Notes on Class 10-9-2012
Chicago Trip
Discussion (Amy)
Rides: Ellen and Amy are driving
and can take 3-4 people. Ellen is leaving Saturday night, even if it’s
super-late. Amy is leaving Sunday midday. Both are leaving for Chicago on
Friday. Please e-mail the person whom you would like to go with and let him/her
know. Ellen and Amy will post schedule on Oncourse.
Hotel/Jennifer’s House: Amy will be
doing hotels, or you can stay at Jennifer’s (704 Fox Street, LaPorte, IN 46350.
Closest South Shore trains stop is Michigan City Carroll Ave.). Amy volunteered to do a Priceline/room
list in order to get a better rate. E-mail Amy details on what you’d like to
do. Use Oncourse to see if anyone is interested in sharing a room.
Black Watch – be there at 7:30 p.m.
– no intermission, no late seating. Amy will provide directions, but give
yourself plenty of time.
Equivocation – Saturday at 4:00
p.m. (Prudencia at 8 p.m.) – will try to get tickets for those who said they
wanted to go to Prudencia
Upcoming Class Logistics
(Ellen and Amy)
We are meeting on Thursday in the Lilly to work with the objects
and groups; be sure to file your item so we will have it available. Please let
Ellen know if you have any questions.
Next Tuesday: meet at the Wells-Metz theatre to look at the Richard III set and chat with the
director.
Next Thursday at 5:30 in the Studio Theatre Amy and Linda
Charnes will be giving a talk about Richard
III.
Phelan and Berlant
Whitney: Starting
with Derek’s blog question: How does this object of analysis
(opera|drama|scriptive thing|performance) function as culture, reproducing and
re-creating itself by surrogation (i.e. by offering “a substitute for something
else that preexists it”)?
Inspired by Roach’s discussion of memory, performance, and substitution,
in which he argues that “performance…stands in for an elusive entity that it is
not but that it must vainly aspire both to embody and to replace” (3).
Whitney referenced Kelly’s image from “Angels in America’s”
televised production – what happens when a performance still offers an
impossibility for a stage performance? Upon questioning, she clarified that she
meant it as practically impossible (perspective, effects, etc.), as well as –
to some degree impossible from Phelan’s philosophy.
Dorothy: The cinematic
connection is important – cultural memory of performance – translation from
cinema to live – people come to think of what they see in film as a paragon –
anything that doesn’t meet these qualifications fails. (Ellen: the Platonic idea of performance becomes cinema?) It can be
for films that turn into plays.
Justin: This is
always a production challenge – fitting your production into iconic images –
this is where theatricality comes in. You can come at it from another way.
Jenna: You shouldn’t
produce the play without having a way to do that iconic moment.
Ellen: Phelan
says you can get the theatricality and the sublime – theatre has the potential
of materiality, which is something film can’t offer.
Amy: Connections
to Phelan – peroformance is subject forming in its disappearance. Did that
point make sense to everyone? We’re starting at the end of her text. [Reads
from article – performance becomes itself through disappearance.]
Iris: This
reminds me of Sara’s earlier comment about live opera vs. recorded. I turned
away from Phelan here – I almost don’t care about the fact that it’s recorded.
Kelly (and Iris): Recalled
“Passing Strange” – and discussed whether those seeing it live saw anything
different from those seeing it staged.
Ellen: Phelan is
making a point that performance isn’t performance if it doesn’t disappear. If
we try to make it more permanent we make it something other than performance.
“The twain can never meet.” That’s an ontological claim, not about the pragmatics
of doing research (Phelan’s doing recovery work). There are other strains to
her claim. Why is it important to her that performance has this ontological
distinction? What are her theoretical commitments to why performance needs to
be separate?
Dorothy: Being
unable to reproduce a discrete moment – liveness – is important to her. Could
be as simple as the way we talk about viewing – saying “I saw ‘Passing
Strange’” is different from “I watched ‘Passing Strange.’” Plus, you have
control over the filmic versions that you don’t have when you’re in theatre.
Sara: Any attempt
to document the performance in any way changes it – her great point. If you
view a filmic version, it won’t change if you watch it.
Ming: Performance
is also affecting the writing about it, according to her (p. 153, other/whys).
Amy: How does she
get to writing? How does she incorporate the idea of the other? (148 quote
“Performance in an ontological sense is nonreproductive).
Kelly: Every time
you do a play, it’s different.
Whitney: She’s
using “reproductive” in order to ease into argument of gender.
Cody: She’s
referencing the Mother as “other” and the hidden genitalia. (Body-based
analysis – women are commensurate with negation – none of the permanence.)
Ellen: Exactly –
which is why she uses these particular examples in her figures. What is the
evidentiary value here? She’s talking about performance art, and she’s talking
about an artistic photograph, which isn’t performance, but it’s on the
spectrum. Offer her a dense area of representation in which she can find her
claims about gender. How are these images particularly meaningful for her? Is
this an extending of Cody’s geneology .
Amy: She sets up
her description of these performances by talking about the writing and the
disappearance. Description of Festa piece on 156.
Dorothy: She’s
talking about how we see.
Ming: She’s
treating the objects as scriptive and what they have the viewer do.
Ellen: These are
people who are not seeing. The body itself is irreducible to the forms of
signification; it remains a blind/blank. Other forms of performance might not
operate identically (gender/Marxist claims may not carry over). What is her
context? Does that make a difference for her ontological claims?
Amy: Her
description is amazingly detailed – she’s arguing across disciplines and doing
it well. She’s simultaneously saying it’s disappearing and the writing is also
a performance. She performs her spectatorship in her writing very clearly. How
she’s making her argument is clearly important to what she’s arguing.
Ming: Is she
writing toward disappearance?
Ellen: She has a
theory that writing is constative. Does her analysis of these performances
render them documented?
Dorothy: It
reminds me of a performance art score – a paragraph.
Ellen: What is
our distance from the faraway look in the eyes in the photograph? How
extrapolate-able is Phelan’s response to the show and her generalizing from it?
Courtney: Could
it be that since we only have her perspective that this references the
subjectivity that comes from a performance? Not that that solves the problem of
our access to it.
Ellen: This reminds
me of the story she opens with – the French artist recording the missing
images. She’s mining her own memory of a lost event and recording her
perspective of it, which pushes toward the ontological questions she finds
embedded in performance.
Whitney: Could we
connect this to Berlant? It suggests this affective relationship.
Amy: Berlant
starts by making strong claims. What does she mean by the affective event and
how it works/what it is?
Whitney: What
Phelan is doing is what Berlant is saying is a problem. Berlant would say that
our current view of the communication of meaning/emotion is problematic.
Phelan’s reading of the photograph is affective communication as mimetic- that
transmission is performative. Berlant is calling for the idea that we can’t
normalize something like this.
Ellen: What is
Berlant ultimately looking for in terms of more nuanced theories of affective
response, esp. traumatic/hard to watch phenomena? (Especially in light of Wexler’s argument.) We need to read
the affective cue as identical to affective uptake.
Amy: Just because
you see a moment of pathos on stage, that doesn’t mean the reaction needs to be
mimetic. There is a desire for the reaction to be in line, but those of us with
some slightly more performance competency might recognize that emotional
reaction is slipperier than we often think. We need to pay closer attention to
transmission.
Dorothy: This
kind of argument against presumptive affect relates well to Phelan’s example.
We are supposed to take her response as the valid response, but that’s
inadequate. Anything that talks about the emotional response at any level – we
should pay attention to the work it took to produce it.
Ellen: Just
because you don’t take the required response – people who view traumatic events
and the rolerize (take on the role) aren’t naïve/ignorant spectators. It’s not
that something misfired – it’s that their mode of response is different from
what we think is affective decorum. Such as Dolan’s piece and her trying to
prove her decorous reaction to the event. There is a cultural impulse to
homogenize, but we need to be aware that there is a broad range of responses.
Whitney: Bernstein
argues that the image/scriptive thing takes into account that range of
responses.
Amy: I think the
difference is in the systems they are both responding to. Bernstein is talking
about the dances possible with this thing. Berlant is talking about trying to
distend/extend the space between the expected and actual reaction.
Courtney: Berlant
allows for the possibility of no response, which Bernstein doesn’t.
Dorothy: This
highlights the difference between a formalized and unexpected performance –
you’ve gone to see something versus passing something that you didn’t aim to
attend to.
Ellen: This has
to do with the archive that Bernstein is working with: photographs.
Sara: Doesn’t
meet her requirements for thing-ness either.
Cody: Why is
section 2 required? Hemphill and Bush? How is it connected to the larger
argument?
Natalie: It’s not
just that there are different responses, but it’s not a cause and effect
between seeing the thing and having a response; it’s a constant negotiation
that has a lot of variables. The emotional response unfolds in time in a way
that we’re not accounting for correctly.
Ellen: What she’s
calling an affect response -- “feeling historical” – is an unusual mood.
Already she wants to extend the repertoire. What is the value of thinking about
thinking historically?
Amy: What is she
pointing to? What joins them?
Courtney: It
seemed important that this (231) was a “crisis lived within ordinariness.”
Dorothy: She’s working
with idea of constant memorialization, but I’m with Cody –don’t know how that
fits in.
Whitney: I was
thinking about the temporality of this type of affect (thought of Harris). In
order for us to think about cause not equaling affect – we need to move beyond
linearity.
Amy: When Hemphill says “now we
think/fuck” – what’s he talking about?
Cody: It’s a
particular moment in history – they were constantly thinking while they were
fucking – esp. black males – because of the prevalence of AIDS in news. I don’t
know how to relate this to Bush aside from this larger historical understanding.
Ellen: Entry into
a new traumatic moment seems to be shared for both. Unfolding the state of
suspension – the ordinariness of living in trauma time. Can’t be a sustained
articulation of Dolan’s “I’m a feeler.” We can all be extremely suspicious of
George Bush’s qutotation; nevertheless, there is some similarity in that they
are both thinking that is not thinking and suspends you a different affective
terrain.
Dorothy: Problem
is that the AIDS epidemic wasn’t consciously started – that represents a
different situation.
Cody: Is there a
larger stake in the way Hemphill/Bush are being compared?
Ellen: Berlant
has a history of writing
about political figures with whom she doesn’t agree. Aiming to talk about a
more complex way of thinking. The subjectivity of the individuals seems to be a
bit of a red herring. Iraq War/AIDS – both are trauma times, but they represent
a state of exception that is prompted by fatality and risk.
Amy: She is also
foregrounding that both of their claims to thinking as an affective statement.
Thinking punctures the present moment in both examples. She’s trying to notice
moments where thinking becomes a code for a kind of affective historical
recognition – the stakes of the long term enter into our affective present
through this concept of thinking about them.
Sara: What about
Taylor’s moment of taking photographs out of her window? I’m uncomfortable with
this idea of thinking/feeling being separate.
Ellen: 232 – full
pgh – Taylor is providing the perfect example for this. That sense of thinking
historical is exactly what she’s doing. This act of documentation isn’t a
thought-through process.
Amy: This would
be much clearer if you didn’t separate them in the first place then try to
bring them together.
Sara: Is Taylor
more in line of what Phelan is proposing then? Keeping faith with the ontology
of performance’s disappearance?
Ellen: Not sure
how we categorize the event.
Dorothy: Reflects
on her (Dorothy’s) teaching of black face performances and the variety of
responses from her students. “Stopping to think” and “having feelings” – you
can turn either off, and you don’t necessarily turn them off.
Ellen: Berlant is
trying to focus on a particular kind of “stopping to think” – one we don’t
necessarily notice – it’s very low-level. If we recognize it, we will find,
symptomatically, a lived trauma. An unconscious
stopping to think, a reflective action,
that points us back to the recalibration to the normal.
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