Introduction: Performative Afterlife

This strange movement of afterlife

If the significance of a work of art or literature shifts according to the itinerary of its transformative re-iterations across time, space and media, so must the terms of its analysis. For many years, a number of important developments in fine art practice, history of art, and performance studies have been linked, at least implicitly, by a vigorous interrogation of the status of (art)works and identities, traditionally conceived of as stable, self-contained and enduring. This issue of parallax initially developed from an interest in this ongoing reflection, unfolding across a number of disciplines, academic or otherwise, in the hopes of highlighting practical and ethical implications of performative iterability.

Another way of framing the broad trajectory of these developments might be with reference to the various pressures – technological, philosophical and methodological – that have increasingly come to affect and disturb traditional conceptions of the origin and the original in the realm of aesthetics and beyond. In this context, Walter Benjamin’s work on technological reproducibility, the concept of criticism in German Romanticism, the task of the translator, as well as the methodologies of citation, montage and repetition in the aesthetic practices of the avant-garde must remain an important reference point. It is therefore at least with implicit reference to the work of Benjamin that we have employed the terminology of ‘afterlife’ [Nachleben] in the tile of our issue and call. The fact that any explicit engagements with Benjamin are missing from the eclectic mix of responses here gathered can perhaps nevertheless be read in the spirit of the concept of ‘afterlife’ as he develops it, which decisively links a necessary movement of reiteration to transformation.

Situated within a larger programmatic of exposing the limits of the human and its works by rigorously differentiating both from the theological domain, Benjamin’s use of the terminology of afterlife designates a relation of ‘original’ works of art to the various modalities of their transformative survival. Shifting the emphasis from the work’s ostensible self-containment to that of a relational dynamic perpetually in the process of alteration, he wrests the ‘originating’ performance of signature-events from the theological concept of creatio ex nihilo and reinserts them into the longue durée of historical networks of reiteration. Such an effort to introduce a historical perspective into the realm of aesthetics recalls a Warburgian enterprise of retracing the continuity and metamorphosis of motifs and images over spatio-temporal distances, which similarly unfolds under the heading of a ‘survival’ [Nachleben]. Although Warburg’s introduction of a radically new temporal model for art history constitutes an important if silent interlocutor for Benjamin’s discourse on ‘afterlife’, the latter also significantly departs from it. Whereas Warburg can largely be seen concerned with gathering the factual evidence of repetitions across time, Benjamin’s challenge to the autonomy of the work of art comes in the form of a transformative potential that is irreducible to the realm of the factual. Turning to the vocabulary of Jacques Derrida’s conception of iterability, to which Benjamin’s discourse on ‘afterlife’ seems profoundly related, we might designate this virtuality as ‘the other time in (stead of) the first’, that is, ‘the time and place of the other time already at work, altering from the start the start itself, the first time, the at once’.¹ Benjamin seeks to account for this breach that divides all that can be repeated at other times and places within the very concept of origin itself. Drawing on the semantic resources of the German word for the origin – Ursprung – he conceives of the latter as a perpetual movement of self-departure and failed reconstitution marked by a crack and leap [Sprung]. The virtuality of this crack and leap names a movement of self-(im)parting that conditions a subordinated being as writing on the possibility of its transformative reiteration.

The notion of afterlife receives its most elaborate treatment in Benjamin’s reflections on translation in ‘The Task of the Translator’, where it is put to work in an effort to rethink the relation of a translation to what it ‘transports’, ‘transfers’ or ‘carries across’, namely, an original work. The decisive shift in rethinking the relation between original and translation is to be found in an attempt at conceiving of the possibility of translation as an intrinsic trait of the original work, independent of a particular context of its realisation. Benjamin designates such a necessary, structural possibility of translation as the original work’s ‘translatability’. The use of the suffix ‘-ability’ in this context inserts itself into a series of similar verb constructions at decisive other points of Benjamin’s work, from the criticizability of the literary work in German Romanticism and the citability of gesture in Brecht’s Epic theatre to his famous reflections on the work of art in the age of its reproducibility. Beyond the confines of Benjamin’s work, his efforts to conceive of a ‘transcendental’ dimension of a necessary possibility (of iteration) could further be said to insert itself into a larger philosophical trajectory reaching from Kant to Derrida. These broad themes and trajectories are well known. They perhaps find their most elaborate and eloquent treatment in the work of Samuel Weber, from who’s insightful reading of Benjamin these cursory remarks on afterlife in the context of translatability draw.

In rooting the call for translation in the structure of the original work, as Weber shows, Benjamin deprives the latter of its ostensible self-sufficiency, independency or autonomy. Introducing a dynamic and historical dimension into the aesthetic domain, he seeks to distinctly differentiate aesthetics and history from theology by wresting both from the divine traits of perfection, totality and eternity.² In conferring ‘life’ to the work of art, Benjamin insists on its profane, finite, mortal dimension, subject to a movement of history that ‘does not try to overcome or transfigure the finitude of […] its “agents”’.³ In the absence of a transcendent scheme that may alter the fact of temporal finitude, a profane life must take leave of itself already from the start, following a movement, as Weber puts it, ‘in which [it…] is only rendered “present” by expending itself, that is, by opening itself to a movement of iteration in which it is constantly altered’.⁴

This strange movement is then named in a noun that Benjamin puts into quotes as “afterlife.” Not simply as that which comes “after” life has gone, but a life that is “after” itself – that is, constantly in pursuit of what it will never be. The reason, in short, why works are translatable, is that they have an afterlife. And they have an afterlife because in the process of living, they are also dying, or at least, departing, taking-leave from themselves and this from their birth.⁵

This strange movement of afterlife – a hybrid of life and death, a curious mode of modified survival and a perpetual pursuit of what ‘it’ will never be – follows a rhythm that Benjamin elsewhere elaborates with reference to a dynamic concept of a breached ‘origin’ [Ursprung]. Developed in the ‘Epistemo-Critical Preface’ of his study of the German baroque, he describes this rhythm as a perpetual attempt to restore the past that necessarily remains incomplete. Wrested from the theological connotations of absolute beginnings, the “origin” thus construed, involves both singularity and repetition. Like the virtual potential of the -ability, it necessarily remains inaccessible to the realm of the factual.

An “origin” is historical in that it seeks to repeat, restore, reinstate something anterior to it. In so doing, however, it never succeeds and therefore remains “incomplete, unfinished.” Yet it is precisely such incompleteness that renders origin historical. Its historicality resides not in its ability to give rise to a progressive, teleological movement, but rather in its power to return incessantly to the past and through the rhythm of its ever-changing repetitions set the pace for the future.⁶

Ur-Sprung (into the void)

Benjamin’s conception of ‘origin’ and afterlife, as we have glossed them above, continue to speak to a problematisation of the conventional relations between an event and its archive as they proliferate in current aesthetic practice and theory. Working across the disciplines of art history, cultural and performance studies, our initial interest in these practices and debates lay with bringing into dialogue two distinct and broad approaches towards them: on the one hand, a consideration of the archive as itself active, inventive, performative, whilst on the other a questioning of the pure presence of the performative event, seeing it as already putting into play its future remains. Whereas contemporary art history and fine art practice have tended to take the first approach, tracing the historicity of archival remains and their transformative migration, current scholarship in performance studies has begun to privilege the second. Shifting its focus from a long-standing infatuation with the impossibility of retrieving the event from its archive, the latter can increasingly be seen to employ a conception of performance as staging its own afterlife, in the sense of an inscription of the future in the present. ‘Performative acts’, as Rebecca Schneider has pointed out, ‘are always reiterative, and as such are already a kind of document or record’.⁷ This concept of an afterlife that doesn’t necessarily wait for the curtain to fall is related to a notion of the performative as iterability, a ‘rehearsal’ that transforms as it repeats and calls for ‘its’ future repetition.

In Benjamin’s famous essay on the work of art in the time of reproducibility, both these approaches to the problematisation sketched out above play themselves out.⁸ Under the banner of a revolution of the social function of art, it traces a movement of emancipation of the work of art from its parasitic subservience to ritual to its subsequent reliance on a different practice: politics and play. In doing so it is able to remind us that a concern with the performative afterlife of the work of art, far from constituting a mere problematic of methodology, speaks to an interest in the possibility of social transformation. For if works of art or literature, as Benjamin puts it elsewhere, ‘transform with the collective because they live in it,’ they inevitably become the precarious site of history’s perpetual reworking.⁹ As one consequence, the concept of afterlife is able to intervene in current debates on participation by indicating a move away from an emphasis on the immediacy of the event in contemporary art and performance practice towards more durational and expansive conceptions of partaking, contributing and sharing. Although here is not the time and place to rehearse these speculative comments with any rigour or depth, let us nevertheless risk to carve out the minutest of passage through Benjamin’s essay that speaks to the thematic of the performative afterlife of a breached origin, before elliptically locating its echo in a contemporary commentary on Yves Klein’s ‘Leap Into the Void’.

For Benjamin, the time of reproducibility designates a movement of immediate self-parting of a work of art from a given context of its production. The reproducible work of art, as Samuel Weber puts it, ‘“takes place” in many places at once, in multiple here-and-nows, and […] therefore cannot be said to have any “original” occurrence’.¹⁰ As the time of its production is always already breached by the time of (its) reproducibility, it has inscribed in it the possibility of the coming of an infinite alterity at its ‘origin’. What previously imbued the artwork with ‘the quintessence of all that is transmissible in it from its origin on, ranging from its physical duration to the historical testimony relating to it,’ here finds itself undermined and with it ‘the authority of the object, the weight it derives from tradition’.¹¹ This process – the withering of the aura of the work of art – is symptomatic of a movement ‘extend[ing] far beyond the realm of art’.¹² Following the ‘cracked’ tone of Benjamin’s thinking and writing,¹³ he reads the breakdown of ‘the idea of a tradition which has passed the object down as the same, identical thing to the present day’ as both threat and chance.¹⁴ Reproducibility jolts the artwork from the sphere of tradition by substituting what Benjamin calls a ‘mass existence’ [massenweises Vorkommen] for a unique existence.¹⁵ Whatever else Benjamin seeks to signal towards with the former expression, it clearly wants to designate a fundamental shift in the conception of the spatiotemporal relations between production and reception. A shift that is indicated throughout Benjamin’s essay, as Weber notes, by the use of ‘the same German verb – aufnehmen – […] to designate cinematic production as well as reception,’ indicating therewith ‘that both ends of the process may share some very basic features’.¹⁶ The shift in spatio-temporal identification not only affects the work of art produced, but also those ‘captured’, or else, written in the process of its production qua reproduction – here, submitted to the Aufnahme [recording] of a film production apparatus. In a scenario of self-alienation that for Benjamin raises the stakes of a favourite theme of the Romantics, one’s (mirror-)image not only ‘has become detachable from the person mirrored,’ but has become transportable, as he puts it, ‘[t]o a site in front of the masses’.¹⁷ However much irreducible to it, the broader stakes of the temporal structure of the afterlife of a breached origin here plays itself out in an illustrative passage on an actor’s test-performances in front of a writing apparatus of technological reproduction. The actor’s perpetually interrupted gestures find themselves severed from or only stand in the most provisional relation to their ‘end’ within a specific contextual constellation. In other words, they are breached by the necessary transformative possibility to be repeated at another time and place. Benjamin adequately illustrates this point with an account of the tendency of film production to split the actor’s performance into a series of episodes capable of being assembled through the processes of postproduction. As the context of this future assemblage is not always already given with the performance of the interrupted sequence, the test-performance is exposed to the time of reproducibility, severed from its present context and suspended in view of ‘its’ possible afterlife. A leap from a window is filmed as a leap from a scaffold, Benjamin notes, and only much later contextualised in a montage with footage of a fall at some outside location.

The leap from a scaffold, divorced from but also swelling under the virtual intrusion of the possibilities of an uncontrollable afterlife or ‘mass existence’ – a virtual reception [Aufnahme] already structurally at work in the time of its recording [Aufnahme]: the other Aufnahme in the first – begins to resonate with Schneider’s reading of a notably different but perhaps not dissimilar leap, namely: Yves Klein, clad in a three-piece suit, in October 1960, leaping from a provincial two-story building. A leap, according to Schneider’s account, which is neither happening for the first nor the last time and ‘that will never have taken singular place’. On the one hand, it repeats a previous leap – that of January 12, 1960, performed in front of the lone witness of Bernadette Allain and ending with minor injuries – and on the other, it already anticipates ‘generations of witnesses to a body caught in that act’.¹⁸ For this October 1960 capturing of the January 1960 event, Schneider relates,

[Klein] had a tarpaulin held by 12 judokas from a judo club across the street to catch him. In this way the staging was projected both toward a future (an audience to witness the photograph as evidence) and in reference to a past […]. This leap was, that is, not for a present audience but for a photograph that would record an event that had taken place at a prior time for a future audience that would see the leap on Theater of the Void Day, November 27, 1960, in the pages of the tabloid Dimanche. For the re-enactment of the real, the photographer Harry Shunk took not one, but two photos. One was taken with a net situated beneath Klein. The other was taken a few moments later from the same angle, but with the street empty. Shunk made a seamless montage of the two photos resulting in the “performance” of an act that will never have taken singular place, and resulting as well in generations of witnesses to a body caught in that act.¹⁹

If we consider that Schneider’s essay’s larger concern lies with ‘once again’ debunking art-historical origin myths through a reading, as she says, for ‘illegitimate’ histories by ‘listening for a syncopation of intention not “properly” resolvable in direct lineage, and, more radically perhaps, joining that syncopation as a critic with one reading among many’ – her analysis of the split temporality of Klein’s leap is never far from Benjamin’s own wider concerns with the provisional gesture of an artistic ‘signature’ in the time of its reproducibility and a new conception of the socio-political function of art within the participatory processes of its historical transmission. ‘Can we listen for other voices in seeming “solo” work,’ Schneider asks,

like the multiple directions of reference figured in the way Klein’s Leap is both citational (referencing backwards) and invocational (calling forward), readable as part of an antiphonal conversation beyond the frame or whitewash of the walls; a response to a call and a call for a response (including mine) beyond the confines of singular intention or policed legitimacies?²⁰

Schneider’s reading of Klein’s Leap begins to figure also the crack or fissure that the German word for leap – Sprung – signifies at the same time. As if the signifier Sprung is itself always already fissured, insecurely placed in more than one place at the same time. That Benjamin, as we saw, pays particular attention to the double meaning of the Sprung as both leap and crack precisely at the ‘origin’ [Ursprung], should further encourage our reading of the ‘antiphonal conversation’ between Schneider, Klein and Benjamin, the leaping (performance) artist and the actor falling from a scaffold in the time of reproducibility.

Afterlife of Performative Afterlife

Read in this way, Klein’s leap perhaps anticipates a certain shift of performance-based art practices and their analysis over the last twenty years, from an emphasis on the material body in performance to an engagement with its iterable afterlife, whether in the form of re-enactment or what the art historian of performance Amelia Jones has recently termed ‘hybrid art practices’.²¹ In an interview with Jones in this issue, we have asked her to reflect on how the trajectory of her own work has responded and perhaps also helped to shape these larger developments. At the heart of our ensuing conversation lies the question of what might constitute the underlying ethico-political concerns that have driven these more or less subtle shifts in perspective and experiment.

An interest in the afterlife of (historical) performance art, as it continues to inform Jones’ analysis of the material body in (the aftermath of) performance, is also the subject of Catherine Spencer’s contribution to our issue. Spencer’s focus lies on the pedagogical aspects of contemporary performance art that engages with the legacy of 1960s and 1970s performance. While acknowledging that pedagogy can be experienced as both emancipatory and regulatory, she argues that the afterlife of radical performance from this era – its memory, legacy and archival remains – is saturated with the potential for consciousness-raising in the present.

Applying certain perspectives, insights and preoccupations of performance studies to an interrogation of ‘the performative paradoxes and para-temporal affordances of a critical attitude to contemporaneity’ that inform Michel Foucault’s writings on enlightenment and critique, Kélina Gotman can be found discerning Foucault’s notably theatrical conception of a subject’s relation to ‘the scene of history’. Simultaneously emphasising our embodied presence in the world and our spectatorial distance, the theatrical scene, Gotman suggests, offers a new avenue for considering critique as a perpetual, immanent questioning of the structures and institutions of knowledge. Such an unending interrogation of one’s present, which compels the taking up of fragile positions perpetually subject to further questioning, Gotman proposes, might be said to follow the movement of a performative afterlife of ‘enlightenment’. Retracing Foucault’s concern with enlightenment as a ‘critical ontology of ourselves’ through the prism of his experience of the Iranian Revolution, Gotman goes on to read his much critiqued account of the latter as a possible example of ‘standing one’s ground on shaky ground, on changing ground; of querying even the dearest political and intellectual truths of one’s moment’.

The two approaches to the problematisation of the relation of an event to its archive, as we have traced them above, replay themselves in Marygrace Hemme’s reading of Hannah Arendt’s and Julia Kristeva’s reflections on the complex entanglements of praxis and poiesis. Such entanglements, whether of the event of action with its narrative afterlife or of the relative permanence of the work with its perpetual interpretative reworking, here follow a movement of osmosis that calls for a redefinition of the strict distinction between actors and witnesses, writers and readers, artists and critics, creaters and interpreters. In this context, Hemme’s essay unpacks how Kristeva’s reading of Arendt raises the stakes for an osmotic form of relationship struck within the historical co-construction of meaning. Under the banner of an ‘intimate revolt’, Hemme finds Kristeva emphasising the role of the body within symbolic chains of cultural reproduction. Designating an affective act of interpretation beyond mere judgement, Kristeva’s concept of ‘intimate revolt’ here follows the program of a trans-individual labour of self-reflection. In this context, Kristeva’s biography of Arendt repeats Arendt’s own experiments with the biographical form that constitute the primary example of intimate revolt. Displaying a sensory intimacy of identification with their subject’s life and thought, as Hemme relates, these idiosyncratic biographical accounts form the necessary ground of externality for a critical act of auto-analysis.

The entanglements between events and their archive, actions and narratives, living spirits and dead letters of writing, as well as the latter’s own spectral afterlife in the boundlessness of contexts to come, is also the theme of David Huddart’s rereading of Peter Carey’s ‘The True History of the Kelly Gang’. Complicating the novel’s common reception as a postcolonial republican work that merely uses a ventriloquised past for the present, Huddart stresses its exploration of the difficulties of any appeal to a foundational Australian identity. By putting into question the nature of originality, as Huddart states, it puts forward a notion of original that does not coincide with itself, paving the way for an anti-essentialist rewriting of Australian history and identity that is necessarily never present. With recourse to Jacques Derrida’s writings on the spectrality of iterability, Huddart focuses his discussion on a structural spectrality at work in the novel’s epistolary address to Kelly’s fictional unborn daughter. Following a Derridian insight that ‘the proper of a proper name will always remain to come’, he goes on to demonstrate how the novel’s self-reflexive historical metafiction is haunted by the future as much as the past. The figure of the unborn addressee, Huddart asserts, begins to stand for the radical openness of an Australia-to-come that is able to speak to the ongoing task of reconciliation between Australian communities beyond the enactment of a fixed political program.

In Sarah Marshall’s attentive reading of Derrida’s conception of originary survival in the context of his 1999–2000 seminar on the death penalty, the structure of this radical openness and incalculable ‘relation to the coming of the other as coming of the to-come’ is similarly pursued in the context of a questioning of stable (collective) identities and the ostensible purity of beginnings and endings. Displacing any origin, order or identity, as Marshall explains, Derridian survival does not begin only ‘after’ one’s life, but renders life and death, self and other inextricable from the start, following a weave of survival that does not come to clothe a more original existence. As a structural alterity that carries a self beyond itself, defenselessly exposing it before the other, the movement of survival remains inaccessible to the realm of experience, ‘perpetuating a singular existence’, as Marshall puts it, ‘only and always by calling it into question’. Marshall’s insightful and eloquent close reading of this rich and complex material returns us to what in some ways has perhaps been the neglected term of the title of our issue. For if the identity of ‘the thing itself’ only appears to be a distinct, natural phenomenon, yet in fact cannot be given in advance, it follows that ‘a necessary but mystified indemnificatory movement perpetuating sameness-to-self in opposition to some constitutive alterity’ must be repeatedly performed. The movement of this repeatedly unsuccessful performance that seeks to secure any thing as itself, Marshal explains, demands ‘alienation and repatriation, exposure to an other that de-limits it and circumscribes its borders’. Simultaneously ex-propriating and re-appropriating, it follows a logic of sacrificial, auto-immune auto-indemnification that Marshall’s contribution to our issue unpacks.

Although the defenceless exposure before the other of a structural survival does not begin only ‘after’ one’s life, the occasion of a death nevertheless helps us to shine a light on this structural state of affair. A version of this becoming explicit of a structural condition plays itself out in Derrida’s reflections on the name. For it is often at the occasion of the death of a friend that Derrida can be seen to ponder, not only on how ‘death appears to sever the name from the bearer of it’, ‘is the event or operation that lifts or peels the name off the body that once bore it’ but at the same time on how a certain law of the name is related to death from the start, bespeaks ‘the structural possibility that the one who gives, receives, or bears the name will be absent from it’.²² The difficulties that must be affirmed but not overcome when speaking the absent friend’s name at the occasion of his or her death, expose the other side of a structural relation of defenceless exposure, namely: responsibility in face of the task of facilitating the other’s performative afterlife. In Matthew Goulish’s and Lin Hixon’s contribution to this issue, this responsibility is met with lightness and grace in the aftermath of the death of their friend and colleague, the writer Brian Torrey Scott. A work of mourning that does not ‘mean to rehearse the sadness, the fateful trajectory of disease’, but offer a ‘minor monument’: ‘Words, last words, our lasting currency’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Swen Steinhäuser

Swen Steinhäuser recently completed his PhD thesis ‘Gesture, Haltung, Ethos: the Politics of Rehearsal’ in the department of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. He has published articles in Performance Research as well in the edited volume On Repetition: Writing, Performance and Art. Before embarking on postgraduate research, Swen worked extensively as a contemporary theatre maker, dramaturg and curator. His performance works under the company names Deer Park and hauser have toured widely in the UK. He currently works as an associate lecturer in Contemporary Theatre and Performance at Manchester Metropolitan University. Email: [email protected]

Neil Macdonald

Neil Macdonald recently completed his PhD thesis ‘Wound Cultures: Explorations of embodiment in visual culture in the age of HIV/AIDS’ in the department of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester. His forthcoming publications include an essay on the performance artist Ron Athey in the edited volume Outsider Bodies: Disrupting the canon of corporeal norms. Neil has taught extensively in the fields of art history and theory. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 Derrida, Limited Inc, 62.

2 Weber, Benjamin’s -abilities, 64.

3 Ibid., 67.

4 Ibid., 66.

5 Ibid., 67.

6 Ibid., 89.

7 Schneider, Performing Remains, 135.

8 We are here following Samuel Weber’s suggestion to translate Benjamin’s essay on the work of art as in the time rather than the age of its reproducibility, so as to emphasise that what is involved ‘is precisely a question of time and of an alteration in its relation to space’. Weber, Mass Mediaurus, 82.

9 Walter Benjamin, “Gesammelte Schriften Band 6,” 136. Author's translation.

10 Weber, Mass Mediaurus, 90.

11 Benjamin, The Work of Art, 106.

12 Ibid., 104.

13 Weber, Benjamin’s -abilities, 119.

14 Benjamin, The Work of Art, 91.

15 Ibid., 103.

16 Ibid., 91.

17 Weber, Mass Mediaurus, 103.

18 Schneider, 30.

19 Ibid., our emphasis.

20 Ibid., 32.

21 Jones, “Material Traces,” 20.

22 Brault and Naas, “To Reckon with the Dead: Jacques Derrida’s Politics of Mourning,” 14, 13.