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1 Lady/Applicant: on the Lazarus by Chris Girard Goldsmiths University

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1 Lady/Applicant: on the Lazarus by Chris Girard Goldsmiths University Lady/Applicant: On The Lazarus by Chris Girard Goldsmiths University of London Thesis submitted for the degree of Ph.D. in Arts and Computational Technology 2013 1 Declaration This is to certify that this thesis is my own work. Reference to the work of others has been cited and indicated throughout. Chris Girard 2 Abstract This research investigates the ‘performativity’ of the ‘author function’ through collaging the audio recordings of American poet Sylvia Plath. The ‘author function’ is a term by Michel Foucault to describe how readers attribute certain characteristics that they believe belong to the author and ascribe them to the writing. ‘Performativity’ is a term used by Judith Butler to describe a set of actions that ascribe and predetermine a set of attributes to a subject through his or her gender, age, timeframe, nationality and race. The ‘performativity’ of the ‘author function’ appropriates these characteristics and attributes them to the author. How the determination of an authorial identity translates to the interaction of the practice component of the project, which includes several components of digital collage, is through attributions that readers make in the creation of an author. The practice component of the project consists of the collage of audio and video recordings, the programming of video with Max/MSP/Jitter, ‘performative’ elements and collage poetry on Twitter. The audio component was collaged from two poems entitled ‘Lady Lazarus’ and ‘The Applicant’ that Plath read to the British Council in 1962 to form a new poem entitled Lady/Applicant: The Lazarus. The video component consists of collaging recorded video clips of storefront and street signs in Camden, London, where she is associated with living and committing suicide at. A second video collage entitled Shadows/Shadows/Tomb takes place at a cemetery close to my residence in 2011 and documents symbols of death that reference my own authorial identity. The second set of videos run on a Max/MSP/Jitter patch that display four screens of filmed texts inscribed on tombstones that play four streaming poems through a systematic structure of boxes. The screens are displayed in each box and sourced from separate folders to display and play the film clips. The practice of collage and constraint-based poetry complicates the constitution of being the author when the collagist of Plath’s poetry is a different gender than hers. This research then expands on how identity radically shifts in the text when the subject and the collagist have very different identities. The radical shift in a collage takes place within a predefined and generalized concept of the reader as determined by Stanley Fish, a prominent writer on the subject of ‘reader-response criticism’, who believes that one way a reader could be approached is through his or her relationship with the writing. 3 Table of Contents Section One – Introduction . 6 Structure . 6 – 6 Research Questions . 6 – 6 Methodology . 6 – 7 Practice Production . 8 – 9 Constraint . 10 – 11 Theoretical Preface . 13 – 15 Idiosyncrazy: Identity as Collage . 16 – 21 Section Two – Theory . 22 Theoretical Overview . 22 – 29 Barthes and Foucault . 30 – 37 Performativity . 37 – 42 Host and Parasite . 42 – 44 Voice and Otherness . 45 – 52 Identity and Memory . 52 – 55 How Can a Dead Woman Speak? . 55 – 65 Queer Desire . 65 – 69 Posthumousness . 70 – 75 Hauntology . 75 – 79 After Heart . 79 – 84 On Fantasia . 84 – 90 Section Three – Praxis . 90 Art and Authorship . 90 – 95 Poetry and Image . 96 – 100 On Digital Writing . 100 – 106 New Media Poetics . 106 – 116 A New Media Poem . 116 – 120 Section Four – Audience . 120 An American Poet in London . 120 – 128 The Collective Reader . 128 – 136 Reader-Response Criticism . 136 – 141 Embodiment, This Embodiment . 141 – 148 Section Five – Conclusion/Addendum . 148 Conclusion . 148 – 151 Bibliography . 151 – 153 Supplementary Bibliography . 153 – 154 Appendix A: Websites . 154 – 155 Appendix B: Exhibitions/Production . 155 – 156 4 Index of Images 1. Chris Girard, Text and Video of Lady/Applicant: The Lazarus, 2010 . 12 2. Chris Girard, Audio Poem of Lady/Applicant: The Lazarus, 2010 . 12 3. Chris Girard, Audio Poem Slices and Audio Screen Caption, 2010 . 12 4. Hollis Frampton, Selected Film Stills from Zorns Lemma, 1970 . 13 5. Chris Girard, Video Detail of Lady/Applicant: The Lazarus, 2010 . 13 6. Chris Girard, Yelp Review of Plein Air Cafe, 2008 . 17 7. Chris Girard, Twitter Feed from February 15th to 20th, 2012 . 17 8. Chris Girard, Activating Shadows/Shadows/Tomb on Max/MSP/Jitter, 2011 . 29 9. Chris Girard, Photographic Détournement of Yeats Plaque, 2010 . 78 10. Matthew Buckingham, Video Still from Play The Story, 2007 . 91 11. Sophie Calle, Images of Subjects from Suite Venitienne, 1979 . 91 12. Allan Sekula, Images from Fish Story: The Rechristened Exxon Valdez, 1990 97 13. Chris Girard, Images from Law Series, 2006 . 98 14. Chris Girard, Images from Law Series, 2009 to 2011 . 98 15. Chris Girard, Images from Lady/Applicant: The Lazarus Installation, 2010 . 103 16. Chris Girard, Reblog and Location Details from Twitter Post, 2011 . 107 17. Chris Girard, Film Stills of Shadows/Shadows/Tomb, 2011 . 110 18. Chris Girard, Max/MSP/Jitter Patch of Shadows/Shadows/Tomb, 2011 . 110 19. Chris Girard, Max/MSP/Jitter Patch of Gestalt, 2009 . 112 20. Chris Girard, Max/MSP/Jitter Sub Patch of Gestalt, 2009 . 112 21. Chris Girard, Excerpt and Activation of Hyperlink from TRY ME., 2008 . 115 22. Chris Girard, Twitter Feed from March 16 to 19th, 2012 . 145 5 Section One – Introduction Structure This text has five primary sections. The introductory section is composed of research questions, methodology, practice production, constraints and a theoretical preface that concludes with a focus on my authorial identity in relation to the practice of collage. The theory section contains the main theoretical drive. I draw on a variety of theorists from a diverse range of subject positions and disciplines including critical theory, philosophy, literature and new media scholarship. The praxis section focuses on how the practice of collage poetry and artwork engages with visual and conceptual components of my project. The audience section considers the readers of the project through theoretical discourse and social media. The conclusion posits the importance placed on the relationship between practice and theory. Direct links to the practice components of the project are included in the appendices. Research Questions Although there are several contextual and research questions pertinent to the practice, questions that are specifically investigated and contemplated upon include: 1. How does the shift of authorial intention and attribution through the collage process reconstitute the author via the ‘author function’? 2. How does the embodiment of multiple authorial inscriptions complicate the ‘performative’ attributes given to a single author by the reader? 3. How does the dynamic of reading collage-based poetry on digital platforms contextualize the reader in ‘reader-response criticism’? Methodology The methodology of my project, both in practice, and in its contextual and theoretical analyses is built upon poststructural and feminist epistemology, in other words, theories and methods of knowledge. I am specifically exploring how authorial attribution and meaning wavers between authors recorded on the audio, video and images and myself through the practice of collage and constraint-based poetry. My interest in shared authorship through the practice that is centred on audio and video installations of 6 collaged poetry and my daily poetry production on Twitter calls for situated knowledge, and academic writing that locates the author, researcher, and practitioner and his or her own complicated subjectivity and biases within the project. The project explores my authorial identity through the positioning of my body with various methods of constraint- based writing, and how my interest in shared authorship complicates my own positioning as an author, when I collage variations of writing attributed to other sources. I believe that given my own interest in identity, as expressed through my autobiographical insertions, anecdotes, and examples of my collage poetry projects, this would be best positioned in the methodology of ‘autoethnography’. ‘Autoethnography’, as posited by researcher Carolyn Ellis in her book published in 2004 entitled The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel About Autoethnography, is a method to avoid objective truth, as might be empirically claimed in the social sciences, by focusing on the individual experience. The focus on the individual experience helps to connect the personal, cultural, social, and political dynamics of the project as both the research and contextual parts of this project use anecdotes to better explain my relationship to the practice component. The creation and display of collage poetry explores the relational aspects of Plath’s identity and mine, as a collagist to her poetry. The importance in establishing an authorial identity to Plath and myself, through methods of constraints used in the collage, is to consider how the practice of collage poetry, through my subject position, historically signifies a trajectory of contemporary poetics that come from the United States. The collage appropriates the representational form of Plath, whose distributive biography put forth by the culture industry manifests illness through Plath who is depicted as having an acknowledged state of depression and suicide, which relates back to gender roles and the historical subject position of Plath’s authorship. The feminist and political implications of Plath’s predetermined state of living past her death, implied as a willing rejection of her physical body in her poetry, becomes the dynamic of the collage of an authorial figure who has already acknowledged to have lived past her own body. The act of fragmenting a body of text by a collagist, a man who shares a ghostly authorial inscription of a woman, the history that the text carries within it, and challenges the notion of how constructs of a shared authorial body never quite resolve themselves.
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