From the Figure to the Cipher: Figuration, disfiguration and the limits of visibility

Abstract

Since the middle of the twentieth century, the appropriateness of ‘the human figure’ has been increasingly interrogated. Considering Narcissister and Jaamil Olawale Kosoko performances, this article is intended to wrest the understanding of theatre and performance from the implicit privilege of figuration upon disfiguration. Paying attention to the sociality of this peculiar type of situation, this article aims to embrace a broad perspective in which visibility, shape and form are important aspects, but are not sufficient to express the interplay of figuration and disfiguration. Unlike the ‘rebellion’ strategies of disfiguration of the twentieth century, Kosoko’s and Narcissister’s disfiguration strategies don’t seek to reveal, to make visible, any ‘real’ ‘self’, any ‘authenticity’ oppressed by the authority of a normative human figure. In their work, disfiguration doesn’t challenge figuration on its own territory. Beyond a grammar of figuration and disfiguration that consists in shallowness and visibilities, Kosoko and Narcissister orchestrate a wider interplay, in which figuration and disfiguration are equivalent features of shallowness and visibilities. In the framework of algebra, the zero, or cipher, is the ‘inner outside’ of the order of figures. In theatre, the peculiar sociality of performance might underwrite a similar function of uncountable operator. This theoretical apparatus invites to think about theatre and performance in a way that tends to consider the gesture of formalization with the distance that our onto-epistemological context seems to reclaim. Without calling for the collapse of the ordering through a science of visible shapes, the standpoint of this apparatus aims to expand the spectrum of theatre and performance’s theoretical toolbox. This updated spectrum redistributes the space of spectacle, underlining its social dimension, and introducing the possibility for it to not be limited to the domain of visibility, figures and forms.

Notes

1 Fred Moten is the sponsor of my current research at NYU Tisch, this statement comes from unpublished conversations.