Staging division: power, violence, and theatricality in The Baby of Mâcon

ABSTRACT

Peter Greenaway’s The Baby of Mâcon (1993) was highly controversial at the time of its release; its means for critiquing cinematic voyeurism and the exploitability of audiences were received as blasphemous and misanthropic. This essay shows that the politics of this film is more complicated, and more profoundly democratic, than has so far been acknowledged. Drawing on Claude Lefort’s work on the “symbolic dimension” of the political and on Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s work on theatricality and “originary mimesis,” it argues that The Baby of Mâcon is a political-ontological fiction that holds a key to understanding the director’s democratic vision in the post-Thatcherite cultural climate of the early 1990s. In the process, not only does this essay advance a new perspective on the film’s complex structure and on the themes of corporeality and sacrificial violence and their place in Greenaway’s work, it also demonstrates the relevance of an ontologized concept of “staging” for reading this unique cult director’s political films.

KEYWORDS:

• Mimesis
• political ontology
• theatricality
• violence
• Peter Greenaway

In an oeuvre that has never shunned provocation, The Baby of Mâcon (1993) remains one of Peter Greenaway’s most controversial films. Charges of sacrilege and misanthropy marked the reception from the start, with many viewers taking issue with a complexly staged punitive rape scene that played with their willingness to suspend disbelief. As it combined ritualized violence with theatricality and artifice, the scene shocked viewers unused to being addressed as participants in what they watch—so much, at least, would appear from what transpired at Alfieri Atelier Cinema, Florence, where the director clashed with an audience in which several people had booed the film. “Is that why you go [to the movies]?” Greenaway asked a young man who protested that he wanted “a good, human message”: “To have your prejudices massaged[?] That must be very boring.” He went on to explain how “[the] strategy and language of this film are pitched around the exploitation of an audience … It is about your own voyeurism” (Shulman 1994, 18). Not just audiences, however, but film critics, too, were unappreciative of this message—or of the hard-nosed style of its delivery. In Sight and Sound, Geoffrey Macnab was typical in the reasons he gave for calling the film “a major let-down.” Declaring it to be coldly formalist and “formulaic,” and accusing the director himself of “authorial hauteur” and of being “monstrously detached,” he wrapped up by faulting The Baby’s Brechtian conceits and the “Artaudian intensity” of some of the acting, objecting flatly that “Brecht, Godard and a host of others have already covered this territory quite adequately” (Macnab 1993, 40). It would seem that the standard of a narrative cinema, supposed to offer seamlessly immersive experiences, was being ruthlessly upheld. The Baby was excluded from competition at Cannes Film Festival and it was Greenaway’s first feature (out of seven) not to find a distributor in the United States.

Not everyone, however, rejected The Baby’s use of over-the-top theatricality, an array of alienation and estrangement devices, and an iconoclastic approach to cultural and religious taboos to critique audiences’ addiction to spectacle and to suggest their exploitability. While few early reviewers acknowledged a political thematic or subtext in the film, art historian Alan Woods, revisiting its reception in an extended interview with Greenaway, suggested a comparison with The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989), a film whose hard-hitting anti-Thatcherite message—delivered in allegorical form—had been much better understood, if not precisely liked, at the time of its release.¹ As Woods put it to Greenaway, “The Baby and The Cook both made clear that there are some things artifice allows you to say about power and politics, in a very general sense, that realism doesn’t” (Woods 1996, 278). The director agreed, and his response yields important insight into the relationship between theater and politics—more broadly, into the imaginary of power—in The Baby. One of his inspirations had been the historical figure of Cosimo III de’ Medici (1642–1723), a weak ruler and, in Greenaway’s words, “religious hysteric” whose reign as a Counter-Reformation Catholic grand duke had resorted to puritanical “moral directives” to keep his subjects in check. Setting the film in 1659, on the day Cosimo turned 17, The Baby anticipates his ascension to sovereignty while showing how a spectacle that was designed to pay tribute to sovereign power—indeed, to re-present it—could at the same time be in excess of it, commanding the royal figure by holding him under its spell. In the interview, Greenaway’s emphasis lies on how fragile power appears when its reliance on performance and ritual comes to the fore. “It’s power as a figurehead, power as an empty space, because of the necessity to respect it through convention and history and the status quo,” he commented, reflecting on Cosimo:

I wanted to make comment on any power that is determined, come whatever the cost, to hang on to its power, and that [sic] any establishment will use every device it can, it will invoke ancient and apocryphal precedents, it will use all the myths that are perpetrated by itself about itself, it will perjure itself and betray itself repeatedly—like communism and capitalism—it will torture, abuse, humiliate, deny everything that it believes in. (Greenaway qtd. in Woods 1996, 278–279)

This statement clearly attests how for Greenaway, the theatricality so characteristic of the Baroque affords access to a more general truth about power in relation to the means it deploys for its symbolic (self-)representation. For him, the theatrics of power always has a double aspect, as Baroque culture revealed: precisely when staged in the service of power, political spectacle may show the truth of that power’s dependence on mythmaking and symbolic make-believe. Bringing a modern democratic sensibility to bear, The Baby stages an inquiry into the nature of power in which its relations with theater and stagecraft take us to the heart, not only of how power works but also of what it is: of power in its “being.”

The Baby of Mâcon is a late-twentieth-century feature, originally conceived as an opera, about a seventeenth-century production of what Greenaway has elsewhere described as a fictitious “twelfth-century miracle play” (Gras and Gras 2000, 189). Although the play-within-the-play retains its medieval character, the production also has aspects of a court masque, for it is staged with Cosimo as guest of honour in a way that recalls the early modern masque tradition, in which the performance functioned as a theatrical “mirror” for princes.² Like a masque, the play has a double addressee: young Cosimo and his entourage, and the Italian community gathered to recognize itself in the play’s tale of infertility and destitution in the French town of Mâcon. Confusingly, compounding this complex layering of levels, the setting appears to be a Church rather than a theater proper, creating ambiguity around the nature of the political-symbolic space which the script insists must stay unresolved. The confusion is ontological in nature, as the events that unfold suggest: the miracle play soon runs off-script as an old woman-actress, clearly past child-bearing, is delivered of a “real” baby in lieu of the wooden doll that is kept ready on stage as a prop. The play then spills over into a more encompassing form of theater that affects the entire lifeworld—the social microcosm—assembled in the Church-like space. It would both be accurate to say that the social is subsumed by the play—as if “all the world’s a stage,” indeed—and to speak of a contamination of the social by a principle of theatricality that is seen to stray beyond the stage as its “proper,” allocated place. With the boundaries thus blurring between (communal) “art” and (communal) “life” within the narrative, the “miraculous” birth is absorbed into the circle around Cosimo (Jonathan Lacey) and a character referred to as the Bishop (Philip Stone), where the Baby, hailed as a signifier of plenitude and fullness, becomes the locus of highly charged rituals and political machinations. The Baby’s appropriation as a privileged sign (more precisely, as a fetish) becomes contested, however, and a spiral of violence begins in which the film’s audiences and publics, which are pluriform, are implicated in various ways. The final sequence implicates the film’s viewers, too: leaving “dead” bodies on the stage as other actors bow at the curtain call, it asks how a potential for (sacrificial) violence which theater may once have been able to channel or defuse has mutated into the present—to be understood as the present of cinema itself, or, of the society of spectacular visual consumption in which it has come to function.

This brief synopsis can only begin to acknowledge the intricacies of the film’s nested structure; part of its shock effect—and the reason why critics have found the structure “muddled” (Thompson 2011, 85–86)—derives from how it is only very gradually that the production that includes the miracle play is itself revealed to be a play, with distinctions between stage and backstage, between actors and audience members, dissolving through the film’s three Acts, two Interludes, Prologue and Finale. Yet in terms of the politics of staging, two points of interest might be discerned. The first is that Greenaway’s fascination with the nexus between politics and stagecraft under Cosimo chimes with a broader interest, threaded through all of his films (and operas) with an early modern setting, in transitional, highly volatile moments in European society and culture.³ Set at the tail end of the Medici dynasty, The Baby presents a juncture in which the modern scientific worldview was starting to bring religious credulity into sceptical relief, unmasking the manipulative and instrumental uses to which “sacred” myths might be put. In the director’s words, “piety was replaced by religiosity” at Cosimo’s court: “We are in a world of pretenders” (Ciment 2000, 159). In semiotic terms we might speak of a tension between knowledge and belief, with the former—modern, sceptical, secular (the Bishop’s Son, played by Ralph Fiennes, represents it in the film)—being disavowed or repressed as the latter—a form of piety no longer certain of its ground—increasingly comes to rely upon a fetish to conceal how it is marked by lack. This, in a nutshell, is the dynamic that energizes the film’s investigation of how the Baby, qua fetish, is invested with so much politically “useful” and commercially lucrative faith: promising the restoration of social self-identity and wholeness, the Baby’s scandalous-yet-seductive imitation of the nativity of Christ simultaneously defies credulity and courts popular adherence, creating a space between denial and worship (or marvel) that might ultimately emblematize the condition of cinematic spectatorship itself.

The second point to make concerns the film’s appropriation of theatrical means to engage the historical imagination. Neither critics’ habitual references to the “presentism” of Greenaway’s historical films—his use of wilful, quirky anachronisms—nor the notion that The Baby might suggest something like a historical parallel between 1659 and the early 1990s—with critics suggesting various parallels and resonances, some more sensible than others⁴—suffices to gauge the strong political valences of this highly self-reflective form of staging the past. Greenaway himself insists in many interviews that his interest in Baroque culture is political through and through; yet the image prevails, often negatively charged, that the period is primarily a reservoir of aesthetic styles and codes for him.⁵ This essay takes a new point of departure by seeing historical representation and meta-theatrical staging as intricately linked in The Baby of Mâcon. In so doing, it takes a cue not only from The Baby’s conspicuous debt to the theater of Brecht and Artaud, but also from the striking resonance between Greenaway’s words in the interview with Alan Woods and a signature insight from work in continental theory that was just then—or, from the 1980s onwards—seeking to account for the fragility of democracy within an ontological and “post-foundationalist” perspective. Indeed, intentional or not, the director’s characterization of “power” at the Medici court as “an empty space” recalls one of the best-known ideas of French thinker Claude Lefort, who in a 1981 essay called “The Permanence of the Theologico-Political?” had proposed a theory about modern democracy as characterized by “the empty place” of power (Lefort 1988b). The central thesis was that the “political form” of society, historically considered, had seen a major mutation since the inherited theologico-political notion—exemplified by medieval symbolism, and surviving into early modern times—of the body politic as organically unified and as mystically incorporated in the figure of the monarch as “at the same time the body and the head” (Lefort 1986a, 302). Democracy, in contrast, still seen in the symbolic dimension, must be understood under the sign of disincorporation: “The democratic revolution … burst out when the body of the king was destroyed, when the body politic was decapitated and when, at the same time, the corporeality of the social was dissolved” (Lefort 1986a, 303). While I am not suggesting a direct line of influence, the resonance between Lefort’s “empty place” and Greenaway’s “empty space” will be my starting point for exploring how the philosopher and the director share a political-symbolic understanding of the “institution” of the social in which images of corporeality and (dis)incorporation do vital political work, negotiating a society’s relationship with shifting, historically changeable forms of sovereign power. The Baby’s interest in fetishism can also be clarified in this light; as we shall see, the film features the dismemberment of the Baby as well as the infamous gang-rape of the Sister as part of its project to interrogate political fetishism in its relationship with audience desire.

Thus, bringing The Baby and Lefort into conversation with each other, the aim in what follows will be to demonstrate how Greenaway’s filmmaking, in the highly charged post-Thatcherite moment of the early 1990s, participated in contemporaneous intuitions about the nature of politics and power in a way that went beyond commentary on local events or circumstances, but asks to be understood in terms of a symbolic dimension that goes to the heart of the formation or “institution” of society. Drawing on Lefort’s ontologized notion of “mise-en-scène,” I first aim to show how the film’s multi-layered, self-enveloping structure stages an understanding of the political that is focused on division as constitutive of society, and, to this extent, as originary and insuperable. As the structure blurs distinctions between “inside” and “outside” the play embedded within the film, the complex treatment of the social space in which the community has gathered ultimately comments on the “institution” of the social itself, in its dependence on symbolism and “staging.” Next, I turn to The Baby’s consideration of body imagery and audience desire, to trace the articulation of voyeurism and fetishist disavowal as distinct but intersecting themes within the film. Through comparisons with Oliviero Toscani’s photographic work for Benetton in the early 1990s and Cindy Sherman’s History Portraits of 1989–1991—both employed as visual intertexts within the film,—Greenaway’s treatment of corporeality and body-image politics will be considered as integral to his project with The Baby and the way it inscribes itself in its historical moment. We will see that in its 1990s context, the film dovetailed with intensified concern over the relationship between politics, consumerism, and the visual public sphere, as discussions of abjection and moral censorship in this period attest.⁶ Third and last, I will return to the nexus between politics and theatricality by bringing to bear Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s notion of “originary mimesis.” In the reading which this notion affords, The Baby stages an understanding of the nature of mimesis that releases a democratic political energy which anti-mimetic theorists in the Platonic tradition have typically sought to contain. Continuing the exploration of Greenaway’s interest in (portrait) photography, this reading further develops the sense in which The Baby, qua ontological fiction, re-orientates us towards the body as democratic “subject matter.” The article ends by teasing out implications of the argument for the way in which Greenaway can be understood as a political filmmaker. Against the received idea of his film as unrelievedly pessimistic, I take The Baby to represent a political imaginary that is thoroughly democratic in its fostering of a post-foundational sensibility built around recognition of the groundlessness of the social. In confronting viewers both intellectually and sensually with the contingency that is at the heart of modern politics, it attunes them to the instability and radical openness of democratic life and invites them to affirm the de-constitutive possibilities of “staging.”

Theater of division

In Claude Lefort’s phenomenological approach, symbolic representation is not just essential to the everyday workings of power; it is at the basis of the political “form” of society, seen as a whole (Lefort 1986b). In Lefort’s terms, the social is “symbolically instituted” in a way that “stages” its unity and thereby bestows it with form, identity and meaning. The paradox here is that while this approach has (rightly) been called holistic, it postulates that the social rests on a “constitutive division” that is coeval with its institution and ultimately ineradicable. Division cannot be eradicated due to the fact that society and its symbolic representation do not coincide, even while they suppose each other. As several commentators note, we may think of this conundrum in spatial terms: the symbolic dimension which institutes the social remains exterior to it, even as it grounds it. Oliver Marchart puts it like this: the “division between society and itself as its other” follows a logic of “self-externalization,” creating an inside and an outside which are chiasmically, irresolvably intertwined (Marchart 2007, 92). Another scholar pithily speaks of an “exteriority-effect” that is wholly negative: “symbolic exteriority creates the interior social space,” occluding (self-)transparency in the process (Breckman 2013, 157).⁷ Lefort’s use of the term mise-en-scène further underlines how social institution is tied to the dimension of symbolic representation. The mise-en-scène of the social might seem exterior to it—certainly if we literalize the metaphor and think of a “staging” that transpires on a theatrical stage, facing a public—and yet without it the social would simply not exist, would not have a sense of (self-)identity. In his historically orientated work on the “mutation” of the symbolic dimension that accompanied the rise of democracy as modernity’s quintessential political form, Lefort suggested that increasing awareness of the ontological truth of the originary or constitutive division, and of the role of “staging” in shaping a society’s sense of itself, are characteristic or even defining of modern political experience. The point to make is that this awareness, far from being inhibiting in its effects, attunes us formatively, even affirmatively, to the groundlessness of the social, the indeterminacy of social identity, and the irresolvability of conflict within the democratic “adventure.” We shall return to this insight when considering how Greenaway’s art participates in a democratic imaginary that has the capacity to make viewers recognize—and accept—the condition of democracy’s contingency and sheer unmasterability in the absence of a stabilizing ground.

The Baby of Mâcon affirms the Lefortian insight of the primordial division—or self-division—of the social in its very structure. It also affirms it in its treatment of the social, communal space within the film as a symbolically instituted space. But it affirms it above all in the way it relates theater—more precisely, a principle of theatricality—to the drama of a society’s quest for self-identity and ultimately impossible wholeness. As all three elements are often simultaneously present, I shall use the term “theater of division” as shorthand as we proceed to trace how The Baby pursues its inquiry into the relationship between politics and theater into ontological territory. A double meaning is intended: first, as used here, “theater of division” refers to the substance of the play and the play-within-a-play that are staged within the film, stressing how both thematize division insofar as the drama of infertility and famine unhinges the community through the different diegetic levels. Secondly, however, the term refers to the sense in which the very fact or “event” of theater—i.e. “theatricality”—stands for a principle of division that is integral to the way a society is organized and given form, extending to the division between the social and the order of symbolic representation as such. In this ontologized sense, theatricality confirms a truth about the social which theater in the narrower sense also embodies or reflects, albeit it in a way that is often curtailed by attempts to confine it to a “proper” place from which it may not stray. It is apposite here to recall Samuel Weber’s notion of theatricality as a “wandering” principle. The “Greek word theatron,” Weber writes, revisiting Plato’s treatment of the relationship between politics and theater in The Laws, “designates the place from which one sees,” thus referring “to a specific place or site” (Weber 2004, 34). What worries Plato in The Laws is the possibility that artists, encouraged by unruly audiences, might dissociate themselves from their allotted place within a fixed spatio-social order; itinerant choirs, for instance, exemplify the threat of disorder on account of their mobility. Weber puts it like this: “Theatricality demonstrates its subversive power when it forsakes the confines of the theatron and begins to wander: when, in short, it separates itself from theater. For in so doing it begins to escape control by the prevailing rules of representation, whether aesthetic, social, or political” (Weber 2004, 37). In Lefortian terms, then, theatricality recalls the provisional nature of the “instituted” social space insofar as it is characterized by movements of transgression; in this sense, the “subversive power” that Weber speaks of works on the level of (political) ontology.

The Baby’s vignette-like opening scene sets us up for consideration of Greenaway’s “theater of division,” conceived of in this way. The scene starts with a crane shot to show the character Famine, standing uneasily on a T-bar against a dark and empty background which we sense is a theatrical space (Figure 1). Famine’s enfeebled and emaciated body, described as “leprous” in the script, spits out its words with difficulty: “The crops are feeble, /The animals barren, /The orchards meagre, /The grass is scorched,/The water low.” He continues: “Copulation is a serious business,/ … and little results/but sickness and sadness” (Greenaway 1994, 31). The sense of crisis in the French town of Mâcon is thus clearly established; the script speaks of a suggestion of divine punishment for “ignoring God … and neglecting to repair the city cathedral” (Greenaway 1994, 5). However, while the idea of a community that fails to sustain itself, i.e. to reproduce itself qua community, is dramatically evoked, the status of Famine’s speech is instantly thrown into question. Not only does his position as stage-actor—“badly-paid, scorned, despised”—shine through as a side-light reveals “the wire that supports his seat,” the scene is intercut with static shots of individual audience members who are isolated visually, in twos or threes, to suggest an overdetermined audience-actor relationship within the same theater space. As they gape at Famine, they are clearly from different classes: poor and credulous, or priestly and powerful. The priests’ gaze is expectant, even commanding, as if to lock Famine into a pre-established script; meanwhile the fact that Famine, grotesquely, wears a cardinal hat with tassels adds to the suggestion of mutual implication: the division between actor and audience is not so much realized as a “fourth wall” that separates them, then, but as an organizational conceit that binds them to each other, as if it is internal to a field of power relations which the performance intensifies. The scene thus asserts the primacy of theatricality in front of the community in its failure to be (fully) present to itself. Theatricality recalls the community to itself in the same gesture in which it also maintains its self-division. Speaking in a psychoanalytic register, we might add that the sense of lack that divides the community from within will from this point onwards motivate the quest for a political master-signifier to restore—or guarantee—its absent wholeness.

Figure 1. Famine (Graham Valentine) in the prologue of The Baby of Mâcon (Allarts Limited, 1993).

It is a measure of Greenaway’s interest in the symbolic character of the social space that as the action unfolds, and the production incorporating the miracle play is revealed to be a performance, the stage area never stabilizes its contours: we witness it “expanding by turns … sideways, both to the right and to the left, and then upwards into the high ceilings of the stage and then downwards to the under-stage cellar-basement.” This movement of expansion continues into “real-life sets,” including the cathedral, to uncover ever new levels of artifice: “These changes in illusion are arranged to deliberately confuse a film-audience’s perception of where we are, and in what degree of artifice we are participating” (Greenaway 1994, 9). If the movement colonizes an “outside” or “off-stage,” however, the very idea of an exterior is questioned in the process; our sense of its “reality” is made doubtful by the logic of expansion itself. A comparison with more traditional uses of the mise en abyme might point up the radicality of the effect: while a mise en abyme would conventionally, as it famously does in Hamlet, separate the inner-level play quite neatly from the higher diegetic level to which it speaks, with the nested play functioning as a kind of miniature image or model, The Baby, in contrast, builds up the narrative from within the inner-level play that opens the film, its nested status only gradually being revealed through an outward-folding movement whose suggested reach is never-ending. To say that this reverses the relationship between the “inner” and the “outer” diegetic layer would downplay the radical ontological gesture involved, for the crux of the effect is that theatricality obtains the status of a world-defining principle that now starts to saturate the socio-symbolic space as a space of pure immanence. The startling implication, ultimately, is that there is no “outside” left; whatever sense of it might be left is collapsed back into the interior space itself, whose power becomes absorptive.

As the inner, encapsulated play sheds its primary function of modelling the “outer” world, it becomes the seedbed for a principle of contamination that exports the sheer vitality of theatricality, seen as a dynamic energy or force. There is a sense in which theatricality becomes synonymous here with a kind of dynamis, an energetic potentiality that threatens the social order on account of its capacity for spillage and excess.⁸ This energy is modulated—and intensified—as the Baby and many characters start to cross through the ontologically destabilized spatial layers, with the sizeable human groups that surround them assuming a sculptural or dynamic-ornamental character. Indeed, as the Baby becomes a symbolic “centre” on account of its promise of communal wholeness, the film’s choreography of unruly bodies pumps swarms of extras around like lifeblood: they include a noisy civic militia, keeping order, their faces done in bluish greasepaint; Cosimo’s entourage, seen in different stages of dress and undress (they change from black into white during the first interlude); and of course the different audiences of the stage play (and the production that enfolds it), depicted not as a homogeneous mass but as internally variegated, as the sumptuary codes—pastiche-like evoked in Lens and Van Straalen’s costume design—underline. It is especially during the interludes that the nested structure works to vertiginous effect. As borders are crossed between the different diegetic layers, chaotic scenes of mixture and confusion result: more precisely, scenes of indistinction that blur relations between artifice and “reality,” with some actors commenting with almost libidinous investment on how keen they are to play a part. The interludes show the mass of bodies as “theatrocratic” in the precise sense cautionarily defined in The Laws: their energy or dynamis, difficult to contain, is popular-democratic and possibly anarchic in quality, threatening the disciplined (self-)image of the social body—upstaging its “self-staging.”

What pushes against this theatrocratic energy, on the other hand, is that following the “unscripted” “birth” at the film’s start in Act I, a new social script develops around the Baby qua communal symbol. It is facilitated by the Baby’s sister, referred to as the Daughter (Julia Ormond), who quickly learns to abuse her privileged access to the child for profit, selling its blessings in mock-religious spectacles of extraction that double as spectacles of “bad sovereignty.” In the course of her machinations—which alternatively seem to rejuvenate the hegemony of the Church and to rival it—the “script” mutates twice more in what seem, yet again, unscripted deviations, as if to insist on the variability of the performances of power to which the Baby, an “empty” signifier promising closure, seems to lend authority. The first mutation comes in the context of the scene in which the Daughter tries to resolve the tensions with the Bishop by seducing his Son (Ralph Fiennes); in a wilfully improbable scene, the Baby interrupts it to order the latter’s death, initiating the Daughter’s downfall. The second time is at the start of the infamous rape scene in Act III, when the illusion of rape is dispelled and the actress playing (the actress who plays) the Daughter is submitted to a “real” gang rape in what Greenaway has described as “a scene played with shadow-theater figures, where the spectator imagines the action based on sound effects” (Ciment 2000, 163). In the terms of our analysis, we might say that the boundary between the social and its mise-en-scène, problematized throughout the film, is troubled here—or punctured—by one “real” birth and two “real” deaths, setting off a dynamic of symbolic re-organization around each of these moments that goes to the heart of the social order as precariously instituted. Indeed, as its “instituted” character shines through, its foundations look ever more contestable. The Baby, at all three moments or hinge points, is the ostensible catalyst to push the play “miraculously” awry—and yet the shock gets reabsorbed each time, as if the symbolic order feeds itself on the apparent disruptions and the attendant sacrifices of human flesh. Crucially, this does not happen without a heightened sense of audience implication, or, of what Weber, in the discussion from which I have quoted, has called the “resurgence of thauma” that is associated with theatrocracy, and which he describes in terms of “the wonder that draws and holds one’s gaze, and whose powerful fascination is … difficult to control” (Weber 2004, 35). Indeed, this “thaumatic” aspect is essential to the film’s analysis of the spectacle of sovereign power: it points back to the (specular) desire which it postulates as this power’s hidden source. At each of the “joints” in the production, politics and theatricality are tied together in a knot that is fastened under our eyes, making us complicit in the ensuing violence in the precise sense of being folded together or folded in.

The question insinuates itself how stable the film’s political-symbolic order is, all things considered. Are we to see the deviations from the script—de-railings, even—as intimations of its instability, indeed, of its potential for collapse? Or should they be read as signs of this order’s capacity to adapt, specifically through a logic of symbolic incorporation of violently sacrificed bodies? In one perspective, the order whose symbolic “institution” is gradually revealed retains a stubborn autonomy. This is underlined by its indifference to the Daughter precisely in the moment she usurps the Mother’s place and begins to impose a new Christological myth (she does so at her cost). Yet, in the contrasting perspective permitted by the notion of thauma, the order’s stability is not left as untouched as the vengeance wreaked upon the Daughter would suggest. Something is rotten in the state of being—the ontological state—of “Mâcon.” As I argue, what undermines the social order is not so much the all-too-visible attempt to re-found or re-institute it as such, i.e. to secure symbolic “closure” by installing the Baby as a political master-signifier or fetish. Rather, it is the voyeuristic investment we have spoken of on the part of the “credulous public” (Greenaway 1994, 6), emblematized in the film by Cosimo whenever he acts as a voyeur who can be seen “interfering in the action, examining the theatrical props, becoming emotionally involved with the drama, [and] eventually becoming an actor himself in his capacity as guest of honour” (7). A figure of baby-faced innocence, it is yet Cosimo who will suggest the mass rape, the “deflowerment” of the virginal Daughter that resolves the religio-judicial impasse that would otherwise have prevented her execution in the Church. Spellbound by thauma, he is also an agent of its intensification. Crucially, the truth of this strikes at the root of sovereignty itself in The Baby, taking us to the heart of its analysis of the theater-power nexus. For one thing, it points up how Cosimo (dis)embodies the “place of power” precisely in its “emptiness”: a would-be sovereign who is also the ultimate voyeur, he is doubly marked by lack. More pertinent still, the film inquires how viewers’ specular relationship with power continues to be maintained, or is indeed intensified, when sovereignty turns toxic. Sovereignty, after all, is far from absent in this film; audience desire maintains it, even as it circles around it as if around an empty centre. To gauge this dynamic more fully, we need to have a closer look not only at fetishist disavowal in The Baby, but at the image of the human body in the film—and at the terms of its incorporation into the body politic.

Physical selves, political bodies

We have seen that The Baby of Mâcon traces a principle of the symbolic institution of the social from a putative new “founding moment” through to points of near collapse: more precisely, to moments where the contingency and groundlessness of the social become visible, where chances for a new hegemonic order to “sediment” appear to have fallen through, and where any sense of exteriority (that is, of a symbolic “outside”) is folded back into the realm of immanence that can now be seen to exhaust the social space. What remains to be considered is how it is the human body that bears the weight of these vicissitudes of political semiosis. As I argue, the human body is not simply a pre-constituted site or entity in this film, readily available for power to inscribe it with its traces or to dress it up with attributes; it is a complex political signifier that is fully caught up in the convolutions of symbolic (self-)representation which the film explores, in ways that constitute bodily matter itself—the sheer fact of corporeality—as political “material.” My approach to corporeality departs here from Lia Hotchkiss’s, who, in reading The Baby alongside Prospero’s Books (1991) in terms of “theater/film rivalry,” takes the actor’s body (and the principle of theater itself) to convey “the fullness of presence” which film definitionally lacks (Hotchkiss 2008, 225). To be sure, Hotchkiss does well to associate the “internalization of theater” in Greenaway’s cinema with a material politics of the body; however, in my view she oversimplifies when she states that The Baby “cautions against [the] forgetting [of] the materiality of the body that grounds illusion” (225, 247). To see the actor’s bodily presence in terms of “fullness” is not just to disregard the many semiotic operations through which actorly bodies becomes dense and unstable signs in Greenaway’s work, or to downplay the tensions he sets up by injecting an Artaudian interest in heightened sensory experience into a cinematic mode of remediation, it is also to misread his argument with the anti-mimetic critique of acting so influentially bequeathed by Plato and Rousseau.⁹ To put a sharper point on it, and anticipating our discussion of mimesis later on, it risks overlooking how Greenaway finds in the “scandal” of the actor’s lack of self-identity—the actor’s constitutive impropriety—the principle and resources of a political energy that might be turned against hegemonic-symbolic forms of totalization and foreclosure. The aspiration to “the physical immediacy of live theater” is surely notable in Greenaway’s filmmaking (Hotchkiss 2008, 225), but should not be conflated with a longing for communal fullness or a celebration of “presence.”

To achieve a reading that is better attuned to the politics of corporeality in The Baby, and to the dynamic between theater and cinema in which it is played out, the film’s treatment of the body needs to be seen in the context of its historical moment in the early 1990s, when developments in the art world addressed the relationship between a new moral conservatism in politics and the fetishization of health and innocence in visual public culture. As Wendy Steiner put it in 1995, considering some recent scandals and censorship affairs, the climate at the time was one of “fear, media hype, and ideological impasse” around body images in art (16). Two visual intertexts help us see how The Baby inscribes itself in this juncture; the first is from the world of advertising, the second from art photography. To begin with the former: in an interview with Michel Ciment, Greenaway named as one important inspiration for The Baby Oliviero Toscani’s (in)famous Benetton photo of “a newborn covered with blood,” an image he had previously used to “preface” the exhibition The Physical Self, curated by him at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in 1991 (Ciment 2000, 157–158). The show had put live naked bodies on display alongside artworks from the museum’s permanent collection to explore how “sensitivities and responsibilities” regarding “the human physical predicament” have been interpreted over time (Greenaway 1991, 7). A second inspiration, a magazine cover for Elle showing a Madonna-like figure with child, was also by Toscani (Ciment 2000, 158). The connection affords a twofold insight into The Baby’s icono-critical project. First, Greenaway’s proposition, as explained in the exhibition catalogue, to see the way that “human physicality” is regarded as an indicator of “the state of health of a nation’s cultural archive” points up the political nature of his interest in the represented body. The nude, for him, at this point in his career, is not so much an object of “purely” aesthetic or painterly interest but obtains meaning and significance within the nexus of social and political forces in which it is inscribed. In this sense, his work on body images is part of a broader strand in his work of questioning the way that representational grids and schemata wield power over the subject as they implicate the gaze. Second, in claiming affinity with Toscani’s signature knack for puncturing the glossy, glamorous world of advertising with images of vulnerable or suffering bodies insofar as they are subject to taboo, Greenaway expresses concern with the hypocrisies and sanitized quality of the society of the spectacle. His filmic investigation of the infant as fetish—in the dual sense of an object that signals and conceals an aporia or lack—surely must have found its impulse here.

The Nativity imagery in The Baby, bitingly parodic, is the site of a critique addressing the gap between the image a society projects of itself through its most iconic productions and the reality of manipulation and power dynamics at work behind the veneer. The script emphasizes how the child’s iconization gets deconstructed by the camera, which it describes as “obsessed with the child” as it inhabits, with analytical intent, a worshipful gaze: “it frames it constantly in compositions that reprise Christian iconography of the Christ-Child, but also trying to catch it out, to mock it in order to mock those who revere it” (Greenaway 1994, 48). The camera’s treatment of the Daughter, too, participates in this double-edged representation, and takes the deconstruction to extremes. As she puts herself forward to sell the child’s blessings, the camera invites us to delight in her glossy, glamorous beauty—of fashion magazine kind, indeed—only to proceed to place her in a cold, harsh light to stress her actorly status not long after. The moment of reversal comes in her dialogue with the Prompter (Frank Egerton), who bounces back her words to the Baby (“We will be rich”; “Joy will be mine”) with perverse twists, predicting her bloody fate (“You will be wretched”; “Misery will be yours”).¹⁰ The lighting turns from warm to icily over-lit, as if to condemn her for not sustaining our veneration (Figure 2). The scene is confrontational for viewers, not simply because it marks how the Daughter, a usurper who postures as a latter-day Madonna, discovers how the political-symbolic order is autonomous and thus indifferent to her fate, but because it asks what becomes of viewers’ investment in her beauty, indeed, of our voyeuristic participation in her shiny “to-be-looked-at-ness”?¹¹ Once again: it is not simply the Daughter’s manipulations that reveal a tear in the fabric of hegemony, but viewers’ being slapped in the face with the question what lies behind the ostensible object of our desires, and where we are to place them—or, how we might get to reinvest them—once our complicity with (sovereign) violence has been traced back to our own gaze, to our own gullibility and willingness to marvel.

Figure 2. The Baby (Nils Dorando) and the Daughter (Julia Ormond) in The Baby of Mâcon (Allarts Limited, 1993).

Our second visual intertext helps take this question further, for it probes deeper into the constitution of the socio-symbolic world of which the Virgin is the emblem. For this other intertext, we turn to Cindy Sherman’s History Portraits, released in three series in 1989–1991 and thus directly preceding Greenaway’s Baby. Alan Woods has suggested that Sherman left her mark on The Baby’s depiction of the Mother, seen as “a cipher, a grotesque whose face is endlessly concealed, a character defined … as impossible”: “The actress who plays the actress playing this mother holds up her plastic body parts, precisely like those used by Sherman in her horror pictures and sex pictures” of the late 1980s (Woods 1996, 54–55). This seems right, and it recalls that Prospero’s Books already included a signal Cindy Sherman moment in its Vesalius sequence, which shows a female body with prosthesis to push Vesalius’ classicizing representation into the direction of abjection—the line between the “inside” and “outside” of the body getting blurred. What Woods does not acknowledge, however—as he might have done if he had taken the History Portraits, not the earlier “horror and sex pictures” as his reference—is that Sherman’s vocabulary of abjection, which is something of a hallmark of this phase in her career, is harnessed by Greenaway, as it is by Sherman herself, for the critique or analysis of fetishist disavowal (with fetishism being understood in terms of the use of an object “that is also a sign of loss and substitution”).¹² Sherman’s Untitled #216 (1989) and Untitled #223 (1990) point up the critical potential she achieved as she “refracted” Old Masters in the register of the abject. As Laura Mulvey comments, by letting images of Madonna figures with prosthetic breasts oscillate “between reverence and revulsion,” Sherman “plays on the structures of disavowal and draws attention to the art-historical fetishization of great works and their value” (Mulvey 2006, 77). This arguably affords a productive ground of comparison with Greenaway, whose reproductions of fake Vermeers in A Zed and Two Noughts (1985)—cinematic re-stagings of paintings whose “fakeness” put into question how value is bestowed by how we look—were already linked to the idea of the female body as fetish. As in Sherman’s reworking of Old Masters, his “abjecting” of the body is most incisive when de-constituting fictions of (self-)identity that are shored up by our investment in religious iconography and canonical art.

The Baby’s staging of the abject Mother borrows from contemporary art photography, incorporating it into its language as another “medium of theatricality.” However, as a film it also lets the dynamic of abjection unfold through time and space, as part of its narrative investigation of the relationship between artifice, spectacle, and power. In this regard, it is significant that as the film’s “ever-growing set of Russian-doll illusions” (Greenaway 1994, 10) increases, the figure of the Mother is revisited in a spatial domain to which she appears to have been abandoned: in one of many instances of the blurring between “play” and “reality” within the film, the Daughter takes the Bishop’s Son to see her in a space that is hidden underneath the proscenium and thus seemingly discontinuous with the theater space above-ground (the extras surrounding them soon give away that it is all still part of the show). Their exchange might be read as a meta-cinematic commentary on the element of disavowal not only at work in fetishism but more broadly in what Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, in an essay on Diderot’s “paradox of the actor,” has analyzed as the paradoxical (hyperbo)logic of mimesis—grounded as it is in a division between reality and appearance, between identity and difference which it (re)articulates even as mimesis also often gets rejected in its name (Lacoue-Labarthe 1989, 260). Let me explain. Just prior to the scene, the Bishop and his Son, sceptics as they are, had reproached the Daughter for imitating the virgin Mary. Against her provocation that a virgin birth “has been known,” they had been censorious toward any notion that the miracle on which their Church is founded might be open to repetition—in the terms of our analysis, a clear instance of the time-worn pattern that condemns mimesis in terms of secondariness and denies it a productive capacity of its own. While the hypocrisy of this stance is evident, the point of the Son’s visit to the Mother’s bedroom is to offer him an alternative explanation of the “miraculous” birth, one that plays to his “scientific” spirit by reinstalling the Mother as procreator. Yet the former refuses point-blank to believe the pair: inevitably, the confession wrought from the Mother by the Daughter that the child is hers founders on the spectacle of her abject-ness. What this amounts to, in the context of this scene, is a refusal to account for events in terms of the productive powers of the body insofar as it escapes culturally accredited ideals—or, a horror of those powers when they are found to be supplemented with the “wrong” kind of “imitation.” It is this strange double bind, not only her mockery of the virgin Mary, that announces the Daughter’s undoing: the refusal of both mimesis and its disavowed twin, phusis, as “originary” in this case.¹³ Put differently, what we have here is a structure of representation where the question of origins is left intentionally undecided or suspended, even as the ultimate referent of the Son’s investigation, the Baby, is retained in full view: neither the Son’s (negative) appeal to mimesis, nor the Daughter’s (positive) appeal to phusis will do. Abjection is deployed here as a representational limit where the dark interest of the Bishop and his Son in legislating mimetic practice begins to show. To this extent, abjection also points to the instability of “mimesis” itself, in its strange oscillation between values of secondariness and of productive or creative, “poietic” power.

All things considered, what does it say about The Baby that fetishization is deconstructed here through images of innocence and vulnerability on the one hand and a staging of abjection on the other? The fact that abjection wears the mark of history in the film—that it enters the diegesis through the medium of “historical picture making,” with Sherman as visual intertext—is telling. It adds to my sense that it is not so much the film’s inclusion of scenes of abjection as such, as the controlled and rationalist terms of this incorporation that may have offended viewers.¹⁴ They are terms that pre-empt any chance of celebrating or affirming, let alone idealizing, the abject and repulsive. Put differently, to borrow a distinction which itself goes back to 1990s art-theoretical debates, The Baby is not an example of “abject art,” it is about abjection, seen as—to borrow Hal Foster’s term—“regulatory” within the political-symbolic order in which it functions (Foster 1996, 114). There is no better proof to support this reading than the carefully graduated way in which the film’s vortex of abjection ultimately sucks in the Daughter’s body: a vortex that has the abjected Mother in the basement bedroom at its centre—in a terrible pun, she is its navel—and throws up dead bodies at the end, thereby covering the whole spectrum of the abject from repressed maternal origin to bodily dissolution or “becoming-corpse.” Only a tightly controlled formalist like Greenaway could stage the movement of this vortex so inexorably. The result is that abjection cannot be used as a “final” term for grasping the film’s project, but that it must be recognized as one concern out of many that inhere in investigating how a symbolic order obtains its seeming coherency and sense of ground. Indeed, as the expansive, outward-moving spatial principle at work in the film proceeds, it is revealed to include the abject—which I just associated with a limit—within itself, as something inherent to the constitution of the social. To quote Foster once again: “Is the abject … disruptive of subjective and social orders or foundational of them, a crisis in these orders or a confirmation of them?” (114). The Baby takes us into the space delineated by this question; it inhabits it in order to expose it.

Mimesis, photography, and the public’s two bodies

The characterization of abjection as taking on a “regulatory” function refers us back to the film’s interest in symbolic institution, i.e. its organization of the political-symbolic order. But our discussion also invites that we rethink the notion of “staging” in the film through the model of the photographic mise-en-scène—seen in Shermanesque fashion as a model that questions inherited notions of mimesis through the use of theatrical setups and role play, among others. What if we saw a critical practice of mimesis as integral to the film’s ontological pursuits? What notion of mimesis might inform, or undergird, its meta-theatrical inquiry into symbolic institution? As I see it, these questions are all the more pertinent in light of the film’s conclusion, which reworks the political meanings of human “flesh” by attending to the sacrificial logic that inheres in The Baby’s spectacles of power. I use the notion of “flesh” here in Eric Santner’s sense, as associated with the excess or “surplus of immanence” that marks the democratic era, and which he understands, in a Lefortian perspective, in terms of the problem of incorporation that is produced by the migration of sovereignty from the monarch to the people—from the “king’s two bodies” to theirs (Santner 2011, 61). We need to work with such a charged and complex association of “flesh,” or so I argue, to gauge the necessity within the film’s logic of the “remaindering” not only of the Baby’s body parts (following the downfall of the Daughter), but of the corpses of the Daughter herself and of the Bishop’s Son (Figure 3). Indeed, if the film had stopped at the mock-cannibalistic partitioning of the Baby’s body by a crowd of extras in the Church, it would have risked remaining stuck within a language of sacrilege; it is only with the further “remaindering” of two actorly bodies on the theatrical stage, in the final moment of audience implication, that The Baby drives home its intuitive insight that these victims are claimed by the “surplus of immanence” itself, which, as we have seen, suffuses the social space in the film to toxic effect. The film understands that it is the transformed character of sovereignty as such—what Lefort analyzed in terms of its disincorporation—that may demand sacrifices of the flesh, whenever it subjects democracy to moments of symbolic crisis.

Figure 3. The corpses that do not rise at the curtain call in The Baby of Mâcon (Allarts Limited, 1993).

To understand the role of mimesis within this logic, I propose a speculative line of argument that takes its starting point from Lacoue-Labarthe’s work on mimesis’ “originary supplementarity.”¹⁵ A post-foundationalist thinker like Lefort, Lacoue-Labarthe developed an innovative perspective on mimesis through a critical study of the anti-mimetic tradition that runs from Plato and Rousseau to (in his reading) Heidegger. One central aspect of his perspective concerns the Aristotelian distinction between techne and phusis. The Platonic rejection of techne as purely “imitative” of phusis (nature) is complemented, in Aristotle, by a notion of techne as completing phusis and bringing it to perfection beyond the point where it can realize itself. But this is to credit techne, as Lacoue-Labarthe points out, with a mimetic capacity that is productive as opposed to imitative in a narrow, secondary sense. Techne’s productivity instances a kind of “general mimesis” that reveals the productive force of phusis to the extent that the relation between origin(al) and copy or supplement gets transformed into a “mimetologic” in which neither term retains priority; it is a logic that can only be grasped as a movement or dynamic—no longer in hierarchical terms. Western thinkers down to Heidegger, according to Lacoue-Labarthe, have denied or suppressed this hidden dependence on the forming, shaping power of mimetic mechanisms—most dramatically so when they themselves have engaged in mythological “fictioning.” As he is concerned to show, their hidden “onto-mimetology” is politically consequential as it may sanction mimetic identifications that obscure how what is postulated as an “identity,” “origin,” or “essence”—on the social or collective level—is “worked into form by a figure” (Ross 2007, 114).

Clearly this perspective has a bearing on a film that traces the exercise of power back to mimetological mythmaking on the model of the Church, and which tries to catch it out in the hypocrisies of (anti-)mimetic disavowal. Greenaway’s cinema works on the side of the de-constitution of mimetic identification and mythological “fictioning,” just as it is firmly on the side of the critique of the anti-mimetic prejudice itself. To demonstrate how this mimetic orientation plays out in The Baby, let us consider a project that is best described as para-cinematic: Greenaway’s exhibition (and catalogue) about “the audience of Mâcon.” Produced in the margins of the film, and ostensibly a minor offshoot, it is yet crucial to my argument in that it takes the human body outside the film’s diegetic world and, in so doing, reworks the image of the “audience”—more precisely, the symbolic charge of its ornamental, physical presence—in new ways. As I argue, it is by breaking the audience up into discrete units, and restoring a measure of individuality to each, that the exhibition offers to de-constitute the function of the “audience” as an ornamental figure whose sheer physical mass—in Santner’s parlance, the sheer weight of whose collective “flesh”—would lend authority to power. The Audience of Mâcon was realized in Cardiff, Wales, in 1993. The circa 800 individuals recruited as extras for the film had all had their picture taken during production in Amsterdam and Cologne (they are still in costume), and a selection of 100 portraits or “still-photographs” made up the exhibition. Lengthy tongue-in-cheek captions, each adding the rudiments of a character sketch, serve to stress—and gently mock—the artificiality of historical staging and our participation in it as viewers. Greenaway explains that what was driving the project was a wish to further blur the lines between audience and actors: “It is not enough to say that the actors are the people on the stage and the audience are the people in the auditorium.” And: “the audience too, in so far that they are pretending not to disbelieve, are also actors.”¹⁶ While marginal in respect to The Baby, The Audience illuminates it in that the movement into para-cinematic space re-directs, and re-inflects, the film’s own logic of theatricality and spectacularization, of spillage and excess. Indeed, while taking it outside the film’s fictional world and into a space that is free from struggle with a social immanence turned toxic, The Audience must at the same time be recognized to continue the film’s movement of theatrical “wandering,” just as it continues the games of splitting, doubling, and self-division that characterize the figure of the actor in The Baby. The space opened by the portraits thus becomes host to the theatrocratic principle itself which, as we saw, is at work in the choreography of audiences in the film; the exhibition releases it into a space no longer bound by rules of social institution, just as it takes the extras “outside the original parameters of … cinematic believability” (Greenaway 1993).

The interest of the exhibition thus lies in its re-staging of the figure of the audience at a distance from the kind of mise-en-scène whose pressures on symbolic self-representation concern the film throughout. Two more points are in order. The first is that mise-en-scène obtains a different status here by virtue of its being released from the film’s political-symbolic space: the promise beckons of another kind of social mise-en-scène, one that differs ontologically in no longer aspiring to communal self-presence. Derrida’s reading of Antonin Artaud might help to gauge some of the effect: as he put it, the purpose of Artaud’s “theater of cruelty,” understood as a theater of life, is to return mise-en-scène “to its creative and founding freedom” so that the “director and the participants [cease] to be the instruments or organs of representation.”¹⁷ I take something like this impulse toward freedom to drive the movement by which the Cardiff exhibition propels outwards bodies whose energy, in the film, was understood to be somehow in excess—i.e. to exceed the demands of social staging and containment. This is not to say, however (and this is the second point), that the exhibition exits the dimension of political symbolism altogether: far from relinquishing directorial control, Greenaway deploys the photographic project to attempt a mode of staging that helps specify the centrality of the body within the film’s symbolic universe. Indeed, The Baby’s conclusion can be reconsidered in its light: folded into the film’s social space, and deeply implicated, the body of the audience is also what remains—stubbornly—when its many meta-theatrical and meta-cinematic layers have been stripped away or deconstructed. It is what stands, quite literally, when the film’s deconstructive movements have been followed through—resisting, like the “real” corpses at the curtain call, reconstitution within the film’s fictional reality. Put differently, the body is what resists the film’s endless capacity for shifting levels of meta-cinematic representation; the raw material over which power-as-spectacle does its work, it is also where the deconstructive movement comes to rest. The Audience imagines that a positive, affirmative element may be freed up: a principle of life that is identified with the material principle of phusis, of sheer productive force and vitality that cannot be bounded. This, then, is the political gist of Greenaway’s mimetologic: insofar as they show the audience’s corporeality to be in excess of its incorporability into the social, The Baby and The Audience of Mâcon do not just acknowledge but positively celebrate the public’s “two bodies.”

Conclusion

Existing readings of The Baby of Mâcon have focused on the influence of Brecht’s theater (and secondarily Artaud’s) and the way it illuminates the place of violence and cruelty in Greenaway’s cinema. They have also clarified the director’s characteristic modes of audience engagement by placing them within this line of work. In the process, Greenaway’s rejection of empathy and identification, his refusal to appeal to a positive principle of community building, and his “resolutely anti-Wagnerian” conception “of the integrated work” have all been gauged in greater depth, and his essentially pluralistic understanding of publics has been well delineated (Elliott and Purdy 1997, 73). This essay has built on such readings, but it has also argued that the politics of theatricality in The Baby is not fully understood unless it is considered in an ontological dimension. The film’s over-theatricalization of the spectacle of power is not simply a distancing technique, brought to bear on a “thematics” of power as if from the outside (as a reading that locates The Baby in a Brechtian paradigm might be content to show); it is also a strategy that is internal to the force-field of power insofar as theatricality is an essential, constitutive modality of power in its own right, consistent with the Lefortian notion that power, prone as it is to “self-externalization,” “provides society with a reference point which allows it to become potentially visible to itself, which allows social articulations within a common space to be deciphered, and which allows actual conditions to appear within the register of the real and the legitimate” (Lefort 1988a, 92). To this extent, affirming that theatricality and power are consubstantial within the institution of the social—within its spectacular mise-en-forme,—Greenaway’s meta-theatrical film must be recognized to descend from Baroque dramatic forms in the precise sense so seminally theorized by Walter Benjamin when he linked the Trauerspiel to a crisis of sovereignty and political meaning at the onset of early modernity. In the words of Lionel Abel, another critic who recognized Baroque culture as an early cradle for meta-theater, what gives the latter its distinctness in contrast with tragedy is that it recognizes, as classical tragedy in his view does not, that “order is something continually improvised by men” (Abel 2003, 183). In the Lefortian language of our discussion here, meta-theater evokes the idea of society’s “absent ground”—building itself over it as over an abyss.

The movement I have traced of the film’s complicated body politics does not just underline this post-foundationalist reading, I would argue that it “seals” it (i.e. what I mean by this is that it seems required within the film’s political-symbolic logic). At the end of this movement, which runs from fetishization through abjection, the impossible body of the audience or public in the film—impossible to confine to a bounded, “proper” space; impossible to contour as a unified, collective body—paradoxically moves centre stage as what Santner would call a sovereign “remainder,” albeit one that is divided between the living and the dead. (The Audience of Mâcon, as we have seen, suggests a variation on this trajectory that contrives to leave the violence behind. Yet there is a sense in which its migration of the figure of the “audience” into a para-cinematic space only underlines the difficulty of getting out of the shadow that is cast by sovereign power; in the social space of the film, such a feat of extrication is simply not on the cards.) It would seem that in Greenaway’s political imaginary, the “place of power” is an empty one indeed. In The Baby as in some of his other “early modern” films, power circulates through vicious cycles of (dis)incarnation or (dis)incorporation in which usurpers and pretenders are in their seats or on their thrones just for the nonce: until the next sacrificial, gory feast. Yet, within the reading developed here, the violence is not gratuitous. The risk that new violence be released into the social appears intrinsic to the evacuation of power within the democratic dispositive; in this sense it would miss the point to call it obscene. The obscenity must be recognized to belong to the social itself, as the violence results from the “surplus of immanence” that attends popular sovereignty in the democratic era.

In this perspective, the alleged pessimism and misanthropy of The Baby, habitually stressed in the reception, might also be productively rethought. “The Baby of Mâcon,” Greenaway told Alan Woods, “is not violence and sensation and humiliation and exploitation of innocence for a quick cathartic giggle; this is cause and effect propositioning, and [it] is intended to show and debate painful issues with a deep sense of seriousness. Perhaps the purposes were too moral” (Woods 1996, 276). The tone in the latter remark is defensive—conscious as Greenaway is here of the widely shared, highly visceral rejection of his film. Yet there is every reason to accept his insistence that the film invites analytical work, even if it does so through a kind of Artaudian sensory shock tactics. Indeed, this essay has shown The Baby to focus attention not just on voyeurism and the disavowal of pleasure within its spectacles of violence, but on the conditions of power in which voyeurism and fetishism are doing their work in the first place, letting political master-signifiers exercise their sway. The very notion of “cause and effect propositioning” returns us to the notion of fetishism, for one productive way of defining it (if we stress its Freudian pedigree) is to see it as linked to disavowals precisely of the kind that “conceal the relation between cause and effect,” as well as, Laura Mulvey would add, our need to conceal our need for this concealment (Mulvey 1996, 12–13). If spectacle “dissociates” cause and effect, making fetish-objects available for investment, Greenaway’s meta-theatrics inverts this logic and submits it to scrutiny.¹⁸ It does so in ways that would seem to have gained legibility in today’s political conditions—conditions we might understand, it has recently been proposed, as marked by nothing less than the commodification of sovereignty itself (Mazzarella, Santner, and Schuster 2020).

The final observation to make, then, pertains to the democratic mode of sensibility which an ontological fiction of this kind has the capacity to promote. Claude Lefort has remarked that a democratic culture, open to recognition of how “the place of power is empty,” must of necessity cultivate a sense of the “gap” that exists “between the symbolic and the real” (Lefort 1988b, 225). It is by virtue of awareness of this gap, the internal fissure in a society’s mise-en-forme that cannot be closed or healed, that a democracy might foster its potential of resistance against tendencies and temptations of totalitarian foreclosure. I speak of a sensibility here because democracy, in Lefort’s perspective, depends on ritualizations and cultural forms to maintain it in the symbolic register without which the experience of the social space would be impossible in the first place. An ontological fiction that contrives to stage the incessant play of grounding/ungrounding that characterizes all political structures attunes viewers not only intellectually but imaginatively and affectively to the contingency and fragility of modern democratic life. That The Baby presents the social space within the film as toxic does not detract from the point, for it is justified by the collapse of transcendent exteriority of which it is aware throughout—by its being folded back within the space of immanence in which violence seems inherent. As we come out on the other end of the journey through this space, the hope is that we might be able to inhabit our own democratic spaces less violently: that we can accept to partake in the work of de-constitution through which the threat of violence might be suspended. Charges of misanthropy notwithstanding, it is this aspiration that makes The Baby of Mâcon a profoundly democratic film.

Acknowledgments

I should wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback and comments. As well, my thanks go to Rafael Sánchez and Aafke Weller for all their encouragement and support and for many conversations about the subject of this essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See Walsh (2006) for discussion of some of Greenaway’s 1980s films, including The Cook, the Thief, as “allegories of Thatcherism.”

2. See also Greenaway’s introduction to the published film script, where he writes that “[the] play performed is deemed by the players to be tailored to entertain Cosimo’s particular religious imagination” (Greenaway 1994, 7).

3. In a 1993 interview for the French film magazine Positif, Greenaway talks about the 17^th century as “a thrilling period of transition, that heralded the era of democracy” (Ciment 2000, 155).

4. E.g., one critic noted in December 1993 how the film was “being viewed in a ‘post James Bulger environment’” (Foley 1993, 12). The Bulger affair, however, in which a two-year old was tortured and killed by two young boys, coincided precisely with the film’s release in the spring of 1993.

5. E.g., in Variety, The Baby’s sumptuous use of period style was dismissed as “all fluff and no filling” (Elley 1993, 45).

6. Cf. Steiner (1995); Mulvey (1996).

7. Italics in the original. Breckman uses “exteriority-effect” elsewhere (Breckman 2012, 30).

8. I borrow my (Aristotelian) term here from Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (Arendt 1958, 200).

9. Greenaway has renewed this argument with vigour in Goltzius and the Pelican Company (2012). For discussion, see my “Peter Greenaway’s Artist-Entrepreneurs” (de Waard 2022).

10. Greenaway (Greenaway 1994, 74). In the script, the child itself replies; in the film its words are spoken by the Prompter.

11. “To-be-looked-at-ness” is of course Laura Mulvey’s term (Mulvey 1975, 11).

12. The quote here is from Mulvey (2006, 79).

13. Lacoue-Labarthe’s discussion of phusis in relation to mimesis will be revisited below.

14. E.g., compare Philip French’s words in The Observer that “The Baby of Mâcon is the most determinedly disgusting film from a major director since Salò” (French 1993, 52; italics added).

15. See, among others, Lacoue-Labarthe (2003). For a lucid discussion of Lacoue-Labarthe’s work on mimesis, see van Peperstraten (2005, 19–45).

16. Greenaway (Greenaway 1993). There are no page numbers in this publication; all quotes are from Greenaway’s opening essay, titled “The Audience of Mâcon: A Suspension of Disbelief.”

17. Derrida quoted in Balsa (2008, 35).

18. “Dissociation” is Dana Polan’s term, quoted in Mulvey (1996, 12).