“The Chymical Wedding”

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Notes

notes

“Plastique Fantastiqie” is a mythopoetic and performative fiction produced by David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan. The collaboration involves an ongoing investigation of the relations between aesthetics, politics and the sacred conducted through objects, installations, comics, texts, and performances in which others also take part. Exhibitions and performances include: “Staabucks Fukkee is Your Enemy,” Aliceday Gallery, Brussels, 2007; “The Chymical Wedding,” Tate Britain, London, 2008; “Protocols for Deceleration,” Outpost, Norwich, 2008; “Black Mass for Partial Objects,” for “Event Horizon” at the Royal Academy, London, 2008–09; “Stranger Things are Happening,” Aspex, Portsmouth, 2009; “Multiverse,” Danielle Arnaud Gallery, London, 2009; and “A Visitation,” Tatton Park Biennale, 2010. For more information see <www.plastiquefantastique.org>.

1 The word “mummers” refers to a group of masked players who visited households, often unbidden, to perform a play in expectation of food and drink. The practice, first recorded in the thirteenth century and common throughout parts of England from the fourteenth to the nineteenth, was repeatedly banned for giving cover to anonymous criminal behaviour. See Ronald Hutton, The Stations of the Sun (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996) 11–96.

2 Jacques Lacan theorised that there was no such thing as the sexual relationship, any relationship being mediated by representation–and that it is love that “makes up” for the (non-existent) sexual relationship. See Jacques Lacan, Encore: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XX, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1999) 38–50.

3 Subkast Kofke is an avatar from previous Plastique Fantastique performances derived from the twisting of the phrase Staabucks Fukkee that was in turn a twisting of the phrase Starbucks Coffee. See <www.plastiquefantastique.org> for further details of performances, writings and other matters.

4 Dr John Dee, during the reign of Elizabeth I, and with the help of scriveners such as Edward Kelley, spoke to angels and eternal beings, interpreting and writing down all his communication and dialogue.

5 “A brand new knot for the RSI” refers to Jacques Lacan's concept of subjectivity envisaged as a Borremean Knot in which the Real (R), Symbolic (S) and the Imaginary (I) are tied together in such a way that if one loop were to be cut the knot would fall apart, and the subject become “untied.” In such cases, only a new form of knot can tie the subject back into the order of things. See Jacques Lacan 118–36. “The Chymical Wedding” might be figured as the writing of a brand new knot in this sense (albeit a temporary and somewhat fragile one).

6 Freud argued that masochism is a perversion that has three aspects: the infantile (a desire for childhood punishment), the feminine (the desire of a man to occupy the subservient position of the female), and the moral (the desire to be punished for some wrongdoing of the past). At one point, recognising the problem of an activity that is not focused on pleasure but displeasure, he suggests that masochism is the inversion of sadism, which in liberal times is suppressed as an activity. See Sigmund Freud, The Economic Problem of Masochism [1924] in On Metapsychology, trans. Angela Richards (London: Penguin, 1984) 409–26.

7 See Coldness and Cruelty: Masochism (New York: Zone, 1989). A psychoanalytical understanding of masochism, as presented in Sacher-Masoch's fiction, views the man, Severin, submitting himself to torture delivered by the woman, Venus/Wanda, which is further read as a desiring of punishment to be delivered by the mother (103–10). This, in turn, is viewed as a negation of the law of the father who punishes to prevent incest between mother and son. In Sacher-Masoch's fiction, the law of the father is then subverted as the punishment Severin receives affirms an erotic relationship with the woman/mother figure. What is important about this story is that through fiction, and an enactment that involves different roles and the taking up of invented names, the law is subverted. In the performance of “The Chymical Wedding,” the fiction is played out between individual and group, but a fictionalising of erotic, social and symbolic relationships is still produced.

8 See Lacan's remarks in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. Dennis Porter; ed. Jacques Alain-Miller (London: Routledge, 1992) on Sacher-Masoch and on the perverse masochist who desires to “reduce himself to this nothing that is the good, to this thing that is treated like an object, to this slave whom one trades back and forth and whom one shares” (239). A question might be posed as to whether masochism consists solely of this play of goods, as depicted in Sacher-Masoch's fiction, or whether masochism, as a technology of the body, allows for an intensive experience that goes “beyond” the symbolic.

9 See chapter 7, “Humour, Irony and the Law” in Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty 81–90.

10 On the “Body without Organs,” see Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 1988) 149–66. The practice of masochism is one example given of how to build a Body without Organs.

11 See David Reggio, “The Hospital is Ill: An Interview with Dr. Jean Oury,” available <http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/history/news-events/interview1.pdf> (accessed 29 July 2008).