Blog Ten: Dorothy on Sara

Sara's blog, Writerly Text, uses a Roland Barthes quote as a framing device and focus. It reads, from the header of her site

The writerly text is a perpetual present, upon which no consequent language (which would inevitably make it past) can be superimposed; the writerly text is ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world (the world as function) is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system (Ideology, Genus, Criticism) which reduces the plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages. … The systems of meaning can take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language. --Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay 5

It seems this blog has been designed to trace Sara's ideas about the performativity of language, often times in the literary sense, through poetry and prose but also in theater and oratory using Barthes concept as a guide. The definition of writerly she provides, " text, [that], self-consciously acknowledges its artifice by calling attention to the various rhetorical techniques which produce the illusion of realism," is a clear and concise concept through which to define and shape performative language.

 The idea of writerly text, as I understand it and as is directly translated from Barthes scriptible, is analogous to that which is thought of as scriptive, in this case producing a sort of interesting paradox. Sara is approaching her blog from a scriptive perspective and I am looking at her scriptive interpretations in an attempt to "acknowledge [the] artiface" a duty has been already attempted by the author!

That last paragraph was possibly nonsensical. What I can sense through perusing this blog is Sara's journey to better understand and explore the artiface/"reality" of performed language. In reading the blog I myself began to perform a similar academic journey, putting myself in the shoes of someone on that same expedition.  Outside of the context of this course, if I was to just stumble upon this blog, it feels like I would attempt to relate to it by trying to image who this person is, which is not true of all blogs. Although there are no directly personal posts and few uses of the "I" pronoun, the sometimes seemingly disparate themes of the posts can only be connected through one person's individual understanding.

In a sense this blog seems to function in the classic tumblr sense- as a moodboard. If Sara continues to expand upon this blog using the aforementioned framework, it seems like it might be a winning scenario for expanding critical readership outside of the performed language that comes first to the conventional mind (plays, monologues, etc).

Don Giovanni

So here's your task: without getting too impressionistic, talk about any transport wrought by Don Giovanni. How does opera overcome its structuring and patent artifice? Can it/does it/should it make you feel the way Cavell does for Desdemona? How, exactly, does it impact you?

I had been forewarned by a friend in the musicology program that the director of this production made some distinctly misogynistic choices in the overture. I was unsure of what she meant, seeing as the overture is what it is, but upon seeing the staging it made sense. The director chose to make Donna Anna a liar, a girl-who-cries-rape, as opposed to the more open-ended reading of the libretto. This direction continued throughout, with every woman who was angered at Don Giovanni still very willing to feel him up and generally only regretting his lack of monogamy. [Mis]interpreting the libretto in this way makes it very strange to see Don Giovanni pulled to Hell, since his only crime was murder, but that murder took place during a duel and thusly is at least somewhat socially acceptable.

Of course, I am not writing this post to give a review of the direction. This introduction was necessary, however, to explain the sense of hyperbole and transport I felt from the mirrored backdrop on the stage. My first thought was, why does the virginal Donna Anna have a mirrored bedroom better  fitted, perhaps, to a Venetian bordello. I then realized, the only character who truly utilized the mirror was Don Giovanni himself. I thought, "Oh my, the mirror isn't real, it is a reflection of Don Giovanni's world-view, that everything exists to serve his pleasure, to reflect back to him whatever he desires the world to be.

This is perhaps the closest I came to any transport during this production, because it took me to an entirely separate interpretive mindset. After I had the mirror thought, Don Giovanni became an unreliable narrator. Does he truly seduce women, or is this just how he chooses to see his actions? This meta-narrative of sociopath narcissism that I created in my head thanks to the mirrors took the opera, at least for brief spurts, beyond the artifice of the broadly comic, often cliche performance and rewrote the presented story, from that of a indefinably and undeniably sexually attracted Lothario, to that of a self-centered, possibly insane aristocrat.

Course Blog 7

The Cockettes

David Bowie

The question of what these performances ask us to ignore seemed relevant to me in the Auslander reading. The queer reading of glam rock he presents led me to think about the paradigm presented of queering rock n roll, but still producing rock stars (Marc Bolan, David Bowie) who served as heterosexual sex symbols, at least, to the mainstream audience.

Auslander writes that hippies hated glamour, which may be true, but he ignores "hippie" collectives/performance groups like the Cockettes who embraced a sense of drag and glamor at the same time as part of their Bohemian lifestyle. They were, however, openly queer, not in a mysterious way or as rumors (Mick Jagger and David Bowie had sex!) but as not-straight individuals.

I think this relates to Auslander's idea that to be a successful musician is not only to sell a performance of music that people like, but to sell the performance of a genre-specific (or perhaps bending) identity. He writes about cross-dressing being a "creating a sort of anxiety" in the United States, but the glam rock groups not only had large amounts of angry homophobic anti-fans, but also large amounts of female fans who found the performance of androgyny sexually provocative (in a good way).

I suppose I'm saying it seems like it might be a function of the form of glam rock to preference the idea of creative rebellion and exploration and ignore the possibilities of calculated gains both in shock value and female attention.

Course Blogs 4 & 5

 As you may well know, I have been very sick and foggy minded in the last week and a half. I decided to clump these two posts together so I could get them to you all as fast as I could, though I still think I'm late! Everyone else said such engaging things on our readings, though, so I don't think anyone was at a loss for my input.

Since this is extra long, I've put it under a cut