Editorial: On Appearance

According to philosopher Giorgio Agamben, etymologically the term ‘appearance’ belongs to the same group of terms as ‘image’ (spectrum), ‘mirror’ (speculum), ‘spectacle’ (spectaculum), ‘sign’ (specimen) and ‘beautiful’ (speciosus). Deriving from a root ‘signifying “to look, to see”’, appearance denotes a category of being whose essence lies in ‘giving itself to be seen’ (Agamben 2007: 56). In fact, for Agamben, appearance is the essence of species – that special category of being whose essence coincides with its appearance, its being given to be seen, whose visibility provides the very grounds of its intelligibility (2007: 57). This may come as no surprise to those used to defending appearances against the reductive, often mistaken, view that they serve to mask or hide ‘reality’ or ‘truth’ or to those actively engaged in processes of facilitating the communication of a specific moment of becoming – of being's becoming image – through the theatre or performance event. Yet the philosopher's language might prove useful in examining the specificities of theatre as the locus of appearance par excellence, Likewise, the dynamics of theatrical presentation might be usefully examined in terms of their interweaving of the special and the specious, the surprising and the vacuous, the appearances that matter and yet have no matter other than ‘mere’ appearance.

On Appearance sets out from the conviction that appearance matters, and matters as the very ‘stuff’ that provides the species ‘theatre and performance’ with its substance, specificity and specialness. Exploring the role appearance plays in a range of cultural forms – from body art to live TV, shamanic invocation to video installation, magic show to ‘non-professional’ performance -On Appearance charts the construction, circulation and contestation of some of the imagined possibilities, lived realities, political identifications and creative opportunities opened up by thinking through the logic of appearance. It examines the correlation between modes of appearance and practices of disappearance and investigates their inscription in the recuperative dynamics of power. On Appearance explicates the practical, philosophical and political implications of Agamben's invocation of ‘the task of politics’ as being ‘to return appearance itself to appearance, to cause appearance itself to appear’ (Agamben 2000: 95).

How, then, does appearance itself appear in this issue? In what ways, and in what forms, is appearance figured, thought and practised? Who and what cause appearance to appear? And who, and what, are disappeared in the process?

The contributors to On Appearance navigate these and related questions. Both Kear and Harris frame the dynamics and modalities of appearance as essentially political – appearance is ‘the introduction of a visible in the field of experience which then modifies the regime of the visible’ (Rancière 1999: 99). For Kear, writing about the relationship between political intervention and theatrical image-making, the appearance of politics occurs in the gap between presence and representation. Through examining the theatricality of photographic and video works by Phil Collins, works involving the apparent ‘self-presentation’ of real people, he demonstrates that in a theatrical context presentation is always cross-cut by representation and as such theatricality involves the bringing to appearance of their relation – a relation of non-relation – in the space and time of the image. For Harris, the appearance of ‘real people’ on stage provides the opportunity to interrogate the cultural-political dynamics of ‘authenticity’. Concerned that physical and social appearance might produce a presumptive normalization designed to contain political possibility and limit the distribution of the sensible (Rancière 2004: 12), Harris argues for a disruption of performance's aesthetic regime and performance studies’ classificatory systems, presenting a case for recognizing the importance of the equality of intelligences of performers, audience and makers in the theatrical event. In Quarantine's Susan and Darren, Harris sees evidence of the need to critically evaluate the gap between ontology and performance, appearance and theatricality. Theatre emerges as a place where appearances are constructed, spectatorship is activated and politics negotiated. This would also seem to be the case for aladin, whose personal narrative interweaves an account of post-colonial migration with the practice of prestidigitation, effecting through both a ‘magical’ resolution of impossible situations and insoluble identifications.

For Bayly, appearance is, in a theatrical context, literally the appearance of someone. Philosophically, Bayly's point of departure for considerations of faciality in epistemologies of performance is Levinas, for whom the face ‘cannot appear, it just faces’. For Levinas, theatre is not a ‘face-to-face’ relation but rather a site of ‘sensible appearance': a thoroughly mediated domain facilitating the recognition of ‘the impossibility of a pure appearing or a simple revelation’. Bayly observes, accordingly, that ‘an ethics of appearing’ needs to be thought ‘as a supplement to the politics of representation’. He elaborates how this might work through examining the logic of expression operative in Duchene's photography, which he sees as a primitive theatre, a site of the ‘inscription of the theatrical’. The photograph is, for him, a theatrical ‘set-up’ par excellence, and Duchene's experiments a sort of ‘experimental theatre’ demonstrating the appearance of the face as an index of subjective expression and defacement as a mark of political de-subjectification. Drobnik similarly examines the ethical dynamics of spectatorship through the lens of the photographic image, suggesting that ethical involvement in spectatorship is evident in theatrical events that create an association between the violence of an event – its incarnation ‘outside’ a theatrical context – and the violence of its appropriation within a frame of ‘authored’ representation. He notes that although spectators cannot intervene in the representation, they also cannot just consume; the latency of the event, of the documentary face-to-face relation, is troubled by, and troubles, the dynamics of theatrical distanciation to create an economy of aesthetic implication in, and indifference to, ‘real’ suffering. Kelleher, similarly, explores how theatricality resides in the gesture of distancing the proximity of the performance taking place in front of the spectator. Focusing on the phenomenology of La Ribot's performance of laughter, Kelleher demonstrates how the interplay of duration and repetition forces recognition of a relation being forged within the work of theatre; not one of correspondence – ‘their world is not our world’ as spectators after all – but of fractured allusion; theatrical violence and political violence are not contiguous, even if they use the same discourse; theatrical suffering is not the same as suffering as such. Theatre thereby re-emerges as a world of appearances – ‘and human appearances at that’ – created with an intensity that both exceeds and undermines intentionality. Durkee likewise examines dance as the appearance of appearance rather than the appearance of a particular subject. Exploring the challenges to spectatorship attendant on apprehending a body-turned-object without reclaiming it as authentic, she locates a struggle between materiality and appearance operating in performance. She argues that although materiality cannot take possession of appearance, there is, nonetheless, an apprehension of the materiality of appearance manifest in the dialectical image.

For Kubiak, appearance is decidedly anti-materialist and must be reclaimed from the philosophical lexicon of materialism. Following Artaud and Blake, Kubiak insists upon theatre's visionary potentiality as a space for the revelation of ‘possibilities not yet apprehended’ and the ‘visionary making and unmaking of a world’. For Kubiak, appearance is the appearance of a vision – a vision of ‘redemptive, political life’. He invokes shamanic consciousness as means of re-envisioning the world with assistance from the ‘apothecaries of the mind’ and theatrical shamanism as a form of cleansing (catharsis) akin to taking the transformative natural hallucinogen ayahuasca. Lavery, likewise, allows imagination to drive his approach to making ‘sensory appearance’ appear at the level of embodied textuality, while for Tresize, the re-appearance of dead relatives in the live performances of John Edward, media medium, is evidence enough of the theatrical laundering of some of the oldest conjuring tricks in the book. She examines the work of ‘making the disappeared reappear’, demonstrating how the performances work by mechanizing appearance, but also revealing the mechanisms by which this is made possible in a postmodern construct linking the discourse of trauma to the technologies of the televisual. Tresize outlines an apparatus of appearance underpinned by an ideological consensus that ‘erases the present’ to create ‘the appearance of appearance’. McGillivray traces this process back to the eighteenth-century construction of the picturesque landscape and its dependence on theatrical staging to produce aesthetic effect. The ‘framing of the world’ produced within this quintessential manipulation of scenographic compositional processes serves to ensure the world ‘appears to be’ as it is presented within the logic of the theatrical mise-en-scène.

For Gough, the ideological consensus governing the appearance of the figure of ‘woman’ in the political sphere is her rendering as ‘spectre’, unable to appear materially – politically – despite having massive political impact and import. In political liberation movements, ‘Women still appear to disappear, or appear to be marginalized and interrupted’. Gough notes how, in Irish nationalist politics, ‘when the call to Cathleen is heralded, ‘real’ women seem to vanish’. Further, she locates the appearance of actual activist women as the exception that allows for the continued exclusion of the category of ‘woman’ from practical politics. Gough accentuates the appearance and disappearance of available forms of subjectivity. Black female subjectivity, represented in the nineteenth century in the form of Aunt Jemima, ‘is disappeared under the weight of the commodity's ubiquitous reproductions’, while at the same time establishing the conditions of possibility for its twentieth-century political re-appearance. Roach similarly analyses the appearance of a different kind of heritage -'intangible heritage’ – and with it the appearance of a different kind of labour. Conceiving of sweat as the appearance of work, Roach notes that the history of slavery and exploitation also contains within it a heritage of labour – the extraordinary work (and works) of carnival and Mardi Gras. As a living tradition passed through family lines, the labour of making performance, and the material sweat of history this tradition contains, ‘reappears in the faces of the next in line’. He argues that the work that emerges from conditions of hard labour – in free time, as ‘free play’ – allows alternative possibilities to appear and offers a glimpse of ‘an exhilarating kind of freedom’.