Performance, Death and the Writing of Time Harradine, David John

Chronographies: Performance, Death and the Writing of Time Harradine, David John The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without the prior written consent of the author For additional information about this publication click this link. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/jspui/handle/123456789/1855 Information about this research object was correct at the time of download; we occasionally make corrections to records, please therefore check the published record when citing. For more information contact [email protected] Chronographies Performance, Death and the Writing of Time Davidjohn Harradine QueenMary, University of London Thesissubmitted for examinationfor the degreeof PhD Abstract This thesisexplores the interconnectingthemes of time, deathand the subjectivein rclation to performance, the performative and the critical act of writing. It is structured as a heterogenousseries of casestudies of atange of performed and petformative events,each offering a focus for an investigationof how the key terms of time and death operatein and around that event, and of how those terms lead to other areasof investigation. It deploys analytical and conceptual frameworks from, amongst others, the disciplines of psychoanalysis,queer theory, cultural studies, the visual arts, literary theory and performancestudies to develop a seriesof interdisciplinaryreadings of subjectsincluding the perfonnative constructionof subjectivity,the temporalityof photography,the temporal and spatialaspects of domesticarchitecture in relation to performanceand installation,and the epistolaryexchange as performance event. The thesis also addressesthe problematics of how to engagein the process of critical writing in response to the ephemerality of performance, and theorises "performative writing" in relation to the broader themesof time and death. A rangeof textual forms are deployed in the text, including fictional autobiography, love letters, instructions for scientific experiments, prose poems and fragmented essaysin multiple voices. By repeatedlyreinventing the form through which the writing is presented,the thesis also implicitly exploresthe limits of textuality in the context of the creation and presentationof the doctoral thesisitself 2 Contents Introduction, or, Start Time: The Twain of the Writing ChapterOne, or, QueerTime: On Death, Sexualityand Repetition 38 Chapter Two, or, Horne Time: The Uncanny Spacesof Domestic Performance 58 ChapterThree, or, ExposureTime: Towards a Performativity of Photography 93 ChapterFour, or, Delivery Time: On Writing a Love Letter 126 Conclusion,or, Ending Times: 167 Notes 190 Bibligrapby 224 , 3 Mustradons Figuirs Pqge Principleof the CameraObscura, after A Kircher,Ars Magna Ludset Umbrae,Amsterdam, 1671. Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid. 104 Plan of the Diorama at Regent's Park 105 3. A standardSLR Camera 105 4. Louis JacquesMand6 Daguerre,View of theBoulevard du TemA .p daguerrotype,Paris, 1839. Stadtmuseum,Munich. 112 5. Aberlardo Morel, CameraObscura Imqge of Boston'sOld CustomsHouse in theHotel Room, 1999. Bonni Benrubi Gallery,New York. 113 6. ReggieTucker, Kbarkov,Ukraine, 1993.115 7. ReggieTucker, Kbarkov,Ukraine, 1993.115 8. JohannesVermeer, A I-a,# Writing,c. 1665. National Gallery of Art, Washington. 165 4 London 12" Dcccmbcr 2002 Dear You I I had a dreamagain last night. It is a dreamI haveoften. I dream I am a writer. I dream I am a condemnedwriter, although I can't rememberwhich of my many misdemeanours am being condemned for. It seemsI have transgressedtoo many boundaries,one too many, one step too far. I rememberit is winter, and it is raining - not the chill romanceof in ice and snow, but the humiliating cold reality of wind-blown rain. And I rememberthat first my dream,I have alreadybeen executeda number of times before, that this is not the of many deathsaccorded me, but I rememberthinking that this time is different, that this front time is for reaLand that this time is the last time. And I am standingfreezing wet in And fire. of a high brick wall, and a firing squadaims up at me. And pull back the triggers. And in that preciseinstant, that electric 'now' that almost,almost, almost becomesa 'then', I as the bullets fly towardsme, a voice speaks.Speaks out, to me. And the voice saysthat before. am grantedanother year to live, to write, to finish the work I had begunmany years falling And in my dream, then, time begins to blur, like oil on water, like a riverbank away during a flood, and I begin to write. I beganto write. I am going to begin to write. I write harder, all day that first day, as the sun moves hidden acrossthe sky and the rain falls and fall into sleepexhausted. The following morning, when I wake, I discover that the pages back that had been scratchedand blotted with ink only hours before had faded to pure And clean white, to empty anticipatingblankness. And again, I begin to write. the next And morning, there is nothing there where before my words had run acrossthe page. every night I fall away from a mass of words and every morning I awake to empty finally anticipatingwhiteness. And as I write, and I write for weeks,then months, then all but all that year,a singledrop of rain runs quickly down my frozen check,the last mouthful dream, of smoke from a last cigarettedisappears into the cold, wet air. And finally, in my look defeatedby the words themselves,I put down my pencil, and closemy notebook, and 'Mat had up Out of my window, at a line of men, rifles, and the cold hard sheetsof rain. begun to turn into snow. And just then, as I look, the volley of rifle fire, releasedonly a lost fraction of a secondbefore, and yet a whole year before, forever before, in a moment 6 to me, now doubly lost through my waking from that dream, cuts through my chest and strikesme in the silenceat the heart. in And if I askedyou now - or perhapslater, quietly, the stillnessof the night - would you ' help me work out what this dreammight mean? I look forward to hearingfrom you soon. 7 Introduction, or, Start Time: The Terrain of the Writing Written with Time: Writing, Performance and Repetition 13'bMay 2000,5.35pm I havespent conjiderable time now pondering how to begin,so I beginwith a date,and a time. A! y own temporal existence slos into thetext, the movement of my y bod acrossthe ks Y of mycomputerjudders onto . thescrren; the time Igive to this workis slicedawayfmm týy life asI rrad And write.And watch,and watchmyself shifting through time as I sit herr,the blank setrenof my computer looking back at me, . waiting. I haveipent considerable time now pondering bow to beginqgain; shall I leapinto a thematic e4osition, quickIy segue into development,stip back and contextualise contextualiseconlextualise (ýyrannicalmantra that gatherstime around it Rke a sbmud)? Should I begin nilb a joray into performativewriting, aprrview, pm)ogue,opening, followed by rrsolution, run tbroiýgbinto explanation and paranoid dffence? How can I mark myseff,my time, Thequeerness of my working, the imminenceof my death (even another seventy_vears- myplan - seemsimminent to me) - the veg themesthat confoundme beir berr 13" Mqy at the start - in my text? I cannotbe gin tofatbom, so I bigin nilb a date, and a time, 2000,535Pm. And as I sit heremrifiýg acrosstime and space, markizg my existencein a milZion tiny dots offadiýg ink, this time slos awyI ajfmm me. And as it trickles awa comeacross another date. 306 March 2000,7.17pm, andfeel myselfsliding into a vertiginouswell, a wbiroool that Ileavesme balanced on the edgeof a dmp down into my ownpast, apast that was written toward my ownfuturr (bow will this sound to me in tbire, five, sevenjears' time, as I rvad and rr-rrad Thistext? ). As I write berr towards a difeirntfuture (it isyou I am wrifingfor, trader, though I don't know wbojou arr, wbereyou arr, when you an), I stumble acrossmy ownpast, trip over and hang huýgfrom the classicalitalic of a curling swinging. And the million tiny dots shimmer, and continuetojade. I have ipent considerabletime now, wondering how to begin. So. To begin. 300Mareb 2000,7. -17. pm 'The languageof out dialoguemight constantlydestroy the possibility of sayingthat of which we are speaking.2 In her text Unmarked,Peggy Phelan begins to theorise the potential value of critical attention to precisely those elements of cultural discourse that are tendered invisible, unclear,and unstable- in order to reclaim, for the left, a politics of negativityand absence which she offers againstwhat she identifies as the reductive agendasof politics basedin visibility, (self-)presence,and representation. She cans for the construction of 'a way of knowing which does not take surveillanceof the object, visible or otherwise,as its cl-ýcf aim' [Phelan, 1993: 1-2]. In Phelan's thesis,live performance offers a kind of 'existence 9 without reproduction', which shevalorises against a capitalistrepresentational and political economy that increasingly accords value to cultural artcfacts (people, performances, political ideals)only to the extent that they are reproducibleand grounded in the potential for stable and self-identical repetition. She elaborates a theory of absence and disappearancethat re-marks the 'unmarked' (that which is rendered outside of representationitsclo as the sourceof a viable,if admittedlydifficult, cultural politics. In elaboratingher theory of the 'unmarked', and preciselybecause she constructsfive performance as the paradigm for these ideas', Phelan also acknowledgesthe paradoxes attendant upon the act of writing about (re-presenting)something that is marked as valuableprecisely because it cannot be represented.Invoking a Derrideanproblematisation of writing itself, Phelanproposes a kind of 'performative writing', a writing strategythat is characterisednot as a constative representationof the perfortnancesabout which one writes, but as a seriesof performative utterancesthat re-create(re-do) and echo absent performancesin the moment of reading Rbid: 149]. In this, Phelan begins to suggesta form of writing that I am interestedin both theorising and in stylisticallyand conceptually engagingin the writing of this text.

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