin. They focused on involving residents of Marin in movement and environmental awareness that could lead to an art statement about their common vision through performance. Curiously, the participants kept drawing repeated images of Mt. Tamalpais, the central mountain in Marin. The mountain, which towers over the Marin landscape, had been closed to the public earlier in the year after seven women were murdered on its trails and the murderer, dubbed the Trailside Killer by the media, was still at large. The focus among the workshop participants became the enactment of a ritual to reclaim the mountain. On April 10, the In and On the Mountain workshop participants, including several Tamalpa trainees, presented a two-day ceremony/performance that began in the College of Marin Theater in the evening with ritual enactments of the murders, as family members of the dead women watched from the audience. The frame of a formal proscenium theatre was a strange setting for this event, which was visually chaotic and scaled more as an intimate exchange than a large-scale statement for spectators. Although she was using a proscenium setting as her venue, Halprin was already shifting into a mode where the real recipients of this dance experience were the performers themselves. As if confirming this, the performance continued throughout the
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night as the participants slept in a “dream wheel” formation where everyone’s feet pointed toward the center of an imaginary wheel and their heads were positioned outward. The suggestion was that they continued dancing in their sleep, or that the act of sleeping itself could be framed as a section of the performance. The next morning, after a brief “sunrise ceremony,” performers and audience members were bussed to the top of the mountain and they began walking down the trails, leaving offerings at the site of each murder. Someone brought a tree to plant, another brought poetry about the mountain to read, and several members of the Pomo Indian tribe as well as local families with children joined in the freeform dancing downhill. Because the killer was still at large, police and sheriff’s deputies were on the ground and helicopters kept watch from the air, further stretching the scale of the performance into aerial space (and including the criminal justice system). Circumstances would soon suggest it swelled to community space as well. Thirty-six hours after the performance, an anonymous phone call helped police pinpoint the killer and, three days later, he was caught (Halprin 1991b, 9). Without this final act, Halprin’s In and On The Mountain might have remained just a broad dramatic gesture. But she found it difficult to dismiss the suggestion of a causal link between the dance, the tip and the capture. “I have never said we caught the killer,” Halprin said, acknowledging it was not that the dance had magical qualities, but rather that “the dance focused the mental intention of the community toward solving the problem” (Paludan 1994, 298). From these unsolved murders of several strangers, to one’s own impending death, Halprin’s collective dances were focused on harnessing this deep attention. Soon she would be seeking means for turning it toward visions of cellular battles with cancer and AIDS. Later that summer, when Don Jose Mitsuwa, a 106-year-old Huichol Indian shaman, visited Tamalpa Institute to present a deer dance, Halprin asked him about a possible link between the dance and the capture of the murderer. Mitsuwa told Halprin there was a connection and that mountains were among the most sacred places on earth but that the rite she and her students had done needed to be repeated for five more years in order to complete the purification. Halprin complied and the repeat performances, Thanksgiving (1982), Return to the Mountain (1983), Run to the Mountain (1984) and Circle the Mountain (1986), each focused on the theme of life against death and each one did so by enacting outdoors the big emotions of loss, recovery, and reconciliation. Halprin had been on a quest for more authentic art and in the process she had arrived, quizzically, at a sure formula for ritual. “As a choreographer who has been making dances most of my life, this has become my challenge and personal criterion: to make it simpler and simpler for people to experience the fullness of their own nature, the humanity in the movement,” Halprin said after the conclusion of the fifth year performance on the moun-
Illness as danced urban ritual 151 tain (McHugh 1988, 3). Jamie McHugh, who served as Halprin’s assistant from 1986 to 1991, the central years of her Circle The Earth dance that immediately followed these Mt. Tamalpais performances, noted that it was precisely this simplicity and its attendant satisfactions that drew him to her work initially from his background in modern dance. “(Her) simplicity honors the complexity of each person’s individual experience while also connecting them to the power of the group,” he said (McHugh 1988, 3). The “power of the group” McHugh referred to was a critical feature of Halprin’s large cast works, evidence of her engendering what Victor Turner has called the communitas of ritual and which Performance Studies scholar and theatre director Richard Schechner defines as “the experience of group solidarity, usually short-lived, generated during ritual” (Schechner 2002, 62). Although she had been using the word ritual for decades since her Ten Myths in the mid 1960s, it was not until Circle the Earth that Halprin finally found a balance between efficacy and entertainment, the critical dyad Schechner identifies as the polarity on which ritual and the performing arts are constituted. He avers that “it is the purpose of the event that finally tips it more to one side or the other” (Schechner 2002, 71). “Circle the Earth is not a substitute for direct action in the world . . . How people apply this experience in their lives becomes the acid test of its success,” McHugh said, confirming the event’s purpose and the participants’ enactment of it as critical ingredients (McHugh 1988, 4). The same arc that Halprin’s body of work described paralleled the path of the secular into the sacred of late twentieth-century performance. The more Halprin articulated the purpose of Circle the Earth as functional change, the more her means of generating movement aligned with the kinds of attributes Schechner associates with ritual (Schechner 2002, 71). What was new was her use of a deliberately accessible movement vocabulary, the same one that decades earlier as task performance led into post-modern dance and now in the late twentieth century brought her to ritual process, efficacy and what McHugh called performance as “prayer.” Two subsequent events ensured Halprin’s continued allegiance to what she understood as bodily wisdom, and particularly the power of the communal body she constituted through performance, in combating challenges. In 1987 Halprin was invited to work with the Creighton Cancer Support and Education Center, a support group for individuals with cancer in Menlo Park, a suburb 30 miles south of San Francisco. Magdalen (Maggie) Creighton, one of Halprin’s former students from the late 1960s who had founded the Center in 1982, ran the group. Halprin began commuting the 150-mile roundtrip twice a month to work for half a day with a group of patients in Creighton’s facility. For two years she commuted regularly, often visiting her mother at her home in nearby Woodside on her way to the afternoon cancer workshop. At the Center Halprin taught the cancer patients to draw their “dark side” just as she had done in confronting her cancer when it returned.
152 Janice Ross Systematizing her own intuitively shaped response, Halprin led them into finding movement tools for expelling some of their anger and fear about having cancer and for visualizing their body’s resistance. “We were working on the core issue with Halprin” (Maggie Creighton, telephone interview, July 2004). “People were surprised when we wanted them to act things out, to actualize their energy toward healing. But Halprin helped them so much in being able to become aware of how they blocked energy,” she said. Halprin induced each person, no matter how restricted their physical ability, to move in some way, even if only while seated in a wheelchair, so that the body’s capacity for shaping, rather than just being shaped by illness, was activated. “Words didn’t do it – move it out did,” Creighton said. “The patients were actually imagining that they were their white cells assertively destroying cancer” (Maggie Creighton, letter to the author, July 2004). Halprin had come to view her Psychokinetic Visualization process as a contemporary way for people to identify, draft and then purge anxieties about critical illness. She encouraged the cancer patients to release their fears in order to make themselves emotionally available to “the healing power of the flip side of the destructive force” (Paludan 1994, 318). Face death, but choose life was the implicit but steady message. A year after Halprin had begun teaching at Creighton, the Center began a new program, Moving Toward Life, created for Bay Area people who were HIV-positive. The staff at Creighton invited Halprin to start working with this new population, and in late 1988 Halprin began a ten-week pilot movement program just for men and women who were HIV-positive, or who had ARC or AIDS (Ross 1991, 12–13). Not only were the health issues different, but the population of the HIV positive ill contrasted dramatically with the cancer patients at Creighton. Instead of mostly older and middle-aged white women, the AIDS group, which soon became known as the STEPS Theater group, was made up almost exclusively of attractive, fit-looking young men from various racial backgrounds. Most were in their 20s and 30s. For a choreographer, even one as untraditional as Halprin, young men were always the most enticing, but most elusive, population one wanted to work with, and now, as her associate Alan Stinson remarked, men were suddenly calling, begging to work with her (Alan Stinson, interview, 1992). After her first workshop with HIVpositive people Halprin also noted another quality that made this work so rewarding for a dancemaker. “I have found in these groups something I have never found before – 100% commitments,” she said (Ross 1991, 12). She had also found a social issue that needed no justification about its importance. The success was so immediate that by the summer of 1989, 24 men from the workshop accepted Halprin’s invitation to continue after the tenweek pilot project ended. That fall of 1989, under the direction of Halprin, those 24 HIV-positive men formed the first all-AIDS member dance group. They named it Positive Motion. Politicized performance events around AIDS had been a growing practice
Illness as danced urban ritual 153 since the late 1980s, when, as David Gere has documented, the activist group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) which was founded in 1987, initiated a series of public actions designed to prompt the government to speed new drug trials (Gere 2004, 66). Paralleling this activist use of performance to address a chemical cure for AIDS was the emerging practice of private, and often theatrical, funerals and gatherings to memorialize those who were dying from AIDS. The focus here was more on comforting the living than the dying since the majority of these gatherings happened in the wake of the death of a loved one from AIDS. AIDS activist and author Douglas Crimp advocated strongly for more artistic responses, but staged earlier so that they could exploit the arts potential to save lives. Although Crimp’s focus was more the marketing capacity of the arts to create a spectacle to get the attention of those in power, his emphasis on the use of the arts as an activist tool and intervention in the downward spiral of HIV/AIDS diagnosis defined a new use of performance in relationship to AIDS that Halprin’s subsequent workshops would push further into targeted rituals of healing. In late 1988 Halprin learned that Alan Stinson, a local black actor who began studying with her in the mid-1970s, and who had since moved to New York, had been diagnosed as HIV-positive. “When I moved to New York in 1980, Halprin and I kept up our relationship. We wrote back and forth all the time,” Stinson recalled shortly before his death from AIDS in 1993. He described his sense that it was in an effort to understand his illness as well as to learn the distinctive signposts of this disease and how to adapt her cancer workshop model to encompass AIDS, that led Halprin to invite Stinson back to the Bay Area to work with her and her new AIDS workshop. She didn’t know anything about AIDS and HIV. She had no reason to because it had never crossed her life or affected her family. But she began to try to find out things and to understand it because I had it. And she found out that it was around her more than she realized . . . She was getting attention, media attention, phone calls, inquiries. . . . AIDS was hot in the therapeutic sense and so she was pushed, guided and led to it by those kinds of things. (Alan Stinson, interview, 1992) Stinson, with his serene presence and resonant, trained voice, became an important link between Halprin’s 1970s work about individuals marginalized because of race to this new population marginalized because of AIDS. Halprin would eventually form an all women’s group of AIDS patients, most of who were young and had become infected through drug use or bisexual partners. She called the women’s group “Women With Wings.” With both groups it was the larger frame of disease that was her primary focus rather than its identity as a critical issue for gay men. “I find it ironic,” she once remarked, “that physical closeness and touch are usually part of
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what goes on when one contracts AIDS, yet the minute you are diagnosed they are the first things you lose” (Anna Halprin, interview with author, June 30, 1992). On June 16, 1990 after nearly a year of weekly evening classes, Positive Motion made its debut at Theater Artaud, a small alternative space in one of San Francisco’s renovated warehouses. Their first time in the theatre Andy Wilson films a spontaneous “rant.” Halprin cries out to the men assembled around her and to the cavernous space of the empty stage behind them: I thought I got rid of all the decorations and all the bullshit and tidilywinks that went with this goddam type of theater. I’m very angry. And I didn’t know I felt like that. And I don’t know how to transform this. So it’s up to you and it’s up to you and it’s up to you. To be so goddam good. To be so real, real. To be so together. And to be so what-it-is-youare-here-for. And what it is you have to do for yourself. And what it is you have to say to someone else. And what it is that you feel. And what it is that you think. And what it is your spirit tells you. That we’re just going to bust this fucking place wide open and make it alive with some kind of fucking life! I can’t stand this black box! (Halprin 1991c) While Halprin was clearly angered at the sterile neutrality of the blackdraped space she was also, intuitively or deliberately, modeling for the men precisely the kind of authenticity-in-the-moment she wanted them to display. Particularly with a disease with as many social prohibitions and containment strategies as AIDS, teaching people how to peel back to the layer of true feelings and then to disclose this publicly required an enormous leap. She was showing them that she could jump first. The 14 men in the group, supported by musicians Jules Beckman and Norman Rutherford, offered an hour-long performance, Carry Me Home. This dance developed out of the men’s workshop experiences of their struggle to come to terms with death in their twenties. A 45-minute documentary film of the rehearsals and performance chronicles the journey of this group of articulate, impassioned men from residents of bodies in crisis to compatriots in a new community of hope. Halprin guides the men through her customary sequence of voicing, drawing and moving their sentiments about having the AIDS virus. Over the first seven months of the workshop, which the video records, many of the men become progressively weaker and Halprin gently accommodates them. At one session she teaches the entire eveninglong workshop with the men all lying flat on the floor, their interactions quieted to slow sliding on their backs as she instructs them to connect and move past each other “like water over a stone” (Wilson 1991). There is dance in all movement for Halprin here and the virtuosity resides in the depth of the performer’s candor in acknowledging what his body cannot do rather than straining past what it can.
Illness as danced urban ritual 155 Carry Me Home marked one of Halprin’s rare returns to the formal constraints of traditional theatrical space in the middle decades of her career, and it was not an easy fit. In particular, she must have felt the irony that she was back in the theatre now only because the subject of men with AIDS performing was radical for the venue – whereas in the past she had used sites that made the venue radical for her subjects. As a work of dance theatre, Carry Me Home never really transcended the hard facts of its subject – the men themselves and their insurmountable life-and-death health issues. Instead it inaugurated a theatre of illness where being present and watching made one a witness whose presence allowed public confession rather the spectatorship of judgment. Halprin’s 1960s experiments with participatory spectatorship were coming full circle. The participants now arrived with the issues that needed to be addressed and Halprin’s task was to shape a movement theatre that allowed this. “We don’t need a cultural renaissance; we need cultural practices actively participating in the struggle against AIDS,” Crimp said. “We don’t need to transcend the epidemic; we need to end it” (Gere 2004, 142). At the same time she was working with the Positive Motion workshop Halprin continued her annual spring ritual, Circle The Earth. Influenced by her new work with the AIDS group at Creighton, she decided to change Circle The Earth, in 1989, its fifth year, into a public ritual by and about individuals with AIDS and Cancer. Thus, Circle the Earth: Dancing With Life on The Line was born. Participants have remarked on the uncanny correspondence that emerged between feelings and forms in the movement images the group spontaneously generated. Jamie McHugh has written of the “chillingly strong archetype” of a battlefield a group of students at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado produced in a workshop Halprin taught there with the score for the Monster Dance from Circle The Earth: We were to hold up our partner’s drawing of their monster as they advanced toward us in their dance of ugliness, anger, rage and darkness, and then comfort and restore them after this confrontation. As I held my partner in the aftermath, amidst the tears and sobbing, I felt myself slipping back through time, back through all the many battlefields in history. I imagined the wailing and keening of women the world over, grieving for dead sons and lovers and fathers and brothers . . . That all of this would emerge through a simple movement structure was very new and exciting for me. (Jamie McHugh, telephone interview, July 2004) McHugh describes Circle the Earth as a ritual that recreates a dual sense of what he calls tribal and dance experience, “recreate(ing) ancient consciousness in a contemporary being” (Jamie McHugh, telephone interview, July 2004). From 1986 to 1991 Circle the Earth was consistently structured as a
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gathering of 100 people for nine days during which time they collaboratively generated the performance’s score or roadmap. “(T)he score for the week shakes up each person’s feelings to a fizz, throws us into more intimacy than we would choose on our own, and uses the pressure of a scheduled performance to help us loose our individual self-importance and focus on our common goal while still honoring our own feelings,” said one participant about the experience (McHugh 1991). AIDS was still a relatively hidden issue in 1989 and Halprin’s spectacle of a performance by people with AIDS confronting their disease was one of the first of its kind in a genre historian David Gere has come to call AIDS Dance. Halprin had become a tour guide to the kingdom of the sick, a specialist in this performance category of her own invention, one that might be called “the tourism of sickness.” Reshaping her own path from illness into remission as the detailed itinerary for a journey anyone could take, and that all would eventually make, Halprin’s Circle The Earth became the most often performed dance of her career. Since 1988 Halprin had offered free preparatory workshops to the public each year, inviting large groups of individuals to design a community myth, which they filled out through drawing, writing, talking and dancing in partner and group work. Because the results are so highly individual and idiosyncratic, it is not possible to designate any one occasion as a typical performance, yet the score that sets it all in motion has been remarkably constant from year to year.2 Halprin has described her aesthetic achievement in Circle the Earth as “shaping a dance of necessity” (Halprin 1991b, 6). Perhaps more importantly, however, she had created a danced pedagogy of illness. Many performing artists had commuted from the realm of the therapeutic to that of the artistic; now Halprin was transporting the exotic cargo of illness into the center of the post-modern dance tradition. Halprin’s tools remained resolutely pedagogic in this regard. Like her mentor Margaret H’Doubler, she wrote numerous statements about her process, the majority of them manuals for how to teach these public rituals. Now, however, it was the imaginative as well as real landscape of the body that Halprin led her participants through. The destinations were understanding, acceptance, possibly even remission, and the means was performance. Schechner, a longtime friend of Halprin’s, once challenged her about this causal linking of dance with recovery in a 1989 interview: Richard Schechner: But I want to know when you ask people to come together, is it in order to enjoy dancing, making dances, or is it to “change the world?” Halprin: I don’t know the answer to this question yet. We are engaged in an experiment and we are by no means finished with it. (Schechner 1989, 72)
Illness as danced urban ritual 157 In conversation several years later, Schechner expanded on this issue. “It becomes suspect when you think individual actions can change structural action. Certain artists want to make the world better. When you make the world better through art, you change individuals, but you can’t make these big claims,” he said. The more defensible contribution Halprin made through this work around performance and disease, Schechner suggests, is the way in which it questions and challenges that there is only one kind of required body for dance. “She helped shift the focus from the body to the person,” he said. “Every person has a body and uses it. In ballet you choreograph onto the body. There is no agency. Halprin made the person” (Richard Schechner, interview, April 2002). Halprin had pursued a transformation of the dancing body into the prosaic body and then looped it back into a new performing body. In the process she fed a late twentieth century desire for a dance where the life of art was contiguous with – life.
Notes 1 EST, which stands for Erhard Seminar Training, was a large group awareness training program developed by Werner Erhard and very popular in the 1970s. 2 Halprin has described the 11 scores that make up Circle The Earth as follows: Circle the Earth is a series of moving ceremonies and prayers in the tradition of a dance ritual. It is comprised of eleven scores, each with its own intention. PREPARATION . . . Peace Meditation coming into mutual alignment. I AM THE EARTH . . . we birth ourselves. VORTEX DANCE . . . we create a group identity. MONSTER DANCE . . . we evoke and confront the destructive forces within us. RESTORATION . . . we heal our wounds and restore our lives. BRIDGES AND PASSAGEWAYS . . . we create a pathway to Peace. THE EARTH RUN . . . we offer the planet our commitment to Peace. PEACE WHEELS . . . we create a wheel of harmony. BIRD TRANSFORMATION . . . we send word of what we have learned and created to the whole planet. PEACE BIRD AND COMMITMENT . . . Celebration. Performers and Witnesses join. (Halprin 1991b, 10)
Bibliography Copeland, Roger (2004) Merce Cunningham: The Modernizing of Modern Dance. New York, Routledge. Gere, David (2004) How to Make Dances in an Epidemic. Madison, University of Wisconsin. Halprin, Anna (1991a) “Dance as a self-healing art: working with people challenging HIV and cancer.” Address to the American Dance Association, unpublished manuscript. –––– (1991b) “Circle the Earth, Myth and Ritual Through Dance and the Environment,” unpublished manuscript. –––– (1991c) Positive Motion: Challenging AIDS Through Dance and Ritual. Transcribed text from a film directed by Andy Abrahams-Wilson, produced b y the Center for Visual Anthropology and Abrahams-Wilson Productions.
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–––– (2002) Returning to Health with Dance, Movement and Imagery. Mendocino, LifeRhythm Books. –––– (2004) Note to author, June 23. Kaplan, Rachel (ed.) (1995) Moving Toward Life: Five Decades of Transformational Dance. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press. Landy, Robert J. (1985) Drama Therapy Concepts and Practices. Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas. Leath, A.A. (2004) Letter to Janice Ross. McCarren, Felicia (1998) Dance Pathologies: Performance, Poetics, Medicine. Stanford: Stanford University Press. McHugh, Jamie (1988) “Circle the earth: dancing with purpose.” Dance (February): 1. –––– (1991) “Circle the Earth: dancing with life on the line,” San Francisco Sentinel. Paludan, Marcia M. (1994) Expanding the Circle: Anna Halprin and Contemporary Theater Practice. Unpublished manuscript. Park, S. (1979) San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop Training Program 1978 Documentation. Unpublished manuscript. Postel, Allan, H.W.R.N.G. and Localio, S. Arthur (1965) “Training the patient in the bulb syringe method of colostomy irrigation: a manual for nurses,” Rehabilitation Monograph XXVI, The Institute of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, New York University Medical Center. Ross, Janice (1991) “Anna Halprin: a performance response to AIDS,” Dance USA/Journal 9/1, 12–13. Roth, Moira (1998) “The Aesthetic of Indifference,” in Moira Roth (ed.) Difference/indifference: Musings on Postmodernism, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage. Amsterdam: G⫹B Arts International. Schechner, Richard (1989) “Anna Halprin: A Life in Ritual,” The Drama Review 33: 67–73. –––– (2002) Performance Studies: An Introduction. New York: Routledge. Shildrick, M. (2002) Embodying the Monster Encounters with the Vulnerable Self. London: SAGE Publications. Sontag, Susan (1990) Illness as Metaphor and Aids and its Metaphors. New York: Anchor Books. Torgovnick, Marianna (1990) Gone Primitive Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Turner, Victor (1982) “Liminal to liminoid in play, flow, ritual,” in Victor Turner (ed.) From Ritual to Theatre. The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ Publications, pp. 20–60. Wilson, Andy Abrahams (1991) “Positive motion: challenging AIDS through dance and ritual,” video, Sausalito, Calif.: Abrahams-Wilson Productions.
9
Post-colonial torture Rituals of viewing at Abu Ghraib Catherine M. Soussloff
But our purpose is in any case to show that torture, as might well be expected, upsets most profoundly the personality of the person who is tortured. (Fanon 1963, 252)
Introduction This chapter addresses the historical and visual situations of the photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, which were made public in late April and early May of 2004.1 The historical analysis of the visual material necessitates the reproduction of some of the images and the difficulty of viewing these photographs emerges in various ways throughout this chapter. Accepting both the culturally determined belief that photographs bear visual witness to actual events that occurred in the past, thereby obliging the viewer to take account of that past in ways that differ from responses to representations in other media; and that the medium of photography has the power to wound us in the present with its distinctively indexical representation of the past, I recognize the power of the visual representation of the events at Abu Ghraib to “prick” or wound me in the present, some two years since the events of torture depicted occurred, and more than a year since they first became public.2 In this sense they make me another kind of victim. That they wound each time I view them means that I cannot ignore them, although others have argued that reproducing, reviewing, and analyzing them somehow legitimates them and endorses their subject matter.3 My exploration of the effects of the photographs of the tortures perpetrated upon Iraqi detainees by agents of the U.S. occupation of Iraq relies on their “performativity,” on their potential as transformers of our historical consciousness. I ask questions of the photographs based on my knowledge specialty, as an expert in art history and visual studies, trained to analyze and interpret images for others. Specifically, I ask how the visual analysis of images, a form of inquiry cultivated by the discipline of art history in the scholarly community, transfers via the interpretation of photographs of torture to an exploration of the institutional context of prison abuse in the
160 Catherine M. Soussloff war and disaster culture of Iraq. Thinking of art historical methods and knowledge as constructed for “viewing rituals,” traditionally understood to be bounded by the walls of the university and the museum, what happens when these habits of viewing and analysis are employed to analyze images of torture, which testify to other boundaries, e.g., the walls of prisons, detention centers, and, indeed of my own imagination? Put another way, how do art historians and experts in the visual culture of photographs contend with the extraordinary power of photographs to wound as well as to move, inspire, evoke, or disturb? Can the viewing specialist, e.g., the art historian, help to change the way we see the Abu Ghraib photographs, thereby effecting changes in the cultural situation that produced them?
The viewing situation The photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib that have been released to the public have been seen and discussed, both singly and as a group, in a wide variety of contemporary print and digital media with varying degrees of indignation, disgust, and speculation.4 Anyone can download them from the Internet. Artist Richard Serra used the image of the so-called “hooded man on a box” in a painting that served as a poster design for the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election, showing how the Abu Ghraib archive could be deployed to seek political change against Bush’s Republican administration. The International Center of Photography in New York City exhibited the photographs in September 17–November 28, 2004 (Inconvenient Evidence). The call for papers for a conference in Great Britain, “The Barbarisation of Warfare,” quoted the image in shadow behind the printed notice. Here the “hooded man on the box” represents barbarism visualized, indicating the significance of the events at Abu Ghraib – not even named in the text of the poster design – for our contemporary understanding of all acts of violence by humans against their fellows. “And the spectacle itself,” states the collective Retort in regard to these photographs, is in the process of mutation. A new round of technical innovation has made alienation-into-a-realm-of-images a pervasive, banal, constantly selfadministered reality. The dystopian potential of such an apparatus is sufficiently clear. But in the present circumstances it has at least the benign side-effect of making control of the spectacle by the state – the kind of short-term and absolute control of imagery that is a necessity of war and occupation, as opposed to the tendential and structural “management” of appearances appropriate to peacetime – truly hard to maintain. (Retort 2005, 187) Taking the most ubiquitous of all of these images, the “hooded man on the box,” as the frontispiece for their recent book Afflicted Powers, Retort uses
Figure 9.1 “Hooded Man on the Box,” Abu Ghraib Prison, Iraq (public domain).
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Figure 9.2 Tellett, “The Barbarization of Warfare” (photo: Janine Tellett, University of Wolverhampton).
this visual archive of torture in contemporary culture as a sign and a symbol of the current character of the spectacle. They do not, however, engage with the image itself: in its specific significance as witness to the materiality, performance, symbolism, and memory of torture. However much the seductions – and I use this word purposefully – of the photographs from Abu Ghraib prison may draw us to the consideration of a breakdown of the spectacle’s power in the hand of the State, I maintain that they also keep us on this level of analysis from a direct engagement with torture itself. In what follows I want to try to hold onto the memory of torture, in all its meanings, in part because these photos threaten to make it illusory, elusive and, as Retort claims, “banal,” a charge that could be turned against the treatment of the photographs by the very same authors. This slipping away, or evacuation of the meaning of torture in these photographs should be seen as more nuanced, and yes, more insidious than a theory of the spectacle currently allows, for it goes to the very specificity of the act of torture in its history at Abu Ghraib prison, the site of innumerable torture events beginning long before the arrival of the Americans. When speaking
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Figure 9.3 “Stop Bush” (© 2006 Richard Serra/Artists Rights Society, New York).
of the photographs, we should not forget that the events of torture depicted in them took place against a backdrop and, one presumes, with instruments designed long ago for this very purpose. The recent book, One Woman’s Army by Brigadier General Janis Karpinski of the Military Police, Army Reserve, formerly the commanding officer in charge of all detention centers and prisons in Iraq, makes this clear. Upon her arrival in Baghdad in June 2003, she and her immediate team assessed the Abu Ghraib site as loaded with memories of torture, both for the Iraqis and for the occupiers. For this reason
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and others she insisted Abu Ghraib be designated an “interim” prison facility (Karpinski 2005, 183–205). To date, that recommendation has been ignored. It has been pointed out, more than once, that what makes the torture at Abu Ghraib distinctive – perhaps even singular – are not the events of torture that took place in the prison, but the photographs that emerged from, i.e., made visible, those events.5 This is an erroneous and dangerous statement, as we shall see, but it warrants some consideration. Historically, many states, even democratic ones, have avoided documentary photographs of the activities of their police and military, forbidding, for example, prison photographs by journalists working independently in war and occupation zones. Yet, at the same time, there exists a venerable tradition in documentary photography and journalism of “reportage” photographs taken during open warfare or street rebellions. With the Iraq War the U.S. government presented a new twist affecting both traditions, i.e., open journalistic access during war and closed access to prisons and detention centers, by insisting on the “embedding” of journalists, including photographers, in military units in order to control the circulation of images coming out of the country. The very existence of non-sanctioned photographic images from this zone of operation makes the Abu Ghraib images extremely significant: they are both prison photographs and non-sanctioned images direct from the “theater of war.” As Bruno Chalifour has recently suggested, most reportage photographs, particularly “their epitome, war photographs and films,” offer the situational “this happens” together with the affective and admonishing, “this should be changed.”6 A prime example of this function of the war photograph would be Robert Capra’s famous images of the Spanish Civil War, meant to mobilize others into action.7 Similarly, John Tagg argued that all documentary photographs bear a particularly strong “burden of representation” (Tagg 1988). By this he meant that in their viewing action becomes incumbent upon the viewer. Photographs of atrocities have historically demanded “more” of the viewer than other kinds of documentary work. Photographs of war crimes, lynching, and now, torture are performative, in that they call the viewer into action, but they are also traumatic in that the traumas represented in them persist through the affectivity of the medium. With such photographs performativity requires trauma for its effectivity. The photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib, taken from approximately October–December of 2003, preceded almost all public commentary and analysis of torture by the U.S. government and/or its agents.8 The release of the photographs produced allegations of torture at Abu Ghraib and at other contemporary U.S. controlled sites of detention, particularly Guantanamo. These allegations, accompanied by calls for investigations, continue. The Abu Ghraib images poured into the world where their status, effects, and significance quickly became the subject of intense debate. The visual record of the torture events at Abu Ghraib, therefore, stands outside the archive of
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other kinds of reportage and trauma photographs for three reasons: 1) the lack of prior visual and interpretational contexts for the photographs, which contributed to the shock that torture produces in the viewer; 2) the lack of public knowledge of the events of torture at Abu Ghraib before the release and repetitions of the photographs in the media; 3) the explicit address – in the form of gesture and stagings – made visible in the photographs to the putative viewer(s) by the perpetrators of torture at Abu Ghraib. Although the photographs supposedly led to the “discovery” of the conditions of incarceration at Abu Ghraib, the growing number of first person accounts by participants at the scenes of torture depicted in the photographs – at least in military court rooms and in memoirs such as Karpinski’s – and interpretations of the photos by reviewers of the reports, documents, and findings to which the photographs appear to refer, do not engage with the actuality of torture and of its memory inscribed in the photographs. In the case of the former, the participant-perpetrators, the evacuation of torture may well be tied to a conscious need to deny in order to defend against punishments that the admission of knowledge would bring. Certainly, this has been the case for Karpinski. But in the case of the latter, the interpretation of the photographs in the reports, documents, journalism, and academic writing that have ensued since the photographs were published, there exists no consensus on the use made of the photographs, on the exact circumstances of their discovery, or on the exact nature of the events that they depict. Were these photographs of actual torture, or were they “show” tortures, e.g., were they documents or instructional materials? Were these photographs designed by Other Government Agencies (OGAs), presumably the CIA, to instruct less well-trained reservists and regular army in the techniques of torture for information? Were these photographs desperate calls for help by the perpetrators shown in some of them, who allegedly circulated them to their friends and families, both in Iraq and back home? Were these photographs pornographic in intent, meant to arouse through their display? Were these photographs deliberate acts of an insidious racism, designed to be shown to other Iraqi prisoners in order to psychologically humiliate them, rather than to physically abuse them? To begin with such questions only keeps us from the pictures themselves. Retort calls the photographs “shrouded in mystery” – a loaded phrase not only metonymic of the image of “the hooded man on the box,” but more significantly, a phrase used consistently since the nineteenth century to characterize the elusive qualities of Leonardo’s painting of the Mona Lisa, a portrait with no easily discernible or single historical referent.9 Like the woman portrayed in the painting, the exact identity of “the hooded man on the box” remains mysterious or unknown, even though the image is seen. In contrast, however, photography’s power as a medium has been said to lie in its ability to represent actual events, e.g. its purported exact indexicality to a past event.10 The powerful affective responses photography elicits from the
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viewer rely on the cultural belief in “an evidential force” of the photograph (Barthes 1981, 88–9). In most cases, then, the affectivity of a photograph relies on the viewer’s belief in the photograph as visual document of an actual event that has been, so to speak, captured by light.11 The Abu Ghraib photographs clearly demean and humiliate – and to deny this is to be insensitive to the Iraqi society from which the detainees came and to which they may someday return – but many ambiguities remain, including the unclear circumstances of their so-called “discovery.” Discovery is another art historical trope used when speaking of the revelation of a lost or previously unknown masterpiece. But what exactly was revealed with these photographs? How had they been “lost?” The ambiguities I point to here keep the reader and the viewer from considering the exact historical situation of torture in Iraq by Americans in 2004.
The analysis of torture Therefore, I begin my analysis of the photographs with the acceptance of torture as an event and with Frantz Fanon’s contention, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, that the victim of torture suffers profound and enduring psychic wounds as a result of physical torture, and that this suffering surpasses that of the torturer, who may also suffer such wounds. The Wretched of the Earth (1963), a tractatus on the political theory of torture and empire, was based on case studies of patients Fanon treated in analysis in Algeria in the late 1950s. Fanon brought a public, political significance to bear upon the effects of torture that had been revealed in the private therapeutic sessions between the psychoanalyst and his patients. To my knowledge he was the first to do so. And yet, in all of the writing on the torture photographs of Abu Ghraib, Fanon’s work and his book are nowhere invoked. It will be too easy, or too glib, to say that the call to rebellion with which The Wretched of the Earth concludes presents too many risks for the appropriation of Fanon’s theory of torture today, even for commentators on the Left. I contend that Fanon’s absence in discussions of Abu Ghraib torture is itself a sign of the desires that torture exacerbates, and about which the Marquis de Sade knew so much: the desire for the body, for the horrors of degradation of other human beings, for a distance from us of what has happened over there to them (de Sade 1965). Fanon’s discussion of torture and torturers in Algeria in the 1950s bears much comparison with Abu Ghraib: a long and complex history of colonization and occupation by a European power, the exploitation of cheap labor and natural resources in the Mediterranean region, the militarized occupying state that pretends to be desirous of democracy and freedom for the conquered, the racism towards Africans and Arabs, the intolerance of Christians for non-Christians, the chaotic period just before and during open rebellion. The legitimation of torture by the French military in Algeria was seen as “a necessary method in the type of war France was waging,” i.e., a war against liberation.12 The historical appropriateness
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of Fanon’s Algeria for our understanding of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the insurgency, and the events of torture at Abu Ghraib, however, cannot be explored if the questions asked are about anything other than torture, for Fanon insists that it is the very effects of torture over time, torture’s memory, that can bring freedom to Algeria for Algerians, that will stop torturers from torturing. In coming to his conclusions regarding the effects of torture over time, Fanon treated victims and perpetrators, Maghrebians and Europeans, rebels and colonialists. Fanon called these aftereffects of torture “reactional disorders.” Although not yet named in Fanon’s time, more recent authorities understand “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder” (PTSD) to be a reactional disorder that follows from the “prolonged mental harm” caused by torture.13 In this timely sense, the prolongation of the event of torture persists over time in what I will call here its torturing effects. As a medical doctor, Fanon treated the torturing effects of the event of torture in both victims and perpetrators. These effects could emerge at any time after the event, as they did in the case of a former militant in a newly independent African country who suffered insomnia, anxiety, and “suicidal obsessions” each year on the date that he had planted a bomb that caused the fatality of ten people (Fanon 1963, 253). As Fanon wrote, these effects may also be characterized as persistent and obviously wounding to the individual’s psyche and to those who interact with it: “These are disorders which persist for months on end, making a mass attack against the ego, and practically always leaving as their sequel a weakness which is almost visible to the naked eye” (Fanon 1963, 252). With Fanon, I also accept both the historical nature and the public character of the event of torture: even as the physical manifestations of past events subside, torture’s effects exist in the present and their “almost visible” extend into the future, just as the effects of the photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib may be felt each time upon their viewing.14 Because these enduring psychic aftereffects link us to the event of torture, they are vital to the specificity of the physical situation. The historical and public effects of torture guarantee the possibility, if not the necessity, of “knowing” the event. Yet that knowledge comes at great cost to all those involved in its acquisition. In fact, the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment as implied by Sections 2340–2340A of title 18 of the United States Code considers “prolonged mental harm” to be one of the identified aspects of “severe mental pain or suffering” that defines and may be used to legally determine torture (Greenberg and Dratel 2005, 178). After the event of torture, in the present and in the future, torture represents itself in a series of psychological ramifications of a traumatic past. But as Fanon also knew and argued in The Wretched of the Earth, those psychological states could not be separated from the State(s) that had endorsed the torture event and the actions of the political subjects who had endured and perpetuated the events. They cannot be separated, then, from us.
168 Catherine M. Soussloff This last observation brings into focus the public nature of the event of torture, even as it admits of its private aftereffects upon the individual’s psyche. Historians agree that the semantic history of the term torture always signifies a “public dimension,” as Edward Peters argued in his book on torture (Peters 1985, 3–10). Furthermore, although torture had been abolished as a legal practice in criminal law in Europe by the beginning of the nineteenth century – before then it had been used legally as a method of obtaining information – it re-appeared by the century’s end in the colonized territories of the European states, such as Algeria. Historian Pierre VidalNaquet stated: “Torture was a feature of the conquest of Algeria between 1830 and 1871; and has since been used whenever there has been a crisis in the colonial system” (Vidal-Naquet 1963, 23). There, it was practiced by police and military authorities, rather than by the judicial branches of government; “less regulated than legal procedure, less observed, but no less essential to the state’s notion of order” (Peters 1985, 7). In Fanon’s Algeria, torture was practiced by officials but not as official policy.15 In many ways the use of torture on the colonized, non-European subjects requires comparison to the uses of torture in ancient times. In Athens if the testimony of slaves was demanded and the demand accepted, it had to be extracted by means of torture in order to be evidential because slaves were not deemed able to exercise the freedom of speech allowed citizens (Todd 1993, 28). In the colonized countries of the Mediterranean basin, including Iraq, torture may be more easily perpetrated upon Muslims or Arabs because they do not appear to speak freely in the language of the colonizers.16 In Greece, the citizen could be punished by the loss of rights, privileges, or possessions, whereas the slave’s punishment was always corporeal (Sinclair 1988, 28). In ancient Roman times only slaves had to be tortured in order to give believable evidence at trial. The “normal” relationship of slave and master precluded believable testimony without torture. The assumption of veracity could be gained only through the absolute situation of torture, in which a slave no longer served his master, but rather, the state, whose power, via torture, represented itself as absolute and its legal system as legitimately requiring of testimony given under torture.17 Clearly, the colonial situation and the events associated with it require their own peculiar rituals. Although we may not have perceived it before, the graphic Abu Ghraib photographs reveal a situation consistent with what we have known since Fanon of the history of torture and its effects in the colonized setting: the perpetrators function as metteurs en scène, fashioning the “stage” and scripting the scenario that will effect a change of consciousness in the victim, allowing not only for information to be given when it had formerly been withheld, but also for the future actions of the detainee to be changed. However, like all performances and rituals whose goal is partially or wholly one of transformation, both victims and perpetrators will be effected in the future in ways that cannot be predicted. Fanon’s conclusions regarding the memory of torture, its torturing effects, were groundbreaking
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for his time and astonishing, inasmuch as they emerged not out of a judicial situation or a juridical discourse, but as a result of counter-insurgency measures instituted by police operating in the French colonial prisons of Algeria and his own observations of the application of psychoanalytic techniques brought to bear upon the memories of torture obtained through analysis. The narratives of Fanon’s patients evoked a description of torture’s torturing effects in the present and in so doing the repressed memories of the earlier scene of torture emerged. In The Wretched of the Earth Fanon joins together the public scene of torture and the psychic aftereffects in order to address the ideological and ritual role that torture has to play in the birth of the postcolonial political imaginary. So too the photographs from Abu Ghraib may allow us to understand – if only partially – how the rituals performed upon the victims there may play out in the political imaginary of the states of Iraq and the U.S. Here, Fanon’s observation that: “These are disorders which persist for months on end, making a mass attack against the ego, and practically always leaving as their sequel a weakness which is almost visible to the naked eye,” pertains directly to the photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib (Fanon 1963, 252). Fanon’s source of this “weakness almost visible to the naked eye” – the memory of torture – is also found in Freud’s essay: “A note upon the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad’ ” (Freud 1961, 227–32). Now familiar as a children’s toy, the Mystic Pad consists of a wax slab over which is laid a piece of wax paper over which is laid a celluloid covering sheet. This “small contrivance,” as Freud calls it, serves as a figurative model for the function of the “mnemic systems” that lie behind the perceptual system. According to Freud, as a model the Mystic Pad has the advantage over “photographic cameras” because “our mental apparatus accomplishes precisely what they cannot: it has an unlimited receptive capacity for new perceptions and nevertheless lays down permanent – even though not unalterable – memory traces of them” (Freud 1961, 228). So too, “the permanent trace of what was written is retained upon the wax slab itself and is legible in suitable lights” (Freud 1961, 230). Memory traces emerge, or are reactivated, according to Freud, once they have been cathected or energized. As we have already seen in the case of one of Fanon’s patients, the memory trace cathects “each year on the date that he had planted a bomb that caused the fatality of ten people.” Fanon called the repetition of the same traumatic “memory trace” a “reactional disorder.” I would say that the digitized images of torture found in the photographs from Abu Ghraib function as Fanon’s “weakness which is almost visible to the naked eye,” or Freud’s “memory trace.” The photographs have been ripped from their referent like the transparent covering sheet of the Mystic Pad, but they have traces that remain in haunting digital afterimages, perceived and functioning for victims, perpetrators, and viewers alike.
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Photography and the traumatic event This condensed discussion of the visual memory of torture as theorized by Fanon through Freud is meant to suggest that the “reactional disorders” that Fanon found in his patients can be associated with photographs of torture, with torture’s psychic after-effects in the visual field of subsequent viewers. It has a psychological depth as well as a social breadth. This suggestion will only make sense if another, more pervasive, claim regarding the images of Abu Ghraib specifically and the traumatic photograph in general, is altered: that it is “the only type of photograph to elude signification” (Barthes 1977, 30–1). Roland Barthes said in his essay “The photographic message” that the traumatic photograph wounds persistently through its visual referent, its indexicality to the image given. Here the viewer of the photographs of torture becomes the victim, achieving we might say, a state of being brought about through the performativity of the image. Yet, according to Barthes, with this very performativity, the meaning of the image eludes consciousness, the state or outcome that Fanon finds as the result of the analysis of the effects of torture upon the victim and the perpetrator. Barthes’ traumatic photograph offers torturing effects over time, but without recourse to the potential of political transformation through action, such as that which Fanon believed could occur for the sufferers of actual torture in Algeria. It is this transformation toward action that I have included in the concept of performativity discussed here. As Fanon indicates at the conclusion of The Wretched of the Earth, when properly analyzed as part of the colonial situation from which they arose, the case studies of torture’s effects served to “stir” the consciousness of a “new man” capable of “the radical transformation of society” in the future (Fanon 1963, 310). Photographs of torture, the digitized images of Abu Ghraib in particular, carry the extreme burden of representation – its performativity – and should be understood as potentially transformative of the viewer, but only if we speak of them rather than revert to silence and mystery. While the Abu Ghraib images have understandably left many speechless and aghast, this must be a temporary reaction because they also call for a response. In this manner of viewing these images I follow Jacques Lacan’s contention that the unconscious, from which our responses to trauma emerge, remains the best position from which to view consciousness (Lacan 1978).18
History: photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib Soon after the publication of the Abu Ghraib photographs, Susan Sontag observed that the U.S. Secretary of Defense and others attempted to refrain from using the “torture word” to describe the events that led to and are represented in the photographs (Sontag 2004, 25). These efforts relate directly to the U.S. government’s attempts to legitimate as non-torture practices that have historically and commonly been understood as torture, by
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producing new and legally binding redefinitions of torture and related activity. This legalistic legitimation process has the “express intent of evading liability in the aftermath of any discovery of these practices and policies” (Peters 1985, i). This public legitimation process refuses an analysis of the photographs’ situation, e.g., their relation to the event of torture and to its specific and subsequent aftereffects in the public imaginary. The photographs taken at Abu Ghraib continue to reveal better than any other “discovery” process undertaken to date the magnitude of events that took place, their status as torture, and the traumatic power of their circulation. Yet, if they have been denied as torturing by the government, they have not been analyzed as part of a public consciousness of the event of torture. To participate in the negation of the events of torture that are shown to have taken place by using euphemistic terminology – including the insidious “prisoner abuse” – is to deny the actual wounding power of these photographs, i.e., as evidence of the real physical and psychic harm that occurred and continues to occur to victims, perpetrators, viewers, and the state.19 Given the photographs, we must question whether torture at Abu Ghraib was a function of the absolute power of lowly enlisted personnel relative to imprisoned Iraqi citizens, most of whom had not been charged with a crime, but were deemed detainees worthy of interrogation. As detainees – simply, those taken into custody in places and for reasons that conform to no publicly specified code – the legal and even human status of these people sank to a level below that of criminal suspect, prisoner, or war criminal, as the photographs themselves demonstrate. In the independent news reports and in the subsequent admissions by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld about the extreme acts and abusive techniques perpetrated upon prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo there is no discussion of the use of photographs at the time of torture. Rather than being viewed as part of torture, the photographs were quickly regarded as an aberration among those who took and posed for them. For example, the American Bar Association Report to the House of Delegates, adopted by voice vote on August 9, 2004, and based on a complete record of the known events up to that time, summarizes and condemns all of the types of torture that occurred but does not name the use of photographs in those types: Allegations of abusive techniques reportedly being practiced by DOD [Department of Defense] and CIA personnel and U.S. government contractors at U.S. Detention facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan include: forcing detainees to stand or kneel for hours in black hoods or spraypainted goggles, 24-hour bombardment with lights, “false-flag” operations meant to deceive a captive about his whereabouts, withholding painkillers from wounded detainees, confining detainees in tiny rooms, binding in painful positions, subjecting detainees to loud noises, and sleep deprivation.20
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Photographs function as evidence but not as an act of torture in this account. It is not easy to impute intention to torture on the part of the perpetrators visible in the photographs for the simple reason that no accounts exist of the use of the photographs as components in the torture, although the photographic apparatus and the photographer(s) were present during such events, as the photographs themselves attest. If the photographs were not intended to be seen by the detainees themselves, they were destined for another audience. Photographing the events of torture implies the need for another level of reality on the part of the viewers of the photographs, one that I will call ritualistic. Any interpretation of the complete archive of the Abu Ghraib photographs that determines that the photographs were intended to effect maltreatment and sexual/cultural humiliation appears “inadequate to the interpretation of the formalized and conventionalized action,” as put by Catherine Bell, and found in the particular images from the Abu Ghraib archive.21 The circulation of the digital image on shared files, before their release as photographic representations to the public, prevents any clear understanding of the details of their use in sexual practices in or outside of the prison based on their status as images. If they were utilized as part of sexualized rituals among the perpetrators, this has not become known and cannot be known from the images themselves. This point deserves further elaboration because it goes to the heart of the meaning of the rituals performed by the perpetrators and seen in the Abu Ghraib images. Some of the photographs appear to repeat certain aspects of sadomasochistic representations commonly found in pornographic photography, such as the leashing of naked figures by uniformed figures or the ostentatious display of the genitalia of naked figures. In addition, certain items of dress, most especially the burlap hood and draped blanket cloak of the infamous “hooded man on the box,” shown in Figures 9.1–9.3, carry excessive symbolic meaning, no doubt contributing to the ubiquity of this particular image noted at the beginning of this chapter. Whether as attributes of the Klu Klux Klan, or as the “hangman’s hood,” these items of dress signify racism in the U.S. culture out of which the photographs emerged, whether real or fantastical. However, putting prisoners in Klan regalia reverses the victim/abuser roles that we expect from the symbols themselves. Nor do actors in pornography photos and films literally suffer, as we know the detainees in Abu Ghraib did. Nor do actors in pornographic media “perform” in order to provide an actual “sexual/cultural humiliation” or harm to themselves. Looking to the Marquis de Sade’s writing, the most famous example of the exploitation of sado-masochistic sexual practices in a prison context, we find consistent understanding of the pleasures, not the harm, to be derived from these practices by all involved (de Sade 1965). Thus, while the photographs from Abu Ghraib bear visual congruences with the “formalized and conventionalized” figures found in racist icono-
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Figure 9.4 Naked figure leashed by uniformed figure, Abu Ghraib Prison, Iraq (public domain).
graphy and photographic pornography, the very existence and memory of these rituals fracture the meaning available in the Abu Ghraib photographs of torture. Those many aspects of the Abu Ghraib photographs that symbolize sexual/cultural rituals of pornography rub against the viewer’s knowledge of the absolute power that must be present in the situation of torture versus the consensual engagement found in rituals of pornography (with the notable exception of pedophilia). These ritualized gestures, actions, and clothing in the Abu Ghraib photographs cannot be read as transparent either to shame or to pleasure. Instead, they appear in the photographs as performative effects of the event of torture at Abu Ghraib. It is the event of torture itself that determines the kind of ritual that we simultaneously observe and experience in the after-effects of the photographs. According to Sontag, “No: the horror of what is shown in the photographs cannot be separated from the horror that the photographs were taken – with perpetrators posing, gloating, over their helpless captors” (Sontag 2004, 26–7). Virtually all of the photographs that have been published give
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Figure 9.5 Display of naked figure’s genitalia, Abu Ghraib Prison, Iraq (public domain).
the appearance to the viewer of having been posed, either because of the careful composition of the figures themselves, their precise framing within the visual field of the photographic image (see Figures 9.3–9.6) or because of the glancing, gesturing, and pointing by the perpetrators who visually guide the viewer to the action represented (see Figures 9.4–9.6) much as a pointing saint in Grunewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece guides the viewer to contemplate the figure of the crucified Christ in the devotional altar painting. Again, the Abu Ghraib image reverses the traditional iconographical type. The Abu Ghraib photographs show with exceptional clarity the active human presence on the scene, behind the camera. Clearly, the act of photographing occurred during some of the events of torture at Abu Ghraib. The detainees were posed for the camera for the purposes of the photographer and his/her desires for future viewing and viewers. When the Abu Ghraib photographs have been compared to photographs of lynchings, the particularity of this spectatorial desire has been lost in the effort to understand the use of “fun” to dehumanize a racialized “other.”22 Lynching photographs depict the hanging and deformed corpse, result or “strange fruit,” as Abe Meerepoole’s song puts it, rather than the actual event, of lynching.23 This important distinction in “aliveness” between the Abu Ghraib torture photographs and lynching photographs goes to the
Figure 9.6 Victim composition, Abu Ghraib Prison, Iraq (public domain).
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Figure 9.7 Grunewald, Crucifixion from the Isenheim Altar, around 1515 (Erich Lessing/Art Resources, NY, Musée d’Unterlinden, Colmar, France).
ostensible purpose of torture itself: to transform or coerce the living, rather than to kill for military or racist reasons. The photographs of Abu Ghraib, therefore, indicate a distinction that needs to be maintained between representations of tortured life and hideous death. The photograph of the corpse at Abu Ghraib underlines the difference between the alive performance – with thumb-up gesture and grin – necessary for the perpetrators, even as it reveals the deathly stillness of the victim. The distinction between life and death is what leads to the high likelihood of prolonged human suffering in the aftermath of torture, as Fanon argued. Taking the victim’s life is not a desired outcome of torture, relative to obtaining information that the victim, if alive, can be coerced into revealing and the effects that may de-mobilize the victim as insurgent, rebel, or militant.24 That the detainees at Abu Ghraib, unlike “true” prisoners, may be held indefinitely reveals the significance of their continued vitality to the perpetrators. The digital medium of the photographs of Abu Ghraib provides a key to my contentions here. While the digitized photographic image may be viewed almost instantaneously in the viewing apparatus of the camera itself,
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Figure 9.8 Living performance and deathly stillness, Abu Ghraib Prison, Iraq (public domain).
due to its small size it is only visible there at extremely close range. Given the extant photographs documenting the events of torture at Abu Ghraib, with prisoners hooded (see Figure 9.5), with prisoners views from the back or bent over (see Figure 9.6), with prisoners purposefully “posed” in attitudes distant from the camera (see Figures 9.5 and 9.6), it seems unlikely
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that close-in viewing of the image in the apparatus would have occurred except by the photographer. The photographic images themselves were a distinct aspect of the events that occurred. Documentation contributed to torture. The digital and posed photographs, with all their iconographical symbolism, display what we have always known about the torture at Abu Ghraib, its design cannot be construed as private for either victims or perpetrators. The perpetrators enact their rituals upon and with the pliant, mute bodies in order to achieve the after-effects displayed in the flat, acid tonalities of the computer screen or digital color photographs. This representational effect – the ritualization of torture for the perpetrator and viewer – entails the historical and public status of events that the photographs depict. The complex performativity of the images as we experience them derives from the multi-positionality that the images record.
Circulations of images and photographs of torture This historical and public status of the photographs occurs only with their circulation.25 It is only once their circulation is established, after the events of torture depicted, that these digital images become representations of torture with the power to burden and wound. Sontag believed that the circulation among the perpetrators, their friends, and some family members of the digital images from Abu Ghraib indicates most profoundly the intention that the resulting photographs were meant to be “fun,” to convey and provide pleasure in “the practice of violence” (Sontag 2003, 29). As these are digital images, the initial circulation evidently took the form of file sharing, either through the exchange of disks or over the Internet, where they required another kind of apparatus, the computer and screen, in order to be seen. For example, the actual “discovery” of the images of torture relied on such file-sharing: January 13, 2004 Specialist Joseph M. Darby, a soldier in 372nd MP Company at Abu Ghraib, leaves a disc of abuse photographs on the bed of a military investigator. The photographs were being swapped from computer to computer throughout the 320th Battalion. General John Abizaid, the head of U.S. command in Iraq, called Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and told him about the images. (“Abu Ghraib Timeline” on the website of Inconvenient Evidence, 17) In this initial form of circulation, the images clearly served the immediate purposes of the individual perpetrators and their investments in “the practice of violence” and the penumbra of absolute power. In the recent “discoveries” about the function of some of these digital images (see Figures 9.4 and 9.5), brought about by the trial of Pfc. Lynndie England, this circulation of the images via file sharing explains the sexualized imagery of some of the photos as voyeuristic in effect:
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One night in October 2003, he [Pvt. Charles Graner Jr.] told her [Pfc. Lynndie England] to pose for photographs holding a leash tied around the neck of a naked and crawling prisoner. He e-mailed one home: “Look what I made Lynndie do.” The now infamous pictures of prisoners masturbating, he said, were a birthday gift for her. (Zernicke 2005, A8) Another kind of circulation occurred when these images were printed and shown on television. They appeared and were known by the public first through their release to the news media via television on CBS 60 Minutes on April 28, 2004, then in an article by Seymour Hersh released on April 30, 2004 for the May 10 issue of The New Yorker, and finally in the Washington Post of May 6 and 21, 2004. As shown on TV they appeared as typical, enframed shots, rather than as televised images as such. Television “quoted” them as photographs, rather than as digitized images. In a comparative analysis of all of the published photographs of the Abu Ghraib tortures, André Gunthert has convincingly demonstrated that the images also circulated to the print media as traditional photographic prints, and not as digital files.26 The initial release to the public by CBS was delayed and then carefully monitored by the Department of Defense. This official censorship, which included their enframing, must be considered a key sign of the restricted range of imagery to circulate publically, traumatic though it was. The censorship of the images from Abu Ghraib marks them as made for public circulation, as Marianne Hirsch has suggested.27 Although a major characteristic of the digitized photograph is its easy susceptibility to manipulation, which classically risks diminishing its status as an authentic document, there has been no question in the media about the occurrence of the events depicted, no question that the pictures have been “doctored.” Indeed, the identification of individual servicemen and women who appear in the photographs helped to determine who would be charged by the military, as two photographs of Private Lynndie R. England reveal. In Figure 9.4 she holds a leash attached to the neck of a prisoner who lies on the floor. In Figure 9.5 she looks at the camera and gestures to the genitals of a hooded prisoner who is seated on the back of another prisoner. Yet, as the second photograph shows in the blurring out of the genitals of the prisoner gestured to by England, the photographic images have been altered for viewing in published form as photographic representations, another quite visible, albeit small, example of the work of censorship and its effects. Based on these manipulations, we must assume the maintenance of the identity of the perpetrators, and not the victims – who remain unknown and unheard from – as key to the public circulation of the photographs, controlled initially by the military, as stated above. This maintenance of identity can be used for purposes of the prosecution of individuals at the lowest level of command at Abu Ghraib, as has already occurred. The forms of visual censorship in the published photographs function literally as signs of
180 Catherine M. Soussloff circulation and for the consumption of incriminating evidence by the military judicial system. The circulation of the initial images in digital form “for pleasure” by the perpetrators and their friends differs not only from the “informational” function of the photographs as seen in newspapers, magazines and on television, but also from the ways that they establish themselves as photographic representations of what had occurred in the past and must be prevented in the future. When the images circulate publicly they force us to view them “as if” the normal and customary had been overturned only at this time and place. We can, however, distinguish differences in rituals of circulation, which denote clearly how the consumption of the imagery of torture among groups differs according to the purposive usage of the medium of digital photography and the receptive status of the viewer – the assumptions they bring to the image. The change of form does not cause change of response. “Real” photos could have been “fun” too, but the perpetrators, as operatives of absolute state power, whose own power was minimal except with regard to detainees, had radically different assumptions and needs from most of the general public.28 In the famous Stanford Prison Experiment sociologists Craig Haney and Philip Zimbardo demonstrated “the way in which social contexts can influence, alter, shape, and transform human behavior” in order to learn about how to prevent the destructive contexts that breed abuse and torture (Haney and Zimbardo 1998, 709–10).29 The desires and actions of the Abu Ghraib perpetrators may have exceeded even their own expectations, as revealed in the photographs that stage a macabre theatre of cruelty commensurate with the transformations occurring in their psyches. The Stanford Prison Experiment authors are quick to point out how little influence this study has had on contemporary criminal justice policies (720). Nor has it been felt on the past and current practices of the U.S. military in Iraq.
Public rituals of viewing historically The photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib document a register of violence perpetrated upon the human body by other humans at a specific time and place. Although we may not know the total extent of the events which they depict, the photographs clearly present particular and extreme divergences from the kinds of representations that scholars of visual culture usually deal with, although a knowledge of the Western visual tradition from which the torturers themselves came allows some parallels to be drawn. A commonly held comparison with the subject matter of the Abu Ghraib photographs has been Francisco Goya’s series of 80 aquatints called in English The Disasters of War, first published in 1863.30 Specifically, in both the nudity of the bodies shown and in the grotesque poses in which the bodies are disposed, Goya’s Plate 37 “This is worse” and Plate 39 “Great deeds – against the dead!” can be compared to some of the Abu Ghraib photographs. The analogy itself signals the power of the representation of
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Figure 9.9 Francisco Goya, “This is Worse” from Disasters of War (1810–14) (photograph © 2006, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).
the horrors at Abu Ghraib in the visual tradition of Western culture. According to the scholars, Goya wished with his prints “to denounce war by making a telling visual report on the Spanish nationalist insurrection against the French puppet king, Joseph Bonaparte” (Hofer 1967, 1). However, the artist was unable, probably because of fears of punishment or censorship, to publish these images at the time when they could have functioned instrumentally in the Peninsular War. The belatedness of Goya’s Disasters of War contrasts markedly with the necessity for comment that the Abu Ghraib photographs have provoked once they circulated. Torture continues to be a likely occurrence at the moment of viewing the photographs today, as recent reports from Guantanamo attest. As we find ourselves in the aftermath of the events depicted in the Abu Ghraib photographs, the evidence of a profound disturbance at the societal level speaks to a desire to understand photography’s part in contemporary situations of torture. These representations hold out the possibility of a closer relationship to the “reality” of the torture events depicted, but in a peculiar way. Does part of the disturbance and, perhaps, a possible escape from it, reside in the very fact that these photographs document torture
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Figure 9.10 Francisco Goya, “Heroic Feat! Against the Dead!” from Disasters of War (1810–14) (photograph © 2006, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).
staged and posed for the perpetrators – tableaux that were metonymically related to “real” torture, as cited by the ABA, but not that torture itself? The torture cited by the ABA seemingly involved interminable duration and would require moving images – something on the order of Andy Warhol’s films Sleep (1963) or Empire (1965) – to document. In photography time appears to stand still – to perpetuate the moment and scene of wounding – whereas in films that document duration, as Warhol’s do, time appears to be infinite and the image produced by it infinitesimally mutable. The Abu Ghraib photographs challenge all viewers because they not only shock, wound, and set-up traumatic reverberations, but also because their very theatricality, i.e., the rituals of posing and enactment to which they bear witness offer a slim margin of difference and distance from the perhaps less sexual, less sadistic but more prolonged, symptomatic, and operational tortures for which they stand. Not intended to elicit information, for none of the instrumentation of information collection exists in the photographs, the staged photographs construct a mise-en-scène of desire, or phantasy, in which the fantasists or torturers locate themselves as agents. The desire emerges as that of the colonizer: to dominate, to physically and sexually humiliate, to induce a state of abjection, and to enjoy the strange fruit of absolute power
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in a raw and brutal form. This desire can be understood as the reverse of the respect of human dignity that makes one innocent until proven guilty.
Conclusion As part of our contemporary reality, by virtue of simply being in view, the Abu Ghraib photographs insure the damaging psychic after-effects of torture that Fanon predicted. In this way the ritualized photographs of Abu Ghraib produce in contemporary culture a mirror reflection of the original violence, distorted in the present to be sure, but inevitably “torturing” the more we see in them.31 I feel the wounds and the burdens of the photographs of the events of torture at Abu Ghraib so acutely because they function as performatives, calling all my experience in the interpretation of images into action in order to convey the senselessness and horrors found there. In seeking to speak of these effects in specific ways that are related to the memory of torture in Iraq – I might call it a parallel to, or mimicry of, the “talking cure” of psychoanalysis endorsed by Fanon in Algeria – the interpretation of the photographs may well enact a transformation of the very culture that produced them. In this sense they cannot be managed by or as symptoms of the new society of the spectacle, because, like memory traces, they are unmanageable. Recognizing the memories of torture for what they are will be the only way not to replicate the toxicity of the events themselves.
Notes 1 I am grateful to Michael Brenson, Mark Franko, and Bill Nichols for their helpful editorial comments at various stages in the genesis of this chapter. 2 I first saw the Abu Ghraib photographs in The New Yorker on May 10, 2004. Soon after I spoke briefly about these photographs at University of California, Berkeley on May 21, 2004, as the graduation speaker for the Department of History of Art. I am grateful to Whitney Davis and to my colleagues and students there for that invitation. I also spoke about these photographs on November 19, 2005 at “Saving Time: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Memory and Memorialization,” sponsored by the UC Presidential Chair’s Group on the Philosophy and History of Time, Cowell College, UC Santa Cruz. I am grateful to David Hoy and Tyrus Miller for that invitation. The research for this essay was completed by October 1, 2005. 3 Slavoj Zizek presents an extreme example of this point of view: “the mere introduction of torture as a legitimate topic allows us to entertain the idea while retaining a pure conscience,” quoted in Sanford Levinson, “Contemplating torture: an introduction” (Levinson 2004, 30–1). 4 Presumably, these photographs are only a part of a much larger archive, see Julia Lesage, “Abu Ghraib and images of abuse and torture,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/links.html. 5 In The Village Voice of May 12, 2004, Sanford Levinson wrote: “The only thing new about recent revelations is the pictures,” cited in “Acknowledgements” (Levinson 2004).
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6 Bruno Chalifour (2004a and b). The only kind of reportage photographs that do not make this admonitory address to the spectator are images made by totalitarian or fascist regimes for the purposes of state propaganda in a mode of celebration, see Soussloff and Nichols (1996). 7 The recent retrospective of Capra’s work at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Site Richelieu-Louvois, Paris (October–December 2004) made clear how much the affectivity of Capra’s photographs of the Spanish Civil War and other atrocities depended upon their magnification through publication in newspapers and journals. 8 I do not mean by this statement that scholars, medical doctors, psychologists, and political scientists have not discussed the idea of torture. It has been and some of that bibliography is available in notes to this essay, to which I would like to add the excellent essays by Mark Danner originally published in The New York Review of Books and now available in Danner, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (New York: NYREV, Inc., 2004). What is obvious, however, is that no one openly discussed the perpetration of torture by the U.S. government and/or its agents prior to the release of the photographs. When discussed by the government, the perpetration of torture was always seen as someone else’s problem, just as the information from the Veterans Affairs assumes that Americans will always be the victims of abusive behavior, not the intentional perpetrators (see note above). For an excellent compilation of Internet links related to the events and images of the Abu Ghraib tortures, see Lesage, http://www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/links.html. 9 “The release of the Abu Ghraib photographs – for all that the exact chain of circumstances leading to the outing is still shrouded in mystery, and no doubt will remain so – is one among many pieces of evidence lately of a breakdown in the usual media-administration contract” (Retort 2005, 190–1). 10 Miles Orvell (1989) claims that in twentieth century America photography first became wedded to the notion that it replicated reality, although many nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics speak of the camera’s ability to capture the real, e.g., Susan Sontag (1973), esp. 183–207. For this reason, “Art Photography” or “Pictorialism” had to be distinguished from photography per se at the end of the nineteenth century and compared with painting (Soussloff 2002). I am grateful to my colleague Martin Berger for discussing his views on this matter. 11 A recent documentary film on the invention of photography states the case most clearly, see Becky Smith (1995). 12 Benjamin Stora gives the argument made in 1958 by Jean-Paul Sartre and other intellectuals in the Comité d’Action des Intellectuels contre la Poursuite de la Guerre en Afrique du Nord (Stora 2001, 90). 13 “Memo 14” contains numerous citations (Greenberg and Dratel 2005, 178). Today, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs provides special therapeutic sessions for soldiers who return from combat with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders, see the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder website, managed by the department: www.ncptsd.va.gov. In the section of the website devoted to “Complex PTSD” (the effects of chronic trauma) there is no mention of torture. The assumption is that torture does not exist for U.S. military personnel today. In addition, the site is addressed to victims, not to perpetrators. The assumption is that whatever the cause of stress, the U.S. citizen is a victim. The website references one article, now over ten years old, on the effects of torture on victims, see Barbara Chester and James Jaranson, “The context of survival and destruction: conduction psychotherapy with survivors of torture,” NCP Clinical Quarterly 4 (Winter 1994): www.ncptsd.va.gov/publications/cq/v4/n1/chester.html. Fanon’s work with both torture victims and perpetrators acknowledged and demonstrated the effects on both.
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14 “In other words,” notes Fanon, “we are forever pursued by our actions. Their ordering, their circumstances, and their motivation may perfectly well come to be profoundly modified a posteriori. This is merely one of the snares that history and its various influences set for us. But can we escape becoming dizzy? And who can affirm that vertigo does not haunt the whole of existence?” (Fanon 1963, 253). 15 This function of torture may be compared with other actions and effects of colonization in Africa as it has been explored by a number of anthropological studies. For a recent discussion of this subject, see the excellent introduction by Tom Conley (2002) to the work of Marc Augé in Marc Augé, In the Metro. 16 I think that it is arguable that in the U.S. this modern history differs significantly from the European model, where it was played out in colonies where victims were racialized. Lynching, an extreme form of torture resulting in murder, and based on racism, took place in the homeland and continued well into the twentieth century, although we had no prior history of legal torture. 17 I am extremely grateful to my friend Erich Gruen for this understanding of absolute power and torture in the ancient context and for insisting on its significance in the situation of Abu Ghraib. See also Jean-Paul Sartre (Fanon 1963, 7–31) who writes of the Hegelian master-slave dialectic in regard to torture in prisons. 18 Lacan’s understanding of the subject was gained through an exploration of “how, in the perspective of the unconscious, we can situate the conscious” (79). 19 As of May 31, 2005 reports continue to emerge regarding related events of shaming and mental torture at Guantanamo and elsewhere. 20 “American Bar Association Report to the House of Delegates, August 2004” (Greenberg and Dratel 2005, 1136). Unfortunately the conclusions regarding torture and the sweeping recommendations for its prevention made by the ABA to the President, Congress, and the Department of Defense appear to have made no effect on policy or practice. 21 Catherine Bell, “Performance and Other Analogies” in The Performance Studies Reader, Henry Bial (ed.). Here Bell (2004) refers to the argument of S.J. Tambiah. 22 This is the important and interesting argument of Hazel Carby, “A strange and bitter crop: the spectacle of torture,” October 11, 2004, www.openDemocracy. net, 1–4. 23 This point is made poignantly in the recent award-winning documentary film, Strange Fruit, directed by Joel Katz (2002). 24 I note that at least since Roman times the effectiveness of torture in obtaining accurate information has been questioned as much as it has been endorsed, see Cicero, On the Ideal Orator (De Oratore). Translated by James M. May and Jakob Wisse (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 2: 118–19, 154: “For we often argue both for and against documents, for and against witnesses, for and against evidence extracted by torture, as well as for and against everything else of this sort, either in the abstract about an entire class, or specifically about individual occasions, people, and cases.” 25 I am grateful to John Tagg, who, in discussion with me on the meaning of these photographs, insisted on the primacy of their circulation to establishing their signification. 26 André Gunthert (2004): 124–34. I am grateful to the author for bringing this essay to my attention and for his subtle analysis regarding the meaning of the circulation of the images of torture at Abu Ghraib. 27 Marianne Hirsch, “Editor’s column: collateral damage,” PMLA 119 (October 2004): 1209–10: “General Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, even went so far as to ask CBS’s Sixty Minutes II to delay showing the
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photographs of prison abuse to the public lest their dissemination do harm to the troops abroad, and throughout May and June of this year pictures from Abu Ghraib were printed and distributed slowly and with an unusual degree of cautionary framing. Congress members first saw hundreds of images in closed, tightly protected settings. They described them to the press but were prohibited from showing them to the public. The ethics of revelation was debated among commentators and politician weighing freedom of information versus the victim’s right to privacy.” Thus far there are very few reports from prisoners who suffered torture in Abu Ghraib, but Seymour Hersh names one, Hayder Sabbar Abd, and suggests that others, including Manadel Al-Jamadi, whose corpse figures in some of the photographs, Saad al-Khashab, and John Walker Lindh, suffered similar tortures in Iraq and Afghanistan, see Seymour M. Hersh, “Photographs from a prison,” (Inconvenient Evidence website, 8–10). I am grateful to my colleague Craig Haney for providing me with the literature on the Stanford Prison Experiment. (Sontag 2003) I am grateful to Jonathan Gilmore for his discussion of some of the points I raise in this essay, while also acknowledging our many differences. So writes Sartre (Fanon 1963, 17): “the same violence is thrown back upon us as when our reflection comes forward to meet us when we go toward a mirror.”
Bibliography Barthes, Roland (1977) “The photographic message,” in Image-Music-Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang. –––– (1981) Camera Lucida. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang. Bell, Catherine (2004) “Performance and other analogies,” in Henry Bial (ed.) The Performance Studies Reader. London and New York: Routledge. Chalifour, Bruno (2004a) “Editorial,” Afterimage 31 (May/June): 3. –––– (2004b) “From Inferno to War: a few considerations on James Natchway, VIII, and war photography,” Afterimage 31 (May/June): 3. Chester, Barbara and Jaranson, James (1994) “The context of survival and destruction: construction psychotherapy with survivors of torture,” NCP Clinical Quarterly 4 (Winter). Cicero (2001) On the Ideal Orator (De Oratore). Translated by James M. May and Jakob Wisse. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Conley, T. (2002) “Introduction: Mark Auge, ‘A little history,’ ” in Mark Augé In the Metro. Translated by Tom Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. vii–xxii. Danner, M. (2004) Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror. New York: NYREV, Inc. Fanon, Franz (1963) The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove. Freud, Sigmund (1961) “A note on the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad’ (1925 [1924]),” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works. Translated and edited by James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, Vol. XIX: 225–32. Greenberg, Karen J. and Dratel, Joshua L. (eds) (2005) The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
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Gunthert, André (2004) “L’image numérique s’en va-t’en guerre: Les photographies d’Abou Ghraib,” Etudes Photographiques 15 (November): 124–34. Haney, Craig and Zimbardo, Philip (1988) “The past and future of U.S. prison policy: twenty-five years after the Stanford Prison Experiment,” American Psychologist 53 (July). Hirsch, Marianne (2004) “Editor’s column: collateral damage,” PMLA 119 (October): 1209–10. Hofer, Philip (1967) “Introduction,” The Disasters of War by Francisco Goya y Lucientes. New York: Dover. Inconvenient Evidence: Iraqi Prison Photographs from Abu Ghraib (2004). Exhibit at the International Center of Photography (2004), photography exhibit (New York, September 17–November 28, 2004): http://www.icp.org/exhibitions/abu_ghraib/. Karpinski, Janis with Steven Strasser (2005) One Woman’s Army: The Commanding General of Abu Ghraib Tells Her Story. New York: Hyperion. Lacan, Jacques (1978) The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Edited by JacquesAlain Miller, translated by Alan Sheridan. New York and London: W.W. Norton. Levinson, Sanford (ed.) (2004) Torture: A Collection, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Orvell, Miles (1989) The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture 1880–1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Peters, Edward (1985) Torture: Expanded Edition. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Retort (Boal, Iain, Clark, T.J., Matthews, Joseph, Watts, Michael) (2005) Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War. London and New York: Verso. Sade, Marquis de (1965) The Bedroom Philosophers. New York: Lancer Books. Sinclair, R.K. (1988) Democracy and Participation in Athens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, Becky (1995) Captured Light: The Invention of Still Photography. New York: A & E television Networks. Sontag, Susan (1973) On Photography. New York: Dell. –––– (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. –––– (2004) “Regarding the torture of others: notes on what has been done – and why – to prisoners by Americans,” The New York Times Magazine, May 23: 24–9, 42. Soussloff, Catherine M. (2002) “Art photography, history, and aesthetics,” in Elizabeth Mansfield (ed.) Art History and Its Institutions: Foundations of a Discipline. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 295–313. Soussloff, Catherine M. and Nichols, Bill (1996) “Leni Riefenstahl: the power of the image,” Discourse 18 (Spring): 20–44. Stora, Benjamin (2001) Algeria 1830–2000: A Short History. Translated by Jane Marie Todd. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Tagg, John (1988) The Burden of Representation: Essay on Photographs and Histories. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Tambiah, S.J. (1979) A Performative Approach to Ritual from Proceedings of the British Academy, London, LXV. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Todd, Stephen (1993) The Shape of Athenian Law. Oxford: Clarendon. Vidal-Naquet, Pierre (1963) Torture: Cancer of Democracy France and Algeria 1954–62. Translated by Barry Richard. Baltimore: Penguin. Zernike, Kate (2005)”Military trial reveals the sordid soap opera at Abu Ghraib,” New York Times, quoted in San Francisco Chronicle, May 10, A-8.
Index
allegory 5, 114, 119; see also Gojira archive 71, 82–3; and spectacle 162; visual 162, 164–5 art-event 4, 77–8 art history 159–60 Asad, Talal 71 Austin, J.L. 3, 5, 35–6, 127; and theatre 51n 7, 51n 11, 127; see also speech act theory Barthes, Roland 170 Bateson, Gregory 3, 98; Balinese Character 15–16; the “Balinese period” of 13, 24, 27, 27n1; and choreography 14; and contemporary performance theory 19, 23–4; and Peircean semiotics 16; and post-structural sign production 25–6; and “steady state” theory 14–16 Bean, Henry: The Believer 102 Bell, Catherine 7n4, 56, 72n1 Blanchot, Maurice 94 Boal, Augusto 51n6 Bourdieu, Pierre 23, 28n18; and Bateson 29n20 Bravo Test Blast 110–12 Brecht, George 76 Bush administration: response to 9/11 100–1, 103–5 Butler, Judith 104–5 buto 133–4 Cage, John 76, 89n3 communitas 37, 57, 71; and religio 65–8, 151; as theatrical 66–8 community theatre 3, 32; and choreography 139, 154; in HIV/AIDS prevention 41–2, 46, 49–50; and public policy 51n15; see also rites of passage; Theatre for Development
corporeal performance: and writing 26, 133, 146 Crimp, Douglas 153 Cunningham, Merce 139 Daigo Fukuryu-maru incident 110–12, 115 dance 86–8, 130, 138–9, 143, 151, 154, 157; in Bali 131–2, 135n13; as disease 138–9, 147–9; and inscription 133; and mark 130, 134; between performance and event 126; as reenactment of death 132–4; as response to the event 126; as ritual 138, 145; transmission of 130–2, 136n20; see also Anna Halprin; corporeal performance; iterability; movement Deleuze, Gilles 82–4 Derrida, Jacques 5, 2, 94, 127–30, 136n16 Drewal, Margaret Thompson 28n11 Eliot, T.S. 78–80 event 1, 83, 125–6, 128; and 9/11 93, 126; and activism 77, 125; and avantgarde practices 4, 75–6, 125–6; and body 134; and catastrophe 93–4, 114; definition of 96–7; and Derrida 127–8; and fantasy 102; and Fluxus 76; and gift 129; in Heidegger 81, 89n1, 128; as inscription 133; and Lyotard 129; and meaning 96–7; in media 5, 93–6; the modernist event 95–6, 105; and narrative 95–6, 98; and performance 125–6; and philosophy of history 84; and postritual 1, 69, 75; and sense 83; and situation 75, 77–8; as statement
Index 189 81–2; as subject-centered 76; and terrorism 95, 97–8; of torture 162–4; 166–8, 173; and transmission of gesture 132; as trauma 94, 97, 102–3, 114; see also performativity Fanon, Frantz 7, 166–70 fantasy 98–9, 102–3, 107n9, 182 Fletcher, Angus 119 forum theatre 51n6; and African performance traditions 45 Foster, Stephen C. 76–7, 125 Foucault, Michel 1, 7n1, 81–4 Franko, Mark 5–6, 26 Freire, Paulo 45, 52n16 Freud, Sigmund 102–3, 169 Fried, Michael 75–6 Geertz, Clifford 58, 72n7 gift theory 6, 126, 134, 136n17; in dance pedagogy 130; and Derrida 128–9; as incorporative donation 125; and Marcel Mauss 129 Goffman, Irving 36 Godzilla 109–10, 119–20 Gojira 5, 109; as allegory 114, 119, 123n16 Goya, Francisco 180–1 Graham, Martha 139 Grimes, Ronald L. 35, 58, 72n1, 72n8 habitus 23, 71 Halprin, Anna 6; and cancer 142–5, 147; Carry Me Home 6, 154–5; Circle the Earth 149, 151–5; and gestalt therapy 141–2; and Multiracial Dance Company 139–40, 147; and public dance 147; and Tamalpa Institute 146; and visualizations 140, 145, 147, 152 Halprin, Daria 146 Heidegger, Martin 81, 89n1, 128 hibakusha 5, 114, 116–18 Higgins, Hannah 76 Hijikata, Tatsumi 133–4 HIV/AIDS: and African forum theatre 40–4; and Anna Halprin’s dance 152–5; and community theatre 32, 41–2; and the dancer 147; pandemic in Africa 31; post-performance discussion of 47–8 Hofstadter, Richard 100 intensity 88
iterability 127 Johansson, Ola 3–4 Kerner, Aaron 5, 106n2 Kertzer, David 8n12 Kristeva, Julia 116, 123n16 Lacan, Jacques 107n7, 170 Lang, Berel 106n6 Levi-Strauss, Claude 58 Lewis, J. Lowell 27n7 liminality 65, 146; and communitas 57, 65; compared to liminoid 4, 6, 48, 140 Lyotard, Jean-François 8n10, 129 McCarren, Felicia 139 Macdonald, Kevin: One Day in September 102 McHugh, Jamie 151, 155 Mac Low, Jackson 4, 85–9 Mahmood, Saba 71 Marx, Karl 68 Mauss, Marcel 129 Mead, Margaret 130–1; Learning to Dance in Bali 130–2 Miller, Tyrus 4 Morris, Robert 76 movement: in Balinese culture 16–23, 29n20; generation in The Pronouns 86–7; and ritual process 151; and story 14; and thought 20, 22; and the trace 25; as transmission (or communication) 130–2; see also dance corporeal performance narrative fetishism 99–101, 103, 105 Navel and A-Bomb 133–4 Ness, Sally Ann 3, 131 Nichols, Bill 5 Nyoni, Frowin Paul: Judges on Trial 42 Oë, Kenzaburo 110, 120 Otukile, Vuyisele: Salty Minds 42 Peirce, Charles S. 13 performativity 3, 7, 36, 48, 127–8, 134, 164, 183; and dance as event 134; and photographic image 159, 170, 178; of Theatre for Development 48–50; and trauma 164; see also photography
190
Index
photography 7; and Abu Ghraib 160–1, 169–80; and digitized image 179; and indexicality 166; of “reportage” 164; and torture 159–61, 164, 170, 181; as torture 172–3, 178 post-ritual theory 4, 24–5, 69, 71, 125–6; as post-Turner 69 post-structural theory 3, 81; corporeal performance in 26; and dance as mark 130; the event in 3 psychoanalysis 84, 103 Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred R. 27n7 Rappaport, Roy 18, 27n9, 36–7 Retort 160–1, 165 Richie, Donald 113–14 rites of passage: and African community theatre 44; and speech acts 35 ritual: and Abduction 14, 22–4; and argument 21–2; and community 45, 47, 69, 71; and crisis 37, 145–6; in dance 138, 145–6 and embodied thought 63; as failure 55, 59, 62–3; and forgetting 62–4; and Icon 16–17; and Index 18; and interdisciplinarity 2, 67; and memory 60–3; and myth 57; in photography of torture 172, 178; and politics 71; of postcoloniality 168–9; post-modern approaches to 18; and religion 64–6; and Symbol 19–20, 57, 63, 70; and theatre 34–5, 57, 66–7, 70; of pornography 172–3; and traumatic history 114, 169; of viewing 180–3; see also post-ritual theory; Victor Turner Ross, Janice 6 Santner, Eric 5, 99 Sartre, Jean-Paul 80–1 Schechner, Richard 2, 8n5, 36, 56, 151, 156–7; The Future of Ritual 72n1 situation 75, 77, 80–1; and the archive 81–2 Sontag, Susan 142–3, 170, 173 Soussloff, Catherine 7
speech acts: and African community theatre 36, 44, 50; compared to ritual 35–6; Derrida’s critique of 51, 106, 127–8; as performative events 40–50; see also Austin, J.L. speech-events 78–9, 82 Stinson, Alan 153 Tambiah, Stanley 18, 28n10 terrorism 101–2, 105; see also event theatre: in Africa 37–8; as alternative to ritual 38–40; and anthropology 36; and the archive 83; as distinguished from ritual 34–5; as HIV/AIDS protest 41–2; and programmatic action 79; and psychoanalysis 84; and ritual 67–8; and sense-event 83; see also community theatre; forum theatre; Theatre for Development; theatricality Theatre for Development (TFD) 37–40, 44; and Boal 45; and community processes 44–6, 48, 52n17; and HIV prevention 46–7 theatricality 67, 76, 81; of images of torture 182 Torgovnick, Marianna 139 torture 167–8; in the ancient world 168–9; and memory trace 169–70; as mise-en-scéne 168; visual documentation of 181–2; see also photography Turner, Victor 2, 4, 56; conditions of research 72n9; and Isoma ritual 61–2, 72n5; The Forest of Symbols 31; From Ritual to Theatre 32; and Lewis Henry Morgan 60–1; and life-crisis rituals 31; liminal/liminoid in 32; and Mukanda 32–3; and the Ndembu 61; 72n9; Ritual Process 56, 58, 60–1; see also communitas Walker Bynum, Caroline 59, 65 Wegley, Andrew 4 White, Hayden 7n3, 95–6, 114
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