This is Not My Body: Alienated Corporeality and Brechtian Critical Theatre Practices A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Ashley Majzels IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Michal Kobialka, Professor of Theatre Arts and Dance, Adviser December 2014 © Ashley Majzels, 2014 i Acknowledgments Writing my dissertation would not have been possible without the support and encouragement of many. For his patience and attention I would like to thank my adviser, Michal Kobialka. For their guidance and feedback, I would like to thank my outside examiner Keya Ganguly, as well as Sonja Kuftinec, Ananya Chatterjea, and Margaret Werry. Additionally, I have to thank Ginni Arons for her extensive help in navigating the Grad School's requirements while I was completing the dissertation in Canada. I would also like to thank Megan Lewis, Branislav Jakovljevic and Aleksandra Wolska for their advice and tutelage during my time at the University of Minnesota. A special thanks to Freya Olafson for her time as well as graciously providing access to her archival materials. For their personal support and feedback during the writing process, my thanks and apologies go out to Claudine Majzels, Eve Majzels, Praba Pilar, Per Brask, and Noah Decter-Jackson. ii Dedication My dissertation is dedicated to my family: C, E, F, and S. iii Abstract My dissertation advances a historical materialist understanding of alienated corporeality meant to inform Brechtian critical theatre practices. In the first half of my project, I draw on Marx's account of commodity fetishism and industrial labour to frame a discussion of Brecht's Mann ist Mann. In the second half, I revise my account of alienated corporeality in the light of Guy Debord's account of spectacular society. I then use this spectacular corporeality as a means to address Canadian inter-media artist Freya Olafson's recent works, AVATAR and HYPER_, as well as her critical engagement with social media as labour, consumption, and ontology. iv Table of Contents List of Figures:...............................................................................................v Introduction:...................................................................................................1 Chapter One: Corporeality under Commodity ..............................................20 Chapter Two: Mann ist Mann and Corporeality............................................39 Chapter Three: Brechtian Realism and Debord's Spectacle..........................87 Chapter Four: Broadcast Bodies: Freya Olafson's Avatar and Hyper_.........133 Conclusion:....................................................................................................157 Illustrations:...................................................................................................159 Bibliography:.................................................................................................167 v List of Figures Figure 1 – AVATAR, 4m06s...........................................................................159 Figure 2 – AVATAR, 16m01s.........................................................................159 Figure 3 – AVATAR, 22m58s.........................................................................160 Figure 4 – AVATAR, 45m53s.........................................................................160 Figure 5 – AVATAR, Promotional Photo.......................................................161 Figure 6 – AVATAR, 2m14s...........................................................................161 Figure 7 – AVATAR, 2m18s...........................................................................162 Figure 8 – AVATAR, 2m19s...........................................................................162 Figure 9 – AVATAR, 38m34s.........................................................................163 Figure 10 – AVATAR, 38m52s.......................................................................163 Figure 11 – HYPER_, “RGB”, 26m57s.........................................................164 Figure 12 – HYPER_, “Hyperbolic Doubt”, 34m33s....................................164 Figure 13 – HYPER_, “Above”, 43m34s.......................................................165 Figure 14 – HYPER_, “Above”, Promotional Photo.....................................165 Figure 15 – HYPER_, “Object Oriented Ontology”, 51m24s........................166 Figure 16 – HYPER_, “Object Oriented Ontology”, 52m47s........................166 1 Introduction My dissertation takes a historical materialist approach to bodies under capital in order to address bodies in Brechtian critical theatre practices. I provide an alternative theorization of embodiment suited to such practices, motivated by my difficulties and dissatisfaction with psychological and semiotic approaches. My intervention is doubled sided, in that I address lacunae in the treatment of alienated corporeality in both historical materialism and critical accounts of theatrical representation. Recent interventions in theatre and performance studies have identified and problematized bodies in a number of ways. Feminist accounts of performance and performativity, which are of particular importance in these fields, frequently present bodies as products of social relations as well as the sites in which to reveal and contest those same relations of power. For example, Rebecca Schneider, in her 1997 The Explicit Body in Performance, finds “[t]he body made explicit has become the mise en scene for a variety of feminist artists” whose performance art involves “[u]nfolding the body, as if pulling back velvet curtains to expose a stage.” (2) As Schneider positions these artists exposing “the sedimented layers of signification,” her notion of 'explicit body' provides the venue in which to critically engage with “ghosts of historical meaning, markings delineating social hierarchies of privilege and disprivilege.” (2) In his Theatre, Body and Pleasure from 2006, Simon Shepherd credits feminism with having “made the body into a key topic, politically and theoretically” and draws a range of tightly connected themes from body art into his predominantly phenomenological approach (2). He presents theatre as “a practice in which societies 2 negotiate around what the body is and means,” a negotiation whose significance arises “because many ideas about what is good, right, natural and possible are grounded in assumptions about what the body is, what it needs, how it works.” (1) Bringing both “the art of bodies” and “physical responses to that art” (9) into this negotiation, Shepherd argues for theatre as “an art of bodily possibility, an event where the limits of body are negotiated, fetishised, imagined somehow else.” (10) In contrast, Yoshiki Tajiri's 2007 Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Body: The Organs and Sense in Modernity locates the significance of bodies in the intersection of two sources. The first is 'body' as implicated in a tradition of “deconstructive thought” in “the field of critical theory,” one that aims to “unsettle the integrity of self (identity) by introducing the other (difference).” (1) His account of prosthesis, “indeterminately between body and technology,” emerges from the deconstructive subversion of “binary oppositions such as mind/body.” (1) This is then joined to “the empirical reality of contemporary culture,” where “[t]he clear-cut distinction between the body (considered internal and organic) and technology (considered external and inorganic) is being rendered obsolete.” (2) Because of this constitutive role in both the indeterminacy of deconstructive practice and its threatened obsolescence in present circumstances, Tajiri foregrounds the importance of his notion of 'the prosthetic body' in registering how “Beckett's work is indelibly marked by the modernist involvement with technologies in the early twentieth century.” (5) While I engage with some of these themes, I find there is a present need to address theatrical corporeality in terms of capitalist society and labour, especially where 3 conditions resembling those of Guy Debord's spectacle take hold. As technologies of image creation, transmission, and reception become endemic under capital, these conditions not only foreground the significance and difficulty of representing corporeality, but also threaten to foreclose the possibility of critical theatrical representation. My investigation of Brechtian theatre practices and historical materialist corporeality takes the possibilities and limitations of critical representation of bodies as a central concern. This commitment necessitates the other half of my intervention: where corporeality has appeared in recent historical materialist thought, it has done so without consideration of critical theatrical representation. Nevertheless, my account of corporeality draws on the Marxist understanding of productive dexterities and capabilities, and is closely related to a society's dominant form of alienated labour. Hence, my dissertation's research project asks how alienated corporeality and its representations are configured by capitalist labour processes and commodity fetishism, as found in Marx, and then again in Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle. I look to Brecht's critical representations of alienated life in large part because of its compatibility with and attention to these concerns. Similarly, Freya Olafson's performance works AVATAR and HYPER_ offer a critical approach to the emerging forms of labour