Class Notes September 27

Class Notes

Bernstein

September 27

Kelly Lusk. 

Amy: 60 dollars tickets is more than planned. Other possibilities are Victory Garden’s equivocation. We have tickets for black watch.

Ellen. Dances with things. Open it to third responders.

Amy. Just to reiterate the prompt

                        First- what she is saying/ main argument

                        Second- what she calls on for evidence.

                        Third- Think about the implications of Bernstein’s argument.

            I reiterate the prompt to call attention to the parsing of the article that is foregrounding, the proof the information. How do we learn to read an article?

            Kelly and Whitney were able to create a salient argument with their first responders.

Derek.  The one thing that I thought that maybe was a connection with previous readings was with Levin. They’re both interested in archive and repertoire and the interaction between the two. SO I went back and went back to Levin. Bernstein’s approach to the photographs resonant with Levin’s section on miss-en-scene.  Levin Page 7. It seemed that Bernstein was doing something similar with the photographs, that there is this tension between the archive and the live performance. Levin was talking about we should accept archive opera performance. What’s interesting with what Bernstein is doing with the photographs, is, I guess we can talk about
miss-en-scene with the photograph, but it’s limiting. I felt uneasy about that.

Ellen. Were there other connections between Levin and Bernstein

Andrea. Bernstein is arguing it’s the scriptive things “Scriptive things are simultaneously archive and rep.’ Maybe we can reconsiders Worthen’s argument with drama bridging that gap. What are the scriptive arguments that make up Drama.

Ellen. Point 69 page 94. Does she solve Worthen’s trouble?

Amy. Just want to note you can hear her reaching to larger implications of her arguments. As a writer, you should make a point that your argument engages with the larger conversation.

Sara. Just curiously it felt, in her biography, she does materialistic culture.

Ellen. Performance study at Harvard. Worthen and Taylor are at the center of her practice.  Her book came out six months ago on her depictions on black childhood.

Amy. Let’s return to this idea of implications. So far we’ve thrown in Levin and Worthen. Are there other points of connections between this and discussions or prior articles?

Jess. Page 75 in the Bernstein where she talks about a performance literate person versus a performance competent person. Maybe a performance literate person is only transported, while a competent person may just see the picture.

Courtney. That’s a useful distinction.

Jennifer. Someone saving Desdemona is someone who was performance incompetent.

Jess.  [Read’s a passage.]

Derek. My question is more, is that applicable to the situation of sitting in the theatre?

Ellen. It’s hard to analogies. That’s a question of genre. Chairs are genre, literary is a mode. She is talking about something more specific though. Competence is a matter of having significance nuance in the genre..

Ming. Residence with the why and how. Literacy is the why, but competent people know how.  Why is a theorist labeling something as vicious. Don’t they know we know?

Courtney. I disagree. The how and why have more to do with her specific argument regarding to race rather than performance. When I was parsing the terms for the blog post, performance comp seems like we can pull that in. But the how and why could only be in this article.

Whitney. One of the values I found is that she could read both things and people as performing. Competence versus literacy is only happening on the level of people. But the how and why are functioning within the whole system. And that applies well to the objects placed before us. The objects don’t have to be competent or incompetence.

Ellen. The incompetent performer is the one who is resistant. She is trying to make room for historical analysis, How audience interacts and accepts or denies the invitation that is sent out. How and why is quite important.

Amy.  Methodologically more important in the substance. The analytic objects versus the analytic methods that Levin sets out. What she is talking about her is she is asking different questions about the things set out in front of us. Obviously the kind of answers one can keep looking for are going to be different if you use a lot of how or why. There is a lot of ideologies packed into both. Trusting the how to register the why.  The why question is a bit of a dead end street. Who care why he wrote Romeo and Juliet. It’s hard to make claims if you are asking a lot of why questions. But the how is about asking and answering different questions and asserting different things academically. She is setting out this binary, but it’s important to recognize this as a methodological question.

Andrea. Can we parse out the difference between the resistant and transgressive performer? Cody pointed out when she used the term transgressive it’s someone still cooperating with the frame set out. Tarzan and Jane with switched genders. They are still interacting with the cut out as it is asked to do. Resistant may be putting a different body part in the cut out.

Derek. I thought transgressive would be more extreme.  READ SOMETHING IN THE ARTICLE You are merely being resistant, since you have not broken out of the script.

Andrea. The example she brings up with Oscar Wilde PAGE 75. He is suggesting that there are two possible responses to the death of Nel both of which are competent (being sad with Nel’s death), but you are also cooperating when you are laughing because you are still interacting with that performance. TO be resistant to it you would have to do something completely different. Such as with the alphabet book you wouldn’t read it. Throw it.

Courtney. Are these terms she proposes?

Derek. We’re building off of Cody. She is using these terms, but using them as synonyms.  She needs to extend what she is doing to make a proper definition.

Ellen. Cody says Bernstein doesn’t make a space for agency. Within the scripts she imagines possible, it seems you can’t undermine the structure.  Is that fair?

Cody. Yeah. I didn’t attempt to make a distinction between the transgressive and resistant. No matter what by interacting with the cut out, how can your interaction alter the interpellations. So I assume her essay, even with Helen Hernandez who makes the joke—her structure told her to make that joke. Butler says you can take time for disobedience.

Ellen. It’s worth our time to read the butler.

Amy. I wonder if it may be useful to connect this to Kelly’s question with historical lens. It’s one thing to think about these performances now and pull them out, or looking at them in their specific moment.

Ellen. Let’s read butler.

WE READ SOME JUDY!! FIRST PARAGRAPH

Ellen. First paragraph is reminiscent of Debaurd Police man is a figure of the law. He can claim someone by saying ‘Hey you’ you are subordinated to a power structure that renders you helpless.

WE READ MORE JUDY! SECOND PARAGRAPH

Ellen. Is the law always enforced in its state of ideological perfection. Or can the subject in their response, find ways to create fishers or undercut, in some way, that state?

WE READ MORE JUDY! THIRD PARAGRAPH

Ellen. Lachina contribution. Anyone want to take that on? We’re in the land of psycho analysis.

Courtney. That moment when alienation occurs in ourselves as subjects. We look in the mirror at age one and we see a body that is controlled by us, but it is somehow separated from us.

Jess. So it’s about separation.

Ellen. Lacan says a child sees their reflection. Sees a person. Recognizes its their self. But also recognizes what he or she sees of themselves and the whole contained figure in the mirror. It creates this desire to create a whole of the mirror and what we see ourselves. It’s a paradigm that butler is creating to say that the law itself is also undermined by the gap between the signifier and the signified. So if we go back to the police officer and he says ‘hey you’ and the person says ‘yes officer?’ (Flirty?). The performance is off, and there is a crack in the law that must be corrected. It illustrates how the law can’t be a perfect insuperable object for the subjects who are interpolated by it. That it is necessarily formed in the act of interpellation in our obedience to it and our obedience is always going to be inflected by our humanity.

Jess. Can we apply that to Cavell? We are together in our separateness?

Amy. I think there are some echoes. The genealogy that we have here from Butler, is almost a hermetically sealed. It’s a form of discourse that only seems to speak to itself. A lot of things don’t hold up. We try to bridge ideas, and that’s important.

Ellen. Sometimes they don’t fit deliberately. What Cavell wants is to overcome a gap. Does this help us understand Cody’s critique of Bernstein? The closing down of agency.  Page 87 Cody quotes. There is no possibility of resistance. What has been always scripted for her what to say or to think. Cody pushes us towards butler where that affect can be pointed at the gaps and lapses. IF we were to go back to the picture, can we work this out?

           What can I Take from this? What is it telling me or the discipline to do? And also, do I agree with that?

           Personally, starting with this first image, she makes the choice to save a surprise of the girls ethnicity till the end. My suspicious problemised the reading. That’s a place of misalignment.  And that word mimicry or parody that comes up from that article from Butler. What if this is repetition with a satiric difference.

            Purely by the performance of obedience the satiric performance seems to come through.

Whitney.  With Butler I’m confused that in her sense whether this breakdown of the law is accidental. IS this resistance possible intentionally?

Ellen. Good questions. Thoughts?

Whitney. Can Cody answer it?

Cody. IF you read further it shows that there are still those spaces the law allows there to be resistance. If everything was controlled by the ideology you would immediately fall in line. So she does begin to make more complex what she initially says.

Ellen. Do we know Paris is Burning? Butler’s essay on that film is when she has to wrestle with the power of performance. IN the end she says is what’s great about that documentary is having people competing in drag. They are competing in order of their realness. They perform and authenticity that is confusing for us and butler. Here is a moment where we can see the edges of the performance of gender. It’s part of a sincerity. It brings out these cracks in the system that make the system open to interrogation. It’s one of those moments where a theorist starts taking apart her earlier ideas.

Jennifer. Part of the reason she focuses on the thing, and she does hold off on
Hellen’s identity until the end. She doesn’t spend that much time on it, but she returns to it. The focus is on the thing. Is she offering Helen as one option? She gives so much qualification as Helen’s identity. It didn’t hold the wait as much as the argument for the thing.

Derek. On the thing about her identity.  It was speculation on the identity of this person. I didn’t understand why she was doing this.

Amy. What did you think of that move? Why does she bring to bear census research and clearly a tremendous amount of archival research? What is the use of that evidence? What doe sit do to her argument.

Derek. I thought it was part of her thing when she says we shouldn’t look at the why we should look at the how. I understand that’s what she was doing but I still thought it was speculative in a way it was very one sided. I didn’t find it to be… it just seemed one sided, and there are other possibilities we are not exploring here. She is only looking for one thing.

Jennifer. Well if she is privileging the how, she is saying we can look at the why but it won’t help.

Whitney. Her look at performance allowed her not to look at the idea of racial [didn’t get that last word. Ugh.] But for me that section kind of grappled weirdly with ideas that if you are a certain race, you might have these very specific ideas of how you are because of what race you are. That is when her strength of performance broke down.

Courtney. I felt like that happened to in her weird equations with the cut outs that leave a space for the face versus the body. She doesn’t take into account that the body performing is very different from the face performing. The lack of this agential element on the part of the human being if she isn’t giving them room to perform in different ways.

Whitney. I think it’s the same thing with the assumption of the US census changed the boxes. A whole race of people changed the way they think about themselves.

Amy. Her point is more that there is a categorical shift going on in this period which rendered the way in which performances of race were happening. WE have evidence of category shift in this one element of archive (census and boxes) and now we have a picture of this performance of race. I didn’t hear her say anything that she was making assumptions or Helen’s performance of race and her experience of it. This image of Helen, that she knew she was created, was this performance or dance about race in a time that this category shifty on race was happening.

Ellen. Mid way down page 86. The methodologically take away from this article can be quite exciting. So set aside the misgivings. What is useful? methodologically. I think Bernstein starts with this picture. IT’s an ugly picture. But most historians would look at this picture and say this would represent an ugly piece of America’s past. But in order to account for the why, because we don’t know this women and intention isn’t clear- we are left in the dark. Bernstein says stop and I’ll give you away by giving you these materials to make this history.

Amy. So what is that way?

Jennifer. Start with how she describes the item her self. She discusses the engravings and he is eating a watermelon, his toe. She is reading them as a historian.

Courtney. On page 79 she makes a move in which she between these two pools of evidence we can look at. One that we can look at IN the picture and then the context (Context and content).

Whitney. The latent present. Presence was very valuable just in a way to read objects. The way she death with the difference between things and object.

Amy. Help Kelly Learn!

Whitney. For me the only instance in Brown’s essay is when he talks about tripping over something is that an object just exists, but when you trip over an object it becomes a thing. Things come at you. What a thing does is it makes you realize your own thingness in return. And that you are on the same playing field as a thing.

 [This is when I talked and tried to understand thing v. object. Didn’t get this part]

Ellen. If we can pay attention to thing rather than fetishize the person, we can answer questions that seem unanswerable. We can bridge these two categories.

Amy. In terms of one of the key take away on page 76 when she talks about what this offers. The use of the alphabet book and the doll in talking about what we know and what we don’t know.  READ ARTICLE. There is a performance that is afforded and invited by particular objects. Therefore we can resurrect a trace of a performance in ways that are more reliable than to Samuel peeps diary. Sure that is setting one form of evidence. It invites a particular kind of performance and we don’t need a diary to tell us what that is.

Derek. That is what I was having discomfort with.  I worry that will lead people too far that will allow assumptions.

Amy. So are we looking for interiority?

Derek. No. This is good and useful. I worry that it seems she is using it. Trying to get at that why she is trying to peak behind. If we are doing historical analysis we should try not to do that.

Ellen. Think on the responses to Don Giovanni. Dorothy’s were about the mirrors use. They were a representation of our wholesale capture into a serial rapist and narcissi.  She ventures into this reading without speaking to the director, but she does it by the audience. IT’s a smart intervention. One way we could deproblimize is the aperture she gives us, the particulars of her reading of Helen is like Dorothy’s. A free standing intervention. It is open to debate. IT’s a personal response. But it seems to me if we can separate these two. One being the critical act of intervention, and the other which is the methodological. And remember what we can speculate about even without a lot of textual or archival evidence. Maybe the essay wouldn’t feel so problematize. She just shows her hand and says her is the basis.  We’ll see because we are all going into the Lily and you’ll pull a photograph and you’ll come up with some way or assessing it’s meaningfulness.

Sara. I’ve been mulling over Cody’s saying isn’t there possibility of disobedience, because even if you’re in the arcade, you’re already participating.

Prompt: Course Blog 10: Personal Archives [whole class responds]

For Tuesday's class, we want you to read and think about one of your classmates' blogs as a de facto archive. The materials and concerns collected therein can be imagined as scriptive things for the blogger--they have commanded or invited interaction. In your blog post please think about the following questions:

• What questions seem to drive this blog's selection/organization/collection of materials?
• Which things, attended to by the blog, can be thought of as scriptive?  
• What kinds of performances do these things entail?

Think about this assignment as a way of offering helpful feedback to your colleagues about what compels them as scholars and practitioners of performance.

For simplicity's sake, we've arranged marriages.

Dorothy  responds to Sara:  http://writerlytext.tumblr.com/
Iris responds to Jess       http://athespianinacademia.wordpress.com/
Cody  responds to Courtney   http://courtneyfosterblog.wordpress.com
Sara     responds to Cody: http://sofarnameless-ortheunnamable.tumblr.com/
Kelly   responds to Andrea   http://whitacresaga.blogspot.com
Whitney responds to Justin   http://hoopdedoo.wordpress.com/
Ming   responds to Kelly    http://wannabeplaywright.tumblr.com/
Jenna respond to Whitney   http://spinningwiththebraine.wordpress.com
Jennifer respond to Iris    http://irisdauterman.blogspot.com/
Justin  respond to Jennifer  http://juszkiewicz.wordpress.com
Derek  responds to Ming   http://contextmessaging.tumblr.com
Jess  responds to Derek     http://explarmance.blogspot.com/
Andrea  responds to Jenna  http://thtr566johnson.wordpress.com/
Courtney responds Dorothy   http://broadwayindahomey.tumblr.com/

Excerpt from Judith Butler on Althusserian interpellation and the possibility of subversion and disobedience

"In Althusser's notion of interpellation, it is the police who initiate the call or address by which a subject becomes socially constituted.  There is the policeman, the one who not only represents the law but whose address "Hey, you!" has the effect of bringing the law to the one who is hailed.  This "one" who appears not to be in a condition of trespass prior to the call (for whom the call establishes a given practice as a trespass) is not fully a social subject, is not fully subjectivated, for he or she is not yet reprimanded.  The reprimand does not merely repress or control the subject, but forms a crucial part of the juridical and social formation of the subject.  The call is formative, if not performative, precisely because it initiates the individual into the subjected status of the subject.

Althusser conjectures this "hailing" or "interpellation" as a unilateral act, as the power and force of the law to compel fear at the same time that it offers recognition at an expense.  In the reprimand the subject not only receives recognition, but attains as well a certain order of social existence, in being transferred from an outer region of indifferent, questionable, or impossible being to the discursive or social domain of the subject.  But does this subjectivation take place as a direct effect of the reprimanding utterance or must the utterance wield the power to compel the fear of punishment and, from the compulsion, to produce a compliance and obedience to the law?  Are there other ways of being addressed and constituted by the law, ways of being occupied and occupying the law, that disarticulate the power of punishment from the power of recognition?   

Althusser underscores the Lacanian contribution to a structural analysis of this kind, and argues that a relation of misrecognition persists between the law and the subject it compels.  Although he refers to the possibility of "bad subjects," he does not consider the range of disobedience that such a interpellating law might produce.  The law might not only be refused, but it might also be ruptured, forced into a rearticulation that calls into question the monotheistic force of its own unilateral operation.  Where the uniformity of the subject is expected, where the behavioral conformity of the subject is commanded, there might be produced the refusal of the law in the form of parodic inhabiting of conformity that subtly calls into question the legitimacy of the command, a repetition of the law into hyperbole, a rearticulation of the law against the authority of the one who delivers it.  Here the performative, the call by the law which seeks to produce a lawful subject, produces a set of consequences that exceed and confound what appears to be the disciplining intention motivating the law.  Interpellation thus loses its status as a simple performative, an act of discourse with the power to create that to which it refers, and creates more than it ever meant to, signifying excess of any intended referent." (Butler, Bodies that Matter; 121-2)

Citation: Butler, Judith. "Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion." Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. Routledge: New York (1993). 121-40.

Interpellation: a handy overview (Ellen)

I would have posted this as a comment to Cody's response, but the comments field isn't a particularly visible space for discussion or elaboration. So for those looking for some context on interpellation, this is useful (if a bit scanty on Butler):

http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/interpellation.htm

On Butler, performativity, interpellation and citation (among other things), you might check out Sarah Salih's chapter, which is uploaded as a pdf here:

http://queerdigital.pbworks.com/f/SalihButlPerfo.pdf

Second Response to Bernstein (Cody)

The primary argument of Bernstein's essay is that "things," various cultural elements with which we interact everyday, in fact, "script" human action--that is, we take certain "cues" from insentient objects that lead us to act a certain way (68).  As such, these "things" are performatives, "they do something: they invite us to move. . . . Things script the meaningful bodily movements and these citational movements think the otherwise unthinkable" (70).  More importantly, our interactions--our "dancing"--with scriptive things interpellates us as subjects within larger ideological apparatuses.

Much of Bernstein's evidentiary support comes from archival photographs of diverse arcade, carnival cutouts that invite human participation via bodily insertion into designated negative spaces--i.e. cutout heads of Tarzan and Jane invite the participation of a white, heterosexual couple.  As Bernstein writes, "the Tarzan/Jane cutout exaggerates polarized, sexualized gender," it "projects" or "implies" a heterosexual couple, regardless of whether the gender bodies of the sentient participants align themselves with the "appropriately" correspondent genders of the insentient cutouts, in other words what Bernstein refers to as "gender-transgressive performance," embodied by the couple in Figure 8 (80-82).  Accordingly, even though this couple in Figure 8 is seemingly able to enjoy farcically the momentary and phantasmatic inversion of gender postionality, the very fact that a man and a woman are the participants signifies this cutout as a mechanism for subjectivating individuals within the heterosexual/heterosexist matrix, rendering hardly transgressive their imaginary gender inversion.  While Bernstein, indeed, mentions the (unlikely) possibility of a same-gender couple's participation in the same event, the cutout still actively writes a heterosexist script--which consequently, I would argue, in spite of any potential and ludic inversions of gender performance, equally invites normative gender configurations.

Perhaps one of my greatest quarrels with Bernstein's exegesis is that she seems too keen to localize or delimit interpellation or subjectivation (in her words, "enscription") to the temporary event of interacting with these scriptive objects.  Surely, as she mentions, these interactions and the manner of interaction are citational and reiterative, which would equally indicate that interpellation is itself citational and reiterative--the origins of which perpetually recede into an etiological abyss of prior signification and subjectivation.  In other words, there is always already an intertextual narrative behind every action and interaction with an object as is there comparably an intertextual narrative behind every scriptive object, and the scriptive object can only import its performative, interpellative powers by virtue of this citationality and contextuality.  In other words, would these cutouts possess the same performative, interpellative powers outside of their arcade, carnival contexts?  Furthermore, instead of speaking of the interpellative moment, should we, instead, speak of interpellative layers?  I would argue that, even before the heterosexual couple places their heads within those cutouts or before the parent or child reads A Coon Alphabet, these individuals have always already been hailed as white, heteronormative subjects.  The couple's entrance into and presence at the arcade or carnival, the purchasing of the children's alphabet book--these actions have already interpellated the respective individuals as the white, heteronormative subjects that Bernstein argues is performed by their subsequent interactions with the scriptive objects.  In a way, we can then consider the entrance and presence within the arcade or carnival as the immediate interpellation and as the larger performance that brackets all the other performances and interpellations transpiring within the designated spatiotemporality of event.  Can we qualify Bernstein's argument so that it considers any performative nuances between these different moments or layers of subject-hailing? Or, are these layers of interpellation merely a specular mise-en-abyme and, therefore, reiterative of the previous interpellations?  (I don't really have an answer(s) to these questions yet.)

I would also like to broach the issues of the phenomenological point of interpellation with regards to the cutouts and the subsequent possibility of transgression or subversion (that is, disobedience or resistance against the "original" hailing).  Bernstein's essay is mostly interested in the scriptive object's performative subjectivation as an issue of tactility or tangibility--that is, once the individual has placed his or her head in the Tarzan/Jane cutout, he or she has effectively fulfilled a phantasmatically signed, contractual agreement, exhibiting consent to the interpellative call and finalizing her/his subjectivation within the white, heteronormative matrix.  But, of course, the latter would mean that, since the cutout cannot actually yell "Hey, you!" like a police officer--unless there is, indeed, a proprietor conducting this hailing--the attendee's recognition of the cutout as a site of personal engagement and entertainment would be the moment of hailing.  And the subsequent action, if the participants are competent performers, requires the placement of specific body parts in the outlined areas (the imaginary rules of the contract).  For me, the placement of a man's head over Jane's and a woman's head over Tarzan's still fulfills the contract, the recognition of certain given rules and boundaries: one man, one woman and the negative space is to be occupied by faces.  Even if there exists the "trangression" of inverted gender positionalities, there is still the contractual obedience of placing faces within the negative space.  In Althusserian terms, they are still "good subjects," and, more importantly, they are subjects with a sense of humor.  The only disobedience I can imagine at this point would be to place a different body part within that negative space--and the body parts I'm thinking of would immediately suffer the abjection of "pervert."  Hence, this is a rather improbable, though not impossible, subversive feat. Additionally, since Bernstein relies so heavily on Althusserian interpellation (and only cursorily mentions in an endnote Judith Butler's critique of Althusser and her discussion of subversion and disobedience ), I wonder how much room Bernstein's essay allows for agential transgression or resistance against the normativizing cues of these scriptive objects?  Even though Bernstein attempts to explain, for example, how Helen Hernandez's performance with the introductory caricature destabilizes the original, interpellative call "to dance the dance of racial impersonation" that marks distance between sentient subject and insentient thing, Bernstein's argument still collapses into Althusserian determinism wherein Hernandez's invention/performance of an "ostensibly transgressive joke" is merely what the constructed caricature "told her to invent" (83, 87; emphasis added).

Blog Post #9, Second Response- Iris

Bernstein uses a lot of examples to explore the interactions the objects which script our actions and the performances that ensue. My favorite example was the "Tarzan and Jane" cut-out. By standing behind a painted image, the man assumes the look of a muscular savage standing among footlights, like a strongman in a circus, while the woman becomes his curvacious sidepiece. They are playing at a stereotype of gender roles that we've all seen a million times. 

What I found interesting was the second image, in which the woman takes on the role of the strong man and the man becomes the buxom beauty. Oh, how droll- they're standing in the wrong places! But according to Bernstein, both of these responses are scripted- drawing a comparison to the majority who sobbed at Little Nell or Eva's death, and the minority who laughed at it. Apparently, "The appeal of the Tarzan/Jane cutout is that its constraints allow for a temporary, Bakhtinian inversion that reinforces rather than undermines existing configurations of power." So, the woman may play at being the aggressive masculine character, but at the end of the day, we all know who's in charge.

But the cutout doesn't just enforce, it also projects- and the image it projects is that of a heterosexual couple.  While two women or two men could stand in the cutout, it is designed to appeal to the man and woman, walking hand-in-hand down the boardwalk. It projects the image of who should stand behind it, and draws in those who conform- whether their intention is to enforce or transgress the norm.

Bernstein Prompt: Primary Post (Whitney)

In “Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race,” Robin Bernstein argues that objects of material culture can (and often do) script human action and that very particular performances emerge out of interactions with racially meaningful scriptive things. This argument is articulated fairly comprehensibly within the first three pages of her article. Bernstein uses her primary example, the “watermelon” photograph, to initially engage the key elements of her argument. After a short discussion of both the “why” (related to questions about the woman and her interiority – person) and “how” (related to ways the photo produces historically located meanings – text) questions that come to mind on viewing this photo, she suggests that the distinction between the “why’s” and “how’s” of this photograph is disturbed by “a complex interaction between the two figures” (68). Because the active (“sentient”) agent is evidently taking her bodily cues from the passive (“inanimate”) thing, Bernstein claims that the caricature itself, as a thing, prompts and structures human action. Consequently, “in the dense interaction between thing and human, the caricature scripted the woman’s performance” (68).

There are several important terms to hash out that occur throughout Bernstein’s article, but the most important one (and the one I’ve already used in my brief summary of her argument) seems to be “script.” She defines her use of the term for the reader on page 69 – “I use the term script as a theatrical practitioner might: to denote an evocative primary substance from which actors, directors, and designers build complex, variable performances that occupy real time and space.” The script, for Bernstein, is that which inhabits the space between archive and repertoire. It is both the dramatic narrative, the stubborn text that structures a performance, and the enabler of action within real time and space. As she adds later in the article, the “script captures the moment when dramatic narrative and movement through space are in the act of becoming each other” (89).

Another important term follows directly from this first one – “scriptive thing.” Like a script, a scriptive thing both structures a performance in relation to itself and allows for variations within the resulting performance. The important added element here, though, is “thing,” a term that Bernstein spends a good deal of time pinning down. Bernstein takes her definition of thing directly from thing theory, which places the term “thing” in direct opposition to the term “object.” The words being in direct opposition, though, do not mean that the elements categorized by each word are necessarily in direct opposition. In other words, a thing can, at times, be an object and an object can, at times, be a thing – “the difference between objects and things, then, is not essential but situational and subjective” (69). Bernstein ultimately suggests that “performance” is the important distinguishing factor between object and thing. “Things are performative in that they do something: they invite humans to move” (70). Things, by this definition then, are also always “scriptive things” because they script “meaningful bodily movements” (dances or performances) by human beings.

“Enscription” is another important term Bernstein introduces (73). This term comes into play as she’s discussing the difference between determined and implied actions scripted by things. Her direct definition is “interpellation through a scriptive thing that combines narrative with materiality to structure behavior” (73). Like the act of turning the pages of Kemble’s alphabet book, enscription combines narrative (violence toward African Americans), materiality (the physical properties of the book that demand its reader to turn the pages), and repetition (performing this action twenty-four times, one for each letter of the alphabet). In Bernstein’s argument, enscription becomes an activity on the part of things that allows them to become “scriptive.” In other words, scriptive things enscript humans into certain patterns and indexes that become natural behaviors.

One final term I want to quickly define is “performative competence” (75). While the other terms Bernstein lays out seem to provide useful new concepts, this phrase seems particularly relevant in addressing some of our previous concepts in a new way (particularly regarding our recent discussions of spectatorship). Performative competence is an understanding of how a thing scripts broad behaviors within a particular historical moment. A competent performer will not only be able to “decode a thing’s invitation to dance” but will also understand the range of implications the scriptive thing is offering and will perform a response that lies within that range of implications.

Finally, after laying out her main argument and defining these crucial terms, Bernstein articulates the consequences of her argument toward the middle of the article. Her expectation is that proper readings of particular historically located performances that result from humans “dancing with things” can ultimately help us form substantial conclusions about larger patterns of behavior within that particular historical moment. In her words, “by reading things’ scripts within historically located traditions of performance, we can make well-supported claims about normative aggregate behavior” (76). She certainly seems to demonstrate this process in her article, and with some enlightening conclusions. While her very last paragraph seems, at first glance, to be a much too short explanation of how to do what she’s calling for (namely, “a revision of what qualifies as ‘reading’ material evidence”), she ultimately demonstrates a revision of “reading material evidence” throughout her article. Therefore, she walks us very carefully through the process she is hoping we will emulate in order to expand our knowledge of normal aggregate behavior within particular historical moments.

Thing vs. Object [Lusk]

Okay. So... what exactly is Bernstein saying.
That is a very good question.
It seems to me that she is requesting a more broad way of investigating artifacts from the past. She begins her article by cueing of Robyn Wiegman in the notion to no longer ask 'Why' to 'How' in reagards to race and how it is performed and how we define our race.
Her argument is best illustrated with the 'Watermelon' picture, and how the young woman is performing her race by mocking a race that she is not. She is saying 'I'm not black, so isn't it funny that I'm interacting with this character?'
She then goes on and declares a vocabulary for the rest of the article on the difference of a 'Thing' and an 'Object.' (She also says some stuff about knives that confused me)

What I THINK she is trying to say is an object is an inanimate representation of something. So... you're walking home from school and you see a rock. It's just a rock. No big deal. That rock is an object.
But... say you're walking home from school and you see a rock that was carved into the shape of a chair. That then becomes a thing because it is requesting participation.
As she says in her article, it can be both, "An object becomes a thing when it invites a person to dance." And then she later says, "Thing hail."
Such as the book she was citing. A book is a thing because it's function requires participation. For a novel to be used properly, and the way it was intended, you must open it, and turn the pages to progress  the information given.

She then goes on to discuss a thing's script. So, the Tarzan and Jane cut out piece, has a script of a heterosexual couple performing their gender properly. The interesting thing is that we can challenge that script. And we can have two men performing with this object. They then are performing gender transgression, which, in the context was not the purpose of the thing.
The script "captures the moment when dramatic narrative and movement through space are in the act of becoming each other." So when we fight the 'correct' script of the Tarzan and Jane cut out, we create our own script that relies on the original script. We cannot have gender transgression without the established 'normal' gender roles.

This article raised a question for me, as in... does historic context ever come into play?
Looking back on these images of African American caricatures, yes they are horrendous and would never (hopefully) be allowed today... but back then, they were allowed, and they were widely accepted.  Just as all of the Life magazine ads directed towards women assumed they were all at home cleaning the house and making dinner. Is it of any value to us to view these performances without the lens of our modern morals? Is there another facet that we are missing in these images? Just a thought, I'm not sure.

Class Notes - Jess - 09.25.12

Class Notes

·      AMY – all your posts were enjoyable; having Don Giovanni will enable us to deploy various theoretical readings to a specific experience we all had; a lack of familiarity will make it very useful

·      ELLEN – Cavell reading is dense, and not complete; he’s a philosopher, not a theatre theorist; that move to a separate field means becoming accustomed to his language; the transcendental doesn’t necessarily mean what we think it means; we may not agree with Mulhall, since he’s not looking at things as we are; let’s talk about Cavell and transport as a jumping off point; Cavell does not utilize that term, but how does that term apply?

·      DEREK – what is meant by transport?

·      ELLEN – I’m not sure we can come up with a consensus; I’m taking it from Levin

·      ANDREA – some of us talked about feeling an emotional connection to the characters onstage; sometimes you love the characters or feel what they feel, prevent bad things from happening to them, etc.; I thought Cavell used that definition in his paper;

·      JENNIFER – Cavell uses it when referencing Desdemona and our desire to save her; separateness

·      ELLEN – for him, the transport itself is the recognition of separation; it’s an ethical revelation; the way I thought transport might operate in this essay is where he’s essentially rehearsing an account of the theatre experience, describing the yokel, etc.; he set that paradigm up to undermine it; there’s this staged dialogue on 145 where there are lots of exchanges with his dashes - - almost like he’s announcing being purposefully irritable; so why does Cavell we think the yokel anecdote/joke is funny?

·      JENNIFER – I found Cavell making a joke of sitting in the crowd in the dark, though it seems really weird out of theatrical context; he takes the yokel anecdote and destroys the joke; Cavell questions our assumptions of the yokel’s ignorance; who is really onstage? is there an actor or a character onstage, and can you save either one? – this made me think of Auslander

·      ELLEN – on 146, he says that if we follow the rules of theatre, we go to see Mrs. Siddons and Desdemona die; he pushes at a kind of epistemological confusion, and beyond; we can’t fully know that Desdemona or the actor is actually in danger; when an emergency happens in the theatre, it makes terrible things possible (volatility); so, that’s one way we can chip away at our philosophical certainty of artifice in the theatre; he has a more philosophical approach to ethics; the question he’s asking is “What are we doing, when we attend the theatre, especially tragedy? What is the nature of this contract? Why do we do it? What is the good of it?”; he’s pushing back a long anti-theatrical tradition that includes Plato and Rousseau; what is the value of this experience, to him?;

·      AMY –  two binaries to set up that might be useful to track his argument is the distinction between Mrs. Siddons and Desdemona, and credible and incredible; what is he doing there, by setting up and blurring the distinction between Mrs. Siddons and Desdemona?; what is he saying on 145?

·      WHITNEY – I think he’s setting up both those binaries to emphasize the fact that in theatre, it can be neither one or the other; it always has to be both at the same time, or this in between space; the actor onstage can never be both the actor and the character; we can’t retrieve the character, post-emergency, until we re-start the theatrical experience; it can’t ever be either one;

·      DOROTHY – this relates to his idea that we can’t be in the presence of the characters, but we are in their present; if we were in her presence and were concerned for Desdemona’s safety, we would be responding, yelling to her, etc.; that related well, to me, to the credible vs. incredible binary

·      WHITNEY – he also draws that distinction between time and space, perhaps another binary we can add to?; but this binary doesn’t work with the neither/or application...

·      MING – I understood that he’s not just pointing to a binary but to a balance that’s been upset; theatre is so full of this tension because of this;

·      ELLEN – insuperable gap between ourselves and the represented character applies to our mirrored images; we can dissipate it by saying merely a system of counterfeit; Dorothy’s metaphor of ghosts or ghostliness points to a common trope in theatre, how we’ve conjured up these ghosts; Derrida has a lengthy account of this in his Spectres of Marx (?); useful language for us to keep at our beck and call;

·      WHITNEY – I was wondering if there might be something to that problem about us being unable to confront a character (as futile as confronting a fictive character) but they’re onstage in front of us; archive vs. repertoire? maybe the archive is where there ghosts are all the time, maybe the repertoire is where they take shape or form? the process whereby the text comes to life, in a way, and I’m wondering if we can use those same terms to think about Cavell...

·      AMY – put a pin in that thought ‘til we come back to that

·      ELLEN – disciplinarily speaking, performance studies or the study of performance, has this impressionistic quality which is strongly divergent from “real” scholars, who work in the archive; it’s a very powerful and entrenched sense of disciplinary opposition; theory goes down the ghostly line (ie: Derrida), so you can see this argument is not substantive; theory is hard and is a mode of thinking and isn’t dissimilar to what Cavell is doing here; what does Cavell want from us here? if you read the endnote on 155, you get a fairly illuminating subtext for this argument; this was written in the late 60’s; he’s trying to “rescue” theatre for modernity and ethical learning; how can we look at this?

·      WHITNEY – for me, it came at his “social justice” argument; he makes this plea to us to see how we do this in the real world; we effectively allow others to stage things for us, when we don’t take action or take part; he sort of finds a place for theatre in a political scene;

·      ELLEN – bottom of 149, top of 150 – this is where he’s discussing this; does this seem clear? This is a fairly important juncture in the argument; one of the innovations of this argument, for Cavell, theatricality is an apparatus of social un-engagement, social detachment/apathy, and that the theatre is a place where our inability to become involved where we would wish to be involved, the yearning for recognition/sameness; he’s speaking from a very human perspective; for him, that’s what the theatre offers to us, this pained recognition of our inability to act, and that recognition is maybe the strongest impulse we have to reach into one another, to be affectively present/compassionate to one another; it gets at Tracy Davis’s arguments as well;

·      AMY – Cavell’s argument about literal-ization onstage of conditions offstage; pg. 150; what about in To Kill A Mockingbird? Or think about that in relation to a theatrical experience you’ve had, that really worked. Deploy this notion.

·      DOROTHY – my example is the Strauss opera Salomé (text by Wilde); I always feel incredibly involved and sad; she has a crappy life, she’s very depressed and petulant, and ends up killing John the Baptist because she’s mad at her parents; makes me want to go talk to young girls! Why’s her dad making her strip?

·      ELLEN – that’s absolutely in keeping with this; we can experience Cavell’s example of Desdemona; the essay is about King Lear and unfulfilled acknowledgement at the root of King Lear; presumably we’ve all had this kind of experience before, where we wish we could intervene or solve the problem; recall Shakespeare in Love when Viola’s nurse cries out that Romeo is dead to the stage; one way we could think of this in terms of Don Giovanni, and Jenna, how you talked about wanting to rescue the actors from their staging, feeling around in the dark where there is no dark; this is an example of decorum effectively keeping you from throwing a tomato;

·      AMY – Ming, talk about your thoughts you wrote about; play out the entailments of this metaphor;

·      MING – I find this moral thing is incredibly confusing, since Brecht; this is all new to me; this dismayed me that it was so morally focused; a friend of mine loves reality TV shows, and she talks to the TV, I suppose like yelling at the TV during a football game; if that’s what we’re doing as an audience, how did that happen in Don Giovanni? There is no subtlety to that argument;

·      ELLEN – a footnote to that: Brecht is accused of painfully moralizing and didactic; perhaps how he would wish to be seen is as activating the audience into the critical engagement, within the larger world; he’s after the possibility of divergent opinion, hence the divergent split between the actor and the role; the visibility of that distinction is part and parcel with Brecht; I worry that Brecht can get caught up in the kind of theatre he’d abhor; he’d argue that moral theatre is bourgeois theatre, but we no longer recognize it as ideology; his vision of theatre is one that proposes the presented material as a problem to the audience to unpack and debate and have fisticuffs over;

·      AMY – so one possible link could be to Derek’s comments on the ethics of the dramaturgy of Don Giovanni; going back to this idea of a desire to act, a recognition of our separateness, and our unity with the audience as part of that separateness; to add to that, Derek’s argument’s about how it seems like Don Giovanni encourages inaction (God punishes, not humans); the conventions of opera certainly tell us to sit down and shut up; the conditions of the experience are extraordinarily separate from the audience to the performers; the structures are discouraging, but here, also the dramaturgy discourages it;

·      ELLEN – Derek’s post made me think of Cody and Dorothy’s critiques of Auslander last time; Don Giovanni was written in 1789, during the first shots of the French Revolution – these are not inconsequential to Mozart’s creation; a nobleman being pulled down to hell for being an asshole is a pretty radical statement; Mozart’s patrons are the aristocracy/royalty of Europe; it was important at the end of the descent to hell, to have a happy song with no trace of irony (marriage of happy/light with heavy/sad); do you even mention history, dramaturgically?

·      DOROTHY – not many musicologists would get away with that, the dramaturg getting away with that; there were a lot of things they could talk about, but they didn’t; is Don Giovanni a fallen noble? the decrepit performance of a Moorish performance?; it gave the possibility of unexplored avenues;

·      ELLEN – this goes back to Auslander and Cody’s point that the conceit as a critic, that they merely read what’s there, within the bubble of that immediate frame, no prior information brought to the conversation; we asked you to do that with Don Giovanni; it seems to be right that you bring your critical dexterity to bear with this; it’s not just an act of generosity, but of making an object of interest for us;

·      ANDREA – I was wondering about transport; it’s about identifying/loving a character, and I did not experience that with Don Giovanni – I hated the character, and I was disappointed at the end of the first act, and he wasn’t dead (partly because it was long, partly because I wanted to see this guy punished); how does this fit in with Cavell and transport? Can we apply these terms to a character we hate as opposed to love?

·      JENNIFER – to feel a deep dislike acknowledges personhood for the character

·      WHITNEY – it seems complicated to move to everyday life; useful impulses, like saving someone;

·      COURTNEY – are these “good” morals inherent in his argument, or is this just because of this specific example?

·      AMY – Dorothy’s point about the overture – what difference does it make to try to make Don Giovanni less of a serial rapist? Is that what was going on? And is that because of a desire to identify with him?; I think that this notion that theatrical enjoyment comes from identification is bankrupt and simplistic and problematic; this instinct makes Don Giovanni too sexy for his shirt and has the unintended/uncared about consequence about making - - -

·      SARA – Slutty McShepherdess

·      AMY – YES! That’s great!

·      MING – in translation, we have three kinds that we fight over; do we give a foreignizing approach or a friendly, fun approach? Were they wanting to make it a point of entrance for inexperienced audience members, this Slutty McShepherdess?

·      DOROTHY – this speaks to opera’s commercial viability; to make money, we have to make these canonical operas “accessible”; perhaps condescending to audiences; a lot of it has to do with the idea that opera is not accessible, so it has to be performed in ways that make it accessible

·      JENNIFER – I found it incredibly unaccessible; I hated it, it was schizophrenic, it gave me a headache

·      ELLEN – You’re not alone; both of your comments bring it back to Levin’s argument of unsettled opera; there’s a lot of real ire and rage on the level of story, but the songs are almost relentlessly upbeat; it seems to me that perhaps your frustration, Jennifer, comes from the interpreter to render settled the opera, to take an unsettled form/text, and try and harmonize it;

·      SARA – it takes so much more cognitive work to get to that point, why Don Giovanni is going to hell and not getting a medal; this was almost a lesson in how to find the concepts – the “effed up moment”; why are we killing a man and making him look into a bathroom mirror while it’s happening?; seven deadly sins – you can see this in the performance; if he’s then not going to hell for raping women, we have to find this other reason for his punishment, and what’s bouffe about that, is that those characters has these characteristics, so the concentration in one man is the problem;

·      ELLEN – so he’s Everyman? Bad choice!

·      DEREK – I’m not sure what I would do as a director; can you change the script?; would you re-cast Don Giovanni as an international financier, one of the 1%, could you modernize it to that extent? How to make it relevant?

·      SARA – Peter Sellars set it in Hell’s Kitchen, making it about drugs and money and sex

·      DOROTHY – you can set it anywhere; librettos are vague in between singing;

·      ELLEN – it’s also worth introducing the virtuosity of the performers in conveying the director’s take, or virtuosity in making the director’s choice legible; the coquetry was painful, for many of us; the performance of sexual desire was painfully mawkish; nobody ever kissed, just weirdly nuzzled each other; tremendous discomfort!; here you get a whole other layer – maybe we’re supposed to render this invisible and just say, well, we get it; but it does seem to me that the demands of opera come into friction that narrative can somehow save the day, and that narrative can be easily conveyed by opera singers performing a dumb show; it felt really, really long!

·      IRIS – Are they having sex, or not?!

·      DOROTHY – the physicality of opera singing is hard – I was happy to see that there was little “stand-and-sing” moments;

·      COURTNEY – the character of Leporello seemed to do pretty good physical humor; he was kind of funny; what was so strange that there was this one guy who was cast like he was acting in a play but no one thought that he should act in everyone else’s manner, and vice versa; it seemed like no one ever talked

·      DOROTHY – there might be a single class about acting for opera singers;

·      COURTNEY – at least on the director’s part, there was some value placed in acting, since this guy was placed in this role...

·      ELLEN – it’s true, opera singers are not trained to act; Levin’s example of Don Carlos as being very rigorous for them; this seems like a norm that can shift; a director will look at the stable of performers and say “Here’s how I can convey my take with these people.”

·      AMY – this is where Levin seems to be least helpful; he gets to talk about the tiny portion of operas that are different, rather than operas like IU’s Don Giovanni; theatre done here is very different than the outside world; I think a good director has to figure out a way to run damage control, and there are lots of ways that you can evoke “sex” in the audience without having an actor having to play “sexy”; you can just suck a finger, and that’s going to do a lot more than that weird humping; we tend to do weird things like miming sex acts, instead of asking what will convey “sex” to the audiences; we tend to go by virtue of representation through the actors, not what is going to evoke it in the audience;

·      ELLEN – Cavell is helpful here, with plausibility isn’t what we’re after; it’s a false set of standards; not useful way of thinking of the pleasures/aesthetics of the experiences

·      AMY – tremendously helpful; our attempt to say that “this is fiction, this is non fiction”, etc., are all useless categorizing;

·      DEREK – I want to ask about the audience member going up to rescue Desdemona; Cavell presents it as a joke, but I think I remember from a different class, someone talking about that actually happened; perhaps it wasn’t Othello, but something like that happened in the theatre; might have been, like Showboat; as a spectator you recognize that you have no present apart from theirs; I was trying to work out a connection between Claudius and having his conscience being caught, and the yokel who runs up onstage to intervene

·      ELLEN – the yoke is a kind of straw man, that’s Cavell’s position – to advocate the indistinction between spectacle and real life; I do think this is a chewy moment; my reading is that catching of conscience is sort of an afterthought here; Claudius has some kind of recognition that the stopping of the play won’t prevent the consequences of his actions, but what it can do is to bring out the power of the theatre as an ethical practice of revelation;

·      DOROTHY – for transportation and for transport and for Levin, something interesting was applying that to opera; acting based + musically based, and this is ignored here; someone might not be good at acting but if you do a good “Dido”, everyone’s crying;

·      AMY – the purity/virtuosity of that is central to the opera experience; the sound that they’re capable of making; we force ourselves to ignore virtuosity; Kelly brought up the materiality/finances of the thing and how palpable the experience was, being in the large fuzzy uterus of the MAC; this is always present in our experience; sometimes it looms large, sometimes not, but we should always attend this;

·      ELLEN – lots of people talked about theorizing transport; total forgetting; remember with Levin’s argument about how he loves being transported, but he wants to know where he’s going; there may or may not have been great moments of pleasure in Don Giovanni, but I’m encouraged by the detailed descriptions and critical upshots that you derived from them in relation to that performance; it says to me that the more alienated we are from the form/conventions of a genre, and the more unsettled the form is, the easier it is for us to do this kind of strongly engaged work; I’m eager to move those apparati onto other performance or more “conventional”, normative genres;