NOTES
- Some of the most important instances of public debate about the legitimacy of political intervention have turned on a scrutiny of the sincerity of testimony and the good faith of the agents involved. The recent over-determined meanings around the constellation of interpretation arising from Tony Blair's position on weapons of mass destruction, the resignation of Robin Cook, and the death of David Kelly, point to something of what I am suggesting. Similarly, the US National Commission into the 9/11 attack gave rise to substantial media debate about the relative candour of the testimony of Richard Clarke and of Condoleezza Rice. Constructions around performance, sincerity and truth have been generated through several hearings at the Hague; and the Commission of Inquiry arising from the Hurricane Katrina disaster similarly turns on the extent to which the performances of key figures can be trusted, and legitimacy rests on such determinations.
- In the eighteenth century the perceived performance of authentic emotion introduced a contradiction into theories of the self. Diderot's Paradox of the Actor “stages” this dilemma.
- This formulation acknowledges Stephen Greenblatt's critical insight into the nexus of ideology, power, ambition and representation which precipitates the modern subject in the Renaissance. See his influential Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago; London: U of Chicago P, 1984).
- There are clearly ideological as well as aesthetic purposes at issue here, but for the sake of the paper I have bracketed these.
- John Walsh, ed., Bill Viola: The Passions, catalogue, (Los Angeles; London: The J. Paul Getty Museum in collaboration with The National Gallery, n.d.) 33.
- Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (London; NY: Continuum, 2004) 100.
- Stefan Brecht, The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson (New York: Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Mein, 1978) 32.
- As I was discovering, the semiotic performance of the authentic self became codified in particular ways during the religious wars that had marked the historical trauma of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Despite my measured resolution not to diminish the differences between contemporary South Africa and early-modern England, these two temporal, philosophical, political and geographical domains were, to my frequent surprise, in my research beginning to address one another. I am not suggesting that modernising England was in any of its particularities, nor for that matter, in its generality, the same as South Africa in transition. South Africa now is not modernism's past. Rather, the comparative analysis of the two cases allows me to consider the implications of “regime change” for subjectivity and representation in two very different contexts, and to explore its meaning for the representation of personhood in the face of rupture.
- I am aware that a history of sincerity has been the ongoing project of John Martin for the past several years, and his impressive and scholarly survey of the history is in part incorporated in his paper, “Inventing Sincerity, Refashioning Prudence. The Discovery of the Individual in Renaissance Europe”, in The American Historical Review 102.5 (Dec. 1997): 1309–42.
- The website still persists, at the time of writing. The site documents statements and assertions made during the ideological battle that raged between Iraqi and US information apparatuses in the first phase of the war.
- I am aware that such a designation necessarily has pejorative overtones, in part because “truth telling” has become such a naturalised good, so necessarily entailed in the logic of the rational, the proportionate, the economic. The boast is discursively associated with excess and vainglorious self-seeking.
- Tracing such links is the substance of my current research.
- Milman Parry, L'Epithète traditionelle dans Homère. (Paris: Société Éditrice Les Belles Lettres, 1928).
- Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (London; NY: Routledge New Accents, 1982) 43.
- Thus while I am suggesting that the play inscribes an instability around changing symbolic languages, at the level of narrative the play deals with changing political regimes. Rome, in this play, transfers authority through a curiously hybrid model somewhat like the elective monarchy which is the source of the dilemma in Hamlet. In Titus Andronicus, political authority is transferred through a mechanism that is a mix of dynastic succession and popular election.
- William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, taken from The Norton Shakespeare, general ed. Stephen Greenblatt (London; NY: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997).
- Readers who are familiar with Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus might recall how much of substance in that play turns on questions of proof, representation and testimony. The young Lavinia, after her rape, has her tongue cut out and her hands cut off so that she will neither be able to speak nor write the names of her violators. Her wounds speak, albeit of a nameless horror, and she is described as a “map of woe.” Finally, however, through reference to pages from Ovid and by drawing in the sand, both incident and agents are well-enough described to warrant her rapists’ execution.
- I would suggest that the traumatic plot is suggestive of the moment of cultural upheaval, with the transition from orality to literacy intersecting with Tudor and Elizabethan anxieties around religious transformation and succession crises. New economies also enter the arena, and a vast anxiety over questions of value pervades the play.
- This is a tricky matter. I am not suggesting here that writing is dishonest while speech is candid. The boasting tradition itself attests that this cannot be the case. Rather, I am suggesting that “writing” takes its claims to truth from something outside of itself, toward which it gestures; while orality tests truth not primarily in terms of an outside object, but in so far as it is performed with conviction. As Hamlet problematises, the “performance” of sincerity becomes a problem during the Renaissance, the moment at which a massive transformation from oral to written culture is taking place.
- Eg. William Shakespeare, Othello, The Norton Shakespeare, general ed. Stephen Greenblatt (London; NY: W.W. Norton & Co. 1997).
- For a recounting of the story, see J. B. Peires, The House of Phalo: A History of the Xhosa People in the Days of their Independence Johannesburg: Ravan p, 1981.
- See also J. B. Peires, in The Dead Will Arise (Johannesburg: Ravan Press; Bloomington; Indiana: Indiana UP; London: James Curry, 1989) 112, for a brief passage from the evidence of R. Daniels, documented in Minutes of the Proceedings of the Court of Inquiry…on the fate of the Caffer chief Hintsa:
- “Did you see those ears?—I did see ears, but I do not know if they were Hintsa's. In whose possession were those ears?—I cannot say, they were lying on the ground. Were they shown as curiosities about the camp?—Not to me.”
- From Jimmy Matyu, “Laying Sandile's head to rest.” Mail and Guardian, 26 January to 1 February 1996: 10.
- A third Committee was also part of the Commission. This dealt with reparations but had few resources to expend, and so had a limited impact on public discourses.
- Tobias Jones, The Dark Heart of Italy (London: Faber and Faber, 2003).
- ibid. xii.
- Castello di Rivoli Catalogue: William Kentridge, Catalogue (Turin: Skira, 2003).