Blog 12, Ming Responds to Courtney

Courtney asks, re Davis's "Theatricality and Civil Society":

How does this performance demand my sympathy? How can I move past sympathy to become aware of my own spectatorial position?

The question reminded me of Taylor's piece and the interrogation of theatricality I saw it creating in the space between sympathy and spectatorship.  The “I” in “Lost in the Field of Vision” is arguably a theatrical one, in that Taylor's memoir is a narrative of self-awareness: one that never “forgets that it is spectating” (Davis 128). Yet I wonder whether Taylor could be practicing theatricality when she couldn't "make sense of what she was seeing" even as moments earlier, while she saw the actual tower in actual flames, she thought, logically enough, that it would take a lot of time and money to fix (Taylor 238-9).  Taylor's line of inquiry challenges Davis's description of Plato's mimetic gap in that, while she “pits the live event against the mediated” when she speaks of the “traumatic loop” of footage of the plane crashing into the tower, she also makes a point of collapsing the distinction between the two (Davis 131; Taylor 241): on the morning of 9/11, for Taylor, the live was the mediated, so relentlessly that the latter seemed to become more “real” than the former...that is, if realness has anything to do with epistemology, which is up for debate. 

 In a previous post I said that like George Oppen, I can't distinguish meaning from narrative; Taylor's piece reminds us that meaning is required for sympathy and that sympathy, therefore, is a product of narrative and impossible without it. Taylor's description of herself and others around her standing “transfixed, watching, witnesses without a narrative” before her TV gave her that narrative was an arresting illustration of what Davis might be referring to with the phrase "epistemological void", in that Taylor knew she was spectating—was conscious of “herself as part of the spectacle”--but her “inability to make sense of what [she] was seeing” left her in a space that arguably reversed the order Courtney presupposes in her question: instead of moving past sympathy toward a spectatorial position, Taylor was in a spectatorial position without the narrative required to construct the meaning that necessarily precedes sympathy (Davis 141, 132; Taylor 239).  If sympathy is "a substitution of oneself for another",  as Butler contends, Taylor never sympathizes with those who jumped from the towers; if theatricality uses the "reiterative power of discourse to produce that which it constrains", then her TV was expressing more theatricality than she was (Davis 150-151).  Taylor was in the position to spectate, but perhaps by Davis's estimation Taylor didn't actually do so since she didn't “assert an awareness of the event's full meaning” (Davis, 132-3). Taylor needed the mediation of the “Military Industrial Media Complex” to understand what was happening, and once she did, her “archival impulse” ran the show, illuminating the reaction that might be the first vestige of “responsible witness" in her since seeing the event (Taylor 141). Taylor is only a spectator in retrospect, and in the moment, unable as she was to construct meaning out of what she was seeing, she was caught in what I'll borrow from literary translator Schliermacher and call “an unlovely in-between realm”, or maybe what Davis calls “protean and in flux” (Davis 137): Taylor did not identify enough of what she saw to spectate, did not identify enough with what she saw to sympathize.  But she'd "know" the first to be able "feel" the second.

That line from Schliermacher's "Essay on the Principles of Translation" can do a little more work for us, actually, given Davis's connection between theatricality and "nation-making": he wrote that “one must be loyal to one language or another, just as to one nation, or else drift disoriented in an unlovely in-between realm.” Such a realm, on the morning of 9/11 in Manhattan, might be one that Davis unwittingly illustrates when she references Burke 's theory that “when fluidity is too fully tolerated, social order breaks down” (Davis 137). Certainly social order broke down as cleanly as Taylor's grasp on what she was seeing that morning in New York, and neither could recover themselves before the media began the business of cohesive “nation-making” (Taylor 243). For Burke, Davis writes, there is “danger” to “creating an image of oneself or one's nation and then broadcasting it” (Davis 137) and Taylor seems to agree with that danger in her retrospective takedown of the media's narrative around 9/11.  Davis's description of one kind of theatricality as “overblown spectacle” is chillingly apropos to the media circus surrounding 9/11 and the theatricality of its “nation-making” (Davis 135), but the more subtle aspect of theatricality, one that is "an aspect of communicating" (Davis 136), wasn't initially present in Taylor that day: she was neither in the spectatorial position nor the sympathetic one.