Friday, September 28, 2012

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.

Thursday, September 27, 2012

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   external link: 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


Wednesday, September 26, 2012

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.


Class Notes: 9/26, Don Giovanni (Ming)

 (Question marks and ellipses and brackets are all admissions that I didn't catch something or may have summarized it incorrectly.)
Let Amy know if you haven’t gotten the Chicago email!
On Nov. 9th, for the Indianapolis trip, we’ll leave by 11 and get back by 5.
Amy: Your posts were enjoyable, and the theoretical readings we’ve done are applicable to Don Giovanni.
Ellen: Cavell is a philosopher, not a theater theorist, you can see by his use of the term “transcendental”…(something about levels of intimacy)…Not sure we’ll all agree, but let’s jump off on Cavell and transport.  It’s not a term he uses; how does it apply?
Derek: Not sure what he meant by “transport.”
Ellen: Do we have a consensus? Levin doesn’t bother to stop and define it…
Andrea: Feeling an emotional connection to the characters onstage, don’t want bad things to happen to them.
Jennifer: more on that on Cavell, ref. p. 153
Ellen: he rehearses the usual account, the breach performed by the “yokel,” so that he can reverse it; p. 145 like he’s trying to be irritating re: yokel jokeàreinforcing decorum.  Why does Cavell think we think it is funny?
Jennifer: what about what a joke it is that we sit around in a crowd in the dark? As audience members it’s what we do. Ref. p. 147 “there’s nothing I can do”: separation between actor and character reflective of Auslander’s person/persona
Ellen: That forked moment—watching Desdemona die…from the point of view of the yokel who is unaware of the artifice of performance. Epistemological volatility there, example: theater fire. Touches upon status of artifice in theater but sets that aside somewhat in favor or a conversation about ethics…scenes of atrocity, painful, poignant: Cavell is pushing back against theoretical tradition’s anti theatrical position in philosophy (Rousseau, etc)
Amy: ref. p. 145., What about binaries: credible vs. incredible; actor playing Desdemona vs. Desdemona…“No amount of pointing at ‘that woman’ will clear up..”  ..?
Whitney: can be neither one nor the other; in an emergency, character vanishes.  Can’t ever be both?
Dorothy: Ref. Cavell: we can’t be in their presence, but we can be in their present…duality of performer…?
Whitney: draws that distinction between time and space, but that doesn’t work between either/or?
Ellen: Ref. dorothy’s post about mirrors in Don Giovanni….analogous to seeing ourselves in the reflection of the mirror, that we can never ‘have’ or ‘get to’; metaphor of ghosts (Derrida explores this beginning with Hamlet’s ghost); convey a sense of consequence attached to all this within the ontological state we view to be significant
Whitney: ref. p. 148, confrontation as tension in front of us or a process whereby the text comes to life
Amy: put a pin in that and we’ll get back to it
Ellen: (summary): the metaphor of ghost work is illustrative of disciplinary opposition, a tradition viewed as divergent from ‘real’ scholars as this theory goes down ‘the ghostly line’, which is seen as not substantive, not a hard and serious mode of thinking that I find very important.  Now: what does Cavell want from us?  To disarticulate good art from artifice, which is flagged as theatricality.  How is this a rescue mission of theater for modernity and ethics?
Whitney: ref. point 3 on p. 150, “social justice argument”
Ellen: Social detachedness and apathy—he demonstrates our strongest […] inability to do something when we would like to do something, yearning to be involved, yearning for recognition of sameness, pained recognition of inability to act, the strongest impulse we have to reach out to each other: for Cavell, this is something we do every day and theater it a site in which to test its limits
Amy: Let’s use that as a segue to the opera, aslo ref. p. 150, which reiterates what Ellen said above
Dorothy: The Oscar Wilde play ‘Salome’ has me feeling for Salome every time, every time I am invested: she has a terrible life, then kills John the Baptist, her dad’s a lech, her mom doesn’t care, and I always want to go talk to her, to reach out to young women
Ellen: wish you could intervene, solve the problem.  Even seeing a lackluster or bad production, you want to rescue the poor actor from their stage business, which is itself a kind of pathos, excruciating feeling.  Three centuries ago you could have thrown a tomato
Amy: ming could you tell us about the line from your post: “if fiction if the playground of the word should, then Don G is the monkey bars”
Ming: I’ve been struggling, since reading him earlier, with Brecht, who calls such attention to the moral business of receiving a play, and at first I didn’t know if I agreed with that, then remembered a friend from home who loves to shout at the television during reality shows, or people who watch football: realized spectating is very much that, and Don G. was a not-nuanced study in that judgment that is the backbone of the fictive world
Ellen: Brecht actually would have been horrified at much theater that would co-opt his view (“moral theater”); he’s more speaking to critical engagement, divergent opinions…a character can be in conversation with its performance. Brecht would say moral theater is bourgeois, and that the theater he’s interested in is more one that presents a real engage-able problem to the audience so they can attack and defend
Amy: dramaturgy is about saying ‘calm down’…Mise-en-scene of opera in particular constructs a big difference between audience and actors, which dramaturgy also does
Ellen: Don Giovanni was created in 1789, literally when the first shots of war could be heard—a play about an aristocrat going to hell for being an asshole is actually pretty risky when you think about it…references the contextual info that used to come along like the program and summary, which is not something a dramaturge would get away with
Dorothy: (didn’t catch it)
Sara: I could see the silver leaf peeling at the top of the mirrors
Dorothy: the set buildings has broken parts which they could have covered up, there was a possibility of nuance that went unexplored
Ellen: the conceit of the critic is that their engagement doesn’t extend beyond that immediate bubble…
Andrea: I wanted to see this guy punished by the end of the first act—is that feeling what Cavell might intend transport to mean?
Jennifer: I think that’s equally valid; it’s an investment in what happens to a character, no?
Whitney: whereas the impulse to save someone from dying might be termed ‘useful’? (didn’t catch it)
Amy: ref. Dorothy’s post’s point about overture; why make him more sympathetic…this notion that theatricality is about identification is bankrupt--and informs Don Giovanni and other productions
(I don’t know how we got to it but Sara references “Slutty McShepherdess”)
Dorothy: was the point to perform it in ways that make it accessible?
Jennifer: I thought it was irritating, schizophrenic, frustrating, I wanted to leave and it gave me a headache.
Ellen: the songs were relentlessly upbeat; damnation of the main character was exculpated
Sara: to my students I might say this is an object lesson: why does this seem f’d up?  Why are we killing a man and making him look in a mirror while we do it?  There was a 7 deadly sins theme going there that was just coded enough to make you feel cool if you got it, but there was so much work involved, of the kind that you have to do if there’s a technical error but that’s not what this was, instead of letting it stand that this dude is abusing aristocracy and that’s why he’s going to hell.
Derek: so if he’d been cast as the banker who’s corrupt?
Sara: ref. Peter Sellers (didn’t catch the rest)
Dorothy: one thing about opera is how loose it is in terms of setting
Ellen: ref. Iris’s post, scene of overture, coquetry—desire was painfully mawkish in this production; no real kissing; kind of groping.  We’re supposed to see through or render invisible the completion of the act.  Narrative easily conveyed by singers also performing a “dumb show.”
Dorothy: but can we also give credit to the physicality of the actors? I was proud of their physicality in terms of not just standing around and singing.  They can’t exactly act/do sensuality they can only do more broad things.
Courtney: The singer who played Leperello was the only one who could really act.  He was good at physical humor, but was the only one in the cast with that trait.  There was just this one guy who could act, and that makes acting conceivably a part of opera casting, at least in this case?
Amy: by definition conservatives are people who learned this 50 years ago and stopped learning 50 years ago.  A good director has to find a way to do damage control.  I mean, just sucking a finger would have done much more for me than the kind of humping that was going on on that stage.  It’s a big problem to ask “how do we represent this through the actors?” as opposed to “how do we evoke this in the audience?” and that’s where good theater goes to die.  Regurgitating vs inheriting.
Derek: I spoke with someone who had seen something yokel-ish actually occur in a theater during a production…ref. p. 154 paragraph 2: “I have no present apart from theirs”..trying to work out connection between Claudius and yokel running up onstage
Ellen: those two things are diametrically opposed; for Cavell the yokel is something of a straw man […] recognition of connection between stopping the play and an ethical practice of revelation, which is a great inquiry into transport as a way of engaging theater without deeply necessarily being completely lost in it.
Dorothy: what about transposing the idea of transport to other kinds of theatrical work.  Largely all this ignored the musical aspect, which is a big part of operatic transport, you don’t necessarily act sad, but if you do a good Dido (?) everybody’s crying.
Amy: I agree there’s little attention paid to the systems of production, and how we’re always aware of the realness rearing up through their singing. Ref. cody’s post on ontological stupefecationà Levin, “Look, I’m about transport, but not losing direction or critical acumen”
Ellen: very much about finding pleasure in the unpleasurable object .  Read Bernstein next!



Tuesday, September 25, 2012

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.