Class notes 10-9-12

Amy: Both Ellen and I are driving and have room for 4-5. Ellen is leaving Saturday night and I am leaving Sunday. Both of us are going up to Chicago on Friday. The rest of you should email the car you want to be in.

Ellen: Car schedule will be posted.

Amy: Hotel or Jennifer’s house?

Jennifer: Stay as long as you want. No food, one bed, electricity. Can take train from house to Chicago.

Amy: Email me and say that you’re interested in a room for this price. Check oncourse to see if people are willing to share rooms. For Black Watch, you have to be there at 7:30, no late seating, no intermission. We’re seeing Equivocation Saturday at 4.

Ellen: We can figure out at Black Watch if we want to convene for some museums or something else in the morning. Reminder: we’re meeting Thursday in the Lilly.

Amy: Next Tuesday, we’re planning on meeting in Welles-Metz Theater to look at the Richard III set. Theatre Circle talk next Thursday at 5:30 in the Studio Theatre.

Ellen: Phelan and Bernant—rich blog posts for speakers to start with.

Whitney: I just thought of as a way in, last time Derek asked how this object performs surrogation. I was thinking about Phelan’s account of performance as an irreducible thing. Maybe we could extend this to surrogation—something that cannot be substituted. In relation to Kelly’s post with the angel picture: if that’s become the epic Angels in America photo, how does that change our expectations of the performance?

Amy: Say more about what renders it impossible.

Whitney: It’s practically impossible in terms of budget for theater versus TV, but also Phelan’s account. I thought that I could use ‘impossible’ from her account, but I’m not sure how to articulate that.

Dorothy: I think the cinematic connection is an important one in terms of the spectatorship of performance. People often place what they see in film as the paragon of this performance. Any performance of Angels in America that doesn’t have an angel breaking through the ceiling is somehow less than it should be.

Ellen: So the platonic image of performance is cinema?

Dorothy: It often ends up that way.

Justin: It’s a production challenge that people come up against because you have outside icons of how it’s supposed to be. That icon becomes something you can undercut or come at in another way.

Jenna: It’s scripted, right? I don’t think you should produce that play if you don’t know how you’re going to do it.

Amy: Speaks to Phelan’s point about the subject becoming itself through disappearance. It is subject-forming in its disappearance. Did that make sense for people? We show up in her last chapter. Right off the bat, performance is only life as in the presence and cannot participate in representation of performance.

Iris: This put me in mind of something Sara said about filming opera, but what would we give for one shitty DVD of Oedipus? I know it’s not the same thing, but I almost don’t care.

Kelly: for the people in the movie watching spike lee’s movie, it’s a performance but for me watching DVD it’s not?

Iris: It’s still a performance, but distorted.

Ellen: Performance has a unique quality of self-effacement creating identity. Anything else can still be good, but it’s not performance. Your example would not be a performance, it is a film ontologically. Whether or not we buy that, that’s an ontological claim, not a claim about the pragmatics of doing research. There are other theoretical strains to her claim that we need to attend to. Why is it important to her that performance has this ontological distinction? She has a pretty strong investment in talking about performance as a thing apart from other representations.

…

Dorothy: Just breaking the silence. This is not a thing I’m going to be able to point to, but the idea of being unable to reproduce a discreet moment is important to her. I was thinking about that in relation to the vernacular of talking about performance. If Kelly said, “I saw Passing Strange,” we would assume he saw it in the theatre, as a live performance. I understand her concepts of them not being able to be reproduced. Even watching a film of a performance, you could pause it or change the angle.

Sara: That was key for me—any attempt to document the performance changes the performance. The litmus test is, does viewing it as a film change the performance?

Ming: I like that she switches it around, so performance is changing her writing of it as well. There were small gestures she was making. Sara made me think she was speaking of an opposite direction the performance can go.

Amy: How does she get to writing? How does she incorporate this idea of the other? Leads to her political commitments.

Kelly: You can do the same play but it’s never the same.

Amy: Why doesn’t she say unrepeatable?

Whitney: It was a way of easing into her argument about gender.

Ellen: So how does gender interarticulate with her argument here?

Cody: Performance in itself shows an existence. Related to genitalia. Having no signifying space, permanence.

Ellen: What is the evidentiary value here of these photos? There is a little bit of drift from the ontological argument because she is talking about an artistic photograph, not a performance. She needs these images to make her argument, and if they don’t function perfectly as performance, they offer an area in which to make her claims. How are these images meaningful to her?

Amy: She sets up her description of these performances by talking about the writing and the disappearance. Aftereffect of disappearance is the beginning of subjectivity. There is a useful detail of Festa piece on 156. Maybe we could hear that and talk about that in relation to subjectivity through disappearance.

Dorothy: reads section, description of Figure 6, page 156.

Amy: What do you hear in that?

Dorothy: She is talking about the manipulation of viewing.

Ming: you get a sense of the performance as a scripted thing. She is walking us through what it has us doing. I’ve been confused since Bernstein about thing and thing-thing, but I saw the way she was treating these objects as scriptive.

Ellen: Performance itself is a testing ground for her performance of gender simultaneously. The eye goes to the mediated representations, and this is where the image becomes solidified in a way we can seize, but the body itself is irreducible. It remains a blind, a blank. It’s a miniature recipe for how she sees performance operating. It gives us the ability to say that other forms of performance might not operate the same ways. She resists reducibility vis a vis capital. The fact that Phelan’s formulation has been readily exported is something we can question. We need to look at her context and whether that makes a difference.

Amy: Her description is amazingly detailed. She does a good rigorous job of archiving that performance, which is important to her theoretical arguments. The writing becomes a different performance that she takes on. She starts playing and renders her own perspective pretty particularly. She performs her spectatorship in her writing very clearly. How she is making the argument is central to the content of the argument. It’s easy to forget how important it is to really look critically at the performance. She is pointing to specific evidence.

Ming: Is she writing towards disappearance?

Ellen: Good question. I wonder. Does her account of these performances render them documented, or is this something more playful?

Dorothy: It read to me like a lot of performance art scores. This is the way those would be written, even saying what the spectator sees. It fits into that performance rhetoric.

Ellen: On p. 161 last paragraph—at this point I wonder what our distance is from the ‘faraway look in the eyes’ in the photograph. How transportable is this set of feelings to a wider use?

Courtney: Could it be that the fact that all we have is her perspective creates an instance of subjectivity that comes from performance? Specifically that the only record we have of the performance is her subjectivity.

Ellen: It reminds me of the anecdote she begins with. What we have is her mining her own memory of a lost event and producing a work of art that is a commemoration of it. It pushes toward the theoretical questions she has.

Whitney: Is this a place to connect to Berlant? It suggests this affective reaction being able to be structured in a way that can be normative.

Ellen: What would Berlant say about that cannibalistic, sick sort of thing?

Amy: Berlant starts with strong claims, midstream in her argument. What can we pull from this discussion about what she is trying to do? What is she pointing at? How did you make sense of this, wherever you are in your swim through affective theory?

Whitney: I think that problematizes what Phelan is doing. Berlant says that is the problem with how we read affect and trauma. I think that the way the Phelan is reading the photograph in this moment is that affective communication as mimetic, transmission as performative. Berlant is calling for the idea that we can’t normalize this.

Ellen: What is Berlant ultimately looking for in terms of affective response to traumatic phenomena? And it is helpful to think of this in terms of Wexler’s critique of sentiment. Wexler is saying that’s an ideological apparatus, and Berlant is saying that we need to combat this inclination to read the affective cue as identical to uptake.

Amy: Just because you see a moment of pathos onstage doesn’t mean you will react with ‘awwww.’ There is a desire for the reaction to be in line—experiences with undergrads—experienced readers and viewers know that emotional reaction is more slippery than that.

Dorothy: This kind of argument against presumptive affect relates well to the Festa example because in reading it you can see when she talks about her reactions we are supposed to take that as the way we’re supposed to react. That’s an important thing to keep in mind in situations that proscribe an emotional response.

Ellen: Add one nuance to that—people who view traumatic events and roll their eyes, Berlant makes possible doesn’t mean you are a bad watcher. It’s not that the work misfired, it’s that their mode of uptake or response is different from what we would like to believe is the decorum of trauma. In Dolan’s 9-11 piece, you see her trying to prove her decorous relation to the event. Any moment where you see that defensiveness, you see the cultural impulse toward a one-to-one reaction to stimulus. There is in fact a broad range of reactions.

Whitney: Would Bernstein complicate that? She argues that the scriptive thing takes into account those responses.

Amy: The difference is in the systems they are both responding to. Bernstein is talking about the dances possible with this thing, and Berlant is talking about extending the space between represented emotion and presumed reaction.

Courtney: For me what was important was the possiblity in Berlant of no response. For Bernstein, you must respond to fit into her theory.

Dorothy: That relates back to the structures of formalized performance that you have gone to in order to see something, rather than something you walk past on the street.

Courtney: But I think that just walking past is relevant for Berlant but not Bernstein.

Ellen: That partly has to do with the nature of their archives.

Sara: It doesn’t meet her criteria for thingness. If you walked past the cut-out, it wouldn’t be a thing.

Cody: I wanted to move this beyond understanding Berlant’s argument. Why was section 2 required? I don’t understand that section and its significance to larger argument.

Natalie: Possible connection—it’s not just that there can be different reactions; it’s a process, constant negotiation that has a lot of variables. Emotional response unfolds in time in a way we’re not accounting for correctly. Her analysis in second section has to do with that quality of the affective response.

Ellen: ‘Feeling historical’ is not one of the feelings we teach when we teach children moods, so there is a desire to extend the range of affect and the implications it can offer. What is the value of thinking about feeling historical?

Amy: What is she pointing at in this section? What joins them at all?

Courtney: For me it seemed important that this was on 231 a crisis lived within ordinariness. That seemed significant, and that was part of why this is here, but I don’t know how to integrate into larger argument.

Dorothy: I’m with Cody on this, not seeing how this fits into larger effect, other than providing a different emotion or affect.

Whitney: I was thinking about the temporality of this affect, and the ways that it provides in order for us to think about cause not equaling effect. It becomes important to see how time plays into it. If time plays into it, we see reactions as linear, but if time is charged in a different way, we see how that movement can be disrupted.

Amy: “Now we think as we fuck”—what does he mean?

Cody: In that historical moment, men having sex need to be constantly thinking while they are fucking. He recognizes himself in a historical moment, and George Bush thinks so as well.

Ellen: Both premised on entry into a new traumatic moment. I think what she is unfolding is the state of suspension that demarcates the ordinariness of living in trauma time. It can’t be a sustained articulation like Dolan, it has to take a different form. She is being deliberate in choosing these quotes in saying that the difference of circumstances doesn’t matter. Thinking that is not really thinking—that suspends you in a different historical terrain.

Dorothy: But the aids epidemic was not a decision like Iraq was. Bush knew people would be dying when the decision was made, and that represents a different situation.

Cody: Is there a larger stake in the way these two men are thinking about feeling historical? The bedrock is to deny those larger stakes, and it loses in its persuasiveness for me.

Ellen: Berlant surely faced criticism of that aspect. Affective states that are sub-rational and not identifiable feelings but something more complex, but which she feels have a stronger effect on our lives. Subjectivity of individuals is somewhat of a red herring. These circumstances cannot be homogenized but represent a state of trauma that deserves this structural comparison.

Amy: Both of their claims to thinking are an affective statement. She is clearly cherry-picking by talking about a moment when thinking punctures the present moment in a way that doesn’t belong. There is a conflation of thinking and feeling in these moments for both of them. Bush is laying claim to an emotional performance of attention to Iraq and hoping to convey to us his recognition of the power of the current moment, and that is the same thing Hemphill is talking about.  She is trying to notice these moments when thinking becomes a kind of code for historical recognition. The stakes of the long term enter into our affective presence through this concept.

Sara: This idea relates to Taylor feeling guilt about taking photos out her window. I’m uncomfortable with feeling and thinking being different things.

Ellen: That’s actually a perfect example for Berlant. It shows subsumption into feeling historical in the moment. To her this act of documentation isn’t a thought-through process, but is spontaneous, and it  seems to affirm Berlant’s claim.

Amy: It’s clearer if you never separate thinking and feeling to begin with, but the point of what she is saying is something I am with.

Sara: Would Taylor’s writing be more in line with what Phelan is proposing as far as disappearance? As Phelan began to do with performance and later slipped out of.

Dorothy: Historicized affect in our affective response to pre-historicized things. In teaching on blackface music, there’s a comedic response, but when the students see it, they feel like they can’t think that it’s funny anymore. That relates to myriad historicized ideas of when you should stop and think instead of having feelings.

Ellen: Your example of students who are very concerned about policing their affective response is the opposite thing that Berlant is talking about. She is trying to isolate a strain of affect that we don’t think about. And yet, if we recognize it we find a lived trauma. I think she is trying to open up for us an unconscious stopping to think and a reflexive action without any self-reflexivity.