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We Are Parasites on the Politics of Imposition

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We Are Parasites on the Politics of Imposition Anna Watkins Fisher is a doctoral student in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She holds an M.A. from NYU in Performance Studies and a B.A. from Duke University. Her dissertation, Feminist Impositions: Performing Parasites in Contemporary Art and Media, proposes parasitism, in the context of contemporary performance art, as a tactical mode of appropriation for moving beyond certain critical impasses for feminist theory. She has published in Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, Le Texte Étranger, contributed to the book In the Limelight and Under the Microscope: Forms and Functions of Female Celebrity (Continuum, 2011), and has an essay forthcoming in TDR (The Drama Review). Roisin Byrne, You Donʼt Bring me flowers anymore 2009 1. New York Times art critic Holland Cotter wrote in 2002, “Of the liberation movements for which the late 20th century will be We Are Parasites: On the Politics of remembered, few have been as disparaged as feminism, and that Imposition scorn extends to the women's art movement. Even presumably well- intentioned art-worldlings seem Anna Watkins Fisher incapable of talking about it without condescension, as if it were some Print | Email Share this: Facebook | Twitter | indiscreet adolescent episode best forgotten” (Cotter 2002). 2. The emails reproduced in this essay The tactics of appropriation have been co-opted. Illegal action has are excerpted. become advertisement. Protest has become cliché. Revolt has become 3. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun asks what it passé…Having accepted these failures to some degree, we can now would mean to “exhaust exhaustion” attempt to define a parasitic tactical response. We need a practice that in her essay “Crisis, Crisis, Crisis, or allows invisible subversion. We need to feed and grow inside existing the Temporality of Networks” communication systems while contributing nothing to their survival; we forthcoming in the journal Theory, Culture & Society. I engaged this need to become parasites. formulation in my dissertation proposal to initiate a different line of -Nathan M. Martin for the Carbon Defense League (2003) questioning. There is, however, an advantage that woman can gain from her very 4. I make this argument at length in a inferiority. Since she is from the start less favored by fortune than man, forthcoming essay for TDR (The Drama Review) called “Like a Girlʼs she does not feel that she is to blame a priori for what befalls him; it is Name: The Adolescent Drag of not her duty to make amends for social injustice, and she is not asked to Amber Hawk Swanson, Kate do so. Gilmore, and Ann Liv Young.” 5. Not only has the parasite been -Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949:695) overwhelmingly deployed as a pejorative term “rooted” in the IT’S NOT YOU, IT’S ME misogyny of the alien threat of The British artist Roisin Byrne, a breakout star of the BBC4 reality series femininity, a destructive and out-of- control dependence on an always Goldsmiths: But Is It Art?, has recently begun to make a name for herself in already healthy patriarch, but it has the art world by sabotaging work by more-established male artists. In June consistently been invoked to 2009, while still an art student, she began a correspondence with the Turner articulate a fundamental problem for prize-winning, environmentally engaged artist Simon Starling, claiming feminism and feminist theory, namely, womenʼs constitution in admiration for his work, only to use the information she gained against him relation to, and secondarily to, when she posed as a horticulturist, stole, and smuggled a rhododendron from patriarchal structures as a result or his earnestly titled 2000 installation Rescuing Rhododendrons at the Parque redress of injury. Literary critic J. Los Alcornocales in Spain back with her to the U.K. on a budget airline flight. Hillis Miller notes the female gendering of the parasite in his Byrne exhibited their email correspondence in full, along with the plant, for her famous essay “Critic as Host,” writing final student show at Goldsmiths in a piece she entitled You Don’t Bring Me that the parasite “…suggests the Flowers Anymore. This is one of a number of works for which Byrne has image of ʻthe obvious or univocal engaged powerful male artists through correspondence, using flattery to get readingʼ as the mighty, masculine what she wants from them. For another piece, Look What You Made Me Do oak or ash rooted in the solid ground, endangered by the insidious from 2008, she enticed the artist Jochem Hendricks into an extended twining around it of ivy. English or correspondence that resulted in her putting her own bank details on his maybe poison, somehow feminine, financial form so that she could later receive his payment and use it to create a secondary, defective, or dependent, replica of one of his works. a clinging vine, able to live in no other way but by drawing the life sap In January 2011, I started to write about Byrne’s artistic practice, fascinated by of its host, cutting off its light and air” (Miller 1977:440, my emphasis). The what I began to theorize as the parasitism of her provocative and ingenious misogyny associated with the artistic reversals of power and its potential for reinvigorating feminism. In his parasite has been internalized by widely known, if still not fully contended with 1982 book The Parasite (Le many canonical text of Western parasite), Michel Serres offers a study that describes the world as a system of feminist theory. An explicit disregard parasitic relations wherein production gets exploited by a maintained order of for the parasitic-female has been espoused by: Mary Wollstonecraft, interloping consumption, organized by one-way relations that are not reversed. Rosa Luxemburg, Catherine He writes: “I call this semiconduction, this valve, this single arrow, this Mackinnion, Simone de Beauvoir, relation without a reversal of direction, ‘parasitic’” (Serres 1982:5). “Precisely Germaine Greer, Gloria Steinem, what is a parasite?” writes David Bell of Serres’ book. “It is an operator that and Avital Ronell, consistently offered as a figural metaphor for the interrupts a system of exchange. The abusive guest partakes of the host’s meal, failings of feminism. consumes food, and gives only words, conversation in return. He does not pay 6. In an interview published in a 1991 in any material sense for what he takes” (Bell 1981:886). Byrne’s art issue of Re/Search, Avital Ronell conceptualizes the creative reversal at the heart of the performance of was asked: “Whatʼs ʻwrongʼ with parasitism, I argued in my dissertation proposal; it challenges artistic and feminism today?” “Itʼs dependent on feminist economies with its compelling manipulation of normative approaches what man does.” Ronell responded, explaining: “Feminism today has a to the production of value and representational political etiquette. In my parasitical, secondary territoriality, analysis, I read Byrne’s practice through the conceptual lens of parasitism, a and if you respond to present term I argued was compelling for rethinking the increasingly vexed states of conditions, youʼre subject to reactive, both contemporary feminism and contemporary feminist art, sites that have mimetic, and regressive posturings. So the problem is: how can you free become bogged down by accusations of cultural cliché and creative yourself? How can you not be stagnation.[1] What might be possible for a notion of feminism unbounded by reactive to what already exists as vague and idealistic objectives such as autonomy, dignity, and independence?, powerful and dominating? How can I asked. you avoid a resentimental politics?” (Ronell 1991:127, my emphases). While the curatorial and journalistic discourse surrounding Roisin Byrne’s 7. J. L. Austin writes, “A performative artistic practice has focused almost solely on questions about the ethics of utterance will, for example, be in a stealing and forgery, I asked: what would it mean to consider her work as, peculiar way hollow or void if said by rather than the sociopathic betrayals of one individual woman artist, an actor on the stage…Language is in such circumstances in special performative actions that literalize and hyperbolize, in ways compelling and ways—intelligibly—used not problematic, long-held notions of femininity as a bad copy of or vampiristic seriously, but in ways parasitic upon threat to masculinity? Byrne has said of her work: “I’m not interested in its normal use—ways which fall placing it in some kind of art discourse: I’m interested in a relationship to under the doctrine of the etiolations of language” (Austin 1955:22, his information and to ownership. The separation between you and that thing you emphases). desire is changing…” (Jones 2010). I argued that a symbolic reading of Byrne’s 8. In “Signature, Event, Context,” conceptual practice demands that one question the ethics of stealing and Derrida writes, “Therefore, I ask the forgery as feminist tactics, as it became evident that what Byrne calls “that following question: is this general thing you desire,” that coveted object taken without permission, is not so much possibility necessarily that of a the fetishized commodity in a society based upon private property but more so, failure or a trap into which language might fall, or in which language the very cultural and commercial capital possessed by the male artists that she might lose itself, as if in an abyss targets. By exploiting conceptual art’s institutional absorption as a recognized situated outside or in front of it? practice in the twenty-first century, I suggested that Byrne is an artist that has What about parasitism? In other “latched on” to the deregulatory zeitgeist of the present contemporary art words, does the generality of the risk admitted by Austin surround market, securing it as the “host”-guarantor to her “feminist” claim to that language like a kind of ditch, a place which would otherwise lie beyond her reach.
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