An organization of Emptiness- Jenna's response to Whitney

One of the most intriguing threads in Whitney’s blog,  spinning with the braine, is one of absence, or perhaps the creation of presence through absence.

The first post through which this thread is laced is The Problem of Closet Dramas, her reaction to Worthen and Jackson. As she prefaces her analysis of closet drama, she writes,

“During the reading for the first week of my course on performance studies (Shannon Jackson’s Discipline and Performance and W.B. Worthen’s “Antigone’s Bones”) I couldn’t help but return again and again to the idea of early modern closet dramas. This is not because Jackson and Worthen discuss closet dramas at any length but, rather, because they were notably absent from the discussions of both scholars.”

I hope she will forgive me for glossing over her substantive analysis of closet drama in order to discuss this slighter element of her post, but Whitney’s inspiration for writing on closet drama is significant in establishing one of the patterns of scholarship present in her blog. Very often, Whitney uses absence as a means to create presence. Here, in her analysis of closet drama, she has located an academic gap in the conversation between Worthen and Jackson and inserted her presence into the absence through the creation of a response.

Whitney continues to probe this concept through questions she poses throughout her blog. For instance, in Joseph Roach and Richard II (?), Whitney probes Roach’s observation that “culture cannot perform itself without also performing who and what it is not” by examining the concept of negation as a form of identity creation in Richard II.

Similarly, in Literary Memorials, Whitney questions literature’s potential to serve as memorial while arguing that memorials often memorialize ways of “not knowing” rather than ways of “knowing.” As such she wonders if literature is unable to memorialize because it fails to provide a method of physically embodying what is not known about the subject of the memorial.

Additionally, in (Un)Categorizing Documentary Theatre, Whitney uses documentary theatre as evidence to illuminate absence in the theatrical archive. Near the end of her post, she asks,

“How detailed does an archive have to be in order for it to be a complete archive? And, if the limitations of any documentary genre, including theater, only allow for the tiniest fractions of the archive to be documented and exposed, can’t we consider plays that take into account popular attitudes, opinions, questions of their time also to be using fractions of materials from a very large archive?”

Through locating topics that are not discussed in the documentary theatre archive, Whitney strives to create a larger archive of documentary theatre that may marry interdisciplinary methodological approaches to the concept of documentation.

In addition to using absence as a means through which to create presence as an organizing principle of her blog, Whitney’s blog also functions as a scriptive object that invites her audience to perform the same action. In two of her blog entries, "Desymbolization of the World" and  Writing as a "Garment of Memory", Whitney posts an absence. In both of these blog posts, Whitney has presented her reader with the absence of written analysis. Instead, the readers are invited to create their own analyses of how Whitney has connected the quotation offered in the post to the post’s title. How might a chair’s inclusion in a museum gallery desymbolize the world? How can text become a garment of memory? Each reader is asked to dance with the quotations that Whitney has provided and create a presence to occupy the absence she has scripted into her blog.

I very much enjoyed reading Whitney's blog, especially as it allowed me to consider academic writing as being spatially organized around the concept of absence and the scholar's role of occupying individual pockets of emptiness.