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.