Grace within the Limits of Theatricality Alone

Abstract

The body in the work of the performance companies Goat Island and Every house has a door is often described with reference to the quality of a certain puppetry: reactive, other-directed, devoid of individual agency and not quite in possession of itself. What other-directs and virtually augments this body is the trace of an archival source material that it enacts without ever fully interiorizing. Exposing an inextricable dependency on the constitutive heterogeneity of external memory supports, this body differs starkly from its modern Western conception as the self-contained container of an autonomous subject. Hanging by the threads of the archive, it becomes a stage upon which forces that come from elsewhere - both past and future - play themselves out. Read through the prism of the work of Samuel Weber, its puppet-like comportment demonstrably bears the dislocating effects of theatricality as prosthetic dis-containment. Following an ethico-political stance that more broadly informs this body of work, the passivity of its appropriative restraint with regards to memory prostheses doubles up as an active response to the trace of the other. With reference to another discourse on puppets – Helen Cixous’s ‘Grace and Innocence’ – the article develops an outline of this comportment as the infinite approach of grace within the limits of theatricality alone. For unlike puppets, its aspiration for a graceful touch irreducible to taking place or possession is forever limited by a necessary minimum of narcissism. Impossible to strictly develop a relation with something so strange that it remains so, the puppet-like body must give in to a necessary if necessarily compromised desire to appropriate, left to exploring the limits of attention, obscurity and bewilderment against the habitual recognition of identity.

Notes

1 A fitting example of a discourse on theatricality tied to a particular idea and experience of theatre is Michael Fried’s polemically (anti-) theatrical art criticism (1988). Given his broader formal associations with the theatre, Fried is willing to make telling exceptions to his anti-theatrical rule, finding anti-theatricality at work in specific examples of theatre, from Brecht to Artaud. Yet what Fried associates with an anti-theatrical tendency of theatre from his perspective, it seems relevant to note in passing, turns out precisely to be associated with the concept of theatricality from another, that is, from Roland Barthes (1972) to Samuel Weber (2004).

2 For the most part, Weber’s writings on theatricality are collated in the collection of essays Theatricality as Medium (2004), but beyond can also be found at work in his reflections on the work of Walter Benjamin in Benjamin’s -abilities (2008), as well as on the work of Sigmund Freud in The Legend of Freud (2000).

3 See, for instance, the Introduction to Theatricality as Medium (2004).

4 The Chicago-based performance company Every house has a door was formed in 2008 by Lin Hixon and Matthew Goulish to create project-specific collaborative performances with invited guests. Hixon and Goulish had previously collaborated for twenty years as the founding members of the performance company Goat Island, whose additional core members comprised of Karen Christopher, Mark Jeffery, Bryan Saner and Litó Walkey. Goat Island was founded in 1987 and ended with a final performance of The Lastmaker in February 2009.

5 Interiorization is of course the literal translation of the German word for remembrance – Erinnerung. In Hegel’s philosophy, as Derrida relates, Erinnerung describes the very work of incorporating and assimilating an external and foreign past in order to transform it into something internal, something that is one’s own. The restraint, therefore, which Goulish prescribes with regards to the appropriation of traces of the past, might be read as a critique of precisely such a – perhaps narcissistic – attitude of appropriation, that is, of a devouring interiorization [Erinnerung] without remainder (Derrida 2009).

6 See my article ‘Calling the signifier by its name: Citational rescue and the politics of ecstatic reception’ Performance Research 22: 5, 35–43.