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).
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