The Theatricality of Grief

Abstract

Roland Barthes’s influential book on photography Camera Lucida has been discussed by Michael Fried as an exercise in ‘antitheatrical critical thought’, for its celebration of the accidental, non-intentional, detail and the naïve non-performance of the photographed subject (see Fried 2008). However, in Barthes’s comparison between photography and theatre in the book he evokes Samuel Weber’s definition of theatricality as an interruption of the Aristotelean movement toward a ‘meaningful goal’ (Weber 2004: 46). Barthes explores the photograph’s ‘foreclosure of the Tragic’ that ‘excludes all purification, all catharsis’, writing that nothing in the photograph ‘can transform my grief into mourning’ (Barthes 1993: 90). In these remarks Barthes sets up a distinction between the self-affirming cultural practice of mourning and the more painful, ongoing affective realm of grief.

In 2017 I staged After Camera Lucida, a practice-as-research performance at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow that responded to the concepts, methods and form of Barthes’s book through my own personal experience of losing my mother when I was 14. This article critically reflects on After Camera Lucida, contextualising the performance through Barthes’s ideas, Weber’s concept of theatricality and recent scholarly work between theatre studies, visual studies and film. The article explores the ways that After Camera Lucida practised the suspension of mourning and catharsis as a particularly theatrical a/effect and how the slowing down of movement and time in the work explored a radical theatricality circulating between bodies, spaces and images.

The article is punctuated by photographic documentation of the performance from Glasgow-based artist Julia-Kristina Bauer.

Notes

1 See Bottoms (1998), Bleeker (2008) and Duggan (2012).

2 This approach is influenced by the work of performance company Goat Island and their use of creative response, whereby, instead of approaching a work based on ‘a collection of problems to be corrected’ there is a focus on what is inspiring or miraculous about a work (Bottoms and Goulish 2007: 211). Additionally, my methods were informed by Laura Cull’s writing on performance philosophy where she argues that we must move beyond mere application to practice a ‘felt knowledge of unknowing’ (2014: 33).

3 See Barthes’s essay ‘Baudelaire’s Theater’ from 1954, collected in Critical Essays (Barthes 1972). For an in-depth discussion of the theatricality of Barthes’s text see Wilson (2017).

4 The audience comments in this article were collected in a feedback session directly after the performance, as well as through email correspondence with audience members in the week following the event.

5 This is in contrast to Benjamin who celebrates the ‘dialectical image’ (1999: 462). For a discussion of Benjamin and Barthes in relation to photography and history see Dant and Gilloch (2002).

6 Barthes’s references to pensiveness in Camera Lucida are brief but can be read in relation to his discussion of the pensive text in S/Z (Barthes 2002) and are also unpacked in useful ways in Rancière’s discussion of ‘The Pensive Image’ in The Emancipated Spectator (2011).