i
PERFORMING CANCER: TOWARD AN AESTHETIC OF THE UNPRESENTABLE
by
Virginia Dakari
A Dissertation Submitted
to the Department of American Literature and Culture, School of English, Faculty of Philosophy,
In fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
September 2016
ii
PERFORMING CANCER: TOWARD AN AESTHETIC OF THE UNPRESENTABLE
by
Virginia Dakari
Has been approved
September 2016
Dissertation Committee: APPROVED
Savas Patsalidis, Supervisor ______
Zoe Detsi-Diamanti, Co-Advisor ______
Domna Pastourmatzi, Co-Advisor ______
Department Chairperson: ACCEPTED
Michalis Milapides ______
iii
This dissertation is dedicated to my mother iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments...... vi
Abstract...... viii
INTRODUCTION...... 1
PART I: THEORETICAL VIEWS ABOUT PAIN, ILLNESS, AND THE AESTHETICS OF THE UNPRESENTABLE IN PERFORMANCE
CHAPTER 1 Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor: The story behind the essay and a critical fallacy...... 40
CHAPTER 2 Theoretical and philosophical perspectives on the experience and expression of suffering...... 57
CHAPTER 3 Theorizing the unpresentability of cancer: Jean François Lyotard’s elaboration of Kantian sublime aesthetics...... 74
CHAPTER 4 Being with others: A Heideggerian perspective on current theories of performance and performativity...... 96
CHAPTER 5 The role and limits of the critic: The Croce/Jones debate and the stakes of “victim art”...... 134
CHAPTER 6 Sontag’s “performance of certainty:” a personal story...... 160
PART II: THE AESTHETICS OF THE UNPRESENTABLE IN PLAYS AND PERFORMANCES ABOUT CANCER v
CHAPTER 7 The unpresentable made spectacular: Cancer on the American popular stage...... 185
CHAPTER 8 Cancer and its performative aporias: When the representational collapses into the real...... 223
CHAPTER 9 Schlingensief’s ‘Death’ in Venice: Art in (spite of) suffering...... 260
CONCLUSION...... 297
Works Cited...... 305
vi
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The writing of this dissertation has been one of the most significant academic as well as personal challenges I have ever had to face. Without the encouragement and help of the following people, this study would not have been completed. It is to them that I owe my deepest gratitude. First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisor, Professor Savas Patsalidis, for all the guidance, support, and patience throughout this project. His academic genius, rigorous teaching, deep knowledge of world theatre, and magical touch with words have not only been invaluable but also inspirational. I would also like to thank the other two members of my thesis committee. To Associate Professor Zoe Detsi-Diamanti, I owe my gratitude for all the years she has believed in my potential. She has continuously encouraged me in so many ways to pursue my dreams in academia. My sincere thanks also goes to Associate Professor Domna Pastourmatzi, whose knowledge of American culture and commitment to teaching have been an ongoing source of stimulus and admiration to me. This thesis would not have been what it is if it weren’t for her insightful comments. I have also greatly benefited from the constructive feedback I received from Professor Yiorgos Kalogeras, Professor Youli Theodosiadou, and Dr Ioulia Pipinia. Dr Christina Dokou has greatly influenced this thesis; her suggestion that I “smell the disease” helped me to run the extra mile. I owe special thanks to Dr Konstantinos Blatanis, whose brilliant comments have been most helpful during critical stages of my thesis. I treasure our conversations with Kostas because they have enriched this study with a deeper perspective. I want to acknowledge a special debt to the immensely talented and diligent students of the Narrative Medicine workshop, organized by Dr Tatiani Rapatzikou and taught by Ms Catherine Rogers, Narrative Medicine specialist, that was held at the School of English, Aristotle University, in 2013. Their genuine interest in illness narratives and their creative participation revealed to me the potential of my work: Our collaboration was a chance for me to become involved with the field of Narrative Medicine and put part of my research into practice. It has been a most exciting and educating experience, and I thank them for that. I also gratefully acknowledge the funding I received from the Research Committee of Aristotle University during the early stages of my doctoral research on account of its originality. vii
My thank you also goes to Pam Patterson and Angela Ellsworth, who kindly shared visual material from their performances and were willing to talk about their art with me. This dissertation owes much to “Metaxa” Cancer Hospital medical and professional staff: Vassiliki Villiotou, head of biochemical department, Vassiliki Spyropoulou, clinical psychologist, psychotherapist, and Nikolaos Karvounis, oncologist, whose commitment to their vocation is outstanding. I am, also, particularly grateful to all the people I met in group therapy sessions, but also in waiting rooms, who shared with me their experience with cancer and whose stories I will forever honor. I also want to express my profound appreciation to my two mentors: Professor Linda Lyman, for all the years of friendship and for the inspiring model of woman academic she has been; and Stella Albani, my teacher and close friend, who has instilled in me a love for English and has strongly believed in me. You have nurtured my intellect and I deeply thank you for that. My family deserves all the credit as the steady base that has given me the spiritual and material means to accomplish my goals. I feel deeply grateful for my parents, Maroula and Yiannis, as well as my grandparents, Despina and Kostas, who have given me unconditional love and support. My brother and best friend, Diamantis, has always been there for me, believing in me and cheering me up at times when I felt my courage failing. As for my husband, Vangelis, for his enduring love, endless affection, and sunny optimism, I thank him deeply: You have been my trusted companion on this entire amazing journey. viii
Abstract
This doctoral dissertation seeks to construct a theoretical context that will accommodate the aesthetics of the unpresentable in contemporary cancer-related performance. The idea of the unpresentable in performance refers to an art event, broadly defined as avant-garde or postmodern, whose explorations exceed containment in given formal aesthetic frameworks. Employing a Kantian philosophical lens, Jean-Francois Lyotard associates the unpresentable in postmodern art as an essentially sublime experience, which does not please the spectator by way of its beauty of form, but rather gratifies the spectator’s effort to come to terms with the terror, awe, and abjection such a spectacle evokes. Departing from the American critic Susan Sontag’s theoretical position and her argument against the possibility of extracting any aesthetic outcome from the experience of cancer, expressed in her treatise, Illness as Metaphor, this study aims to deconstruct such a long-held assumption that has extensively affected criticism regarding the diseased body in performance. This study further aims at proving that Sontag’s objections to making art out of cancer are situated in her personal struggle to come to terms with her repeated bouts with cancer, a fact that interestingly elucidates many of her critical inconsistencies, as these surface in her various works of criticism from the 1960s until prior to her death in 2004. To this end, in this study I am attempting a comparative reading of a number of seminal philosophical and theoretical perspectives: Kantian aesthetics of the sublime, Martin Heidegger’s existential and aesthetic explorations of authenticity, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s language games, Lyotard’s aesthetic and rhetorical postulations regarding the unpresentable; Elaine Scarry’s pain inexpressibility and Judith Butler’s performativity are complemented with Hans Thies Lehmann’s and Erika Fischer Lichte’s performance theory studies. Sontag’s several other critical works and interviews are also considered, while Scarry’s position regarding the linguistic inexpressibility of pain is partially refuted. It is to be understood that it is not my intention to provide an exhaustive reading of the above-mentioned philosophers but simply to use for comparative reasons certain highlights from their works that directly relate to my central thesis, which is to delineate an alternative code that is keen on resolving the problem posed by the unpresentability of illness and suffering. This study thus entails two primary tasks: setting the theoretical framework of the aesthetics of the unpresentable and examining respective exemplary cases of theatre/performance. The body of the text is bifurcated into two parts. The first part presents ix theoretical views on pain, illness, and the aesthetics of the unpresentable, while the second part discusses a number of exemplary American and European performances and plays. The questions this dissertation explores extend to issues of audience reception and the ethics of representation, namely: What distinctive contributions to audiences’ understanding of the experience of cancer do the cases of contemporary performance discussed here offer? In which ways do philosophical and theoretical perspectives assist the analysis of such art events? How is the ultimate goal of transformation of all participants achieved? Why is it important that the critics engage more with artists who experiment with their diseased bodies in aesthetic discussions and not merely confine them into the sphere of testimonial/utilitarian art? What are the audiences these performances address? What do these performances stand for to the healthy/sick members of the audience, even the performers themselves? If the suffering imposed by cancer is to a great degree ungraspable and unpresentable, speaking about it maps a promising detour, opening up new ways of expression. The body in pain becomes the ground for further political, ethical, and aesthetic debates, rather than merely a contested, sensitive, and self-represented topic. In fact, the difficulty of its self- representation alone becomes an ongoing debate in itself. What this dissertation ultimately aspires to is to de-institutionalize conventional ways of looking and thus engage with illness in a more constructive way, both aesthetically and socially.
Dakari 1
INTRODUCTION
This study seeks to construct a philosophical/theoretical/analytical framework that will accommodate the distinctive aesthetics of illness-related performance: namely, the unpresentability of cancer and the sublime feeling it generates in spectators. Contemporary postdramatic, intermedial performance, which involves at least one performer and some spectators, gathering anywhere between stage and cyberspace, offers the ideal ground for such explorations. The cultural/geographical milieu of the cases studied is predominantly
American/European and the historical period ranges roughly from the seventies to the present day. Consistently challenging American critic Susan Sontag’s postulation that cancer “cannot be aestheticized,” articulated in the seventies and under the shadow of her own illness, ill artists under discussion try to mine an aesthetic idiom of the unpresentable through bringing
(their) cancer in performance. Their goal is to overcome the inexpressibility of cancer and its mythological layering in western culture; to subvert the systematic disqualification of the legitimacy of existing terminal illness in the production of high art, as it has been noted in discussions among critics; to reshape society’s perceptions around cancer; and ultimately, to promote healing bonds with other human beings by means of the elevating effects of performance.
(False) beginnings
What spurs someone to explore the representation of a taboo illness like cancer in performance? Even though a predictable motivation may as well derive from personal involvement, one’s own or a beloved one’s struggle with illness, pain, and the end of life, this is not the case with the present study. There has been no direct confrontation with cancer in my case. The idea of this thesis, therefore, was not conceived in the grip of any kind of
Dakari 2 personal or familial affliction, although I still possess the lingering childhood memory of my grandmother in distress asking for help, as she was trying to cope with tufts of hair falling and spreading all over the sink. This indelible image has grown with me because it was rather one of the last memories I had of my grandmother than the conscious fear of cancer. I was raised without knowing what cancer actually was, exactly because it had never been openly discussed in my presence. It was not until sometime in my adolescence that I found out more about this “shadowy” illness and was able to understand what happened to my grandmother.
This is obviously a case in point of the secrecy that has traditionally surrounded cancer: the pauses, the suggestive tightening of the lips, or the euphemisms devised so that naming “it” would be avoided.
Bewildering as this memory might be for a child’s limited interpretative faculties, it was not what made me gain momentum to become involved with this topic in theatre on an academic level. In spite of all the circumstances that helped directing me towards this research, it has first and foremost been the outcome of conscious choice, genuine interest, and investment of effort into trying to get as close as possible to understanding the vocabulary of cancer experience/art, while still remaining on the safe side. As it is often the case with the most engrossing projects in people’s lives, some are keen on thinking it was their destiny, that somehow the project found them, rather than the other way round. When it comes to cancer having found you, however, even for the purposes of research, the metaphor misfires.
It is an unwanted parallelism, an uninvited wish. In my case, it was simply not true. I admit I got a little—or not so little—disturbed every time someone would rush to connect my research with my life, not for superstitious fear of this happening, but because it entirely cancelled my perspective on the topic and regressed into the usual stereotyping: that one is expected/exclusively entitled to write about their cancer.
Dakari 3
On the other hand, these reactions to my research communicated something to me about the way people think, and about how they tend to interpret and react to the presence of
(someone with) cancer, which galvanized my desire to reach deeper into the intertwining of experience, expression and reception of such an experience. Although responses to cancer vary from one geographical area to another, and among different historical periods, the fear of the unknown affliction that threatens life evokes similar responses in what is generally described as western, post-war, secularized, capitalist societies. For me, the moment of recognition came specifically after I read Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor (1978), a less- than-ninety-pages-long essay, written in the seventies. This essay attacks the irrational dimensions of fear around cancer that feeds on taboos and cultural fantasies of demonic possession or divine wrath, dating back to the dark ages of medical knowledge, as well as the secularized, psychoanalysis-centered model of weak character and suppressed emotions as risk factors of becoming ill.
I first came across Sontag in 2006, while researching on my Master’s thesis about staging the encumbering trappings of cancer metaphors in contemporary American theatre.
Having hero-worshipped Sontag and her polemics, I was convinced by her claim that the healthiest way of being ill is to live through one’s illness free of everything lyrical and romantically depressing; that one would have to resist the gravitation toward metaphorical thinking and have faith in straight scientific and biomedical discourse; and that a patient should seek good medical advice and be well-informed about his/her condition. I had read
Illness as Metaphor so many times that I can still recite some passages by heart:
Illness is the night-side of life, a most onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born
holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.
Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is
Dakari 4
obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place. (Illness
as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors 3)
Oddly enough, this is an abundantly metaphoric way to start a cascade of aphorisms on illness metaphors. But I could not have seen the irony then; I would just keep savoring the cadence of Sontag’s words, especially her intent to explore cancer identity: “I want to describe, not what it is like to emigrate to the kingdom of the ill and live there, but the punitive or sentimental fantasies concocted about that situation: not real geography, but stereotypes of national character” (Illness 3).
The front cover illustration of the original edition of Illness as Metaphor (also appearing in the 2002 Penguin Classics paperback edition of Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors printed together in one volume) is a fifteenth-century engraving of the
School of Mantegna that shows Hercules combating the Lernaean Hydra. In Greek mythology, Hercules has to perform twelve labors as penance for unwittingly killing his wife and children. According to an astrological interpretation, each of these labors depicts the sun’s passage through the twelve signs of the zodiac. In this particular task, the mythic hero defeats the polycephalous serpentine beast and crashes the giant crab Hera has sent to distract him. Following the defeat of the monster that she raised to kill Hercules, Hera turns it into the constellation of Hydra; she also gives the crab a place in the sky as the constellation Cancer.
Sontag, however, dissociates her choice of illustration from this intricate symbolization. As she explains in an interview to Jonathan Cott, she is intuitively driven to this picture, which is in fact an arbitrary choice. As in most of her criticism, Sontag resists the usual urge towards interpretation. What attracts her to this picture, instead, is a visceral, almost erotic, response to the vulnerability and passion present in Hercules’ physical and facial contortions as the beast attacks him. In order to further accentuate her “against interpretation” line, Sontag uses an obvious metaphor that sums more or less the persistence
Dakari 5 of metaphors around cancer which is typical of that particular time in the American cultural context of the seventies: “[These] ideas about cancer are like Hydras—you lop off one head and it comes back” (Cott 24). In this assertive and unapologetic manner, Sontag has repeatedly enticed her readers with metaphors to put an end to metaphors throughout her renowned illness treatise.
The Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors volume reads smoothly as a solid essay. And yet, written almost a decade later, AIDS and Its Metaphors discloses an interesting piece of information: Sontag had cancer a few years prior to writing Illness as
Metaphor; in fact, that very experience spurred her into writing it. Why had she omitted such an important detail in the first book? By being open about her illness she would have banished the cultural bogey of cancer that plunged the ill in silence about their condition.
Sontag, however, explained that she remained silent because there was no need for another cancer story; what was needed was a detached essay that would banish all “sentimental” literary accounts.
To my dismay, Sontag also revised her earlier position that there can be a metaphor- free way of being ill, an idea I was keen on writing a doctoral dissertation on, taking it further into a thorough theoretical examination of a number of dramatic texts. In her exact words,
“[of] course, one cannot think without metaphors” (Illness 91). Of course—what was I thinking?
Sontag’s self-refashioning put me in a similar process. From that point on, I stood more critically against (or next to) her. Even though I would not object the inner workings of personal affliction as well as the particularly harsh and biased mentality of the time that spurred the renowned thinker’s positions on cancer metaphors, I reconsidered some of her assumptions—especially the firmness with which she held on to them through the years. My encounter with cancer on its gripping interface with performance spurred an immense interest
Dakari 6 in the expressive capacity of the body, exactly because of its dis-ease, not in spite of it, which goes against Sontag’s metaphor-stripping lens. Metaphors, in fact, are integral to our conceptual faculties, according to George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, as seen in their seminal work Metaphors We Live By (1980). As their study contends, metaphorical thinking is the only way in which we interact with the world and in which we express our experiences. What is more, the gravitation toward a synthetic construction predicated on giving the thing a name that belongs to something else is as old as Aristotle and his Poetics. Returning to the course of the present study, since there had been no other solid source of experience behind it, as I have explained, I can only think of myself being pulled to it as if by a magnet—a metaphor that works well in the case of every riveting enterprise of our creativity that evolves and expands—sometimes even, in spite of us. A series of events and encounters, which I will talk about later on, simply helped the project run its course.
Re-visions
The aspects of Sontag’s positions regarding the expression of cancer experience that survived the test of my changed perspective have to do with her opposition to the stigmatizing qualities of some metaphors that have indeed made the lives of the ill harder— much more so several decades ago; for instance, that cancer is the embodiment of someone’s repressed emotions; or, that, unlike nineteenth-century romanticized fantasies of tuberculosis, cancer was far from revealing anything spiritual; it only revealed the body as “all too woefully, just the body” (Illness 19).
Cancer today has become treatable to a significant degree. Headlines about breakthrough research on cancer cure flood the news and become “viral” on social media every day, and we can actually see it around us how effective treatment and access to healthcare, whenever plausible, has made the lives of patients a lot better and has also helped
Dakari 7 change society’s attitude to cancer. Since there have also been concerted efforts to turn down the volume to cancer fantasies through cultural schooling (i.e. all the awareness-raising initiatives, the sharing of personal stories across the web, television, the arts, and literature, and certainly Sontag’s contribution to this direction), why should someone bother to write specifically about the undiscussable, unpresentable aspects of cancer in theatre, since it is not so much of a stigma any more? Undoubtedly, it remains a serious illness with many complications, risks, and, unfortunately, high mortality rates, but is there any heart disease-, or diabetes-related metaphoric construction or relative artistic genre that has attracted the same attention? With no intention whatsoever to downplay the physical and emotional toll on people with any such kind of chronic or terminal condition, the former are likely to be seen as a mechanic failure of the body. Even though mortality rates of heart disease, for instance, may be even higher than cancer’s in western population, it still does not sound as odd as cancer’s spell, despite years of scientific elucidation and relative progress.
Though American and west European societies have become a lot more tolerant to the sight of baldness or a scar where a breast used to be, the spell still remains, as I intend to show in my analysis. These societies may have enthusiastically embraced the numerous hospital series on television and all the sponsored cancer-related sports events, fund-raising initiatives, and even commercial items on sale, all in special colors for every type of cancer, but they very often fail to accept that being cancer-conscious or cancer-cool does not make one cancer-proof. This easy-going, progressive attitude very often operates, I argue, as our modern-day talisman against what we cannot really grasp, explain, or possess. And cancer, or any other state that force-reminds us of our expendable, imperfect nature, will always be a hot topic in the arts—even more so today, when the religious narrative has long failed us and the scientific essay, which by definition is filled with blind spots and uncharted territories, is far from providing a cure-all.
Dakari 8
Sontag’s writings on cancer at a time when such an illness would better be kept secret have done us a great service: they brought cancer (and later AIDS) out of the closet. Well, not entirely out, it seems. There is a highly contested sentence in Illness as Metaphor that had drawn my attention from the first time, even though I was not sure how to deal with it:
“Cancer is a rare and still scandalous subject for poetry; and it seems unimaginable to aestheticize the disease” (20). Unlike other taboo illnesses of the past, like tuberculosis, cancer to Sontag is irretrievably trapped in the aesthetic closet: there cannot be any such thing as cancer art, she argues.
Challenges
In 2013, I presented a paper at a conference at La Laguna University, Tenerife, which dealt with the performative aporias of cancer when represented and lived cancer co-exist on the performer’s body. I discussed the aesthetic aspects of lived illness in Angela Ellsworth’s
Hemaderby and Pam Patterson’s Bodysight: A Reclamation Project (both discussed here) as well as the effect such a spectacle has on spectators. Two members of the audience attending the panel were shocked even to see the slides I showed—pictures that Patterson herself had sent to me and agreed on my using them. There was an explicit mastectomy scar that was magnified by the large-scale screen of the room I was presenting in. Another member of the audience simply thought that what I was arguing was insufficiently sustained; that cancer indeed cannot be aestheticized because it is abject, too explicitly physical, and too closely associated with death—more or less, what Sontag argued in the seventies. What is more, that scholar thought that cancer can only be sublimated or simply documented in testimonial narratives, which usually lies at the margins of high-standard art—a conflict that concerned
American intelligentsia in the nineties and which I examine in depth chapters 5 and 6. The word “aesthetics”, according to Jacques Rancière, however, does not refer to “a theory
Dakari 9 sensibility, taste, and pleasure for art amateurs.” It rather strictly refers to “the specific mode of being of whatever falls within the domain of art, to the mode of being of the objects of art”
(22). If we look into Kantian philosophy, we will find two modes of aesthetic judgment: the beautiful and the sublime. Cancer is certainly not beautiful. I therefore turned to the sublime, as non-beautiful but ravishing nonetheless.
In his philosophical masterpiece Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), Kant develops his idea of what constitutes taste, what forms our aesthetic judgement when we encounter a work of art, bifurcating into two different moments, of beauty and the sublime. In the chapter “Analytic of the Beautiful” Kant states that beauty is not a property of an artwork or natural phenomenon, but is instead a consciousness of the pleasure that derives from the free play of the imagination and the understanding. In particular, Kant associates the beautiful with anything that possesses a certain form, is purposive in this form and thereby finite; it pleases without an interest; it pleases universally; and, it ultimately aims at satisfaction. In the chapter “Analytic of the Sublime” Kant identifies the sublime as an aesthetic quality that, like beauty, is subjective. Unlike beauty, however, the sublime refers to an indeterminate relationship between the faculties of the imagination and of reason, and shares the character of moral judgments in the use of reason. The sublime does violence to our imagination and therefore calls for the intervention of reason as the senses alone fail to grasp it. The sublime, thus, is boundless, formless, and involves us in a painful yet gratifying process of understanding. Unlike the beautiful, the sublime feeling engages us in entirely different ways: it is the great, the awe-inspiring, the overpowering, or the indescribable, both as a natural phenomenon (dynamic) and as a state of mind (mathematical); it causes unrest, threat, even terror, and yet it is gratifying exactly because it reminds us of our capacity to contemplate our own shortcomings, imperfections, and dignity. It holds a mirror out to the infinite and gives us an authentic sense of ourselves in the face of this wonder/terror/aesthetic experience.
Dakari 10
Drawing on Kantian aesthetics, Jean-Francois Lyotard sees in the sublime the manifestation of the unpresentable; as a response to art which rejects the beaten track of good forms and whose task is to search for new presentations which will not make the unpresentable more enjoyable but which will impart a stronger sense of it. The artist in turn takes on the task of the philosopher/researcher who mines for new idioms of expression after having abandoned the old restricting ones.
Martin Heidegger’s existential and aesthetic explorations interestingly relate to the exploration of the task of the postmodern artist. What connects Lyotard’s position on the sublime with Heidegger’s philosophical exploration of the nature of a work of art is their denunciation of the Kantian beautiful as the sole aesthetic output of art. Heidegger writes in
“The Origin of the Work of Art”: “In the fine arts, the art is not itself beautiful, but is, rather, called so because it brings forth the beautiful” (16). Beauty is to be found in truth, in the being of beings, but also in their form, which, as a mode of presence becomes reality; reality, then, becomes objectivity, and objectivity becomes experience. It is in this way that beauty, truth, and experience converge in a work of art. His position regards that works of art do not merely represent the element of truth, i.e. the way things are, but they actually create that truth and shape cultural understanding around it. In order to be able to see the truth of the artwork, Heidegger suggests that we “let [it] be” (12).
Regarding the way art is received, in other words individual taste, Kant maintains that aesthetic judgments derive from reflecting reason; in other words, every example must precede the rule—the opposite is determining reason, which indicates a priori formation of judgment based on set rules; in this sense, “the reflecting power of judgment is supposed to subsume under a law that is not yet given” and must thus “serve as a principle itself” (257).
The observation that a judgment is generated along the way rather than pertain to predetermined rules rhymes with Heidegger’s suggestion that we let the work of art be if we
Dakari 11 are to discover its truth. The true nature and purpose of a work of art cannot be judged by means of given frameworks. This philosophical attitude towards the “thingness of the thing”
(“Origin” 15)—Heidegger’s way to denote an artwork’s nature, stripped of semantic layers of purposiveness or interpretation—is present in Lyotard’s approach to the task of the postmodern artist/philosopher, which is to discover the rules that apply to the artwork rather than subsuming it under pre-existing principles. When it comes to the unpresentable, Lyotard suggests, the difficulty of its articulation should itself be its presentation. The aesthetic output of this experience is essentially a sublime one in the way it summons our reason, rather than our disinterested indulgence to the spectacle – a feature that is found in aesthetic judgments on the beautiful. In this sense, Lyotard points out, “sublimity is no longer in art but in speculation on art” (Inhuman, 106).
Indeed, the sublime lies not in the work itself but in the eye of the beholder, which is a very interesting point to depart from in the exploration of the aesthetic outcome of illness- related art. Lived illness is an experience inextricable with existence; either we have been through it or have witnessed it. Its presentation cannot be beautiful in itself, but it does bring forth the truth of Being; the thickness of the body in illness shocks us out of the disembodied illusion of immortality. This truth shapes our understanding of others and ourselves. Could this experience be gratifying in some way? Could witnessing the pain of others be in turn transformative? Also, how feasible is it to train the audience to see things differently?
What is at stake here is not only the question of aesthetics, namely what principles form a particular judgement, but a deeper question of the essence of being that surfaces in the ancient problematic of pain versus pleasure. In one of his portraits of Socrates in the Phaedo,
Plato unfolds the philosopher’s investigation of the possibility of the immortality of the soul as a response to his students’ apprehension of bodily suffering and death. The setting is the prison where Socrates was kept after his trial and hours before he drank the poison. The
Dakari 12 dialogue is supposed to be reported by Phaedo to Echecrates, who expressed the desire to know more about the last hours of their teacher. Phaedo admits to experiencing strange emotions while he was there:
I was not filled with pity as I might naturally be when present at the death of a friend;
since he seemed to me to be happy, both in his bearing and his words, he was meeting
death so fearlessly and nobly. . . . And for this reason I was not at all filled with pity,
as might seem natural when I was present at a scene of mourning; nor on the other
hand did I feel pleasure because we were occupied with philosophy, as was our
custom—and our talk was of philosophy;—but a very strange feeling came over me,
an unaccustomed mixture of pleasure and pain together, when I thought that Socrates
was presently to die. And all of us who were there in much the same condition,
sometimes laughing sometimes weeping. (205)
In this last gathering of his companions, Socrates takes the opportunity of his approaching death to discuss the issue of the immortality of the soul and persuade them that only by leading a philosophic life can the person be rewarded with wisdom and everlasting happiness in an afterlife. He therefore welcomes death much to the dismay of his company. As soon as he is released from the fetters that held him hostage, he speaks in relief:
What a strange thing that seems to be which men call pleasure! How wonderfully it is
related to that which seems to be its opposite, pain, in that they will not both come to
a man at the same time, and yet if he pursues the one and captures it, he is generally
obliged to take the other also, as if the two were joined together in one head. . . . [I]f
Aesop had thought of them, he would have made a fable telling how they were at war
and God wished to reconcile them, and when he could not do that, he fastened their
heads together, and for that reason, when one of them comes to anyone, the other
Dakari 13
follows after. Just so it seems that in my case, after pain was in my leg on account of
the fetter, pleasure appears to have come following after. (210-11)
This account suits the purposes of this discussion, as it entails a public performance of pain, a performer, witnesses, and a metaphor that derives from experience and shapes in turn further response to pain. It is the most dramatic of all Socratic dialogues, as it elevates the philosopher to the status of a tragic hero who is the victim of injustice and prejudice. It is so close to being “a true drama,” as Peter J. Ahrensdorf observes (1), because it evokes strong conflicting emotions to the onlookers. Unlike drama however, where what we are witnessing is only a mimesis of an act, what Phaedo reports is the vibrant here-and-now of someone who is dying. What is particularly interesting is the way this death is delivered, witnessed, and received. Phaedo admits to feeling no pity, as Socrates was apparently eager to die. Phaedo is indeed present at a very awkward performance: Socrates’s sentence to death is meant not only to punish him for his supposed crimes of blasphemy against the state’s deities and corruption of young people, but also to be a public performance of the State law as an apparatus of discipline against its offenders. It is therefore a fact, Socrates is dying, but it is also a performance of state power—Socrates is dying for offending the State. Lived and enacted dying, thus, collapse into one another.
This instance may not be directly related to the aesthetics of the unpresentable in an artwork, but it does reflect the idea of the social performance of suffering and the display of certain pain behavior as a way of communicating thoughts or inciting certain action, as seen in such works as Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (1953), John L.
Austin’s How to Do Things with Words (1962), or Judith Butler’s Excitable Speech: A
Politics of the Performative (1997). Socrates’s body becomes the site where private suffering and political responsibility converge. He does not only reveal his wounds to his followers but
Dakari 14 uses them also to deliver a final lesson on the ethics of leading a philosophic life as a citizen of a democratic nation.
This negative pleasure initiates a discussion that extends from ontological to aesthetic considerations, and from the experience of pain to its expression and reception. This paradoxical gratification, as I see it, derives not from witnessing someone suffering, but from the recognition that this act of bearing witness possesses the power to alter the way we perceive its truth, which in turn mirrors the truth of our being there. This engagement with the spectacle of pain/illness/suffering, realized through the synergy of both actors and spectators, breaks the walls of our disconnection. It is equally aesthetic and real.
Regarding pain
Pain is real; it resides in everyone: we have certainty in its existence the same way we know we are alive. It is both physical and mental, in the sense that one must be at least conscious in order to perceive any sort of pain. Pain is thus axiomatic of Being. As such, it demands to be given meaning, even as it escapes every such attempt. Philosophy, religion, political theory, medicine, literature, and the arts have thus far reflected an ongoing engagement in this endeavor that seems to have sprung the very moment a living being with a fairly developed cognitive system and understanding of his/her body-ego twitched with pain.
Pain has been said to destroy language, to return the self to a primitive isolation and separation from their ecstatic dimension and into their visceral one (Scarry 4; Leder 6).
However, it is only a certain aspect of communication that pain destroys, not all expression.
Detouring difficult tasks, such as finding the right words to express what exactly pain is, the body in pain develops an alternative system of language and behavior, makes the most of silences and inarticulate cries and becomes itself a sign that is directed, staged, lived, and witnessed. What is most significant is that pain prompts a dialogue among ideologies,
Dakari 15 disciplines and institutions. Pain as a condition/event is not liable to change, for pain is. What is liable to change, however, is the way we look at it.
In modern western biomedical settings pain is a paradox; it is associated with individual survival—a warning signal against potential or actual damage to tissue cells, but useful only as long as it draws attention to a certain malfunction of the organism. Once having done its job, it is unnecessary, its alleviation being one of most profitable enterprises of western capitalism. In its most extreme presence, it is associated with disease, dissolution of the self, a harbinger of death. Ironically, the most intense imagery of pain, the crucifixion, has been both sanctified and unremittingly commodified. This could be the reason why western philosophy since antiquity has been preoccupied with the essence and telos of pain.
The kingdom of the sick
Though pain is an integral aspect of life, it is our understanding of how painful an experience like cancer might be is galaxies away from the “nightside” of illness: the taxes citizens of this other country have to pay, their visa renewal being denied, the air they breath in this faraway land lying right next to me, you, us all. I therefore decided to literally travel to a nearby “kingdom of the sick,” Metaxas Cancer Hospital in Piraeus. It was December 2014.
A physician whom I had met by chance some time before agreed to meet me in her office at
Metaxas. We would talk about my research; however, I wasn’t even sure what my research at the hospital was. I just went there, entirely unprepared, to “smell the disease” as I had been advised to do since my thesis was about cancer. I only had to find out how.
Walking through the central gate felt liminal as much as clichéd. I have to admit that I unconsciously felt into my bag for my antiseptic tissues. I was not sure whether I feared germs or something else. A woman about my age walked past me; the base of her throat was bandaged with a small piece of gauze but apart from that, she looked great. I unconsciously
Dakari 16 touched the base of my throat as I took the stairs to the second floor. The physician was waiting for me. Our brief discussion closed with her idea of what her task is: to do good service and be of use. She also arranged me a meeting with the hospital’s therapist; I would be given permission to attend group therapy sessions with cancer patients as a trainee the following days.
I kept wandering in the hospital space the rest of the day. Once, I had to cross a big waiting room where people would sit in aligned rows all facing a screen above a closed door.
Announcements were projected on the screen, as the patients waited patiently for their turn to see a doctor. As I was the only one moving around, I felt uncomfortable as I entered their visual field, disrupting their waiting. What a gathering. I tried not to stare at people. But I could not not see their bald heads, in caps, scarves, or entirely uncovered. Some were in their pyjamas, which made me think I really should not be there—the parlor of the kingdom of the sick. I was now at “their place—an uninvited guest. And I felt even more unwelcome as I couldn’t keep myself from staring at a young girl, a lot younger than me, with pale, puffy face and a beautiful scarf covering her baldness.
I took the stairs to the next floor and found myself at the gynaecological department.
A long row of rooms led to a big window facing the sea. I headed to the window, momentarily forgetting the setting behind me and enjoying the view of the landscape stretching in front. It was days before Christmas and there were medium-height decorated trees outside the patients’ rooms. It was visiting time. As I was walking past the open doors, I could see relatives carrying bags with treats, presents, bottles of juice and everything they thought might distract or relieve their loved ones from post-operative anguish and pain.
In front of me there was a glass door and the next row of rooms. There was a Breast
Cancer Awareness Month poster on the wall behind the door. As soon as I entered, a distinctive odor of excrement filled the air. Was that the smell I came to find? The elegant
Dakari 17
Pink Ribbon and Go-Pink posters featuring corporate sponsoring and happy faces were advertising a fund-raising event that had taken place in October but nobody had bothered to take them down. It was December now and the smell was intolerable. I kept walking along the corridor. A woman wearing a hospital gown and holding and IV pole was approaching with a cautious step. I tried not to stare; however, she did stare at me. Hers was a deep unflinching gaze.
The next day I met the therapist at the Community Psychiatric Center in Kastella—an old neoclassical building nestled in an iconic sloping neighborhood. The waiting room was nothing like the hospital corridors. It was like someone’s home. I could even smell fresh coffee. What a change. I took a seat in the long oval-shaped table. There were packets of rusk, juice and water for the patients—all of them post-operative and female. The first one came in. The therapist had suggested earlier I should not get involved in the conversation. So
I was pretending I was writing something important in my notebook. The middle-aged woman, however, spoke to me cheerfully and offered me sweets she had made herself. She thought I was a trainee—trainees very often attend these group sessions. Another woman came—she had had a temporary colostomy and could barely stand. Another woman came and brought homemade liqueur for the group. Their husbands had their own gathering outside. Once everyone showed up, the meeting began.
That session, and the ones that followed, smelled of fresh coffee and chamomile, home-made liqueur and sweets. It smelled of longing, of love, of things to do, of children and grandchildren. Talks about fashion, love and relationships, the fear of death and the longing for life all blended during those sunny December mornings in Kastella. That was the smell I had come to find—the smell of life happening in spite of cancer.
On my very last day at Metaxas Hospital, I was looking for an oncologist who had been through cancer himself and who, along with other hospital staff who had the same
Dakari 18 experience, created a documentary film about their lives while treating/being treated for cancer at Metaxas. Produced and directed by distinguished filmmaker Stavros Psilakis,
Listening to Time [Ακούγοντας το Χρόνο] (2012) focuses on this group of phycisians/patients who diagnosed themselves with cancer and kept working in order to cure/be cured. It traces their journey from the shock of learning they have cancer to the experience of learning to
“listen to time” in life and work.
The oncologist was very busy that day. It was his last day at work before retirement, as I found out while waiting. I finally met him, and we ended up talking about our shared interest in Narrative Medicine.1 I spent the rest of the day in his office while he was seeing his patients and had the rare chance to witness a doctor actively listening to stories of illness.
His patients would talk about families, trips, and food, while he examined their scars. Some of them, who also brought him homemade gifts, would burst into tears as soon as they found out he was retiring. Each appointment took him longer than scheduled, so he delayed his break for more than an hour. Afterwards, we rushed to the hospital’s Christmas gathering: an amphitheatre crowded with hospital staff, volunteers, and friends celebrating his retirement. I caught another look of that sea of eyes and stories and left this country.
The idea behind this dissertation
Susan Sontag’s thoughts on understanding and representing pain and illness are to be found at the centre of this study, but not in the way I intended years ago. As my research
1 In 2013 I was invited to participate in “Understanding Illness and Trauma through Narrative,” a series of seminars developed and co-taught by Fulbright specialist Catherine Rogers on the practice of Narrative Medicine in the development of narrative competency through close reading, attentive listening, and reflective writing (Aristotle University). Through my contribution to the seminar, I became aware of the practical/educational aspect of illness narratives as empowering self-understanding, self-expression, attentiveness to the pain of others, and connectedness. This collaboration with Ms Rogers led to my participation in the panel she proposed for the HELAAS Conference The War on Human (Athens 2014), with the title “The Role of Narrative in Human Health, Well-Being, and Wholeness.” The paper I presented was “The TEDtalk Cure: Politics and Aesthetics of Cancer on A Global Stage” and reflected on this new perspective of the transformative potential intrinsic to the performance of illness narratives. The time I spent at Metaxas the following weeks helped me consolidate and elaborate on my basic exposure to Narrative Medicine.
Dakari 19 sprawled outward from my original aim, Sontag’s positions gradually felt rather restricting and incomplete. In Illness as Metaphor, her arguments against metaphorical thinking are truly captivating, giving off a strong sense of certainty and unforced righteousness. The decade-apart AIDS and Its Metaphors, however, reveals the shaky grounds of her argument:
Sontag wrote Illness as Metaphor “quickly, spurred by evangelical zeal as well as anxiety about how much time [she] had left” (Illness 99); it was thus written under the pressure of the fear death imposed on her, “in mock exorcism of the seductiveness of metaphorical thinking”
(91, 99). Her writings have had a long-lasting and penetrating impact on how western, secularized, capitalist societies perceive philosophical, physiological, medical, and social facts of illness, pain, and suffering. Her insistence, however, that cancer, unlike other illnesses, cannot be aestheticized/ romanticized (she fails to make the necessary distinction) and her meticulous attempt to support this argument on the obscenity of this illness fall short of giving the complete picture. Had she done so, this would have made a world of difference in both the ethics and aesthetics of the representation of cancer—perhaps even in her own devastating experience with it.
Susan Sontag’s criticism of cancer-related metaphorical thinking is the conceptual scaffolding which I will be using as a takeoff point for examining the culture(s) of pain, illness, and suffering, as these are crystallized in contemporary theatre and performance.
Aesthetic considerations on the (re)presentation and reception of cancer will be at the core of my analyses of the performances under discussion.
The purpose of this study is two-fold: to explore the ways pain and illness are tackled by performers/authors/artists who have suffered—or are still suffering—from cancer and how their works of art are received by spectators: the degree of their sympathetic/empathetic involvement and the potential for transformation through changed perspective for all participants. The most painstaking task, however, is to examine the aesthetic principles of
Dakari 20 performing illness. This is not an easy task, as the subject matter runs the risk of being considered “too real” and therefore outside the aesthetic realm.
A promising hermeneutic and aesthetic solution derives from the concept of the sublime as a way of both presentation and reception of cancer performances. While topics such as explicit illness, pain, and death have been said to belong to the sphere of the unpresentable and therefore excluded from all aesthetic considerations (Sontag), I argue for a break from traditional formal patterns and a redefinition of art as more than merely pleasing and beautiful.
Research methods, criteria and limitations
The themes that I have used to organize the chapters of this dissertation are by no means exhausted in each one respectively. The works under discussion are in a constant dialogue with one another, and the theoretical trajectories running through them are only a guide rather than a definitive delineation. There are numerous ways in which these works could have been grouped together, and possibly many other frameworks of theory and criticism that could have informed one’s approach, varying among feminist theory, sociology, narrative medicine, psychoanalytic theory, or ethnography studies. What has been particularly challenging and at the same time exciting in this study is the fact that the topic of cancer in performance opens itself up to infinite possibilities of expression and reception, deriving from each and every performer and extending to each and every spectator respectively.
The theories and methods I employ in my approach spring from the idea of the unpresentable. As an interdisciplinary and eclectic tool, the unpresentable brings together the concerns articulated in aesthetics, language philosophy, cultural studies, religion, and theatre in an amalgam of representational genres, from staged storytelling to dance, and from popular
Dakari 21 theatre to global conferences. From the unpresentability of death in ancient Greek theatre, or of God in philosophies of religion, to the inexpressibility of pain in language and the problematic articulation of identity in medical culture, the unpresentable is roughly defined as that which cannot be adequately contained through the senses. Its elusive nature brings us in front of our finite interpretive capacity, our failure to come up with effective systems of communication, and ultimately, our problematic being.
I see the unpresentable as the implosion of the universe that sustains it. One stands in awe in front of this undetectable, unpredictable dark mass. In terms of research, this phenomenon is highly problematic as it defies traditional hermeneutic solutions. Philosophy seemed a most effective way for me to begin with. Departing from basic notions, as for instance, the universality of pain, illness, and the fear of death, I employ Lyotard’s twin concepts of the sublime/differend, which have worked best to advance my understanding of
Kant’s philosophy of aesthetics. Taking into account not only the subject in question, but also the historical and cultural circumstances that brought it to light, the ontological questions found in Heidegger’s aesthetic deliberations on the origin of art, refined my examination of the unpresentable as both universally true and historically specific.
My approach to the unpresentable in cancer performances, however, is not only concerned with its aesthetic value but also with its personal, political, and cultural implications. Some other issues I explore, besides aesthetics, are identity politics, postmodern conception of illness in art and society, cultural parameters of audience reception and the social ethics of representation. What distinctive contributions to audiences’ understanding of the experience of cancer do the cases of contemporary performance discussed here offer? In which ways do philosophical and theoretical perspectives assist the analysis of such art events? How is the ultimate goal of transformation of all participants achieved? Why is it important that the critics engage more with artists who experiment with their diseased bodies
Dakari 22 into aesthetic discussions and not merely confine them into the sphere of testimonial/ utilitarian art? What are the audiences these performances address? What do these performances stand for to the healthy/sick members of the audience, even the performers themselves?
The various approaches to the nature of pain and illness that are employed in this study cannot but attest to their incomplete representation and problematic reception. That said, by entering this debate, performance stands in for the sufferer’s private experience.
Echoing Lyotard, performance offers an alternative code that is keen on resolving the differend posed by the unpresentability of illness and suffering. If pain is to a great degree ungraspable and unpresentable, speaking about pain maps a promising detour, opening up new ways of expression, while the body in pain becomes the ground for further political, ethical, and aesthetic debates, rather than merely a contested, sensitive, and self-represented topic. In fact, the difficulty of its self-representation alone becomes an ongoing debate in itself. My hope, finally, is that by de-institutionalizing conventional ways of looking, we might be able to engage with illness in a constructive way, both aesthetically and socially.
The cases I examine vary in styles and forms and range from popular Broadway plays and solos, to comedy, experimental dramatization of essays, community-based performances, and multimedia and installation art. Cancer, especially in the cases of established dramatic texts usually possesses a symbolic status, however the main focus is on lesser-known, experimental pieces where the body of the artist becomes the object and the medium of performance. The main social cultural context is American. However, in order to avoid simply affirming what is common practice within this context, this study tests its theoretical contours by stretching out across the Atlantic to include the cancer-related works by German artist Christoph Schlingensief. This happens not only for comparative purposes. What this
Dakari 23 study aims at is showing that there are many different aspects of expression, extending beyond cultural, political, or generic borders.
Selection of data is based primarily on the co-existence of an ill performer and spectators. This is ultimately, what brings together these cases under the same analytical scope. This means that the outcome of this parallel analysis continues to expand as new productions and aesthetic experiences are considered. It is for this reason that the present dissertation claims to work toward an aesthetic model for the analysis of cancer-related performances rather than present a rounded and complete analytical tool. It is, in that sense, a work in progress that seeks to create rather than reproduce knowledge: each new performance will add an edge to it. Each spectator’s experience will point, in turn, to new directions of artistic experimentation and critical perspectives.
The first part consists of six chapters where I present philosophical and theoretical views on pain, illness, the aesthetics of the unpresentable, and performance that have informed my thesis. In this part, which could as well stand on its own as a separate thesis, I perform a review of literature and try to critically compare and combine Kantian aesthetics with later philosophers like Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Lyotard, Scarry, and Bulter, in my attempt to trace the difficulty of expressing pain in language, social and private life, and in the arts. I summarise Sontag’s major points in her illness essays and her opposition to metaphorical reconstruction of cancer and set the stage in order to later detect discontinuities in her argument, what I see as a critical fallacy: that cancer cannot be aestheticized. The
Croce/Jones debate offers a most fitting case in point: it asks whether reality and art can coexist without emotionally blackmailing the audience and solely serving the artist’s narcissism and what the role of the art critic should be.
In the second part, a number of exemplary American and European performances and plays is discussed that shows to what extent the proposed outlook on cancer art is applicable.
Dakari 24
I do not claim that all plays and performances about cancer are equally artistic or relate to the new aesthetic idiom of the unpresentable. For instance, Edson’s Wit employs conventional melodramatic techniques that made it very successful despite its dark implications. Katan’s comedic acts make use of contemporary culture’s overexposure to cancer, in order to attack the compulsive bright-siding of breast cancer and the public’s confusion as to how to deal with non-existing nipples. The sublime in her case rests in the way she deliberately brings us to a very awkward place of laughing at her cancer.
On the other extreme we find artists line Ellsworth, Patterson, and Schlingensief, who have meticulously experimented with the aesthetic/transcendental dimension of their personal experience with cancer. These performances pair the real with the staged and do not let us reside too long on either side, which is a true challenge for the audience and the professional critic who must confront this tension between being touched and being detached so as to assess the spectacle.
In short, this study focuses on performances that break from the Aristotelian mimetic act. It does not discuss the representation of cancer on a symbolic level, involving an actor that plays a role and a group of spectators that agree to suspend their disbelief. It looks into the coexistence of the real and the artistic in performance. It analyzes performances about and through the ill performer’s body and the degrees of empathy and ecstasis spectators experience.
Philosophical perspectives are employed in an attempt to illuminate the nature of being ill and the principles of contemplating suffering in art. These artists tell us about both the power and impotence of performance to contain and explain suffering. What they do in their work is to put the limits of performance to test. It is not my intention, however, to provide an exhaustive reading of philosophical and theoretical works such as Kant’s aesthetic philosophy, Heiddeger’s concept of Dasein and authentic existence, or Jean-Francois
Dakari 25
Lyotard’s differend. Comparing these philosophical standpoints was a bold decision I had to make for lack of any other fully developed theoretical model that would answer my questions. My aim has been to acknowledge an alternative idiom of expression, which promises to resolve the problem of the unpresentability of suffering in art.
In the course of my research, I have faced several challenges and limitations. One of them, which is of primarily ontological nature, has obviously been my limited perspective with respect to what cancer experience originally entails. Grounded on life’s bright side, the
“kingdom of the well,” not only was I faced with the challenge to explore a gruesome topic empirically unknown to me, but I was soon to realize that I was claiming my share of recognition in a field that was predominantly peopled by life’s night-siders: from Sontag to numerous other scholars, critics, thinkers, and artists, who had gained their artistic and authorial momentum from their own experience with illness and whose writing brims with unparalleled insight—hence my visit to Metaxas Hospital and my attendance to group therapy sessions with cancer patients, in an attempt to deepen my perspective in the study of illness and its expression.
The other challenge, or limitation, I had to face was of a more methodological nature, since I had to decide on my analytical scope on performances that I had not attended. All of these performances were created at a time prior to the ripening of my project and far away from Greece, were I am based. I had thus to regard them from a theoretical rather than aesthetic angle, which meant that a significant aspect of my thesis, the aesthetic analysis, would have to be severely compromised. In addition to the obstacle of the fleeting materiality of performance, which is only accessible the moment of its creation, I had to deal with the hurdle of insufficient performance documentation. Many of the cases I examine are not text- based, as for instance Ellsworth’s and Patterson’s pieces. In the case of Schlingensief’s numerous works, which are exclusively in German, analysis grew out of fragments that I
Dakari 26 managed to retrieve from reviews that were translated in English, as well as the English version of the artist’s Web page.
That said, documentation-related setbacks have been incorporated in the fabric of this study. The fact that most of the progressive, experimental pieces discussed in this dissertation have been, to my knowledge, generally neglected in performance scholarship makes this study’s claim to original contribution all the more valid. Unlike the timeless materiality of a painting, a poem, or a theatrical text, performance is set up by its participants and lives in the moment of their co-existence. Once this moment passes, the conventional methodological trajectory of description-analysis-interpretation cannot apply, for “I can only describe what I have seen,” Fischer-Lichte notes. Thus, “no performance analysis can make any claim to objectivity; nor can it treat its results as definitive.” In fact, I nod in agreement when Fischer-
Lichte says: “My perception . . . is influenced and directed by an interpretive hypothesis of rather provisional nature” (The Show and the Gaze 188).
The interpretive decisions I made in my analysis involve specific angles of the performances in question, as for instance the particularities of the interaction of performers with their audiences. Following Fischer-Lichte’s suggestions, I have applied the method of segmentation, dissecting performances into smaller units in order to provide a more sustainable analysis. With the exception of the more conventional text-based plays like Wit,
The Shadow Box, and A Cat on A Hot Tin Roof, where analysis is predominantly guided by the poetics of drama, performances are examined through an intersemiotic lense; aspects like the venue of the performance event, spectators’ physical location within it, their proximity to performers, the use of digital media, and so on, impart a kaleidoscopic view—a different angle offers an entirely new aesthetic experience.
Apart from the fluid aesthetics of these spectacles, which is hard to pin down for examination, a significant part of the analysis is invested in the historical and cultural
Dakari 27 specificities that shape the expression and reception of performances, and, in turm, aesthetic experience per se. In cases such as Katan’s and Patterson’s performances, where the focus rests on a female body that is explicitly traumatized by breast cancer, discussion extends to feminist theory and identity politics, which imparts an understanding of illness within a specific context (i.e. American culture from 1990s onward and its obsession with the female breast, either as the object of erotic fantasies or the subject of massive cancer-awareness campaigns), as well as through women’s perspective. What happens once American audiences have to deal with the explicit sight of a mastectomy scar? What feelings derive from Schlingensief’s desecration of religious symbols and himself? And, finally, what is the degree of empathy involved in watching the Indian dancer Ananda Shankar Jayant’s TED presentation on our computer screens? Despite variations in genre, form, delivery and reception, all these performative acts attest in one way or another to the presence of the unpresentable. In this light, this study does not claim to objectively judging how “good” or
“bad” cancer-related art is. The purpose is to acknowledge the ongoing friction between the real and the artistic, as artists themselves experience it, and the feelings these co-existing extremes generate in spectators.
Contribution to scholarship
It is a fact that the stigmatizing quality of cancer still surfaces to some extent in cultural fantasies that indeed have made the lives of the ill harder—much more so several decades ago; for instance, that cancer is the physicalization of someone’s repressed emotions; or, that, unlike nineteenth-century romanticized fantasies of tuberculosis, cancer was far from revealing anything spiritual; it only revealed the body as “all too woefully, just the body.”
Sontag wrote about cancer metaphors in the seventies, and from a cultural point of view, cancer was going through its dark ages. Things changed in the following decades
Dakari 28 especially in the nineties when the American society experienced a breast cancer awareness boom. A number of personal narratives, usually called autopathographies, appeared. There was also visual art and photography, and some interesting plays that even reached Broadway.
A number of critical essays and books that approached illness as a biocultural phenomenon appeared and gradually the multi-disciplinary field of Medical Humanities and Rita Charon’s discipline-shaping project of Narrative Medicine paired the theoretical depth of literary criticism with the practical aspects of fieldwork in the cultural study of illnesses like cancer and the ethics of caregiving.
There is a significant volume of literature that discusses Sontag’s contentious legacy.
In their respective critical works, Lisa Diedrich, Ann Jurecic, and Martha Stoddard Holmes for instance, are very sceptical about the deep impact of Sontag’s attack on metaphors, in part, as a side effect of her own long-lasting and complicated experience with cancer. Even though these scholars also draw attention to Sontag’s position regarding cancer in performing arts, a thorough examination of this issue lies outside their scope of analysis. Other studies,
Like Mary DeShazer’s analysis of women’s cancer literature, does not challenge Sontag’s legacy, but rather departs from the spellbinding lyricism of illness as “the night-side of life” to discuss various specimens of cancer narratives through a feminist lens. Focus rests on the analysis of various genres of women’s cancer. Even though cancer plays are also considered, the specificities of performance aesthetics are not examined in detail. Cancer is studied only insofar as it raises questions of agency and solidarity among women sufferers. However, there are so many other cancers that are left out and a number of different theoretical perspectives that could apply.
Usually, there are studies on illness and aesthetics of trauma, mainly focusing on performance or narrative as a mechanism of regaining authority over one’s body, like Arthur
Frank’s The wounded Storyteller or Petra Kupper’s The Scar of Visibility. Frank’s work
Dakari 29 departs from his own cancer experience to expand his analytic scope on several narratives of loss and restitution, in which the problematics of identity of the ill narrator becomes a recurring motif. Petra Kuppers’s The Scar of Visibility interrogates contemporary conceptualizations of medical images of the ill/disabled body in visual culture.
Apart from several essay-long studies that underline the subversive character of the artistic medium of performance the disenfranchised subjects employ in order to reclaim their voice—especially in cases of autobiographical performances or community-based theatre— there has not been any systematic attempt to subvert Sontag’s claim that cancer cannot yield art other than victim art. Emphasis is placed in social dialogue, activism, or equal rights in health care, rather than aesthetics. Although the authors of several of these studies attest to the artistic nature of the pieces they discuss, they do not elaborate on the aesthetic aspect of the art event, except for Kuppers, which can be summarized as audience experience in witnessing an ill subject performing his or her cancer. Aesthetic judgement on the outcome of these performances as both real and artistic is generally out of focus. Finally, there has not been any study I have come across, which employs a similar approach to the performance of cancer through the philosophical lens of the unpresentable.
The original contribution of this thesis to the bulging literature on performance studies lies exactly in that it begins, almost from scratch, to trace the fluid principles of the aesthetic idiom of the unpresentable in cancer-related Anglophone performance through a selective, comparative reading of a number of seminal philosophical and theoretical perspectives as these serve the discussion of a variety of performances. The above choice of theoretical and philosophical positions have assisted me in approaching elusive concepts such as pain, the sublime, authentic being in the world, or the essence of art, and deepen my analyses. Some of the cases I examine have not been discussed before in this length or in this perspective, as for instance, Paget’s “The Work of Talk,” or Cristofer’s The Shadow Box. It is my firm belief
Dakari 30 that Sontag’s impact on the way cancer-related art has been critically and artistically approached has had a lot to do with this.
It is for this reason that the present study goes deeper into Sontag’s other writings before and after her illness essays so as to understand her perspective on aesthetics and interpretation. According to the findings of this research, even though Sontag seems to be transgressive in her writings of the sixties, she gradually retreats to more conservative positions regarding art. This is obvious in her support to Croce in the latter’s harsh criticism of Bil T. Jones’s performance Still/Here. The collection of critical essays on this case, The
Crisis of Criticism, address the problematic nature of the critic’s authority and sheds light to the gap between elite art and the public that spurred the culture wars of the nineties. Its wide range of perspectives has significantly assisted me in keeping up with my aspiring intention to subvert Sontag’s ideas on aesthetics.
Implications for future study
Can this art that springs from illness experience be associated with medical and social domain where future health professionals are trained, where funding for scientific research can be obtained, and where political action can be stirred? In other words, can a discussion on the aesthetics of cancer reshape its ethics and politics, even the practical concerns of responsibility for health care? Even though I do not have any definitive answers to these questions, I am convinced that once society re-learns to be attentive and receptive to the unpresentable, to take it as it is, the prospect of transformation in all the above domains is strong. And by transformation, I mean the healing power of expression and the liberating effect of acceptance, banishing restrictive conventions is art and in life. By accepting the unpresentability of cancer as it is, without having to gloss over or detour its disturbing facts, a new perspective on the world becomes possible.
Dakari 31
My hope is that this work will be incorporated in the expanding field of the critical medical humanities, and involve in a cross-disciplinary dialogue that builds connections between medicine, community and the arts. More specifically, my aspiration for this dissertation is to be expanded into an academically rigorous study of a variety of performances and plays about cancer that will delineate a distinctive field in critical studies on contemporary performance. Aspects of this study can be implemented in Medical
Humanities courses or any other inter-disciplinary tought program for future scholars and medical practitioners.
Besides its instrumental benefits to the field of the Medical Humanities, this study aspires also to find its place in the emerging interdisciplinary field of Performance
Philosophy. Research in the field is based on an interdisciplinary, pluralist approach to all kinds of performing arts, from theatre and dance, to music and live art. Its scopes include not only the value of philosophy for analyzing the performing arts, but also the idea of performance as its own kind of philosophical thought.
Chapter breakdown
The body of the text is bifurcated into two parts. The first part presents theoretical views on pain, illness, and the aesthetics of the unpresentable. Chapter one introduces
Sontag’s positions on cancer metaphors as elaborated in her work Illness as Metaphor. Her dubious stance with respect to metaphors is isolated and examined through the perspective of a wide range of critical responses to her positions. Appearing at the beginning of this study, this chapter intends to deconstruct the critical righteousness of Sontag’s treatise, which has indeed inspired a number of illness narratives and critical works exactly because it starts which such an evocative metaphor, and not so much because it seeks to banish metaphors from the experience of cancer.
Dakari 32
Chapter two examines Elaine Scarry’s position regarding the inexpressibility of pain as discussed in her seminal work, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World
(1985). In the first half of her book, she posits that pain is essentially a private experience that cannot be put into words; it even shatters every such attempt, returning the subject-in-pain to a pre-language state of inarticulate cries. In the second half, she examines ways pain, once its acuteness subsides, can indeed stimulate a reconstructive process of the self, which she finds possible in imagination/metaphor and the products of human creation. There has been a major misconception of her argument, as Scarry talks extensively about the alternative languages, art being one of them, which reconstruct the essentially private experience of pain.
Scarry’s position is complemented by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s assumptions on the expression of pain as a socially constructed and therefore taught behavior, presented in Philosophical
Investigations (1953). Lakoff and Johnson’s study on metaphors, Metaphors We Live By
(1980), as an essential part of our conceptual system and Butler’s theory of performativity in
Excitable Speech: The Politics of the Performative (1997), as it is associated with Austin’s study of performative utterances, examine the dynamics of metaphor in both describing and shaping the experience of pain.
Chapter three introduces the idea of the Kantian sublime as it is discussed in Jean-
Francois Lyotard’s The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (1991). Lyotard detects in the experience of “negative pleasure” a potential for bringing the unpresentable into presentation without having to explain or tame it into standard representation. This is also evident in his discussion of phrases in dispute in his work, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (1983), which imparts a performative role to the phrase—anything from a verbal statement, to a gesture, even silence. The lack of a common rule of judgement that would be able to resolve a dispute between two opposing parties, what he calls differend, could be, upon examination, a case of negotiating the unpresentable in art—which is by definition puzzling as we try to present
Dakari 33 verbally or else. His various other works are also considered, with special focus on The
Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1984), where he defines the role of the postmodern artist as philosopher or researcher in search of new aesthetic idioms that will be able to negotiate the unpresentable.
Chapter four begins with a discussion of Martin Heidegger’s aesthetic and existential concerns as expressed in his respective works “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1936) and
Being and Time (1927). The idea that the truth of an artwork resides in its “thingliness,” its way of being once it is disengaged from its traditional usefulness or meaning is complemented by the philosopher’s thoughts of an authentic being-in-the-world as essentially a “not-at-home” alienating process of becoming awakened into a painful but also enlightening self-awareness. Departing from this discussion on authentic being, I discuss its applications into postmodern/postdramatic performance. Hans-Thies Lehmann’s
Postdramatic Theatre (2006) and Erika Fischer Lichte’s The Transformative Power of
Performance (2008) provide the basic theoretical framework of my discussion. Both Lehman and Fischer-Lichte detect an aesthetic turn in contemporary performance and focus on the centrality of presence and presentness, the here-and-now of performance, which brings together actors and spectators in an authentic and transformative re-appreciation of their- being-in-the-world. Butler’s views on the dynamics of the assembly, expressed in her most recent work Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015), argues for the reclamation of subjectivity and socio-political identity that is present once people gather together. The flow of energy among live bodies demonstrating together imparts a political dimension to Fischer-Lichte’s aesthetics of performance, while it complements the discussion on presenting the unpresentable as the re-enfranchisement of previously silenced groups—in this case, artistic voices arising from diseased bodies.
Dakari 34
The views examined above provide the framework of chapter five, where I discuss a case of disenfranchisement in aesthetic representation: American dance critic Arlene Croce’s criticism of Bill T. Jones’s experimental dance piece Still/Here (1994). Jones created his performance by interacting with terminally ill volunteers in dance workshops. During these workshops, Jones, himself HIV-positive, invited participants to “dance” out their experience with illness and the fear of death. The gestural patterns of the amateur participants were later choreographed by his company of professional dancers. Croce expressed her objections in her famous “non-review” (as she did not attend the performance but was based on the piece’s
“deafening publicity”), where she attacks Jones for emotionally blackmailing his audience. In her view, that was a case of “victim art,” resembling a “medieval medicine show” rather than classical dance that would be worth attending. She also accuses him of both taking advantage of victims and hiding behind them in an attempt to feed his artistic and personal narcissism.
Croce received harsh criticism by a number of artists, scholars, and thinkers, who opposed her rigid formalism and hackneyed critical lense.
Chapter six returns to Sontag, as she was one of the few who took Croce’s side in this debate. Sontag accuses Croce’s detractors as philistines and artistically ignorant. Considering
Sontag’s previous writings on art, I attempt to disclose her constant re-fashioning of her views, which, once taken together, reveal multiple critical inconsistencies: she goes from a radical aesthetic grounded on the free play of the form of an artwork and banishing all previous content or hermeneutic load to more conservative formalism, as seen in her letter of support to Croce. In re-examining her criticism on the representation of illness, a deep-seated bias comes to surface, which, I posit, derives from the fact that she had never able to come to terms with her own illness.
In the second part of this dissertation, I examine cases of performances and plays that attest to the above-presented philosophical, theoretical and critical trajectories. In chapter
Dakari 35 seven, I examine cases of cancer-related plays that made their way to America’s most popular stage, Broadway: Tennessee Williams’s A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Michael Cristofer’s
The Shadow Box (1977), Margaret Edson’s Wit (1995), and Susan Miller’s My Left Breast
(1994). What I suggest is that although these plays do tackle cancer, they nevertheless do so in a way that does not offend the audiences’ sensibilities. Cancer is either portrayed as an allegory—which alludes to Sontag’s scepticism regarding the metaphorization of illness— subsumed under “well-made” patterns, or pushes a certain agenda other than illness. Other aspects considered are the developments in cultural representations of cancer from the nineties onward, resting on breast cancer culture that has been omnipresent in personal narratives, grassroots awareness-raising initiatives, and the profitable “pink ribbon” enterprise. The obsessive thematization of cancer in the American media and popular culture does not reflect a society’s coming-of-age with respect to a more honest contemplation on previously silenced topics, but rather a media-driven trivialization and commodification of disease along with so many other social issues.
In chapter eight, I examine several cases, grouped in three sections, where the aesthetics of the unpresentable is grounded on the co-existence of lived and performed illness. The first section discusses the idea of the unpresentable as a linguistic differend in
Marrianne Paget’s experimental piece “The Work of Talk” (1989). The second section deals with the sublime as it is exemplified in the thickness of flesh in Angela Ellsworth’s
Hemaderby (1998) and Pam Patterson’s Bodysight: A Reclamation Project (2004). In the third section focuses on three TED presentations by Eve Ensler, Tania Katan, and Ananda
Shankar Jayant, which are delivered as solo performances in the context of an educational global platform. In these TED talks, the medium of a global performative space, both live and virtual, is examined. As this study of diverse styles of performance shows, the blending of
Dakari 36 real-life experience and performance aesthetics promotes constructive sharing of experience and creation of communities both physical and virtual.
In the final chapter, I turn to German artist Christoph Schlingensief’s various works in order to discuss the way he makes use of the aesthetics of the sublime to transform his dying into a total art experience. The intersemioticity of his works, using various media, liveness, and public action dissolves the borders between representation and reality, art and life, actors and spectators. I particularly focus in his cancer trilogy, The Current State of Things (2008),
The Church of Fear vs. The Alien Within (2008), and Mea Culpa: A Readymade Opera
(2009), as it was exhibited posthumously at the 2011 Biennale in Venice and won the
German pavilion a Golden Lion.
The aestheticity of these performances lies precisely in the elevating capacity of the performer-partaker continuum. No longer susceptible to the polarization of stage and auditorium, the performative act merges the two into a single organism whose vital functions are attuned. The goal of performers is to communicate their own experiences to an audience.
This raises them far above their own private and painful being into a higher level of existence where the visceral and the ecstatic meet. Mind-and-body unity becomes attainable for both performers and partakers, since they all perceive themselves being in communion with each other, regarding the other and themselves anew. This uplifting moment promises to appease the burden of our imperfect existence and to make us whole as persons and community, even for the duration of the event. Illness, in all its pain and suffering, demands our attentiveness.
Being there makes a world of difference.
In place of a closure: on performance
Illness and suffering in performance will always remain real and constructed at the same time. The point of their convergence will always be a zone of conflict and excitation; of
Dakari 37 doubt and certainty; of aesthetics and ethics; of hot-selling commodity and unfathomable mystery; and, ultimately, of the real and the artistic. This realization extends from the bold decisions performers/artists have to make in (re)presenting their suffering, to the task of the critics to closely observe these experiments, eventually leading to the aesthetically challenging experience spectators gain.
It is, in fact, the symbiotic nature of performance—its “as well as” ontological basis— that foregrounds and sustains extremes and substantiates all the risks taken. That moment in space and time when a performance takes place is at once marked by intense presence and fleetingness; it activates a vibrant flow of energy that circulates among all participants and is forever lost in time the next minute. It is a total moment of being-ness in the here-and-now, but also entirely subject to the particular circumstances that activated it. In fact, the aesthetic product of performance cannot exist outside those circumstances, nor can it be congealed into an object-based work of art, like a sculpture or a painting. Performance on the edges of what is known, presentable, and cognitively contained promises a new outlook through defamiliarization of the familiar—or, what I describe as “seeing the world with different eyes.” To performance artist and researcher Marina Abramovic, the moment art and life meet in performance is a violent moment of crisis and potentiality. The proximity between life and death lays bare, at once startling and elevating all participants. As she observes,
all human beings are always afraid of very simple things. We're afraid of suffering,
we're afraid of pain, we're afraid of mortality. So what I'm doing—I'm staging these
kinds of fears in front of the audience. I'm using your energy, and with this energy I
can go and push my body as far as I can. And then I liberate myself from these fears.
Abramovic invites her audience to exit their comfort zone, to do things they do not like, if they want to change perspective, because “nothing happens if you always do things the same way.” She, therefore, returns to the incontestable and problematic reality of the body and the
Dakari 38 here-and-now mindfulness of performance to re-mystify the body’s uncanny presentness— hence her method of performance, “to do things I'm afraid of, the things I fear, the things I don't know, to go to territory that nobody's ever been.” In this lucid articulation of the essence of art and life, the present discussion on the performance of cancer finds its nesting place.
Dakari 39
PART I
THEORETICAL VIEWS ABOUT PAIN, ILLNESS,
AND THE AESTHETICS OF THE UNPRESENTABLE IN PERFORMANCE
Dakari 40
Chapter 1
Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor: The story behind the essay and a critical fallacy
Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship.
Everyone who is born holds a dual citizenship, in the kingdom of
the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to
use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at
least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.
(Sontag, Illness 3)
In the first part of this study, I depart from the American critic Susan Sontag’s theoretical position and her argument against the possibility of extracting any aesthetic outcome from the experience of cancer, expressed in her treatise, Illness as Metaphor (1978), to deconstruct such a long-held assumption, which has extensively affected criticism regarding the diseased body in performance. The first six chapters aim at proving that Sontag’s objections to making art out of cancer are situated in her personal struggle to come to terms with her repeated bouts with cancer, a fact that interestingly elucidates many of her critical inconsistencies, as these surface in her various works of criticism from the 1960s until prior to her death in 2004. To this end, I am attempting a comparative reading of a number of seminal philosophical and theoretical perspectives: Kantian aesthetics of the sublime, Martin Heidegger’s existential and aesthetic explorations of authenticity, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s language games, Lyotard’s aesthetic and rhetorical postulations regarding the unpresentable; Elaine Scarry’s pain inexpressibility and Judith Butler’s performativity are complemented with Hans Thies
Lehmann’s and Erika Fischer Lichte’s performance theory studies. Sontag’s several other
Dakari 41 critical works and interviews are also considered, while Scarry’s position regarding the linguistic inexpressibility of pain is partially refuted. This discussion ultimately aims at mapping an alternative code that is keen on resolving the problem posed by the unpresentability of illness and suffering, as this is illustrated in the analysis of exemplary performances in part II.
Overview of Sontag’s argument against cancer metaphors
Nearly forty years have passed since American critic, novelist, playwright, and filmmaker Susan Sontag penned these opening lines to Illness as Metaphor (1978), her treatise against the cultural taboos that were attached to certain modern illnesses and the way western literature has reflected and shaped the public’s beliefs and fears. Her argument is constructed around the apposition of nineteenth-century metaphors of tuberculosis and twentieth-century metaphors of cancer. She traces the affinities between the two diseases, which both involved mystery and inescapable fatality, in the case of tuberculosis until 1882, when it was discovered to be a bacterial infection.2 The modern perspectives on cancer in western societies, she argued, had much in common with the Romantic glorification on tuberculosis in nineteenth-century literature and culture; they were both “spectacularly, and similarly, encumbered by the trappings of metaphor” (5).
Cancer, like tuberculosis, was thought to be much more than a disease: it was considered a state of being, a secret citizenship granted to a rare kind of human beings. Most of the metaphors Sontag discusses are induced by the mindless, unjustifiable proliferation of malignant cells that gradually take over the organism: on the one hand there is biomedical
2 The nineteenth-century understanding of tuberculosis as a metaphor for expanded consciousness, artistic sensibility, and spiritual transcendence declines in the twentieth century as the disease becomes associated with urban destitute and immigrant communities. As Lisa Diedrich observes, TB-related narratives could not represent the illness experience objectively since it was either middle or upper class people who were able to write about their experience; it was also those people whose social class and financial background allowed them access to high quality treatment offered in sanatoria, which significantly affected the way their experience was reflected in their narratives (Diedrich 8).
Dakari 42 deficiency in coming up with effective cure at that time; on the other, there has been a long tradition of mythological investment of illness and suffering throughout the course of history of western civilization. Sinister imagery of the “other within” reflected the belief of a demonic possession; the militaristic hyperbole of the “self at war with the self” reverberated the terror of the battlefield and the urgency for aggressive (medical) intervention to eradicate the enemy; the association of cancer with a corrupt society, with an out-of-balance body politic, spoke of the modern plight of the industrial civilization and an expanding technocratic world. In all cases, actual sufferers were severely stigmatized by a condition that came uninvited and had already been attributed mythic proportions. Sufferers, Sontag details, were thus plunged into secrecy, shame, and self-contempt.
Cancer is particularly horrid in a very physical way, Sontag posits. This is the point where the two mythological lines part: “the TB death” Sontag explains, “dissolved the gross body, etherealized the personality, expanded consciousness” (Illness 20). It was, thus, the ideal material for Romantic art, particularly in the way it glorified the transcendental spirit and exemplified the Cartesian mind-body split in all its aesthetic robustness. Cancer, on the other hand, in its projection of the baseness of the decaying body, is “obscene,” “ill-omened, abominable, repugnant to the senses” (9). Whereas tuberculosis was thought to “produce spells of euphoria, increased appetite, exacerbated sexual desire,” she argues, “cancer is thought to cripple vitality, make eating an ordeal, deaden desire.” Unlike the aphrodisiac effect of tuberculosis, cancer is “de-sexualizing” (13). As such, both were understood as
“diseases of passion:” excessive passion in the case of tuberculosis, whereas, in the case of cancer, repressed passion (21).
The ways the two diseases alter the geography of the body are also strikingly dissimilar. Tuberculosis affects the lungs, which to Sontag signify “the upper, spiritualized body;” a “disease of the lungs,” she says, metaphorically suggests a “disease of the soul”
Dakari 43
(18). Due to its physiology, tuberculosis did not require disfiguring surgical interventions: it is simply “disintegration, febrilization, dematerialization.” Its progression relates to time: it speeds up life, highlights it, spiritualizes it” (14).
Cancer, on the other hand, is seen as “pathology of space.” Its progression is three- dimensional: it “‘spreads’ or ‘proliferates’ or is ‘diffused’” (15). Not only does it expand, but it also degenerates—unlike tuberculosis, cancer turns the body tissues “into something hard.”
Its notoriety for “attacking parts of the body (colon, bladder, rectum, breast, cervix, prostate, testicles) that are embarrassing to acknowledge” arouses feelings of shame, Sontag believes—except perhaps leukemia, which she considers an etherialized form of cancer (18).
In its most extreme, it is considered a “demonic pregnancy” or a “demonic possession”—a metaphor in which the physical, the moral, and the metaphysical converge. As cancer dramatically changes both the body’s and the soul’s substances, it demands extreme intervention/exorcism.
Sontag’s notable effort to purify illness from its metaphorical load is obvious in her consistent assault on the assumption that patients are responsible for their disease, first tuberculosis and later cancer: “the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease—because it has not expressed itself” (47). As she goes on to explain, “given the romantic values in use for judging character and disease, some glamor attaches to having a disease thought to come from being full of passion.” Here she refers to tuberculosis, which has been associated with spiritual refinement and unrestrained passion, either artistic or erotic. When it comes to cancer however, “there is mostly shame attached to a disease thought to stem from the repression of emotion— . . . The view of cancer as a disease of the failure of expressiveness condemns the cancer patient: expresses pity but also conveys contempt” (49). To highlight the prevailing mentality of “life’s loser” attached to cancer, Sontag browses through a
Dakari 44 number of historic personalities, such as Napoleon, Ulysses S. Grant, and Hubert Humphrey, whose political failure had been said to spur the oncet of their cancer. To illustrate the other aspect of this mentality, namely, that emotional repression leads to cancer, she refers to
Sigmund Freud and Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose cancer diagnosis was seen as a repercussion of “a lifetime of instinctual renunciation” (49). What Sontag aims to make clear is that responsibility for one’s own cancer was thought to equally rest on a series of wrong political and personal choices.
Another dissimilarity in the way nineteenth-century tuberculosis and twentieth- century cancer shaped western imagination has to do with the way they affected the body’s image. In the case of tuberculosis, “it was glamorous to look sickly,” Sontag writes.
Tubercular appearance (emaciated and pale face, hollow chest) thus became a staple of the time and a new model for aristocratic looks in Victorian circles. Romanticizing tuberculosis, according to her research, “is the first widespread example of that distinctly modern activity promoting the self as an image” (29). The tubercular look gradually became the symbol of erotic and literary passion, which was particularly evident in the romantic treatment of death.
As a case in point, Sontag refers to Byron’s erotically exaggerated paleness (32).
Once shifting to cancer, the body’s image, according to Sontag, is morbid; medical intervention radically alters it through baldness and scarification. That body’s agonies, she states, cannot be romanticized. The modern illness that perhaps could still contain “the myth of our self-transience” after tuberculosis, to Sontag, is not cancer but insanity, which is
“thought to bring consciousness to a paroxysmic enlightenment” (36-37). Those aspects of tuberculosis that had indeed to do with agonizing death were filled in by cancer.
The above imagery, according to Sontag, elucidates the way in which the Romantics moralized, even aestheticized, death. Far from a lyrical death, however, “[cancer] is a rare and still scandalous subject for poetry; and it seems unimaginable to aestheticize the disease”
Dakari 45
(20). In Sontag’s line of argument, this explains why tuberculosis was romanticized, even eroticized, in nineteenth-century Anglophone art and culture, whereas cancer has merely echoed abject horror and, as such, it has altogether discouraged any artistic reconstruction.
With the encumbering load of metaphor weighing on them almost simultaneously with the pronouncement of diagnosis, cancer patients have been lied to (especially in earlier times), or have felt compelled to lie to others about their condition, which equaled (then) a death sentence. For those who have suffered from cancer in real life—depending on the cultural and social context, until recently—it is hardly helpful “[to hear] their disease’s name constantly being dropped as the epitome of evil” (85). By labeling cancer “the killer disease,” the effort to cure it “a fight” or “a crusade,” and the people who suffer from it “cancer victims,” Sontag states, the illness is to be considered a culprit but, at times, so is the patient:
“Illness is interpreted as, basically, a psychological event, and people are encouraged to believe that they get sick because they (unconsciously) want to,” or that they are responsible for it due to misbehavior, suppressed emotions, or guilt—what she refers to as “the modern bogey of the cancer-prone character—someone unemotional, inhibited, repressed” (59, 40).
Sontag’s main concern, therefore, is to dissolve the belief that cancer was rooted in a person’s psychological profile, forcing the sufferer into an endless circle of victimization.
She thus ends Illness as Metaphor with the expectation that scientific breakthrough in cancer treatment will dissolve all metaphoric language around the disease:
Since the interest of the metaphor is precisely that it refers to a disease so overlain
with mystification, so charged with the fantasy of inescapable fatality. Since our
views about cancer, and the metaphors we have imposed on it, are so much a vehicle
for the large insufficiencies of our culture, for our shallow attitude toward death, for
our anxieties about feeling. . . . The cancer metaphor will be made obsolete. (87)
Dakari 46
What her argument essentially boils down to is the necessity for the scientific essay to substitute literary narrative in order for all metaphoric thinking to dissolve and for patients to experience “the healthiest way of being ill” (3).
Reading between the lines of Illness as Metaphor: Sontag’s cancer
Surprisingly, the most seminal experience of illness Sontag chose to leave out was her own. Although it is not mentioned in Illness as Metaphor, Sontag underwent surgery and treatment for metastatic stage-four cancer for three years prior to the publication of the book.
Her academic manner of approaching the topic, with a breathtaking amount of cultural examples and literary sources, would not leave much space for such a discussion.
Only after Illness as Metaphor was published did she openly discuss about her own afflictions. Her own first reactions, which Sontag admits in a New York Times interview immediately afterwards, were visceral: “Panic. Animal terror. I found myself doing very primitive sorts of things, like sleeping with the light on the first couple of months. I was afraid of the dark. You really do feel as though you're looking into that black hole” (“Susan
Sontag Found Crisis of Cancer Added a Fierce Intensity to Life”). Sontag did not remain impervious to the disturbing notions about the cancer-prone personality type either. As she confesses in the same interview,
I immediately thought, I’m exactly that type . . . And then I realized, who doesn’t?
That’s also called being civilized. I don’t know a single person who doesn’t repress
emotions. . . . [T]hose are the things we all fear now, that we’re not expressive
enough. That’s the going psychological dogma, just as in the nineteenth century it was
the opposite. But I don’t believe emotions are the cause of disease. (“Sontag Found”)
These thoughts of hers were articulated at a time when Sontag had gained back the illusion of immortality, or as she said, “this irresistible optimism now that so far I’m getting away with
Dakari 47 it” (“Sontag Found”). In the same interview she gives us a glimpse of what having cancer was like:
The entire first year I was thinking about death all the time, but in many ways it's been
a positive experience. It has added a fierce intensity to my life, and that's been
pleasurable. It sounds very banal, but having cancer does put things into perspective.
It's fantastic knowing you're going to die; it really makes having priorities and trying
to follow them very real to you. That has somewhat receded now; more than two
years have gone by, and I don't feel the same sort of urgency. In a way I'm sorry; I
would like to keep some of that feeling of crisis.
Sontag’s choise of words here is striking: she talks about how “fantastic” and “pleasurable” the “intensity” of approaching death was, but she only phrased it thus once the immediate threat was suspended—at least this is what she believed at the time, that she was almost back to a state of safety and wisdom. As it seems, she set out into writing Illness as Metaphor as a concealed personal response to the fear she might have been a cancer-prone personality type, thus causing her own cancer. As she reveals in an iconic interview to Jonathan Cott, her first thought was: “What did I do to deserve this? I’ve led a wrong life, I’ve been too repressed…
Then I asked one of my doctors: ‘What do you think about the psychological side of cancer in terms of what causes it?’” The fact that her doctor dismissed it absolutely, made her begin to think “about TB, and the argument of the book [Illness as Metaphor] fell into place. And I decided that I was not going to be culpabilized” (Cott 6-7). In fact, what this personal insight reveals is how ingrained with her personal experience the book was: “People said I must have been detached to write Illness as Metaphor but I wasn’t detached at all” (Cott 4). Her silence while this book was being written, therefore, remains striking and renders her argument against both the unnecessary spell of metaphor and the centrality of individual experience in rearticulating cancer experience all the more spineless.
Dakari 48
Sontag goes on to subvert her previous exhortation of metaphors in AIDS and Its
Metaphors, written a decade later. In this follow-up on illness mythology, she expresses her second thoughts on her previous call for “a purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric meaning” attitude (Illness 3). Her “illness as the night-side of life” imagery (3) is now diminished to a “brief, hectic flourish of metaphor, in mock-exorcism of the seductiveness of metaphorical thinking,” reaching the obvious conclusion that “of course, one cannot think without metaphors” (91). In other words, she was luring her readers by drawing their attention to a collective anxiety.
Proceeding with analysis, she takes a break from her usual archaeology of cultural and literary imagery to give her readers a hint of autobiography:
Twelve years ago, when I became a cancer patient, what particularly enraged me—
and distracted me from my own terror and despair . . . was seeing how much the very
reputation of this illness added to the suffering of those who have it. Many fellow
patients with whom I talked . . . evinced disgust at their disease and a kind of shame.
They seemed to be in the grip of fantasies about their illness by which I was quite
unseduced. (Illness 97-98)
By constructing a thesis against metaphor and withholding the autobiographical specificities behind it, Sontag obviously favors the essay’s distanced criticism over the affective surplus of a (personal) narrative. The reason behind this decision of hers is that
I didn’t think it would be useful—and I wanted to be useful—to tell yet one more
story in the first person of how someone learned that she or he had cancer, swept,
struggled, was comforted, suffered, took courage… though mine was also that story.
A narrative it seemed to me, would be less useful than an idea. . . . The purpose of my
book was to calm the imagination, not to incite it. Not to confer meaning, which is the
traditional purpose of literary endeavor, but to deprive something of meaning (98).
Dakari 49
To the extent that such metaphors cause additional suffering to those who already suffer from cancer, Sontag’s argument against metaphor is indeed a valuable contribution to what she sees as a “the healthiest way of being ill” (Illness 3). Objections to her argument begin to build up the moment she suggests that metaphorical thinking should be entirely banned from illness discourse, which she swiftly contradicts, once a far more stigmatizing illness makes its appearance.
The rising AIDS epidemic diverted her attention from the evolving attitudes about cancer in the American context of the late eighties. As I will be arguing later, however, there could be another explanation behind her change of mind regarding cancer. This attitude, I argue, might have derived from her persuasion that she had fully reclaimed her citizenship to the kingdom of the well. The years of remission that followed her first bout with cancer gave her the confidence, or illusion, of health. As it will be discussed, the terror of cancer would return her yet again to the “night-side of life.”
As the cure for cancer—and therefore its demystification—Sontag had hoped for never fully arrived, and as AIDS articulated a biocultural3 issue with severe moral and political extensions, illness would always strike back in its urgent request to be expressed.
Ironically, it was Sontag’s own story behind the history of metaphors that has been a major source of inspiration for several cultural studies on illness and personal narratives published in the decades following both Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors.
Critical response to Illness as Metaphor
Sontag approached the topic of cancer imagery in scholarly precision: a breathtaking
3 In his examination of illness in the postmodern age, Morris parallels Lyotard’s concept of all- encompassing “grand narratives” of modernity with the modern biomedical model, according to which every illness is reduced to a biological mechanism of cause and effect. What he argues is that postmodern illness, defined by “an awareness of the elaborate interconnections between biology and culture” does not aspire to become another grand narrative that seeks to explain every affliction on the planet, but rather one that “[describes] a new, transitional, and unfinished understanding of illness” and which needs to “be supplemented by other compatible and similarly limited models” (Illness and Culture 11).
Dakari 50 list of literary sources are examined as case studies ranging from the Iliad and the Odyssey, where disease occurs as supernatural punishment, as demonic possession, and as the result of natural causes to Frantz Kafka’s diary notes, where he writes of his own tuberculosis as a symbol of emotional trauma, to Kant’s figurative use of cancer as a metaphor for excess feeling, even to Kurosawa’s film Ikiru, where the character’s cancer urges him to live his remaining time to the fullest.
In a more thorough reading, however, the supporting evidence she presents against metaphors appears to be neither adequate nor convincing. Denis Donoghue expresses his scepticism as to the accuracy of Sontag’s research on illness metaphors. As he observes in his
1978 review, Sontag draws mainly on specific literary works, sparse medical representations, and numerous unsupported common beliefs, while she entirely leaves out patients’ autobiographical accounts that might have shed light on the actual experience of illness as it affects and is affected by metaphor (Diedrich 28). This is a central point to be taken into consideration in every discussion of the experience and expression of illness, for, as we shall see, this particular state in life, during which the self experiences physical and/or emotional distress, and is faced with the threat, or the certainty, of death and the existential terror this engenders, is a very subjective way of being-in-the-world.
Donoghue leafs through Sontag’s previous writings and extracts a surplus of metaphoric tropes, often punitively used. As he reports, for instance, Sontag confessed that once, exasperated by America’s war on Vietnam, wrote that “the white race is the cancer of human history;” he juxtaposes it with what she wrote in the last chapter of Illness as
Metaphor, that “the use of cancer in political discourse encourages fatalism and justifies severe measures—as well as strongly reinforcing the widespread notion that the disease is necessarily fatal” (qtd. in Donoghue). Donoghue’s point thus inculpates Sontag for having committed the crime she has fought against. The impression he gets is that Illness as
Dakari 51
Metaphor is “a deeply personal book pretending for the sake of decency to be a thesis” referring back to her concealed personal motive in writing it.
Morris acknowledges the important message that underlies Illness as Metaphor. As he writes, “[t]here is practical, therapeutic, value in an effort to ‘calm the imagination’ of patients gripped by harmful myths” (Illness and Culture 269). He objects, however, to her intention to reduce illness to “a scientific, biological fact.” This, he believes, “does not deprive it of meaning but simply leaves it in the grip of a reductive, positivist, biomedical narrative that focuses solely on bodily processes.” Such a radical denunciation of embodied experience in illness, Morris explains, results in a heightened split between body and mind and “ignores the healing role that stories play in non-Western cultures” (270). Thinking without metaphor and separating illness from its cultural context is in this sense impossible.
Sontag’s dual citizenship/emigration imagery is “the twentieth century’s most cited metaphor for illness” Ann Jurecic notes (68). Indeed, a massive body of literature, such as criticism and personal narratives, has been informed by Sontag’s famous trope; some of them are Arthur Frank’s The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics (1995), David
Morris’s Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age (1998), Jackie Stacey’s Teratologies
(1997), and Mary Deshazer’s. Fractured Borders: Reading Women’s Cancer Literature
(2005). Departing from this massive wave of influence, Jurecic examines Sontag’s overall contribution: from her discussions on the representation of suffering as seen in her other works on war photography aesthetics, such as On Photography (1977) and Regarding the
Pain of Others (2003), to the ethics of reception, as well as the independent development of theoretical literary criticism and the pragmatic medical humanities (Jurecic 67-91). She warns us, however, about Sontag’s argument against metaphor. “[S]cholars in the medical humanities who have focused on [Sontag’s] argument against metaphors” Jurecic explains,
“have only inherited half the story... All those writers who quote ‘illness is the night-side of
Dakari 52 life’ in their articles, Web pages, and blogs recognize the power of her metaphor, which is influential because it provides a narrative framework for engaging with the suffering of others” and “[making] available new ways of thinking about the unthinkable” (90).
In the same vein, Lisa Diedrich is right to observe that “such emigration/citizenship/ national character metaphors have become a recurrent trope in personal narratives of illness” that appeared after Sontag’s discussions. Instead of calming the imagination, she thus ended up rekindling it. “Which is more useful” Diedrich asks, “Sontag’s metaphor or her argument against metaphor?” (29). This inconsistency becomes even more telling if we consider her silenced struggle with cancer even as she writes those lines. If the secrecy enveloping an illness like cancer further contributed to a vilifying mythology around it, why did she promote it by choosing to remain silent about it?
It seems that when Sontag was so forcefully attacking metaphoric thinking around illness, she was embarking on a very personal effort to dispel her own demons veiled behind her criticism. This is obvious in AIDS and Its Metaphors, where she abandoned cancer and turned to the AIDS pandemic and its (sub)cultural myths seeking the most debated illness metaphor to date. The urgency of dealing with AIDS was typical of the time; perhaps also
(her) cancer was becoming far too common and much less sexualized (in fact completely asexual, as she wrote). Compared to AIDS cancer was now the normal or “the mainstream”—so to speak, even if not quite the material for art yet. It is not only a matter of elitism, it runs deeper: it has to do with a mind-body split: by rejecting the recalcitrant body, she became ensconced in the excellence of mind—and the conservative, normative, and elitistic principles it stands for.
In retrospect, Sontag fell short of dispelling the horrors of metaphor in her own cancer experience. Ironically, she approached her own illness as a battle, in spite of all her admonitions against such a stance (Jurecic 86). In March 2004 Sontag was faced with cancer
Dakari 53 for a third time; this time she was diagnosed with leukemia. The grim biopsy and blood test results did not leave much hope for remission or survival. Even so, she was determined to endure any sort of pain at the remotest prospect of recovery.
The vulnerable person behind the stalwart intellectual avatar is posthumously revealed in Swimming in a Sea of Death (2008), a memoir written by her son David Rieff. This is his account of his mother’s refusal to accept the fact that this time she was dying and his guilt of fueling this self-delusion of hers. Rieff questions the usefulness of a narrative in conveying any sort of knowledge or assuaging the existential torment in the face of death; least of all, in offering any amount of consolation. As he writes, “[a]rt has always been my mother’s solace
. . . But not the least of the cruelties of her death was that what had sustained, inspired, and informed her in life made it so much harder for her to die.” Far from reaching a closure, he laments: “I still cannot believe there was nothing I could do to help” (Swimming 170).
Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, then, can be read anew as Sontag’s own illness narratives, a desperate ritual of healing, of surviving against the odds of her disease (Jurecic 25-26). Attacking certain metaphors through metaphor, this would then be
Sontag’s way of dealing with cancer, her cancer, at a very specific historical moment, when, culturally speaking, the disease was still through its dark ages. Her need to distance herself from her own predicament could also be detected in her rushing into an analysis of the AIDS crisis, understanding it as much worse than cancer—and in many ways it was, but not in terms of effective cure. And while among the intentions of Illness as Metaphor was to expose standard practises of clinical medicine, like keeping the diagnosis secret from the patient, the backwash of thematizing the negative effect of metaphors is obvious not only in other works of cultural criticism and personal narratives but also in texts of medical history. The list is long; Jurecic has done an impressive job bringing together scientific and literary narratives that have been influenced by Sontag’s handling of cancer metaphors.
Dakari 54
Further thoughts
The legacy of Sontag’s polemical essays has significantly influenced scholarship in
Medical Humanities 4 and Narrative Medicine, 5 and has to a great extent shaped its foundational core. As this field has evolved, so have certain attitudes towards Sontag’s argument. Below I illustrate two cases of scholars who like Sontag, have been through cancer and were tempted to employ her dual citizenship imagery, attesting to a distrust of punitive metaphors through an opulent metaphor. In Letting Stories Breathe: A Socio-Narratology
(2010), Frank departs from the relationship between narrative and illness to explore the restorative role of stories as a fundamental means of being in the world and connecting with others. He outlines a comprehensive theoretical and methodological approach to the interpretation and analysis of narratives and seeks to breathe new life to a thriving world (of stories) “that Susan Sontag laments as being lost” (1). Even though he was himself drawn to the allure of the metaphoric tropes suggested by Sontag, as one sees in his earlier seminal work The Wounded Storyteller (1995), he never lost his faith in the power of narrative. Like
Sontag, he wrote his treatise on illness having resided in the “kingdom of the sick.” Unlike
Sontag, however, he treasured the meaning-making process along this journey. Encouraging
4 The rising field of Medical Humanities is, according to Thomas R. Cole, Nathan S. Carlin, and Ronald A. Carson, an “inter- and multidisciplinary field that explores contexts, experiences, and critical and conceptual issues in medicine and health care, while supporting professional identity formation” (ix). It is called into being by society’s needs and problems that cannot be adequately addressed “within the boundaries set by traditional disciplines and/or methods” (4). The courses taught in medical humanities departments range among literature, history, philosophy, religious studies, and social science. Some of the topics explored are the history of medical technology, death and dying, the ethics of caregiving, and suffering and hope. The ultimate aim of this field is to educate students in medical profession how to develop critical thinking and empathy in order to be able to treat the whole person instead of the disease alone. 5 Narrative Medicine, which shares goals with the Medical Humanities, is a more specialized and highly practical field that seeks to situate storytelling at the center of the practice of medicine. Rita Charon, Professor of Clinical Medicine and Director of the Program in Narrative Medicine at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons coined the term in 2001. In her seminal work, Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness, Charon defines narrative medicine as “medicine practiced with narrative competence . . . at once attuned to the individual patient, replenishing to the individual professional, dutiful in generating and imparting medicine’s knowledge, and cognizant of the responsibilities incurred by the public trust in medicine” (10). The development of narrative skills in students of medical professions, which is generally absent from their respective programs of study, is of vital importance, in Charon’s view, as it can resolve many of the urgent charges against medical practice and training, for example its impersonality, detachment, fragmentation, self-interestedness, and lack of social conscience.
Dakari 55 us to value stories “that surround and circulate through our lives,” he invites us to discover their immanence and transformative potential once we become attentive to them (Letting
Stories Breathe 1).
In a similar vein, Martha Stoddard Holmes, Professor of Literature and Writing
Studies at the California State University, wrote her essay, “After Sontag: Reclaiming
Metaphors” (2011), in order to serve a two-fold objective. First, she exposes, like Diedrich and Jurecic, the danger that lurks behind Sontag’s argument against metaphors. To exclude an integral component of our conceptual system, she maintains, is to starve ourselves of expression and creative recovery. “In calling for an end to metaphoric thinking about illness,” she explains, “Sontag may have unwittingly lessened patients’ already marginal power”
(266). The other aspect of Holmes’ critique is to recover her own story, which she had consistently suppressed “in part because of Sontag’s substantial power as a public intellectual and her text’s impact on my own intellectual products” (“After Sontag” 267). Stoddard
Holmes internalized this prohibition and found herself starving for expression and “creative renewal” through narratives about her very own illness experience. According to both Frank and Stoddard Holmes, the renewed task of the humanities should be to constructively employ metaphors into the creation and interpretation of narratives rather than succumbing to the confining stereotypes they have once promoted.
Even though Sontag’s judgment has lost much of its impact today, indeed because medical knowledge and intervention have significantly evolved, and society has learned to be more tolerant to the sight of illness and more impervious to its mythology, a certain degree of unsustained mystification still remains. I would like to consider as example a recent publication, the Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of
Cancer (2010) by Siddhartha Mukherjee, an Indian-born American physician and oncologist.
The book is an exhaustive account of the course of the human struggle with the disease for
Dakari 56 more than five thousand years. I would like to rest on two words in particular, “emperor” and
“biography,” as they sum up the conceptual metaphors around cancer and their cultural imprints. If malady is something to feel appalled by, one can imagine the feelings stirred by the “emperor of maladies.” And, as it suits an emperor, a biography is provided. Although a biography is usually composed after the death of the individual whose life is registered, in cancer’s case this biography is being written while the emperor is still alive. So cancer not only is the worst affliction a person would experience, but it also seems to be attributed the qualities of an entity, which transforms it from a state of being to a being.
While this attitude was very common in the Middle Ages, when the inception of most of the entity-related metaphors attached to cancer is to be traced, this book was published almost half a millennium of scientific breakthrough and cultural evolution later. Although the title of the book sounds unnecessarily propagandistic, and only capable of amplifying rather than abating the sense of helplessness, the truth that lies behind, namely that cancer indeed remains a riddle to a large extent, cannot be denied. This observation reflects the fact that cancer, like any other state in life, cannot exist outside the metaphorical, but also that the way it is metaphorically invested can largely affect one’s life.6
6 Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer inspired the development of a three-part, six-hour television series on PBS under the same title presented by documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, launched in March 2015. As advertised on the project’s web page, it is “the most comprehensive documentary on a single disease ever made,” covering “its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the 20th century to cure, control and conquer it, to a radical new understanding of its essence.” The series also makes extensive reference to the current status of cancer knowledge and treatment —“the dawn of an era in which cancer may become a chronic or curable illness rather than its historic death sentence in some forms” (“About the Film”). This initiative has received wide support by public broadcasting corporations, non-profit organizations, research institutions, as well as pharmaceutical industry and seeks to reshape public understanding of cancer and provide material for educators of all fields by means of the signature contribution of PBS television. Further information on and preview of the episodes available at: http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/cancer-emperor-of-all-maladies/about-film/overview/.
Dakari 57
Chapter 2
Theoretical and philosophical perspectives
on the experience and expression of suffering
On pain
“Etymologically, patient means sufferer,” Sontag writes (Illness 123). Suffering in illness denotes a distinctive, agonizing manner of being ill, and thus bifurcates into two dreaded conditions: pain and death. Even within the dramatically conspicuous forms of suffering to be associated with death, Sontag sees variations that derive from the specific illness mythologies attached to them. “In contrast to the soft death imputed to tuberculosis” she observes, illnesses like cancer and AIDS “[lead] to a hard death. The metaphorized illnesses that haunt the collective imagination are all hard deaths” (Illness 124).
David Bakan attempts to conceptualize the intimate relation of pain, illness, and death. “Pain,” he posits, “is the common companion of birth and growth, disease and death, and is a phenomenon deeply intertwined with the very question of human existence. It is among the most salient of human experiences; and it often precipitates questioning the meaning of life itself” (57). Illness, which is inextricably associated with suffering, is in fact
“one of pain’s most conspicuous manifestations” (3). Given its universally private nature, pain, though a common experience to all human beings, cannot be easily tamed to linguistic containment. It is, in fact, precisely because of this immanence that figurative language has been employed to compensate for the conceptual quandary it leaves us with.
As it was argued earlier, Sontag’s controversial stance on the effectiveness of metaphors is itself a manifestation of metaphors’ inexorable nature. Another case in point is a short story of hers, “Man With a Pain,” published in 1964. The protagonist experiments with various metaphors in order to find one that best conveys the fact that he is in pain. He begins
Dakari 58 with the metaphor of pain as a wound. But who has wounded him? And what metaphor should he use to refer to this wound? He thus ponders:
Either the wound is a contract (then there is a date of termination, when all obligations
are cancelled) or it is an inheritance (then it’s his until he can bequeath it to someone
else) or it is a promise (then he must keep it) or it is a task (then he must refuse it,
though he will be fired) or it is a gift (then he must try to cherish it before exchanging
it) or it is an ornament (then he must see if it’s appropriate) or it is a mistake (then he
must track down the person in error, himself or another, and patiently explain matters)
or it is a dream (then he must wait to wake up).
The choice he is to make will reflect both the way he experiences pain and the way he decides to communicate it. For, pain, though common to all living beings, is essentially a private experience; and though intensely felt, it is scarcely outspoken with precision.
The language of pain
The body in pain is a site where theological and scientific discourses converge. Bakan traces its mythological origins in Eve’s disobedience in the Garden of Eden and her condemnation “to bring forth children in sorrow.” The most prominent image of pain in western culture, he observes, is that of the Crucifixion, “undoubtedly one of the most painful forms of execution ever devised” (58). Bakan comments on the significance of the cross as a symbol of the meaning of pain. As he specifically states, “the major psychological use of
Christianity has been to overcome the essential loneliness and privacy of pain.” This unspeakable pain, Bakan explains, is what unites the entire Western Christian world under the same existential quest: “to overcome the essential loneliness and privacy of pain” (67).
In the modern medical context, there is scientific evidence that confirms the cultural assumption that the vocabulary of pain accompanied by high levels of anxiety draws on the
Dakari 59 crucifixion motif. In 1971, pain experts Ronald Melzack and Warren Torgerson developed the McGill Pain Questionnaire –an experimental tool in the study of the effects of various methods of pain management in a clinical setting (Melzack 277-99). It consists of three major classes of word descriptors, sensory, affective, and evaluative, that are used by patients to specify pain experience. Additionally, it contains a scale of intensity and other items to determine the properties of pain experience. The intensity scale in the measurement of pain ranges from “mild” to “excruciating,” the in-between words being “discomforting,”
“distressing,” and “horrible” (279). “Excruciating” is thus registered as the most intense sensory, affective, and evaluative descriptor of pain experience.
There is, however, an undeniably prescriptive effect of this pain questionnaire: the suggested pain descriptors have been proven to immensely affect the way patients recount (or have been taught to recount) their feelings, pain historian Joanna Bourke posits (152).
Evaluating the diagnostic effectiveness of the McGill Pain Questionnaire, Bourke draws on a number of experts on pain-languages researching between distinctive national and geographical groups. The dominant conclusion is that, “to the extent that culture and language may actually affect perception, thought, and cognition, then to that extent they may also affect the actual experiences of pain” (Bourke 151). As it will be discussed shortly, this observation attests to philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s assumptions of pain as a localized, taught behavior in human societies, rather than an ahistorical, collective axiom. In other words, it conveys not only the way people experience pain but also, significantly, how people
“ought to describe their pain” (Bourke 153), which can be restrictive, and counter-effective for the sufferer.
(In)expressibility of pain Prevalence of one vocabulary over another, which is obvious in the way medical discourse has substituted the religious one in modern times, does not necessarily stand for its
Dakari 60 full capacity to elucidate and control all aspects of the complex experience of pain. This elusiveness is immanent to pain, Elaine Scarry contends in her seminal work The Body in
Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1985). Scarry’s argument develops around three subjects: the difficulty of expressing physical pain, the political and perceptual complications that occur as a result of that difficulty, and the nature of both material and verbal expressibility—“the nature of human creation” (3).
Scarry’s discussion of the language-based inexpressibility of pain has routinely appeared in critical works for only what is to be found in the first few pages of the book’s introduction, that
[p]hysical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about
an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a
human being makes before language is learned. (4)
This is a very compelling point, echoing Virginia Woolf in her meditation “On Being Ill” that
“the merest schoolgirl when she falls in love has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her, but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry” (qtd. in Scarry 4). Her argument moves from the nature of pain as essentially non- representable in language—“unmaking the world,” which reaches its extreme deconstruction in cases of war and torture, when the body becomes itself a prison that intensified the subject’s pain. In the second half of her argument—“the making of the world,” she observes the innate capacity of human beings to make up for the linguistic discontinuities pain imposes. This is the nature of human creation, which exemplifies itself through the creation of artifacts and civilization. As Scarry posits, being in pain is in stark contrast with hearing that someone else is in pain. It is “at once something that cannot be denied and something that cannot be confirmed.” In this sense, “[t]o have pain is to have certainty; to hear about pain is to have doubt (13).
Dakari 61
The difficulty of articulating physical pain objectifies the sufferer in various domains.
A person in pain in the medical context is often thought to be an “unreliable narrator;” communication depends on the physician’s ability to put an order to a patient’s fragmented narrative. From the sufferer’s perspective, however, this encounter with the clinic leads to the opposite conclusion, “that physicians do not trust (hence hear) the human voice” (Scarry 6).
Approaching pain as solely an issue of biochemistry, Scarry implies, the medical account fails to contextualize the sufferer’s entire pain experience, bypassing the person in pain and simply focusing on the defective part through other more credible narratives: blood tests, X- rays, or CT scans.
That said, Scarry observes that there has been a different, more patient-centered approach to the management of pain and brings the McGill Pain Questionnaire as a case in point. With respect to the project’s objective to “[provide] an external image of interior events, the human voice, far from being untrustworthy, is capable of accurately exposing even the most resistant aspects of material reality [of pain]” (8).
Apart from the medical texts, Scarry notices, there are verbal documents that also reflect “the passage of pain into speech” (9). She refers to the publications of Amnesty
International, namely the transcripts of personal trials, the poems and various other narratives by artists, which enable a shared discourse and an insight to the aversiveness that is experienced within someone’s body. Another instance of putting pain into words is the courtroom, which promotes the representation of disenfranchised individuals pursuing compensation for the physical suffering induced to them. This aspect of entering language, in
Scarry’s view, involves impediments that ought to be resolved. The last instance of putting pain into words, and perhaps the one that interests us most, is art. Scarry goes on to juxtapose various literary works in order to highlight the rarity with which physical pain, as opposed to psychological suffering, is represented in literature.
Dakari 62
The part of Scarry’s argument that has to do with the language-destroying properties of pain lies behind a number of illness narratives, along with Sontag’s discussion on stereotypes around cancer. An example of this is Margaret Edson’s play Wit, where Vivian, a
Professor of Literature who has just been diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer, gradually realizes her diminished skill with words when it comes to articulating the excruciating pain of aggressive treatment at the hospital. Likewise, the ill characters in Michael Cristofer’s The
Shadow Box suffer from an unspecified illness, which is itself an indication that this illness
“has to be cancer” (Sontag 109). They try to tame language into communication, which as we shall see in the second part of this study, is problematic.
The first part of Scarry’s argument has been incorporated to the critical canon as her case on the language-destroying effect of physical pain. Morris is among the first to notice this (The Culture of Pain 6). 7 There is a growing body of scholarship that exemplifies a profound distrust to this attitude on pain—I prefer, however, not to address this issue as
“Scarry’s view on pain” because she offers medical and non-medical evidence for the opposite. Jurecic, for example, states: “Although Scarry discusses the potential for creativity after pain, this part of her argument has been overshadowed by the cultural force of her claim that physical pain ‘actively destroys’ language” (51). Additionally, she stresses the fact that
Scarry does not consider in detail the reception of artistic responses to pain (50). Jurecic goes on to support her argument by drawing on foundational texts on illness and narrative, such as
Arthur Kleinman’s, The Illness Narratives, and Arthur Frank’s, The Wounded Storyteller.
She also considers important ethnographic studies, such as those by Jean E. Jackson and
Byron J. Good, which adopt Scarry’s misconceived position on pain’s resistance to language to the point that “their theoretical framework prevents them from listening fully and attentively” (51).
7 See also Frank, Wounded Storyteller 103, 173; Stoddard-Holmes and Chambers 131-33; Diedrich 79; Jurecic 44; Bourke 5.
Dakari 63
I would rather disagree with Jurecic’s profound distrust in Scarry as making a case for the sweeping misrepresentation of pain in language (43, 51, 62, 65). In fact, Scarry makes a clear distinction between forms of extreme suffering (i.e. torture) and the chronic pain of trauma or illness, emphasizing the reconstructive potential of language in the latter. It also happens that the borders between the two blur. Still the increasing number of narratives that tackle various forms of suffering severely questions the widely-perceived validity of Scarry’s misconceived position (Jurecic 44).
Joanna Bourke notices a major ontological fallacy in Scarry’s approach to pain as existing outside language. It is dangerous, she states, to refer to pain as though it was an entity because “it risks making the pain an independent agent” (Bourke 4). In order to advance her argument on Scarry’s fallacy, Bourke refers to Geoffrey Galt Harpam’s view that such an argument
treats as an immediate and monochrome physical experience, a baseline of reality,
what is in fact a combination of sensations, dispositions, cultural circumstances, and
explanations, a phenomenon involving body, mind, and culture. [Scarry] has, in other
words, misconceived the character of pain precisely by giving it a character, by
treating it as a fact—a brute fact, the first and final fact—rather than as an
interpretation. (qtd. in Bourke 4-5)
As Bourke sees it, Scarry “has fallen into the trap” of treating figures of speech, like pain
“bite” and “stabs,” like “descriptions of an actual entity” (5), much like the author of The
Emperor of All Maladies has, in treating metaphoric thinking about cancer as evidence of a being. Pain, Bourke evocatively advocates, should be seen as “a way-of-being in the world or a way of naming an event” not an entity in itself (8). It should be viewed as an event, something that is part of one’s life and is conditioned by personal, physiological, psychological, social, and cultural specificities. As Bourke points out, “pain describes the
Dakari 64 way we experience something not what is experienced,” pointing to the differentiation between “what pain is” and “what pain is like” (7). As event, pain enables us to avoid reifying it and overloading it with attributes of an entity (Bourke 12).
By acknowledging the elusiveness of pain as predominantly a language problem, however, literary, anthropological, and social studies have eventually neglected what the second part of Scarry’s argument proclaims: that once the extreme-scale pain subsides, the subject’s capacity for metaphor returns; this is when one bear witness to the birth, or rebirth, of language (172). Scarry is not solely concerned with the difficulty in putting physical pain into words. She also addresses the potential of overcoming it by means of the very nature of human creation, “which manifests itself everywhere,” on the one hand “fully present in the most fragile and singular of outcomes” like everyday objects, while, on the other, “fully present in the overarching structures of civilization whose scale places them beyond the reach of sensory as well as, perhaps, of intellectual apprehension” (177). Having this in mind,
Diedrich admits that “[Scarry’s] work is often read pessimistically” (162).
In the same spirit with Diedrich, Stoddard-Holmes re-examines Scarry’s position under her newly acquired perspective on illness, as a result of her own diagnosis of ovarian cancer, and the ensuing need to find the right words to talk about it. She is “startled to see that [Scarry] herself attends to chronic pain . . . and is careful to acknowledge that not all physical pain does eradicate language” (Holmes and Chambers 133). She then comes to the conclusion that
[p]erhaps the fault is not in The Body in Pain, . . . but in how we have tended to read
it: drawn to the keen lines of acute pain and the attractions of the unmaking of the
world, we have bypassed the places in the text where the world is never quite unmade,
but remade all the same. . . . What we may need is not to dismantle The Body in Pain,
Dakari 65
but to look at a wider range of relationships between pain and language. (Holmes and
Chambers 133)
Even as an anesthetized patient is convenient in allowing the surgeon to intervene in order to provide treatment but also pursue research objectives, a patient discouraged from using his/her idiosyncratic voice as aesthetically unrefined serves the theorist, Holmes argues
(Holmes and Chambers 132).
Seen together, Sontag’s devaluation of narrative in illness discourse and the misperceived extrapolation of Scarry’s statement to all expression of pain essentially betray not the sufferer’s but the interpretative system’s inadequacy. The only language pain disrupts, in this perspective, is the institutional language, which has heavily relied on the silencing of the suffering body-self for the sake of its own articulacy (Holmes 132; Jurecic 55).
Pain as taught behavior/social performance
The concurrent arbitrariness and reconstructive potential inherent to pain discourse, as propounded by Scarry, can be effectively elucidated through philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein’s understanding of the role of ordinary language in communicating pain. His main line of argument regarding the language of pain, expressed in his Philosophical
Investigations, is that it is rooted in the individual’s private sensations and the attempt to phrase them out. He posits: “If language is to be a means of communication, there must be agreement not only in definitions but also (queer as this may sound) in judgements” (89).
Social interaction is thus regulated by certain rules of conduct, which are expected to yield certain responses.
Shared codes, linguistic or other, serve the objectives of this interaction, which is not only to communicate with others but also to establish oneself in a desired way and expect the desired reactions. Sociologist Ervin Goffman examines this social interaction in terms of a
Dakari 66 theatrical performance in his seminal work, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959).
In his book, Goffman posits that social interaction is basically a performance, “all the activity of a given participant on a given occasion which serves to influence in any way any of the other participants.” Expanding on the metaphor of social life as a theatrical performance,
Goffman even develops concepts such as “front” and “back” regions that echo the front and backstage of the theatre. This performance transmits information about the individual, which
“helps to define the situation, enabling others to know in advance what he [sic] will expect of them and what they may expect of him [sic]. Informed in these ways, the others will know how best to act in order to call forth a desired response from him [sic]” (Goffman 13).
A problem occurs however once a private sensation, like pain, which cannot be previously agreed upon by all interlocutors, is to be addressed. In Scarry’s words, to hear that one is in pain is essentially to have doubt. Wittgenstein asks, “How do words refer to sensations? . . . How is the connection between the name and the thing named set up?” He refines the previous question into “how does a human being learn the meaning of the names of sensations?” (89).
To provide an answer, Wittgenstein goes back to “the primitive, the natural expressions of the sensation” with which words are associated and used in its place. He concludes that, to arrive at any meaning, words for pain must be devised and learned.
Reflecting Goffman’s position, this process constitutes a social performance through the individual’s repository of acquired patterns of behavior. This is something that a person learns early in life and that continuously refines and revises in order to communicate with others (Wittgenstein 89). And, as in the rest of our interactions in social contexts, these patterns, or communicative acts, are normative. The language, gestures, and facial expressions we use in order to express pain are not simply descriptive of our pain experience; as Bourke notes, “they contain veiled instructions on how people should act” (17).
Dakari 67
Wittgenstein’s reflections show that “pain” can only be accepted as a primary element, even if a private reality, around which communication is built, and not “as a preconceived idea to which reality must correspond” (51). This leads us to the assumption that a definition of pain is always elusive and inadequate: at once indubitable and doubted, this private sensation is channeled into a behavioral system conditioned by historical, social, and cultural parameters. Reactions to pain may be visceral but their public performance is largely the result of a culturally invented, taught and internalized behavior. When, for instance, a child cries due to an intense painful stimulus, his parents take on to teach him/her exclamations and later sentences. In other words, “they teach the child new pain-behaviour”
Wittgenstein concludes (89).
As he cautions us, however, “the verbal expression of pain replaces crying and does not describe it” (89). There ought to be a mediating language, therefore, between pain and its expression, as this is a private sensation. Were we to construe collective experiences as a linguistic code, accepted and understood by everyone who speaks this language, and amenable to translation by a non-native observer, private sensations would be impossible to be codified successfully in a shared linguistic system. “The individual words of this language are to refer to what can only be known to the person speaking; to his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand the language,” as Wittgenstein puts it (88-
89).
Wittgenstein breaks down language as an established composite sign system to the point of returning language to the primary act of naming as Socrates describes it in the
Theaetetus:
[T]here is no definition of the primary elements—so to speak—out of which we and
everything else are composed; for everything that exists in its own right can only be
named, no other determination is possible, neither that it is nor that it is not. . . . But
Dakari 68
what exists in its own right has to be . . . named without any other determination. In
consequence it is impossible to give an account of any primary element; for it,
nothing is possible but the bare name; its name is all it has. (21)
For Socrates therefore, the essence of speech lies not in the names but in their composition and transformation into descriptive language.
The feeling of pain may—strictly speaking—exist in a private sphere, but pain as an event cannot exist outside the social. In opposition to the privacy and inexpressibility of pain as argued by Scarry, Bourke insists on an elaborate code of communication people-in-pain possess: “the cry ‘I am hurting!’ seeks not only to convey information, but also to encourage collaboration,” which is what makes pain expression “always a public practice” (18). Social and political significations, according to Bourke, co-exist with the physiological body and consistently call the subject-in-pain into social action. The expression of pain is a normalized behavior that is susceptible to changes. It is imitated, learned, and performed whenever the subject-in-pain seeks relief, care, compassion, or even confirmation of one’s eligibility for inclusion to a social benefits plan.
To partially refute Scarry, not all language is inadequate to express pain as a primary element. Even this difficulty is abundantly articulate once we all agree on the fact that pain is indeed a private sensation which differs from subject to subject and which we can only assume through personal knowledge. Judith Perkins elaborates on this inherent incompleteness of language in communicating pain and points to the need for an inter- subjective approach to the complex process of social interaction. The power of discourse, she states,
inheres precisely in this remarkable ability it has to set its agenda and mask the fact
that its representation both has an agenda and that there could be other representations
and other agendas. . . . A representation of ‘reality’ must leave something out even as
Dakari 69
it puts something in. A culture’s discourse represents not the ‘real’ world but rather a
world mediated through the social categories, relations and institutions operating in
the specific culture. (2-3)
Pain discourse, emerging as a system of taught and shared behavioral patterns, and, as such, amenable to interpretation and translation, is equally culture-specific, and conditioned by historical, social, and generic factors. Though we have learned to think of pain and suffering as self-evident, being part of human nature, it is exactly because of this quality they too change over time. In Perkins’s words, “[human nature] is not something we possess but rather something we acquire through the various self-understandings and self-representations our cultures offer us” (4).
The repetitive patterns of prescribed response to pain lead to naming pain, Bourke concludes. This process “teaches” bodies how to react: the social body affects the physiological in an endless cyclical process of inscriptions (19-20). It is when metaphoric language weighs in to shape the way we understand, experience, and express illness and suffering.
From pain’s metaphors to its performance
One of Wittgenstein’s allegories might be of use for making sense of one’s own pain as opposed to the pain of others. He has us suppose everyone had a box, which contained a beetle. However, no one was able to see what the others’ box contained. As people only new what the beetle really was by looking into their private box, it was quite possible for everyone to have something different in their box. Hence, everyone would have a completely different idea of what a beetle really stands for. Indeed, the content of the box might change regularly; or, the box might even be empty. Regardless of what really was in the box, everyone had a very specific idea of what “a beetle in a box” was. The word “beetle” then would be what
Dakari 70 they needed in order to establish communication and what would further constitute public experience. If we substitute the word “beetle” with the word “pain,” as Bourke suggests (7), then Wittgenstein’s language game reveals that it does not really matter that one cannot have direct access to someone else’s private experience so long as they have agreed on a shared
“language”—a metaphor, as it were—that keeps communication flowing.
In their study on metaphors and the way they shape and reflect our social life, Lakoff and Johnson posit that “the human conceptual system is metaphorically structured and defined” and therefore “all language . . . is fundamentally metaphorical” (4). Metaphors, they hold, are not merely poetical or rhetorical devices of embellishment, nor can they entirely be eschewed, as Sontag suggests. Even if we could see beyond them, this would be only possible by means of other metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson 239). So integrated is metaphor to our functioning, that “[i]t is as though the ability to comprehend experience through metaphor were a sense, like seeing or touching, or hearing” (4). Even as they affirm metaphors as a universal cognitive apparatus, Lakoff and Johnson acknowledge its richly varying origins: “[T]he way we have been brought up to perceive our world is not the only way. . . . [I]t is possible to see beyond the ‘truths’ of our culture” (239).
The realities metaphors define are thus as many as the cultures they originate from and as the individuals that conceive of and use them. As Lakoff and Johnson observe,
[m]etaphors may create realities for us, especially social realities. A metaphor may
thus be a guide for future action. Such actions will, of course, fit the metaphor. This
will, in turn, reinforce the power of the metaphor to make experience coherent. In this
sense metaphors can be self-fulfilling prophecies. (156)
Metaphors therefore both shape and are shaped by experience. In this perspective, they are able to equally articulate and inflict pain.
Sontag’s thesis on the injurious effect of metaphors implies that such metaphors, as
Dakari 71 for example CANCER IS A BATTLE, CANCER IS DIVINE WRATH, CANCER IS A VERDICT OF
FAILURE, or worse, CANCER EQUALS DEATH, echo what J. L. Austin termed performative utterances: utterances which, once occurring within a “total speech situation,” a situation, that is, which invokes certain conventions at the moment of utterance (i.e. a cancer diagnosis), they do what the say: they stir wartime reactions, pose a moral threat, condemn someone’s personality, or lead to death. Austin defines speech acts as “illocutionary,” meaning those that, in saying, do what they say. He distinguishes them from “perlocutionary” speech acts, which generate certain effects as a consequence. The former contain a strong sense of the performative, as opposed to the latter (98, 99). Sontag’s observations suggest that cancer metaphors have thus become ingrained to collective consciousness that they are often said to dramatically precipitate the effects of disease (Illness 6). It is on the toxicity of taboos of former times that she bases her plea for a radical denunciation of all metaphor, which only stirs further secrecy and medical paternalism.
Butler’s thoughts in Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative come in partial support of Sontag’s scepticism regarding the punitive metaphors of cancer as a “linguistic injury.” Butler’s position elucidates Sontag’s case on the injurious effect of the wrong metaphors—I would not, however, extend Butler’s argument to the point of affirming
Sontag’s plea for de-metaphorization as that would contradict the fundamental structure of our conceptual system according to Lakoff and Johnson. Butler states that “[t]o claim that language injures, or . . . that ‘words wound’ is to combine linguistic and physical vocabularies. The use of the term such as ‘wound’ suggests that language can act in ways that parallel the infliction of physical pain and injury” (Excitable Speech 4). Be it the “verbal assault” of racist speech—or the nocebo effect of a cancer diagnosis announcement8—such formulations suggest that
8 The “nocebo effect,” which stands for the exact opposite of placebo, can be roughly defined as the unconscious somatization of negative associations around the side effects of specific medication or the expected symptoms of a disease.
Dakari 72
linguistic injury acts like physical injury, but the use of the simile suggests that this is,
after all, a comparison of unlike things. Consider though that the comparison might as
well imply that the two can be compared only metaphorically. Indeed, it appears that
there is no language specific to the problem of linguistic injury, which is, as it were,
forced to draw its vocabulary from physical injury. In this sense, it appears that the
metaphorical connection between physical and linguistic vulnerability is essential to
the description of linguistic vulnerability itself. (Excitable Speech 4)
In further elucidation of her point, Butler draws on Scarry’s formulation that “the threat of violence is a threat to language.” She restricts her argument to the language-shattering aspects of torture, however, where “the one tortured loses the ability to document in language the effect of torture; thus one of the effects of torture is to efface its own witness” (6).
Meditating on the degrees of agency in language, Butler turns to Toni Morrison, who said:
“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives” (qtd. in Butler, Excitable Speech 6). In these words, Morrison, and Butler after her, corroborate the less prominent aspect of the contemplation on pain as witnessing the rebirth of language and of the subject’s agency in Scarry’s argument.
It is important to consider Sontag’s polemical view within this critical context. In order to set the ground for launching her harsh criticism against figurative language, against the expressive potential of narrative, Sontag, it seems, had to locate it between the two extremes: the dark cultural bogey and lucid clinical knowledge. Though she asserts her intention to purify, elucidate, and set language free, she has propagandized it, I posit, into yet more obscure and encumbering associations.
Dakari 73
Conclusion
The theoretical and philosophical views discussed in this chapter aim at deconstructing the fixed conceptions with respect to the use of metaphor in communicating pain and suffering. Wittgenstein’s, Austin’s, and Butler’s positions, in particular, elucidate the contention of this study that the pain and suffering involved in cancer can and should be communicated through metaphor and imagination; and that, perhaps, this is the only possible way to communicate the elusiveness of this private experience.
In the pages that follow, my intention is to examine the viability of both Scarry’s and
Sontag’s positions with regards to the inexpressibility of pain and the deconstruction of language, and the exclusion of the topic of cancer from the realm of the aesthetic. To this end, I examine the idea of the Kantian sublime as aesthetic judgement and as a mode of presenting the unpresentable as seen in Lyotard’s writings on Postmodernism and the sublime. I elaborate on pain (contained in illness) as an indisputable event, a “phrase” or presentation, according to Lyotard, which, though language-defying, still stands as an utterance—be it elliptical or silent. I depart from Austin’s idea of illocutionary performative speech acts to explore the fragmented and incomplete expression of cancer experience as a case on aestheticity empowered by the conditions of the performance event, as seen in Erika
Fischer-Lichte’s The Transformative Power of Performance. In this perspective, once suffering is presented in front of an audience, it is made into art. Whether this is “good” or
“bad” art does not concern the present study—a different thesis could as well deal with this aspect of criticism. This spectacle, though, cannot be an easy one, as those who witness a pain event will likely experience uncomfortable spectatorship. The fear, awe, horror, or precarious delight spectators may feel—what is known as the philosophical sublime—will be discussed next.
Dakari 74
Chapter 3
Theorizing the unpresentability of cancer:
Jean Francois Lyotard’s elaboration of Kantian sublime aesthetics
Sontag’s aesthetic considerations as a critical fallacy: a Kantian perspective
What Sontag has in mind when she declares that cancer cannot be aestheticized becomes clear once it is examined in the context of her criticism prior to her illness treatises. In her
1964 essay “Against Interpretation” she elaborates on the necessary flight from the
“reactionary, stifling” modern project of interpretation. The doctrines of modern systems of hermeneutics, as for instance the Marxian and Freudian ones, assign interpretation the task of digging for meaning; and as “the modern style of interpretation excavates, [it] destroys” (6).
Indeed, reflecting back to her essay on cancer ten years after its publication, she writes, in
AIDS and Its Metaphors, that her intention had been to “apply that quixotic, highly polemical strategy, ‘against interpretation,’ to the real world this time. To the body” (Illness 99). In this perspective, cancer as a subject matter is overburdened with “content”—what she calls “the perennial, never consummated project of interpretation” (“Against Interpretation” 5), which she considers to be “a hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism” (5). She sees the “effusion of interpretations or art” as “[poisoning] our sensibilities” (7). Even as excess content accumulates by means of interpretation, the word is impoverished and depleted. Her polemic, therefore, against illness metaphors is, in essence, a plea “against interpretation:” to “regard cancer as if it were just a disease... [w]ithout ‘meaning’” (Illness
99).
Sontag does not bargain wounding metaphors with useful ones. She just breaks the transaction and lets the hostage get shot. By devaluing the transformative potential of illness art over the detached analysis of the critical essay, and by transferring the body’s rights of
Dakari 75 representation to the dissecting, technical narrative of biomedicine, Sontag all but promises a healthier way of being ill. With no metaphor to transcend the physical and discursive limitations of illness, the sufferer is reduced to a set of biochemical glitches. Sontag’s radical excision of all content is, in this sense, a blow not only to the aesthetics but also to the ethics of representation.
Departing from Rancière’s basic definition of aesthetics as a word that “does not refer to a theory sensibility, taste, and pleasure” but “the specific mode of being of whatever falls within the domain of art” (22), I argue that there is a conceptual/critical fallacy evident in
Sontag’s phrasing: she identifies the “aesthetic” or “artistic” with something by definition beautiful, eroticized, or pleasurable in a disinterested and self-sufficient way. In other words, she equals aestheticization with beautification, which would in this context stand for recreating illness as something beautiful and pleasant. Of course, turning illness and suffering into something that our senses identify as beautiful, in the way a classic sculpture, a
Romantic painting, or a Beethoven symphony is, would be at least difficult—if not entirely impossible, undesirable, and certainly non-commercial, as I will be arguing. However, her intention is not only to question the possibility of beautification, or romanticization of cancer, which in this sense would mean rendering it through metaphor into something else by means of a chain of conceptual associations. Cancer of course, has been heavily metaphorized—
Sontag argues, though, that the chain of metaphorical associations involved is totally wrong.
But what if there were a different path of conceptual processes that would possibly lead to positive associations? Sontag thinks that this is impossible: cancer as human experience ought to be entirely excluded from what is known in Kantian philosophy of aesthetics as aesthetic judgement—the way we construct a sense of taste that reflects our response to objects in nature and mental life. As such, Sontag posits, cancer as a state of being and as a
Dakari 76 state of mind is unpresentable in terms of aesthetic judgement due to its inherent abjection, its loathsomeness so to speak.
In this way, Sontag fuels a major misconception with respect to both illness and art: first, she renders cancer a metaphor for the ultimate abjection, which to Julia Kristeva is that which “does not respect borders, positions, rules”(4)—partly correct, considering the physiology of this disease, which indeed stands for the ultimate boundlessness and disorder suggested by an unspecified error that leads to the excessive proliferation of cells without a determined purpose. Kristeva also identifies as abject “the in-between, the ambiguous, the composite,” the loathsome and unclean that derives from bodily secretions, pointing to excessive materiality or putrefaction, which is also “death infecting life” (3-4). Arguing for the diseased body’s abomination, Sontag thus almost unwittingly precipitates the effects caused by the wrong kinds of metaphor instead of revoking them. To Sontag, cancer is all about death infecting life and not just in allegorical terms.
This leads us to the second misconception evident in her argument: that since cancer is disgusting it cannot be presented in art. Paradoxically, the entire Illness as Metaphor is an inventory of literary works on tuberculosis and cancer. Cancer does appear in literary imagination, therefore, or hides between the lines so to speak, and she writes a book about it.
But let us return to identifying the second misconception: What she means by aestheticization, as already mentioned, is the common perception of the term, namely making something beautiful to our senses. Within this aesthetic framework, illness art especially when cancer-related, is rejected as less-than-art, or non-art, a position also shared by Arlene
Croce in her criticism on Bill T. Jones’s 1995 dance performance Still/Here (discussed in chapter five of this study).
Sontag’s emphasis on form, wherein lies the beauty of art and which is central to the process or artistic creation and its reception, should be examined in terms of Immanuel
Dakari 77
Kant’s philosophy of aesthetics as elaborated in his 1790 work Critique of the Power of
Judgement, also known as his third Critique, following his Critique of Pure Reason and
Critique of Practical Reason. His endeavor, if it were ever possible to be summarized in a few lines, is to look into mental life: to examine what constitutes the principles, scope, and limitations of thinking. In the first two Critiques, he examines the a priori principles (or transcendental principles) of whatever we can possibly think and what can be said about our ethical life; what we ought to think about, what our obligations are, how to restrain our desires and so on. In the third Critique, which is of interest in the present discussion, Kant develops his idea of what constitutes taste, what forms our aesthetic judgement when we encounter a work of art, bifurcating into two different moments, of beauty and the sublime.
Here, a priori principles cannot apply, since taste is fundamentally a subjective form of judgement.
In the chapter “Analytic of the Beautiful” in Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant states that beauty is not a property of an artwork or natural phenomenon, but is instead a consciousness of the pleasure that derives from the “free play” of the imagination and the understanding. As he writes,
In order to decide whether or not something is beautiful, we do not relate the
representation by means of understanding to the object for cognition, but rather
relate it by means of the imagination (perhaps combined with the understanding) to
the subject and its feeling of pleasure or displeasure. The judgment of taste is
therefore not a cognitive judgment, hence not a logical one, but is rather aesthetic,
by which is understood one whose determining ground cannot be other than
subjective. (89)
In particular, Kant associates the beautiful with anything that possesses a certain form, is purposive in this form and thereby finite; it pleases without any further interest; it pleases
Dakari 78 universally; and, it ultimately aims at satisfaction (96-123). A pure judgement of taste is in fact subjective insofar as it refers to the emotional response of the subject and is based upon nothing but esteem for an object itself: the satisfaction it yields is in fact a disinterested pleasure, and we feel that pure judgements of taste, i.e. judgements of beauty, lay claim to universal validity (122-24). With respect to the above delineation of what a judgement of beauty entails, a cancer-related spectacle, based on deviant physical explicitness and upsetting content, cannot be considered beautiful as it is.
Beauty however, is only one dimension of aesthetic judgement, which is contained merely in its own possibilities. In fact, an object is beautiful precisely owing to its very limitations. Another feature of aesthetic judgement according to Kant is the sublime. In the chapter “Analytic of the Sublime,” Kant identifies the sublime as an aesthetic quality that, like beauty, is subjective. As he writes, “the beautiful coincides with the sublime in that both please for themselves” and that “both presuppose neither a judgement of sense nor a logically determining judgement, but a judgement of reflection” (128). Unlike beauty, however, the sublime refers to an indeterminate relationship between the faculties of the imagination and of reason, and shares the character of moral judgments in the use of reason. What stimulates the feeling of the sublime, according to Kant, “[appears] in its form to be contrapurposive for our power of judgement, unsuitable for our faculty of presentation, and as it were doing violence to our imagination” (129). It therefore calls for the intervention of reason as the senses alone fail to grasp it. The sublime, thus, is boundless, formless, and involves us in a painful process of understanding.
The feeling of the sublime, according to Kant, is divided into two distinct modes (the mathematical and the dynamical sublime) and describes two subjective moments, which call for the collaboration of the faculty of the imagination with that of reason. The mathematical sublime lies in the failure of the imagination to comprehend natural objects that appear
Dakari 79 boundless and formless, or appear “absolutely great” (128-134). This failure is then recovered through the pleasure taken in reason's avowal of the concept of infinity. In this way, the faculty of reason proves itself superior to our imperfect faculty of the senses (131-
140). In the dynamical sublime there is the sense of annihilation of our sensory capacities as the imagination tries to comprehend an alarm-instilling entity, i.e. “bold, overhanging . . . threatening cliffs,” “thunder clouds towering up into the heavens,” “volcanoes with their all- destroying violence,” “hurricanes with the devastation they leave behind,” “the boundless ocean,” or “a lofty waterfall” (144). This power of nature threatens us but through the resistance of reason to such sensible annihilation, the subject feels a pleasure and a sense of the human moral “vocation” (145).
Its attractiveness, in other words, lies in the perspective the onlooker adopts, who finds sublime objects attractive as long as one contemplates them “in safety” (144). This satisfaction, which, unlike that taken in the beautiful, is negative, is situated in “a feeling of the deprivation of the freedom of imagination by itself,” according to Kant (152). This astonishment, which borders on terror, is immediately followed by the awareness of staying on the safe side. We contemplate chaos, therefore, without being actually threatened by it.
This awareness of the privation of chaos and the delight taken in safe contemplation of what will not happen to us is a very useful analogy when in comes to analyzing disturbing spectacles in performance and elsewhere.
What is special about the sublime as an aesthetic response, and what I think Sontag entirely left out from her discussion on the art-potential in illness, is the fact that the sublime, though not satisfactory in the way the beautiful is, gratifies us through the complex and
“painful” mental processes it leads us into, as “even to be able to think of demonstrates a faculty of the mind that surpasses every measure of the senses” (Kant 134). Unlike the beautiful, the sublime engages us in entirely different ways: it is the great, the awe-inspiring,
Dakari 80 the overpowering, or the indescribable, both as a natural phenomenon and as a state of mind; it causes unrest, threat, even terror, and yet it is gratifying exactly because it reminds us of our capacity to contemplate our own shortcomings, imperfections, and dignity. It holds a mirror out to the infinite and gives us an authentic sense of ourselves in the face of this wonder/terror/aesthetic experience.
Likewise, illness breaks the illusion of immortality that usually goes hand-in-hand with the everyday givenness of health. My point is that cancer, or any other dreadful condition that we may face, awakens us into the reality of our bodies, reminding us of their imperfections and presentness. Art that deals with this essentially human experience, may not be beautiful, nor does it operate under conventional aesthetic principles; it brings us however to a more genuine, authentic state of being within our bodies and in the world. An aesthetic of the sublime, therefore, may interestingly illuminate those aspects of an art form that tackles darker subject matters like suffering, illness, and dying—what this study will be addressing as the unpresentable.
To this end, the idea of presenting the unpresentable that lies behind the aesthetics of the sublime is examined. The description of the sublime as negative pleasure in Kantian terms, elucidated by Jean-Francois Lyotard as the aesthetic output of the unpresentable in presentation, is the most appropriate framework, I posit, for the theorization of the aesthetics of cancer in performance, particularly in the context of postmodern culture—what is roughly perceived as the period that spans from the 1940s on and is characterized by its rejection of systematic philosophies, grand narratives, as well as by arbitrariness, artificiality, and local, multivocal, or marginal narratives.9 This approach intends to prove Sontag’s position on the impossible aesthetics of cancer not only as an inadequately sustained opinion, but also as the understated self-informed narrative that derives from her own illness.
9 This general description of postmodern culture is based on Connor’s Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary; and Jameson’s “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.”
Dakari 81
Jean-Francois Lyotard’s observations on postmodernism and the Kantian sublime:
Toward an aesthetic idiom for presenting the unpresentable.
The formlessness and the questioning of the limits of representation that characterize the aesthetic of the sublime have been extensively addressed in Jean Francois Lyotard’s writings with particular emphasis on those characteristics of postmodern art attending to the retreat from “the promise of enlightenment” and the problem of legitimation (Shaw 115). In his seminal work, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Lyotard defines the postmodern as “incredulity towards metanarratives,” where metanarratives are understood as totalizing stories about history that legitimate knowledge as well as the institutions governing social practices of such knowledge—as, for instance, the Enlightenment narrative and its rationalization of public and mental life extending to scientific and technological activities, politics, and the arts (xxiv, xxv).
Alongside metanarratives, Lyotard introduces the concept of grand narratives, “such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth” which are the governing principles of modernity and its legitimizing metadiscourse (Postmodern Condition xxiii). The postmodern condition, according to Lyotard, is related to the radical crisis of those narratives and their accounts of human society. By incredulity, therefore, he refers to a distrust to the rightfulness of the criteria that organize knowledge and decide what is to be included in and excluded from a particular discipline, artistic genre, or social category.
In the chapter, “What Is Postmodernism?” Lyotard distinguishes three types of artistic and cultural representation: realism, modernism, and postmodernism. The criteria of distinction between the three movements however are not chronological, as it is observed in
Dakari 82 other analysts of postmodernism, like in Jameson’s historical/cultural perspective.10 What
Lyotard suggests is that these three movements coexist in all periods of artistic production.
The distinction is not a matter of historical periodization but of aesthetic style. In this sense,
“a work of art can become modern only if it is first postmodern,” Lyotard says, implying the task of the postmodern is to put directly into presentation that which cannot be presented, the sublime that is, rather that devote itself, as the modern does, to present the fact that the unpresentable exists (78-79). Kant gives the answer, Lyotard believes, “when he names
‘formlessness, the absence of form’ as a possible index to the unpresentable” (79). As he writes,
Modern aesthetics . . . allows the unpresentable to be put forward only as the missing
contents, but the form, because of its recognizable consistency, continues to offer the
reader or viewer matter for solace and pleasure. Yet these sentiments do not constitute
the real sublime sentiment, which is an intrinsic combination of pleasure and pain: the
pleasure that reason should exceed all presentation, the pain that imagination or
sensibility should not be equal to the concept. (81)
This sense of indeterminacy is first experienced as a “failure of expression,” Lyotard posits in
The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. This failure is what gives rise to a pain the subject experiences as a conflict between “what can be conceived and what can be imagined or presented” (98). Therein also lies the pleasure that the subject derives from the sublime. As
Lyotard goes on to explain, “the impotence of the imagination attests a contrario to an imagination striving to figure even that which cannot be figured” aiming “to harmonize its object with that or reason.” It is in the “pathos of the sublime,” as opposed to “the calm feeling of beauty” that Lyotard sees an affinity between avant-gardism and the Kantian
10 Situating his analysis in an examination of historically dominant landmarks, as for instance the cultural and artistic production of the 1960s, Jameson discusses postmodernism as a reflection of those historical stages in contemporary culture, with special emphasis on the times of late capitalism and its logic of equating aesthetic production with commodity production (56).
Dakari 83 aesthetic of the sublime (Inhuman 98).
The sublime, to Lyotard, therefore, is seen as a response to art “which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable.” Its task is to search for new presentations which will not make the unpresentable “more enjoyable” but which will impart a stronger sense of it (Postmodern Condition 81). In this sense, the postmodern is an intensification of the modern. Any sense of comfort derived from either form or content should be abandoned in favor of new formulations, which, however, will not become canonized; they should only be a commentary to aesthetic explorations, not their rules.
In the passage below, Lyotard condenses his thesis on postmodern aesthetics as essentially an aesthetic of the sublime, on the role of the artist in the face of “the return of the terror” and on the “realization of the fantasy to seize reality:”
A postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text he writes, the
work he produces are not in principle governed by preestablished rules, and they
cannot be judged according to a determining judgement, by applying familiar
categories to the text or to the work. Those rules and categories are what the work of
art itself is looking for. The artist and the writer then, are working without rules in
order to formulate the rules of what will have been done. Hence the fact that work and
text have the characters of an event; hence also, they always come too late for their
author, or, what amounts to the same thing, their being put into work, their realization
(mise en oeuvre) always begins too soon. . . . Finally, it must be clear that it is our
business not to supply reality but to invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot
be presented. . . . The answer is . . . let us be witnesses to the unpresentable.
(Postmodern Condition 81)
This kind of art that cannot be contained in traditional aesthetic frameworks, art whose
Dakari 84 formlessness cannot be easily represented and whose content poses a threat to our capacity to conceive, but one which under the right circumstances could gratify us through this very difficulty of processing it, is what cancer performances discussed here lay claim on, demanding that we bear witness.
The conflicting experience of “both pleasure and displeasure” allows us to confront the complexity of the spectacle of suffering the artist with cancer brings into performance
(Lyotard, “Complexity and the Sublime” 10). This complexity, however, cannot be solely addressed on aesthetic grounds. I share Lyotard’s contention that “what art does—what it ought to do—is always to unmask all attempts to reconstitute a pseudo-religion” (Driftworks
72), which means to oppose to the enslavement of art to aesthetic idealism detected in
Sontag. The realm of art, Lyotard observes, may be ontologically distinct from the sociopolitical; both, however, should be in constant dialogue. Lyotard provides the following equation: “aesthetics=the workshop for the forging of the most discriminating critical concepts” (Driftworks 16), where he suggests that art should be in the position to deconstruct all givens, itself as well. In this sense, he places critical discourse as subsequent to the creation of art, following its transformations. It is my firm belief that this approach to art provides a suitable basis for the discussion of the unpresentability of cancer in performance.
The sublime as “minimal occurrence:” finding delight in the suspension of chaos
Lyotard’s exploration of the sublime in The Inhuman focuses particularly on the temporal dimension of the sublime feeling. As seen earlier, this is a moment primarily marked by indeterminacy, a benumbing of our receptive faculties due to the shocking immediacy of the event. British philosopher Edmund Burke, for example, who precedes Kant in examining the concepts of the sublime and the beautiful (Inhuman 99-100), saw this as a moment of terror in contemplating the infinite magnitude or destructiveness of nature, which
Dakari 85 at the same moment offers the pleasure of not being directly threatened by this source of danger, a relief as it were, which he calls delight. Lyotard’s analysis focuses on this feeling deriving from the threat of privation. As he writes,
[t]he sublime is kindled by the threat of nothing further happening. . . . Terrors are
linked to privation: privation of light, terror of darkness; privation of others, terror of
solitude; privation of language, terror of silence; privation of objects, terror of
emptiness; privation of life, terror of death. What is terrifying is that the It happens
does not happen, that it stops happening. (emphasis in original; 99)
The condition for this terror to blend with pleasure into a sublime output is “the terror causing threat [to] be suspended, kept at bay, held back,” Lyotard notes (Inhuman 99). As such, the sublime occurs as a secondary privation, the privation of a threatening privation for the subject, which is experienced not as a positive satisfaction but as relief: “the soul is deprived of the threat of being deprived of light, language, life” (99). Herein comes the contribution of art, Lyotard posits, which, by distancing this threat, returns the soul to “the agitated zone between life and death, and this agitation is its health and its life” (100). This agitation of the soul is a promise that “something will happen, despite everything, within this threatening void, that something will ‘take place.’ . . . That place is mere ‘here,’ the most minimal occurrence” (84).
This shock of something happening is what Lyotard considers as the source of indeterminacy in art, banishing teleological presumptions and formalist constraints. This is also what infuses the artist with endless possibilities for experimentation and the spectator with an amplified sense of their emotional capacity. There is no specific end to which the artist works. This openendedness in the object of art is what makes perception challenging; in
Lyotard’s terms, “to make seen what makes one see, and not what is visible” (Inhuman 102).
This principle of the unpresentable, which the twentieth-century avant-garde has extensively
Dakari 86 addressed, is transformed within a postmodern context into a political statement of resistance, as it requires our involvement by appealing to our faculties of cognition.
Performance offers the ideal context for such interaction between sender (the artist) and addressee (the spectator). In the here-and-now of performance, no filters apply, no retrospection or distanced contemplation, as in literary accounts of suffering. The artist and the spectator are unconditionally and irreversibly exposed to one another. Performance theorist Erika Fischer Lichte examines this interaction in terms of an ongoing feedback loop, which derives from the energy flow among the bodies of all participants that share the same space—to be discussed in the next chapter. According to this view, when it comes to representing pain, either actual or symbolic, certain sensory modalities are activated; inevitably we partake in the torment we are witnessing, we tend to process the spectacle in a
“what if” manner.
This spectacle, however, also hinges on the unpresentable, as it evades our full understanding, since it is not our pain. This “sensory now,” which Lyotard attributed to
Avant-gardist painting as that, which “cannot be presented and which remains to be presented” in the very decline of conventional representational art, is also the essence of the representation of the subject-in-pain. The futile quest of making sense of pain shifts the aesthetic discussion from the “what happens to the subject” to “does it happen?” For Lyotard, this approach to privation articulates the aesthetics of the sublime (Inhuman 103). In the context of the present discussion, this position could be phrased as the critical turn from
“what pain is” to the fact that “pain is,” in all its ontological intensity and existential depth.
Speculating on such art, and consciously turning it into research on aesthetic idioms, all previous knowledge and comfortable certainties are suspended. The sublime is exactly what invalidates the faculty of cognition and brings the subject in direct confrontation with the limits of knowledge; beyond these limits lies the unknown, that which evades
Dakari 87 containment by means of conventional formal criteria, and which denies its spectators immediate intuitive gratification. It is also, and most significantly, what resists “an all too easy assimilation by the public as just a consumer commodity,” as Daniel Mafe comments
(58). Chapter seven of this study, for instance, examines how popular cancer plays withhold this sense of chaos by following traditional structures.
This aspect of the sublime as opposed to the beautiful is where Lyotard grounded his definition of postmodern art: the capacity to put the unpresentable into presentation itself. As he writes:
Art is not a genre defined in terms of an end (the pleasure of the addressee), and still
less is it a game whose rules have to be discovered; it accomplishes an ontological
task, that is a “chronological task.” It accomplishes it without completing it. It must
constantly begin to testify anew to the occurrence by letting the occurrence be.
(Inhuman, 88; emphasis added)
In this perspective, the Kantian concept of the beautiful as a disinterested contemplation cannot be used as an appropriate description of the diseased body in performance. Oscillating between aversion and voyeuristic pleasure, direct exposure to a body obviously marked by disease, as for instance a mastectomy scar (chapters seven and eight of this study) cannot satisfy by means of disinterested reflective intuition. It also cannot be universally pleasing, or morally appropriate, considering the connotations it carries at least within a contemporary western cultural context.
That said, the unpresentable, which Sontag locates in the abjectness of the subject matter, cannot be entirely excluded from aesthetic evaluations as other-than-art, as Sontag posits. Quite the contrary, the sublime that derives from the negotiation of the unpresentable exists within the aesthetic and the socio-political. It is constituted by what Theodor Adorno defines as an “historical moment:”
Dakari 88
authentic works [of art] are those that surrender themselves to the historical substance
of their age without reservation and without the presumption of being superior to it.
They are the self-unconscious historiography of their epoch; this, not least of all,
establishes their relation to knowledge. . . . Artworks may be all the more truly
experienced the more their historical substance is that of the one who experiences it.
(Aesthetic Theory 182-83)
In this sense, the minimal occurrence the sublime suggests is art’s bearing witness to life, and is thus completed, if only temporarily, the very moment of contemplation, by spectators’ own histories. The aesthetic thus precedes the hermeneutic; the task of the critic is not to suggest but to describe, because “art is what it has become,” Adorno observes (Aesthetic Theory 3).
Lyotard’s concept of differend:
Aesthetic and political considerations of presenting the unpresentable
Central to all negotiations, political or aesthetic, of the sublime as unpresentable is what Lyotard calls differend in his work, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (1988), which he defines as “an unstable state and instant of language wherein something which must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be” (13). He focuses particularly on the way the differend is evident in injustices that occur in the context of language. As such, a differend “would be a case of conflict, between (at least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both arguments. One side's legitimacy does not imply the other's lack of legitimacy” (xi). A problem arises since there can be no common rule of judgement that would resolve the differend, the dispute that is; one of the two parties will be wronged and thereby silenced and/or disenfranchised from representation.
Lyotard distinguishes this situation of incommensurability from a litigation, i.e. a dispute which can be fairly resolved because the opposing parties can agree on a shared rule
Dakari 89 of judgement. In the case of a litigation, the wronged party is a plaintiff, while in a differend the wronged party is a victim. In a litigation, the plaintiff's wrong can be presented, as “he or she lodges his or her complaint before the tribunal.” In a differend, however, the victim’s wrong cannot be presented, as he or she “is divested of the means to argue” (9). A victim, for
Lyotard, therefore, is not just someone who has been wronged, but someone who has also lost the power to present this wrong. A case of differend between two parties takes place when the criteria of judgement that would resolve this conflict derive from the idiom of one of the parties while the wrong suffered by the other is not signified in that idiom. The victim is thus disempowered: he or she may be silenced, or threatened into silence or in some other way disenfranchised. Alternatively, the victim may be able to speak, but that speech is unable to present the wrong done in the dominant discourse by which judgement is made.
Lyotard here makes an interesting observation with regards to genres of discourse:
“[the] only one that is indubitable [is] the phrase, because it is immediately presupposed. (To doubt that one phrases is still to phrase, one’s silence makes a phrase)” (Differend xi-xii). In other words, he does not single out any “proper” genre of discourse, as he believes that once a phrase happens, there is a multitude of phrase regimens (i.e. a set of rules) to accommodate its translation, for example, knowing, reasoning, describing, questioning, and so on. Links can be achieved among these regimens in order to achieve certain goals, “to know, to teach, to be just, to seduce, to justify,” and so forth. There is no metalanguage for “phrasing” which means that there is no solid ground to base judgments on. Lyotard, thus, disputes the existence of “language in general” (xiii); it is rather a construct or better, infinite constructs each running on a specific set of rules. The limits of representation are thus detected in the indeterminacy involved in the linking of phrases. Phrases, on Lyotard's account, may be extralinguistic, and can include signs, gestures, or anything that “happens.” For instance,
“[t]he phrase, ‘Under threat, under torture, in conditions of incarceration, in conditions of
Dakari 90
'sensory deprivation,’ etc. , the linguistic behavior of a human being can be dictated to him or to her," is a well-formed phrase” (12). In the philosophical context of the differend, every event is to be understood as a phrase.
The method Lyotard uses in his investigation of the limits of representation suggested in phrases is that of language games, which he derives from Wittgenstein. As Lyotard understands it, Wittgenstein’s use of the term “language game” suggests that “the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life” (Differend 11). In this sense, each of the various categories of utterance can be defined in terms of specific language rules; if the rules change, so do the properties of the utterance. An example of a language game would be the beetle-in-a-box analogy used in a speech case where all interlocutors are asked to use a common code to express their idea of what pain is—discussed in the previous chapter. What
Wittgenstein’s language-game theory suggests is that utterances around which communication is constructed are in fact arbitrary configurations that do not shape language and thereby experience but are rather descriptive of a certain activity.
The discourse of the rule of judgement may be such that the victim's wrong cannot be construed into its terms; the wrong may thus be unpresentable as a wrong. Lyotard presents various examples in order to show how the differend operates, the most important of which is
Auschwitz: namely, did gas chambers exist and what would the evidence be? He uses the example of the revisionist historian Faurisson's demands for proof of the Holocaust.
Faurisson would only accept proof of the existence of gas chambers from eyewitnesses who were themselves victims of the gas chambers. However, any such eyewitnesses could not have survived in order to be able to testify. Faurisson concludes thereby that there were no gas chambers. The double bind lies in that either there were no gas chambers, in which case there would be no eyewitnesses to produce evidence, or there were gas chambers, in which case there would still be no eyewitnesses to produce evidence (since they would be dead).
Dakari 91
Faurisson would only accept as evidence for the existence of gas chambers the testimony of actual victims. He therefore concluded from both possibilities (i.e. gas chambers existed; gas chambers did not exist) that gas chambers did not exist. This is a case of a differend because the wrong done to the victims cannot find expression by means of Faurisson’s standards of judgment.
The performative power of the phrase (i.e. what eventually acknowledges the existence of the unpresentable) lies in its eventfulness even in the absence of a standard of discourse. As Lyotard writes,
[t]he silence of the survivors does not necessarily testify in favor of the nonexistence
of gas chambers, as Faurisson believes or pretends to believe. It can just as well
testify against the addressee's authority (we are not answerable to Faurisson), against
the authority of the witness him- or herself (we, the rescued, do not have the authority
to speak about it), finally against language's ability to signify gas chambers (an
inexpressible absurdity). If one wishes to establish the existence of gas chambers, the
four silent negations must be withdrawn: There were no gas chambers, were there?
Yes, there were.—But even if there were, that cannot be formulated, can it? Yes, it
can.—But even if it can be formulated, there is no one, at least, who has the authority
to formulate it, and no one with the authority to hear it (it is not communicable), is
there? Yes, there is. (Differend 14)
Through the idea of the differend, Lyotard has drawn particular attention to the ethico- political dimensions of presenting the wrong when the parties in dispute cannot agree on a common discourse, or rule of judgement. This requires new rules for the formation and linking of phrases to be conceived. As he writes, “[t]o give the differend its due is to institute new addressees, new addressers, new significations, and new referents in order for the wrong to find an expression and for the plaintiff to cease being a victim. . . . Every wrong ought to
Dakari 92 be able to be put into phrases” (13).
Lyotard associates the identification of a differend with the feeling of the sublime, the mixture of pleasure and pain that accompanies the attempt to present the unpresentable. The moment one realizes the limitations of language in attending to one’s experience is a moment of pain and illumination, as Lyotard has argued in most of his works:
This is when the human beings who thought they could use language as an instrument
of communication learn through the feeling of pain which accompanies silence (and
of pleasure which accompanies the invention of a new idiom), that they are
summoned by language, not to augment to their profit the quantity of information
communicable through existing idioms, but to recognize that what remains to be
phrased exceeds what they can presently phrase, and that they must be allowed to
institute idioms which do not yet exist. (Differend 13)
What is more, Lyotard clearly privileges art and its capacity to create narratives as the realm, which is best able to provide testimony to differends through its sublime effects. As he writes:
narrative is a genre; deliberation is a concatenation of genres, and that suffices to let
the occurrence and differends sprout up within it. . . . The multitude of phrase
regimens and of genres of discourse finds a way to embody itself, to neutralize
differends, in narratives. . . . There is a privileging of narrative in the assemblage of
the diverse. It is a genre that seems able to admit all others (Differend 150, 158).
In Lyotard’s view, all units of linguistic or non-linguistic signification (i.e. a gesture, a music score, even silence) constitute phrases. More specifically, Lyotard’s definition pertains to its pragmatic content, the possibility (or impossibility) of what can (or cannot) be put into phrases:
Dakari 93
This state includes silence, which is a negative phrase, but it also calls upon phrases
which are in principle possible. This state is signaled by what one ordinarily calls a
feeling: "One cannot find the words," etc. A lot of searching must be done to find new
rules for forming and linking phrases that are able to express the differend disclosed
by the feeling... What is at stake in a literature, in a philosophy, in a politics perhaps,
is to bear witness to differends by finding idioms for them. (Differend 13)
Although Lyotard’s analysis focuses on linguistic significations of a phrase, there is an interesting reference to extralinguistic instances that could as well constitute a phrase and which are closely related to the performance of a body in pain. As he states, “[a] wink, a shrugging of the shoulder, a tapping of the foot, a fleeting blush, or an attack of tachycardia can be phrases” (Differend 70). In this sense, every sensation stands for a phrase, which to
Lyotard is an event that has already happened irrespectively of the moment of its articulation or the quality of its linguistic or other realization. Through the act of witnessing, the pain event constitutes a phrase, whose semantic content may be doubted however its performative presence is certain. The feedback that the sufferer receives through witnessing and acknowledgement complements the experiential value of pain, even if to others his/her pain can never be known to others. In the context of the representation of suffering, the differend is construed as a gap between discursive language and the art event that should be acknowledged and accommodated.
Lyotard thus draws attention to the power of silence to signify, as he considers it to be a phrase as well (Differend ix). Whenever someone refuses or is unable to speak, this still means something. Silence as another carrier of meaning has always been central to theatre. It redirects attention to the actual time that is shared by performers and spectators. During these moments, the act of witnessing itself is accentuated by means of the here-and-now of performance, which is itself an utterance even if not necessarily linguistic.
Dakari 94
Silence has political connotations, as in the case of a differend and the pursuit of justice, especially when one of the two sides is deprived of the right to speak (Lyotard,
Differend 138-39). It also signifies a privation, according to Lyotard: the privation of language, a threat that is the condition for the sublime to occur. Coming up with a new all- encompassing idiom is equally impossible, Lyotard argues. Instead of searching for a universal principle that would settle a differend, one should attest to the existence of the differend. A postmodern thinker, according to Lyotard, is thus faced with the task of
“[bearing] witness to differends by finding new idioms for them” (13).
Even if there are no obvious links between phrases that would make it easier for the interlocutors to understand each other, as for instance the expression of pain, it is still worth directing our attention to the very act of trying to put into words. As Lyotard writes, “It’s not easy to know what one is phrasing about . . . but it is indubitable that ‘one is phrasing’ be it only in order to know this,” which in effect draws on the capacity of language to refer to itself (Differend 69). This observation of the self-reflexivity of phrase (even in its absence) can be paired with Wittgenstein’s investigations on the deconstruction of the givenness of pain expressions discussed earlier.
What can be inferred from this parallel reading of Lyotard and Wittgenstein is that a pain phrase, which happens at the very moment of its phrasing, is an indubitable pain event, that even if one doubts its accuracy, intensity, or communicability, one cannot dispute its happening now. Be it chronic or acute, pain plays out its different plots, following certain histrionics, and using those modes of communication appropriate to senders (the in-pain subjects) and their addressees. As such, even an inarticulate cry, a moan or a pregnant silence are performances of pain, happening here and now, following specific phrase regimens that will indicate a certain mode of mediation, and serving specific goals: requesting care, rousing
Dakari 95 compassion, serving a specific political agenda, or simply seeking to connect with others by means of artistic creation; in all cases, reaching out to a desired audience in life or in art.
There are obvious affinities between Lyotard’s and Scarry’s positions in terms of the reconstruction of the sufferer’s world and the acknowledgement of the unpresentable. Scarry argues that pain-shattered language can be reconstructed by means of human creation, while
Lyotard suggests that new idioms be conceived that would enable the unpresentable to be acknowledged. Diedrich notes that both thinkers “pay attention to forms of affect, that exceed the capacity of representation, and both seek methods to bring into being new ‘idioms which do not yet exist’” (148).
According to the positions expressed, the aesthetic, the ethical, and the political converge in the affective moment of the sublime. Several artists will be discussed that bring art, politics, and illness together; they attest to the unpresentable by their very attempt in presenting it. Exemplary of this endeavor is Bill T. Jones’s dance piece, Still/Here, and its rejection by Croce as victim art—but how can a victim be a victim once he/she talks back?— or as non-art, as it stages “real” illness and thus lets life contaminate the realm of art—to be discussed in chapter five. In Edson’s play, Wit (chapter 7), Susan juggles with lines by
Donne’s transcendental poems and distancing medical reports in a futile effort to bridge together philosophical/academic and medical/technocratic realms as a way of resistance to degeneration, depersonalization, and eventually dying. In Paget’s experimental performance text, The Work of Talk (chapter 8), a differend emerges the moment the physician sees in his female patient’s scar “a beautiful surgery,” while for the woman it reflects something
“terrible.” What happens when the dominant standard of judgement, i.e. medical discourse, fails to identify and treat a patient’s cancer? How can the patient present the wrong done to her when even the word cancer is entirely banned from their interaction? “The hyphen that
Dakari 96 separates the two subject positions in the phrase ‘doctor-patient relationship,’” Diedrich notes, “signals a differend in the doctor-patient relationship” (150).
Conclusion
In acknowledging the problematics of expression as itself a mode of expression, the
Lyotardian phrase attests to the legitimacy of the performative as examined earlier in
Wittgenstein, Scarry, and Butler. Though the expression of pain would be broadly considered in cognitive terms, meaning “I am reporting,” it could also be viewed as a performative utterance in the sense “I am expressing my pain, I am therefore affirming my subjectivity as independent entity,” which is of immense value in all narratives, literary, visual, or staged.
What Lyotard sees as a possible resolution of a differend is the construction of a new vocabulary that will validate a new set of idioms conceived upon the discursive process. As the unpresentable poses a perpetual semantic/cognitive quandary, idioms must continuously be renewed and revised. Instead of focusing on the resolution of this riddle by means of a given hermeneutic/aesthetic approach, I posit, the critic should embrace its incommensurability and continue from there in addressing the issues that arise from the artistic representation of illness and suffering.
Under the light of the above consideration of the intricacies of aesthetic judgement as seen in Lyotard’s discussion on the sublime and postmodern art, Sontag’s argument appears to be strikingly incomplete and biased, given her overall erudite disposition and the wide spectre of evidence she claims to have taken into consideration. When, for instance, she described her own experience of illness as “animal terror,” she unwittingly sublimated what she had previously strived to desublimate, that is, illness as metaphor; therein lies her fallacy.
Her objections are situated not in the fact of illness itself but in its potency as narrative, which reconstructs and re-presents a real event.
Dakari 97
Chapter 4
Being with others: A Heideggerian perspective
on current theories of performance and performativity
Lyotard’s examination of the sublime as differend calls for a genuine openness to the event around which new principles of judgement are to be tested. Heidegger’s existential and aesthetic explorations interestingly relate to the exploration of the task of the postmodern artist as seen in Lyotard’s writings. Heidegger’s position on the nature of an artwork, expressed in his essay, “The Origin of the Work of Art” (written between 1935-36), bridges the concept of the differend, the presentation of the unpresentable, and contemporary theories of performance and performativity expressed by Hans-Thies Lehman, Erika Fischer Lichte, and Judith Butler.
What connects Lyotard’s position on the sublime with Heidegger’s philosophical exploration of the nature of a work of art is their denunciation of the Kantian beautiful as the sole aesthetic output of art. Heidegger writes: “In the fine arts, the art is not itself beautiful, but is, rather, called so because it brings forth the beautiful”(“Origin” 16). Similarly, Lyotard observes that “[a]rt is not a genre defined in terms of an end (the pleasure of the addressee), and still less is it a game whose rules have to be discovered; it accomplishes an ontological task . . . without completing it . . . [and] must constantly begin to testify anew to the occurrence by letting the occurrence be (Inhuman 88).
Departing from an examination of Heidegger’s aesthetics and philosophy of Being, I draw on recent theoretical positions regarding contemporary theatre and performance—in particular Hans-Thies Lehman’s discussion on postdramatic theatre and Erika Fischer
Lichte’s theorization of the transformative potential of performance, in support of my approach to illness performance as exemplary of the aesthetics of the sublime. Finally, I
Dakari 98 complement my discussion on the issues that arise from the aesthetic problem of suffering with Judith Butler’s thoughts on the performativity of the assembly, i.e. the energy that flows from the gathering of human bodies and its political significations, as suggestive of a more effective way of becoming attentive to previously disenfranchised artistic voices.
Heidegger on the essence of art
Not only was Heidegger’s commentary on the nature of the work of art attentive to the advent of the avant-garde, but it can also still be appreciated for its original elucidation of the postmodern, as it will be shown shortly. His position in “The Origin of the Work of Art” regards that works of art do not merely represent the element of truth, i.e. the way things are, but they actually create that truth and shape cultural understanding around it. The question is:
What is the origin of the work of art? There is no settling answer to this question: “The artist is the origin of the work,” since he/she produces it; “[t]he work is the origin of the artist,” since it lets him/her emerge as such. However, both artist and work co-exist in this system of associations on the condition of art “which is prior to both.” The question then is: “Can . . . art really be an origin?” Art to Heidegger is but a word that derives its significations and attributes from both the work and the artist. As such, it cannot exist prior to them, as it is generally believed (“Origin” 1-2). Alternatively, could we say that “work and artist exist insofar as art exists,” i.e. as their origin? If we accept that “art presences in the art-work,”
Heidegger writes, the next step would be a comparative study of those artworks that are exemplary of the nature of art. Still, this does not resolve the puzzle, as we cannot be sure about the outcome of this study unless we know beforehand what art is and what its constituents are (2).
Heidegger’s study explores what a work of art is. Conceding on its materiality, its natural presence as a thing, he elaborates on its thing-ness, whose understanding develops in
Dakari 99 parallel to the aesthetic experience one derives from this artwork; for instance, a painting by van Gogh is packed and travels from gallery to gallery as any other commercial item. It is, however, “something other than itself,” as it operates as an allegory: the painting is a portrayal of a pair of peasant shoes; it thus also exists on a symbolic level (“Origin” 3). Its allegorical dimension is grounded on its material one, which is obviously crafted by the artist.
Heidegger investigates the essence of a work of art, which he situates in its “thingliness,” his own term that refers to the inner nature of things, what makes them what they are. He considers three ways of approaching the essence of a thing: in terms of its classificatory features, as a sensory manifold, and as a formed matter—the latter perhaps being the most inclusive aspect of a thing’s nature, its materiality that is. He distrusts however the conceptual scheme of the matter-form distinction which is “deployed in the greatest variety of ways by all art theory and aesthetics,” apparently alluding to Kantian formalist aesthetics, as discussed in the previous chapter. As Heidegger observes, “this indisputable fact . . . proves neither that the matter-form distinction is adequately grounded, nor that it belongs, originally, to the sphere of art and the artwork” (9).
All three conceptual interpretations, which are grounded in western metaphysics, cannot get into the essence of “the thingliness of the thing,” according to Heidegger. Instead, an ontological/phenomenological approach should be adopted. In validation of his argument, he turns to a painting by Vincent van Gogh that depicts a pair of peasant shoes. His aim is to make a distinction between a work of art and a piece of equipment, in other words, between the object in its self-sufficient presence versus its equipmentality. Judging from the appearance of the depicted shoes, Heidegger invites us to guess their use, i.e. shoes a peasant woman uses to work in the fields: “[o]nly then do they become what they are” (“Origin” 13), revealing their equipmentality. But what about their thingliness? This would only be revealed when the perspective of equipmentality was removed, when they would lie “empty and
Dakari 100 unused,” withdrawn from their casual surroundings. Their true being is then revealed: worn- out, mudded, carrying their owner’s tolls, they finally stand out as objects, not tools. Their equipmentality is thus reified and appears before us through the painting (“Origin” 15).
This task of “[allowing] a being to be as it is” presupposes that we “allow it to rest in its own nature” (“Origin” 12), Heidegger posits. In this sense, resistance meets the effort of thought in attempting to define the thingness of the thing. This is the difficulty that our faculties of reason meet with when contemplating the sublime, in Kant’s terms. Here,
Heidegger’s view on the nature of art as grounded on “the truth of being’s setting itself to work” approaches the concept of the Kantian sublime as the unpresentable, especially in the way our inadequate hermeneutic capacities indicate that “the thingness of the thing is particularly difficult and rarely capable of expression” (“Origin” 12). A withdrawal from the prevailing concepts of the thing, which “block the way to the thingness of the thing, the equipmentality of the equipment, and . . . the workly character of the work,” is therefore necessary, in Heidegger’s view. This idea of withdrawal from the world of the artwork refers to the disengagement from all previous context, outside all relations. This is where a work belongs “within the region it itself opens up,” wherein “the happening of truth is at work”
(“Origin” 20).
From this example, he makes a very interesting inference that is closely related to the present discussion of the Kantian sublime or the Lyotardian differend as an exploration of the unpresentable and as the setting up of new idioms in art creation and criticism. As he argues,
[t]he essential nature of art would then be . . . the setting-itself-to-work of the truth of
beings. Yet until now art has had to do with the beautiful and with beauty—not with
truth. . . . In the fine arts, the art is not itself beautiful, but is, rather, called so because
it brings forth the beautiful. Truth, by contrast, belongs to logic. (“Origin” 16)
Dakari 101
Heidegger thus opposes traditional aesthetics of the beautiful as the appropriate and only path to forming judgement on an artwork, and suggests that art be appreciated in its capacity to disclose the truth of the artwork—as opposed to its abstraction (19).
Just as an artwork is able to set up “worlds” (“Origin” 22), in other words, pragmatic associations, being in dialogue with the historical and cultural conditions that gave birth to it, it is also distinguished for “[setting] forth the earth,” where it lies undisclosed and unexplained, like the shoes once withdrawn from their peasant “world.” Likewise, art can bring the unpresentable forth not by interpreting, resolving, or forcing it into familiar forms, but by letting it be in all its unpresentability. In Heidegger’s view, “the setting up of a world and the setting forth of earth are two essential traits belonging to the work-being of the work”
(“Origin” 26). World is where we take ourselves to be at home, “wherever the essential decisions of our history are made, wherever we take them over or abandon them.” Its opposite, “earth,” is undisclosable; it is itself and cannot come forth in any other way, nor can it be forced into constructed meaning; “it shows itself only when it remains undisclosed and unexplained” (25).
The setting up of a world and the setting forth of earth are two essential constituents of the artwork according to Heidegger. Indeed, an artwork is a manifold of allegories, symbols, purposes, and pure presence, making it impossible to identify on only one of these grounds. The example Heidegger uses to elucidate this opposition is that of a Greek temple, which, in the course of time, has lost its initial associations, i.e. the presence of a god. Now, it
“simply stands there” (“Origin” 20); it has become part of the landscape that has sheltered it through the centuries, it lets nature project itself through the very materiality of the hollow space it occupies. It now belongs to earth, which to Heidegger is “that in which the arising of everything that arises is brought back—as indeed, the very thing that it is—and sheltered”
(21). Like the peasant shoes, withdrawn from the peasant’s feet, the temple, too, standing as a
Dakari 102 work, sets up a “world” of historical associations as it allows its own desecrated material to come forth, sets itself back (24). In these examples, the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic come together and constitute the work of art as the becoming of truth.
Heidegger goes on to locate the work of art in the intersection of world and earth, since “world is grounded on earth and earth rises up through world” (“Origin” 26). In fact, he perceives these two planes of existence in opposition, as “strife,” and as a constant pulling back and forth between inauthentic and authentic existence. In setting up a world and setting forth earth, the work of art both instigates and accomplishes this strife (27). This does not mean that the work of art resolves this conflict between the opposing spheres. In this sense, this strife Heidegger perceives could be seen as a differend between these opposing yet symbiotic (mutually-sustaining) ontologies, immanent to a work of art, which make it what it is. This ongoing fight which the “work-being of the work” consists of is the “continually self- surpassing of the agitation of the work” (26). This agitation that exists in the work of art is perceived in Lyotard’s view as a minimal occurrence that keeps the terror of privation at bay.
Most significantly, this agitation attests to the truth that is set into the work (33) and which is seen as the outcome of this struggle occurring within the artwork.
The reason why Heidegger inquires into the essential nature of art is “in order to be able to ask properly whether or not, in our historical existence, art is an origin, whether, and under what conditions, it can and must become one.” In his view, this is “the enigma of art,” in other words, that art itself is an enigma and should be experienced as such; far from seeking a solution, “the task is to see the enigma” (“Origin” 50).
This conclusion to Heidegger’s aesthetic exploration interestingly relates to the questions the present study raises regarding what occurs in the realm of the aesthetic, what can be considered art. Heidegger clearly makes a case for a renewed approach to art when he expresses his distrust in the term “aesthetic” that has traditionally been connected with
Dakari 103
“specialized thinking about the art and the artist.” He reminds us of the ancient Greek root of the word, i.e. an object of αίσθησις, which denotes the sensory output that derives from our interaction with an artwork. “These days,” he observes, taking us back to the pre-World-War-
II cultural milieu, “such apprehension is called an ‘experience.’” It is precisely in the way one experiences art where he finds the artwork’s “essential nature,” which not only affects “the appreciation and enjoyment of art” but also its “creation.” “Everything is experience,” according to Heidegger (“Origin” 50).
In line with the centrality of experience as both the origin and outcome of art,
Heidegger observes that truth as the “unconcealment of beings as beings” cannot be founded on abstractions, nor can it be equaled to beauty, as in traditional aesthetic discourse. Beauty as merely relative to pleasure cannot convey the essence of beings, i.e. their truth. Rather than occurring alongside this truth, beauty, according to Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis, resides in its very unconcealment. Beauty is thus to be found in truth, in the being of beings, but also in their form, which, as a mode of presence becomes actuality, or reality; reality, then, becomes objectivity, and objectivity becomes experience. It is in this way that beauty and truth converge in a work of art.
Heidegger on Dasein as the return to authentic Being and its applications to acting
In the above exposition of the essence of an artwork, Heidegger suggests that it must withdraw from its world, where it is at home, in order for its truth to be unconcealed. This idea of alienation from the world of familiar associations that constitutes our experience of existing with others is a central preoccupation in Heidegger’s philosophy, which he presents in his seminal work Being and Time (1927). In this work, he presents the ontology of Being as being-there, i.e. in this world, along with other beings, which he terms Dasein (“there- being”).
Dakari 104
For Heidegger, Dasein, which is understood as our being-in-the-world, is an entity which, “in its very Being, comports itself understandingly toward that Being” (Being and
Time 68). As he sees it, Dasein may exist on two conditions, authenticity or inauthenticity.
Dasein’s authentic being is constantly obstructed by its very nature of being-in-the-world and being-with-others, in other words, Dasein’s “average everydayness” (38). In his analysis of
Heidegger’s Being and Time, George Steiner observes that “the notion of existential identity and that of the world are completely wedded. To be at all is to be worldly. The everyday is the enveloping wholeness of being” (85). It is this “everyday publicness” of the “they” that conceals from us the knowledge that in truth we are alienated beings, according to Heidgger; this ignorance, he posits, makes us feel “at home” within the world (Being and Time 234).
This is an inauthentic way of being, however. In order to discover its authenticity, Being must realize its solipsistic status, withdraw from a world that stands as a given, and contemplate it anew, not as ready-to-hand, but as present-at-hand and forge links with this alien world anew. The outcome of such realization would be anxiety, which however is the only condition for the Being to be awakened into its authentic mode of existence and relocate itself into the world.
There are obvious affinities with the concepts of “world” and “earth” Heidegger employs in “The Origin of the Work of Art.” In this sense, the world is an inauthentic state, while earth an authentic one. This deduction is of immense interest to the present discussion, as it abandons the givenness of a priori hermeneutic frameworks and points towards an anxiety-inducing response to art as the only way to attend to the experience of the unpresentable at all stages, from creation to reception. As Heidegger states in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” art “is nothing but a word;” to understand it means to reduce it to finiteness. What we should do, instead, is to “allow a being to be as it is” (12). Heidegger’s
Dakari 105 aesthetics thus anticipates Lyotard’s thoughts on the unpresentable in postmodern art. In this sense, Heidegger’s aesthetics of truth in art can be read as an aesthetic of the sublime.
Further exploring what constitutes an authentic being-in-the-world, Heidegger writes:
“The self of everyday Dasein is the they-self which we distinguish from the authentic self, the self which has explicitly grasped itself. As the they-self, Dasein is dispersed in the they and must first find itself. This dispersion characterizes the “subject” of the kind of being which we know as heedful absorption in the world nearest encountered” (Being and Time
167). George Steiner comments, in turn, that this Dasein lacks ontological integrity and as such “subsides to a ‘oneness’ within and among a collective, public, herdlike ‘theyness’”
(92). Heidegger reflects on the dictatorship of the they as follows: “We enjoy ourselves and have fun the way they enjoy themselves. We read, see, and judge literature and art the way they see and judge. But we also . . . find shocking what they find shocking. The they which is not definite and which all are, though not as a sum, prescribes the kind of being of everydayness.” This mode of being-with, Heidegger observes, creates averageness, which in turn reveals “the leveling down of all possibilities of being” (Being and Time 164). The challenge posed therefore is for Dasein to become aware of its loss of self and return to its authentic Being; to acknowledge the normative character of the faceless “they” and overcome its imposed banality.
Regarding the artistic value of a spectacle, Heidegger’s position questions the role of generic rules in the representation of “reality” as ultimately restricting the creativity and agency of performers as well as the experience of spectators. Doug Rosson examines
Heidegger’s representation of the “authentic” with regards to creative and improvisatory consciousness in actor training. The ultimate goal is to show that even a real, unimportant experience is completely different when performed on stage. Rosson grounds his proposition on Heidegger’s idea of Dasein, as “being-with-one-another” (187). Heidegger posits that
Dakari 106 being can only be substantiated through its interaction with other beings as the source of its capacity to make sense of the world it inhabits. In other words, being human means to be bound in the day-to-day world in a tangible, matter-of-fact way. However, to Heidegger, this is an inauthentic existence, as this preoccupation with actuality disrupts all self-reflection.
Authentic Dasein, on the other hand, is precisely this reflecting on one’s own being, a philosophical perceptiveness, as it were, of our being-in-the-world and being-with-one- another. This presupposes acceptance of inauthenticity as essential in going past the delimitations of inauthenticity. Rosson departs from this distinction to suggest ways of the representation of an authentic, non-iterative way of being in the world, which opposes the repetitive components of life (and performance) that restrict creativity and discourage the exploration of radically new artistic paths. In this perspective, “[a]uthentic modes of Being occur when we are no longer comfortable with the world around us” (189). This is where new possibilities of self-awareness arise.
To demonstrate Heidegger’s position in its application to performance, Rosson provides the following example: A young actor is met with a challenging exercise. One day, at the afternoon acting class, the instructor assigns the following task: all members of the class will bring in the necessary toiletries and brush their teeth in front of the class, the objective being to teach actors to be natural on stage. The actor returns home and attempts to rehearse brushing her teeth; in fact, she tries to remember the way she has brushed her teeth every day her whole life. All the objects (toothbrush, toothpaste, sink, mirror), which have been always at-hand up to this moment, now seem awkward to her. When she eventually completed the task of brushing her teeth,
her actions had been in no sense “everyday”. . . . Her comportment towards the world
became authentic; she was no longer able to function performatively for the “reality”
of the situation removed her from her average everyday brushing of her teeth and
Dakari 107
required her to contemplatively reconstruct her performative actions. She was present
in her to-be in an active and authentic way. Her mode of Being could not be described
as performative because although she was performing actions she had performed
before, they were not iterations, but a new cognitive performance—essentially a first
time. (Rosson 189-90)
What Rosson’s example stresses is that once the “natural” is consciously performed, its
“everydayness” dissolves. The abandonment of this convenient, inconspicuous automaticity reveals the “not-at-home” uncanniness of being, which is the anxiety-inducing authenticity
Heidegger reflects on. If everydayness cannot by definition induce such an ontological shift, performance certainly does.
To Heidegger, the inauthentic state is always accompanied by fear. On the other hand, anxiety11 is what restores authentic existence. In Steiner’s interpretation, “[a]ngst [anxiety] is that which makes problematic, which makes worthy of questioning, our being-in-the-world. .
. . [It] is a mark of authenticity, of the repudiation of ‘theyness’” (94). In performance, even the most trivial everyday concern becomes the foundation of a contemplative mode of being- in-the-world and uneasiness caused by such an acknowledgment.
Overall, this ontological discussion pertains to the role of the actor on stage, while contemplating the character and its everydayness he/she is to impersonate (Rosson 191). For the actor on stage every object is present-at-hand (and not ready-to-hand). He or she must contemplate the way a character would use it, lust as the actor brushed her teeth anew when she had to contemplate her tools, so does the contemplating performing actor on stage create from scratch in every performance. As Rosson concludes, “to perform is an authentic manner of Being” (191). To perform anew is also the founding principle of performance, as it cancels reproduction, mundaneness, and inauthenticity: “[n]o performance onstage is repeated in the
11 Heidegger uses the term angst in the sense of “dread,” or “uneasiness,” which he swiftly distinguishes from fear, a phenomenon that borders on inauthentic everydayness (Being and Time 227, fn1).
Dakari 108 way we repeat the everyday” (Rosson 191). A performance of the everyday, therefore, cannot be the everyday, even though it provides the grounds for performance to happen.
We only notice the thingliness of a thing when it stops being equipment, when it breaks or when it stops being useful, when, that is, is no longer ready-to-hand, but becomes present-at-hand. In the same manner, we become hyperaware of our bodies in the onset of illness. It is the moment the body emerges from the background of its everyday functionality; in Drew Leder’s terms, the body “dys-appears—it becomes felt due to dysfunction (95). With his/her own diseased body present-at-hand the performer experiences a transition into an authentic existence twice: as a performer and as a sick person. On stage, he/she re-presents his/her withdrawal from the everydayness of “being healthy,” a state of body-disappearance, which is inauthentic in the sense that it diverts our attention from our bodies. We tend to occupy the ecstatic sphere, according to Leder, taking for granted a well-functioning body which takes us anywhere we want, performs the tasks we assign to it, and goes by it an almost automatic way; only when this stops, do we return to the painful authenticity of the flesh (11). Contemporary performance has extensively addressed this hyper-awareness of our embodied selves.
Postdramatic aesthetics and enchanting transformations: contemporary theories of performance
A performance cannot be a thing fixed in time and space, as a painting or a sculpture is. Its materiality, though transient, can be realized as a “most minimal occurrence” in the fleeting moment when the here-and-now brings together actors and spectators and enables a flow of energy among them. In the discussion that follows, prompted by recent theoretical views on contemporary performance, the aesthetics of presence are examined vis-à-vis
Lyotard’s and Heidegger’s philosophical configurations on art’s essence and role. As Jeanie
Dakari 109
Forte states, nowhere is the body’s presence more felt than in pain and live performance
(251). Pain and performance, thus, awaken us into the materiality of our bodies. This experience, I posit, rhymes with Lyotard’s idea of the unpresentable and Heidegger’s emphasis on the pursuit of the authenticity of Being.
German theatre researcher Hans-Thies Lehmann has significantly contributed to the theorization of contemporary theatre and performance beyond the traditional aesthetic frameworks. In his seminal work, Postdramatic Theatre (originally published in German in
1999), Lehmann introduces the term “postdramatic” as a paradigm rather than theoretical norm, which is indicative of a new aesthetic idiom for analysing, teaching and practicing theatre. “Post” here should not be seen as a chronological demarcation of aesthetic trends ascribed to theatre, roughly spanning from the 1970s onwards. It is rather contingent with
Lyotard’s view of the postmodern—expressed in The Postmodern Condition—as incredulity to the totality of grand narratives and as a mode of critique toward the modern. Lehmann contends that the early twentieth-century theatre model, framed by Aristotelian mimesis and the telos of pity and fear on the one hand, and Brechtian epic theatre and reflective alienation on the other, is conceptually limiting. In his view, the term “postdramatic” addresses “a concrete problem of theatre aesthetics,” evident in representational theatre, which calls for an
“idiosyncratic” reaction reaching “far beyond the validity of a simple genre classification”
(21).
The turn to neo-avant-garde art forms such as happenings, environments, Fluxus events, performance art or live art, developing concurrently in Europe and the United States from 1960 onwards, progressively detached theatre from its dramatic basis. These developments have significantly affected audiences’ expectations, which now extend beyond catharsis or reflective alienation. Intersemioticity of contemporary performance, which employs multimedia, visual, arts, dance, music, and interaction constitute the primary
Dakari 110 elements of audience involvement that entail continuous shifting of frames and perspectives, reflection on the “world” of the act but also a “gut” awareness of “earth,” to use Heidegger’s terms, which enables the setting up of worlds thereby asking us to “see” the enigma art and being-in-the-world pose.
By definition the act of witnessing a performance event requires a number of cognitive and affective processes through which the spectator is engaged with the spectacle.
It is not only about “attending a play” or reading, discussing and performing a “dramatic text.” Moving past the canon of text-based theatre (“drama”) Lehmann turns to postdramatic theatre/performance as an event-like heterogeneous practice that cannot be restricted to either
Aristotelian or Brechtian critical language. As Lehmann succinctly observes, this relinquishment of “the idea of theatre as a representation of a fictive cosmos in general has been ruptured and even relinquished altogether, a cosmos whose closure was guaranteed through drama and its corresponding theatre aesthetic” (31).
This shift brought a new terminology that abandoned the “normative idea of theatre”
(Lehmann 33). As such, the “dramatic discourse” of “play,” “plot,” “character,” “stage” versus “auditorium,” as well as of an “author” fathering the play have been gradually abandoned in favor of a structurally changed quality of the performance “text,” which becomes “more presence than representation, more shared than communicated experience, more process than product, more manifestation than signification, more energetic impulse than information” (Lehmann 85). Perception is expanded through the addition of the dimension of time, which is central in the theory and practice of performance art: “duration, momentariness, simultaneity and unrepeatability” enable spectators to immerse and attune themselves to the rhythms of the process (Lehmann 134), which ultimately leads to the fracture of “comforting [dualities]” and the negotiation of conceptual and ontological boundaries in art as well as social life (185). Most significantly, the centrality of human
Dakari 111 experience, which extends far beyond aesthetic to ethico-political considerations, elevates all participants into a renewed perception of being (186).
Of immense interest to the present discussion are Lehmann’s views regarding the postdramatic representation of the body, especially the body in pain. Pre-modern theatre rarely thematized explicit physicality. Lehmann lists few exceptions that confirm the rule of its marginalization, such as Philoctete’s pain, the torture and agony in Christian theatre, or
Woyzeck’s illness (162). It was modernist and postdramatic theatre that rendered such themes as pain, illness, and the ontology of the body in its limitations and excesses, presentable and negotiable beyond the traditional givenness of the body as a signifier. The auto-deictic presence of the body, its self-reflexiveness that is, provokes a concurring pleasure and fear realized as a “threatening dispossession . . . and simultaneously as a promise” (Lehmann 162-163). By emphasizing the paradox of nothing-further-happening and the privation of this, a promise of something-happening, Lehmann brings Lyotard’s theorization of the sublime into the discussion of postdramatic representation of the body
(163).
What particularly differentiates postdramatic process from earlier dramatic processes is that it overcomes the semantic body, upon which the agon is displayed as a metaphor, to the phenomenality of the body, which is the very “image of its agony:” “a self-dramatization of physis takes place” (Lehmann 163). Attention shifts from the aesthetics of language to gestural and sculptural aesthetics. Lehmann considers new dance to be the most representative case of gesture: movement is the articulation of pure energy, by means of which the body becomes its own message. This message though is discontinuous and self- consciously inchoate. The “ideal” body is renounced through “impulsive gesticulations, turbulence and agitation, hysterical convulsions, autistic disintegrations of form, loss of balance, fall and deformation” (Lehmann 163).
Dakari 112
The technique of slow motion that is present in Bob Wilson’s theatre exemplifies postdramatic images of the body. As Lehmann explains,
[w]hen physical movement is slowed down to such an extent that the time of its
development itself seems to be enlarged as through a magnifying glass, the body itself
is inevitably exposed in its concreteness . . . “cut out” of the time-space continuum as
an art object; at the same time the motor apparatus is alienated; every action . . .
remains recognizable but is changed, as never seen. (164)
In other words, the purposiveness of movement, the equipmentality of the body as disciplined instrument, is decomposed; what remains is the “thingness of the thing” in Heidegger’s words, a “purposeless pure gesture” (Lehmann 164).
Besides gesture, the postdramatic body projects its physicality as a live sculpture.
Such is the case of Societas Raffaello Sanzio, an Italian experiential theater company that was founded by Romeo and Claudia Castellucci in 1980. The objective of the company has been to explore the integration of life and art and to come up with a new theatrical vocabulary. To this end, less-than-perfect bodies—anorexic, obese, aging, or diseased— would occupy the stage; non-human bodies were also involved, like animals or machines.
Lehmann focuses on their 1995 production Oresteia, where performers resemble live sculptures, with aspects of their physicality being excessively stressed and stylized to such a degree that they engulf the gaze beyond any interpretation (164). The live sculptures do not compete with the impossible perfection of classical works of art. They rather tackle the
“painful confrontation with imperfection,” exposing the spectator’s voyeuristic gaze upon the
“exhibited” performer (Lehmann 165).
The other aspect of body in postdramatic theatre Lehman discusses is the representation of pain; in particular, “the evocation of the unpresentable that pain constitutes”
(165). He distinguishes ideal suffering from the base physical pain; the first case of
Dakari 113 represented pain is about a mimesis of pain, which yields painful empathy with the played pain.” In the latter case, that is pain experienced in representation, its aesthetics has always posed an aesthetic and moral problem, as it has been so far examined. What postdramatic practices suggest is that this ambiguity should become “the indicator for the question of representation” (166). Lehmann’s observation clearly rhymes with Lyotard’s aesthetics of the sublime, as they both uphold the idea of the unpresentable into presentation itself.
The most telling example of the aesthetics of ambiguity generated by the implosion of represented and lived pain within the performer’s body is that of the American actor Ron
Vawter, founding member of the Wooster Group theater company, who died of AIDS in
1994. Shortly before his death, Vawter played in a series of monologues juxtaposing the portraits of two gay men. The condition of his deteriorating health was incorporated to his performance to such a degree that one was impossible to tell whether the abrupt pauses were acted or real exhaustion (Lehmann 166).
This effect of ambiguity was even more intensified in his very final performance as
Philoktetes in the play under the same title by John Jesurun. The mythical Greek warrior
Philoktetes was abandoned by Odysseus on the island of Lemnos after he had been bitten by a snake while on the way to Troy. His wound would not heal, while his moans and the stench of the wound distressed the other soldiers and compelled Odysseus to leave him behind to die alone. In this adaptation of the greek myth, written upon request for Jan Ritsema's 1994 triptych production at Kaaitheater, Brussels, entitled Philoktetes-Variations,
Vawter/Philoktetes is stigmatized and ostracized due to his noxiously infested wound, which took on added poignancy as it turned to be a metaphor for AIDS. Vawter actually revealed the abjectly visible marks of purple Kaposi rash covering his body, as he addressed the audience: "I am dying, I am on my way to the grave but am just doing this performance on the way." With the double meaning of these lines in mind, Savas Patsalidis points to the
Dakari 114 collapse of enacted and lived suffering into one another as an avowal of the incontestable materiality/histrionics of the body. As he writes, “by inserting his own narrative enclaves of loss and pain, [Vawter] brought into play and into the play two aspects of himself: a) the performer who fabricates these impressions and b) the character who is the impression fabricated by an ongoing performance which entails them both” (64).
Bearing witness to the transgression of fixed aesthetic frames, postdramatic theatre disrupts a priori judgments rooted in taboos, even as it evades an all-too-easy rationalization of the world. Sublime contains such irreconcilable extremes; instead of struggling with the borders, it plays with them by means of an aesthetics of risk—or, in Lehmann’s terms:
“extremes which always also contain the possibility of offending by breaking taboos” (187).
The auditorium is no longer a safe place, a sanctuary for voyeurs; it is a place of bearing witness and partaking to the spectacle. Negative pleasure, shock, delight, terror, shame, even aggression are not only part of the agreement upon entering the performance space, but the very essence of this gathering (Lehmann 187).
To summarize Lehmann’s position, the “performative turn” that characterizes theatre since the sixties is grounded on the materiality of performance, i.e. its physical setting, the embodied presence of performer and audience, the media that engage our sensory manifold, and the emphasis on the procedural aspects of the event. Postdramatic theatre thus centers on the presentness of the performer’s and the audience’s presence as an ephemeral moment of communication and “self-transformation” which “annuls all aesthetic distance—for the artists themselves as for the audience” (137). This understanding of presentness “as something that happens” (144) echoes Lyotard’s aesthetic elaboration on the “most minimal occurrence” the experience of the unpresentable suggests; it, thus, points towards the discourse of postdramatic theatre as indeed a promising new idiom, which “can only aim to name the area
Dakari 115 of overlap between theatre and Performance Art” without, however, providing any adequate analysis of performance art itself (Lehmann 137).
Prominent German performance theorist Erika Fisher-Lichte picks up on Lehmann’s concept of presence as “a process of consciousness” but insists that this is a phenomenon, which “cannot be grasped by such a dichotomy as body vs. mind or consciousness.” We are not talking anymore about the reflective processes of traditional western “dramatic” theatre as opposed to the primordial sensuality of oriental performing bodies; performance, Fischer-
Lichte posits, “collapses such a dichotomy.” It is the very presence of the actor that projects the continuum of mind and body acting in unison, “each . . . always already implied in the other.” By virtue of the performer’s mindful presence, spectators experience the performer and themselves as “embodied [minds] in a constant process of becoming,” enabled by the ongoing energy flow which affects and transforms everyone present (The Transformative
Power of Performance 98).
Fischer-Lichte traces the emergence of performance as a process or event (rather than a fixed art object) wherein “the commonplace appears transfigured and becomes conspicuous” (Transformative 175) through the involvement of actors and spectators alike.
The continually operating feedback by this ongoing interaction, what she terms “autopoietic feedback loop” (48) is what leads to the “re-enchantment of the world” (190): a deeper experience of self-awareness and of being in the world.
What interests her is the performative character of a performance as event, the energy that circulates among actors and spectators. Unlike Sontag, who sought to affirm or reject a work of art on the basis of pre-existing patterns, Lichte, echoing Butler’s theorization of the performative, perceives the co-presence of actors and spectators as itself a validation of the aestheticity that is intrinsic to this experience. To a significant degree, this view echoes
Dakari 116
Lyotard’s thoughts on the task of the artist/philosopher to reinvent the rules. Lyotard, however, searches for this dynamic predominantly in art objects (i.e. paintings).
With both the performer and the spectator present in their being-here and being-with others, there exists a robust potential for transformation, Fischer-Lichte argues. This is the point of departure in her investigation of performer-spectator relationship. The performer’s body is where she draws on to support her thesis. She relates her theoretical insights to a number of performance events from the 1960s on that are exemplary of her notions of the performative, aspects of ritual, and the role of the audience. This is particularly evident in
Marina Abramovic’s 1975 Lips of Thomas, which took place at the Krinzinger Gallery in
Innsbruck. In this performance, Abramovic first undressed, then ate two pounds of honey and drank an entire bottle of red wine using a glass. Afterwards, she broke the glass with her hand, which caused her bleeding. She then cut a five-pointed star into the skin of her abdomen using a razor blade, and knelt down and flagellated her back severely. Next, she lay down on a cross made of blocks of ice above which there was an electric radiator, which made the ice melt but also aggravated the bleeding from the skin of her abdomen. The performance ended in an unexpected way: after she lay there for 30 minutes, some audience members, unable to bear this self-imposed torture any longer, remove her from the ice block
(Fischer-Lichte, Transformative 20).
Abramovic, who was not playing a part, transgressed the frames of mimesis, actually harming herself. Her performance exhibited features of ritual; self-flagellation, for example, is an old religious practice of spiritual transformation through physical extremity. It also exemplified characteristics of spectacle, as it was supposed to be a performance. The uncertain limits between ritual and spectacle, which Fischer-Lichte interprets as “liminal,” or
“threshold” experience (Transformative 174), displaced the audience from their traditional
Dakari 117 role. The audience members stopped being spectators and were actively involved in the progression of the spectacle; roles were reversed and the audience completed the spectacle.
Another example that exhibits elements of role reversal and which shows that aesthetic, social, and political aspects are inextricable interlinked in performance is Coco
Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena’s, Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit... (1992). It was performed in a variety of public places, like Covent Garden in London, or the Plaza Cristobal
Colon in Madrid, art museums and galleries in US cities and elsewhere on the occasion of the quincentenary celebrations of the discovery of America by Columbus (Fischer-Lichte,
Transformative 44). The performers, exhibiting themselves in a cage, were literally testing the validity of their theory that “the mere act of perceiving the Other constituted a political act,” which confirmed that colonialist discourse was still at play in western cultures. This time the spectators were the unwitting passers-by or visitors who were attracted by the exotic spectacle and were provoked into engaging with them it what turned to be a display of the colonialist gaze. As Fischer-Lichte comments, “the act of perceiving the other is always a political act that involves projections of self and other mingled with a variety of disciplining mechanisms” (Transformative 46).
A third example, which occurs in a public space, experimenting not only with the ontological boundaries of performance but also with the limits and autonomy of art as it enters public life is Christoph Schlingensief’s Please love Austria! First European coalition week (Bitte liebt Oesterreich! Erste europaeische Koalitionswoche). Classifying it is difficult, as it verges somewhere between street art, political action, and television reality show, playing with the unwitting public who witnessed a group of asylum seekers living in a container in a central square in Vienna on the occasion of Vienna Festival in 2000. By asking people to vote for the deportation of the asylum seekers who were monitored in a Big-
Brother-like way, this performance satirized the television voting culture of the time, but also
Dakari 118 disclosed Austria’s latent fascism and nationalist sentiments. This performance/public action also raised a finger against Schlingensief himself who was accused of taking advantage of real asylum seekers in order to serve his artistic narcissism, as it will be discussed in chapter eight of this study.
Around the above-mentioned, as well as numerous other examples, Fischer-Lichte constructs her theory of the aesthetic of performative as essentially an aesthetic of presence.
As she writes:
Theatre and performance art events since the 1960s have been experimenting with and
developing the use of the body by frequently referring to and drawing on the historical
avant-garde’s emphasis on the body’s materiality. The artists of the 1960s differ from
it insofar as they do not take the body for granted as an entirely malleable and
controllable material but consistently acknowledge the doubling of “being a body”
and “having a body,” the co-existence of the phenomenal and semiotic body. Use of
the body is grounded in the actors’ bodily being-in-the-world. This opens the
possibility for a reintroduction of a radically redefined idea of the term embodiment.
(Transformative 82)
Essential to this project of transformative interaction of all partakers is the dissolution of boundaries and the transition from an either/or distribution to an “as well as” continuum. The continually shifting perspectives, which is symptomatic of liminal performance (199) turns boundaries into thresholds; crossing them can be precarious, threatening, and profoundly unsettling. Alienation occurs but not in the Brechtian sense of disinterested spectatorship.
The withdrawal from the everyday world is required, as in all liminal rituals and initiations, so as for the partakers to be fully immersed in the performance event. Once the process reaches its end, everyone recovers his or her previous state in life, enriched this time by the insights obtained through the performance event.
Dakari 119
This collapse of boundaries and binaries does not only concern the ontological distinction between actors and spectators, art and life, subject and object, but also, and most significantly, the “oscillating focus between the actor’s specific corporeality and the character portrayed” between presence and representation. This is what Fischer-Lichte terms
“perceptual multistability” (97). Ron Vawter’s performance, which brought together lived and enacted illness, is a case in point.
This usefulness, however, is far from seminal in Fischer-Lichte’s position. As Marvin
Carlson sees it, her thoughts on transformative experience are more contingent with Jill
Dolan’s concept of the utopian performatives, those “small but profound moments in which performance calls the attention of the audience in a way that lifts everyone slightly above the present, into a hopeful feeling of what the world might be like if every moment of our lives were as emotionally voluminous, generous, aesthetically striking, and intersubjectively intense” (Carlson, “Introduction” 9). It is in these magical and intense moments that Fischer-
Lichte’s idea of the enchantment of the world takes place, “resulting in a sudden deeper insight into the shared process of being in the world” (Dolan 5). Dolan’s description could as well accommodate the idea of a sublime aesthetics that resides in those aesthetically striking, uplifting moments, which however she refuses to “[pin] down to prescription” (5), further rejecting any teleological assumptions around a supposed quest for a utopia. Carlson interestingly highlights the affinities between Dolan’s “aesthetics” and “intersubjectivity” and
Fischer-Lichte’s aestheticity of performance as substantiated through the co-presence of actors and spectators (“Introduction” 10).
Border-crossing also entails the deconstruction of the strongholds of philosophical and pragmatic binaries, “the realms of art, social life, and politics” which “cannot be clinically separated in performance” (Fischer-Lichte, Transformative 51). What Fischer-
Lichte implies is that dualistic conceptual configurations can no longer sufficiently contain
Dakari 120 major queries about existence itself. The promising potential of dissolving all boundaries and binaries that performance offers is evocatively suggested in Lichte’s aesthetics of the performative. There can be no definitive assertion of transformation as an end.
Transformation is inherent in the very process of performance.
Fischer-Lichte’s position could be seen as a contemporary reworking of Heidegger’s meditation on Dasein’s authentic being-in-the-world. As it is obvious in her thesis, however,
Fischer-Lichte is not so much preoccupied with the essence of the artwork, which could lead her discussion to hinge on a formalist aesthetic orientation (Transformative 166). What spectators experience is the materiality of live performance as an ephemeral event rather than the reflective response to a static work of art, like a text, painting, or sculpture. This shift form object to event is the informing difference in Fischer-Lichte’s aesthetic approach.
Fischer-Lichte explains her choice to refrain from identifying established aesthetic positions such as Heidegger’s, as she considers the aestheticity of performance to be self- evident in its nature as event (Transformative 162). This requires no further theoretical edification, she believes, than her proposed model of the aesthetics of the performative.
According to her findings, this aesthetic idiom is constituted through the three aspects of the nature of performance as event: the autopoietic feedback loop, activated by the co-presence of actors and spectators; the dissolution of binary oppositions, such as actor-spectator, stage- auditorium, art-life, or signifier-signified; the emergence of meaning cannot be solely derived from the performer; the spectator contributes as well through his/her presence and the semantic memory he/she applies to the experience, such as the emotional response to existing taboos (158-159). Such hermeneutic processes constantly place the spectator into a crisis, as he/she is split between involvement and detachment. Still this crisis is what turns the experience of the event a constantly changing process of becoming; and situations of liminality that transform the participants of the performance, for instance, role reversal as in
Dakari 121
Abramovic’s Lips of Thomas, where the spectators find themselves in an ethical/ontological crisis: should they intervene and put an end to the artist’s self-imposed torment and the performance; or should they remain within their “role” as audience and let the performance— and the torture—continue with unexpectable results? (Transformative 163).
She also makes no direct reference to Lyotard’s aesthetics of the sublime, or the presentation of the unpresentable for that matter. Her emphasis on the physical presence of the performer expands on and complements Lyotard’s discussion on the performative aspects of a phrase (linguistic or extra-linguistic). Her distinction between “presence” and
“representation” echo both Lyotard’s and Heidegger’s observations on a work of art not as the concretization of a priori aesthetic judgments and the application of previously existing formal structures, but as a thing that needs to be rediscovered in its pure thingness, an open process rather than a fixed object that keeps shaping representation and reception along the way.
Her approach, which expands on the affective potential of the performance event as ongoing energy flow among participants is certainly a much more complete approach. This view radically opposes Sontag’s aesthetic purism evident in her opposition to the representation of cancer in art. In Fischer-Lichte’s view, “you cannot not react to each other,” which is to say, “any gathering of people always constitutes a social situation”
(Transformative 43). At the same time, Fischer-Lichte theorizes this gathering as by definition performative and therefore aesthetic. The most significant aspect of her proposed idiom with regards to the present discussion, therefore, is that the aesthetic and the socio- political coincide (51). This will be a key point to be examined in the next chapter: whether illness can be equally appropriate for aesthetic negotiation and social (and personal) transformation without the one excluding the other.
Finally, Lichte’s concept of the re-enchantment of the world through the feedback
Dakari 122 loop circulating among co-existing performers and spectators and their subsequent transformation through this communion resembles Lyotard’s idea of a sublime feeling that derives from our contemplation with the secondary privation inherent in performance, that is, the privation of a primary privation, be it the fear of darkness, silence, or death, and the promise of something happening. Similarly, Lichte’s theorization of the re-enchantment of the world, echoes Heidegger’s thoughts on the restitution of a primordial truth of essence:
Dasein’s authentic being.
However, the negative connotations of the inauthenticity deriving from the banal publicness of the “they,” of the being-with-one-another as not being-oneself in Heidegger, should not be confused with the transformative potential of the co-presence of performers and spectators. As Lichte postulates, performance already is a liminal experience, a threshold space where participants are withdrawn from their everyday world to partake to a ritual, which can be equally threatening and exciting, and return to the world transformed. This is also the process by means of which Dasein reclaims its authentic core and is able to return to its everydayness in full awareness.
Emergence of meaning in performing an already existing condition of illness or pain, brings to surface its two-fold signification with particular emphasis on how to (re)present such a private experience. Under this light, performance becomes a language that creates images for others to reflect on. At the same time, performance is the expression of a private sensation/thought of the individual. It is the way he/she sees things, his/her understanding of interior mental/emotional processes. It is the moment, however, when the performer invites the audience to participate in his/her understanding of pain that makes a difference. This moment, described by Stanton Garner as “the dialectic of the inside and the outside, the human body as lived and witnessed” (16) brings to light the threshold-state of performance.
There are cracks on the formerly rigid surface of ontological and representational barriers that
Dakari 123 permit interaction between performer and spectator. Once dialogue between them is established, the beholders find themselves occupying both realms: the real and the representational.
This process is important for the performer as well. She/he in turn is faced with her/his corporeality and the role she/he impersonates. She/he also moves in an out of these states the way spectators do. In performance, this ongoing movement destabilizes the fixity of theatrical conventions; pain calls attention to itself and to the necessity of keeping this energy flowing among the involved members in order for them to be truly touched and transformed.
Experience displaces mere interpretation, and performance is identified as an art event, mutable, precarious, ritualistically unpredictable, and engaging.
Lichte’s argument is insightfully complemented by Dolan’s, suggesting that this brief moment of utopia should be seen as a process and not a result, a “finished perfection” (Dolan
6). This prospect echoes what Joseph Chaikin, founder of the Open Theatre, once said, that in theatre “one can demand that the promise of another dimension of existence be revealed, and that the impossible be achieved/experienced here and now, in the presence of other living human beings—the impossible, namely a sense of unity between what is usually divided in our daily life: the material and immaterial, the human body and spirit, our mortality and our propensity for perfection, for infinity, for the absolute” (qtd. in Dolan 6).
The aesthetics of the performative Fischer-Lichte has developed does not aim to entirely substitute established theories of the aesthetics of work, production, and reception, but to “complement the existing categories productively,” as she argues (Transformative
181). Her theoretical model suits the present discussion on performances about cancer, which are often beyond the grasp of such delimiting terms as “work,” “production,” and
“reception.” The TED talks discussed in chapter seven, for instance, cannot be clearly considered artistic events; they lie somewhere between inspirational public talk—suggested
Dakari 124 by the social character of the TED culture, solo performance/dance, and dramatized literature.
Likewise, in Angela Ellsworth’s Hemaderby and Pam Patterson’s Bodysight (chapter seven of this study), as in Bill T. Jones’s dance piece to be discussed in the next chapter, ontological/generic boundaries of performance dissolve. These artists/performers involve in pre- and post-performance interaction with the public that significantly contributes to the overall experience of the event itself. In Ellsworth’s Hemaderby, in particular, the kinaesthetic energy released by the skaters’ bodies moving to all directions create a living organism that expands, contracts, and interacts with the static crowd of spectators, crystallizing Fischer-Lichte’s argument on the ephemeral materiality of performance and its dynamics of affect. In the same way, Patterson involves the group of people gathered around her in the stage space of Goddard College into tactile participation by handing them cushion- like breast prostheses to feel under their garments and play with, inviting them to step “in her shoes” for a while. The participants’ perceptive faculties are further challenged by the explicit sight of Patterson’s mastectomy scar which they witness live as a whole and in photographs, where they get glimpses of flesh and stitches. Both spectacles are equally compelling and participants have to decise where to focus their attention on.
Alternatively, in Schlingensief’s posthumous exhibition at the 2011 Biennale in
Venice (chapter eight of this study), which brings together various forms of visual arts, film, performance recordings, and installation art, a major ontological crisis is at play: the reversal of roles instigated by the death of the artist and the completion of performance by the very presence of spectators. In this case, even Fischer-Lichte’s condition of the co-presence of performer and spectator is challenged without, however, putting its transformative potential at risk, as I will be arguing.
All the above cases clearly suggest a relocation of spectators outside their conventional fixed positions. According to Fischer-Lichte, they occupy a “liminal space”
Dakari 125 which marks performance as a threshold, a precarious, unhomely, yet transformative space.
In the context of artistic performance, this liminal experience can be confusing and uncomfortable, especially when it comes to witnessing the artist’s pain, physical and emotional, or the very process of dying. It is nevertheless constitutive of the re-enchantment of the world, which in the case of cancer performances is about an intense sense of connectedness and deeper understanding of our ephemerality. This elevation from the everyday is only at play while this temporary community of partakers is formed on the occasion of the art event. This is a significant point in Fischer-Liche’s theory, as it is precisely the idea of the “journey-as-the-goal” that the aestheticity of liminal experience is grounded on, rather than an altered status that will continue after performance, i.e. a wedding
(Transformative 199).
This observation regarding performance as an end in itself versus performance as a goal to an end, which Fischer-Lichte articulates towards the end of her book, radically changes the aesthetic landscape. As she sees it, a liminal performance is aesthetic once the passage/threshold is itself the goal and not the passage to something else, like a changed status, the formation of a community, or entertainment (Transformative 199). Fischer-Lichte examines a wide range of events that are generally considered performances, like festivals, political gatherings, religious ceremonies, or even sports events that exemplify certain spectacular qualities. However, when such events serve a specific end that is other than merely experiencing them, then they should not be considered aesthetic, according to
Fischer-Lichte.
Still, Fischer-Lichte thinks that this distinction between aesthetic and non-aesthetic is misleading in classifying performances. As she argues, “aesthetic and non-aesthetic experiences can alternate in the course of a single performance” depending on the individual’s perception, whether, that is, one focuses on the “threshold-state” of the event or
Dakari 126 its direction toward a specific goal. Such shifts can occur from minute to minute and as such keep partakers constantly involved, requiring their decision-making alertness. Each state affects the other and shapes the overall experience. As Fischer-Lichte observes, “artists . . . endeavor to cross the borders between art and non-art, between the aesthetic and the non- aesthetic, so as to blur and erase them entirely” (Transformative 200). Abramovic’s Lips of
Thomas, for instance, experiments with these conceptual boundaries and with the concept of the autonomy of art itself: where does the performance stop and Abramovic’s health risks start?
Regardless of the dilemmas the artists pose and spectators have to deal with, performances that occur within an art institution, i.e. theatre, art festival, gallery etc., guarantee their validation as art, Fischer-Lichte posits (Transformative 201); this might be the only precondition that has always been valid with respect to what is generally perceived as
“art,” which, however, is challenged by such impromptu performing spaces as the street in
Schlingensief’s Please Love Austria, or Fusco and Gomez-Pena’s Amerindians. In this sense,
Fischer-Lichte’s observation on the constituents of aestheticity in performance relates to the present discussion, which intends to challenge Sontag’s aesthetic purism in excluding cancer from serious artistic explorations. All the performances under discussion either occur within such institutions, or experiment with their legitimating frames.
Summarizing Fischer-Lichte’s approach, co-presence, border-crossing, liminality, or withdrawal from the ordinary, are the key concepts behind a transformative performance event. These features are evocatively stressed in a number of performances to be analyzed here. Illness itself suggests in fact a withdrawal from ordinary existence, as it is experienced as an in-between state—what Sontag’s metaphor of the “nightside of life” succinctly conveys, and one that possesses a deeply affective potential that is instigated by the self- referentiality of the body.
Dakari 127
Gatherings around a diseased body, in their primordial intensity and sublime unpresentability, will always address this tension between art and life, presence and representation, the aesthetic and the socio-political in creative and affective ways. Returning to Lyotard’s differend as an unresolved dispute due to absence of a mutually accepted rule of judgement, Fischer-Lichte’s idiom of the aesthetics of the performative suggests a way out toward the re-enchantment of the world, which is “accomplished through this linkage of art and life” (Transformative 206). Art, life, and illness in art and life enable our being-in-the- world as embodied minds. This, according to Fischer-Lichte, is a refreshing break from the
Enlightenment tradition of the mind-body split (207).
The ideas of embodiment, co-existence, intersubjectivity and flowing energy are vibrantly present in the above positions and suggest, as I see it, an effective complementation to the aesthetic and ethical problem of the unpresentable. Just a brief moment of an impossible, utopian uplifting moment suffices in re-enchanting the world around and within us. This is a fleeting moment of connectedness, different for each of the partakers, however, one that they can cherish in the mundane everydayness.
Judith Butler on the dynamics of the assembly: a performance perspective
What happens when we act in concert? Lichte’s views on the transformative potential of performance are reflected in Butler’s exploration of the dynamics of the assembly. In fact, the latter is a highly politicized version of the former. Butler is particularly interested in the energy that flows from public assemblies that have taken place both in the United States against precarity—or its European equivalent, austerity (Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly 51). Both are cases of performance, of a concerted gathering of physical bodies that in one way or another demonstrate something. In this sense, even art is political, and not only when it promotes a certain agenda. The very gathering politicizes the event.
Dakari 128
In her latest work, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015), Butler sheds light on the dynamics of public assembly under dominant economic and political conditions. Departing from the problem of who really counts as “the people” in democratic politics, she reveals the stitches of a fundamentally selective political scheme, which, under the pretext of inclusion (“we are the people”), “involves an act of demarcation that draws a line usually on the basis of nationality or against the background of the nation-state. . . . In other words, there is no possibility of ‘the people’ without a discursive border drawn somewhere” (Notes 5). Further widening the gap between those who are recognizable as the people and those who are not, such explicit and implicit modes of inequality perpetuate “the process of naming and renaming” and therefore reveal the constructedness of fundamental categories, Butler observes (6).
Understanding assemblies as plural forms of performative action, Butler extends the theory of performativity beyond speech acts to include the concerted actions of the body, or what she calls “forms of assembly.” Assemblies of physical bodies have an expressive potential that exceeds speech: “silent gatherings, including vigils or funerals, often signify in excess any particular written or vocalized account of what they are about” (Notes 8). She stresses the significance of such gatherings as essential in acknowledging and empowering the identity and agency a group, even as she admits its limitations: “Not everyone can appear in bodily form [in a political demonstration, for instance], and many of those who cannot appear . . . [or appear] through virtual or digital networks, are also part of ‘the people,’ defined precisely by being constrained from making a specific bodily appearance in public space” (8). As Butler observes, this fact compels us to reexamine “the restrictive ways the
‘public sphere’ has been uncritically posited by those who assume full access and rights of appearance on a designated platform” (8).
Resembling Lyotard’s concept of a phrase, Butler’s assemblies, too, “say” something.
Dakari 129
Demonstrating about his/her own precarity, one calls attention to his/her physical presence, as if saying, “look at this body, this is a body that does not have shelter/ is hungry/is dying.”
The body then is not only the vehicle of expressing a certain political view; it becomes the subject of its own predicament.12
Butler’s position becomes contingent with the present discussion if we replace the realm of politics with that of art, “the people” with those who rightfully create, judge, and appreciate art, and the assembly with the co-habitation of the designated platform, i.e. the performance space, by performers and spectators alike. What issues does this assembly promote? Who are entitled to be part of the assembly, either by being physically present or be represented in spite of their absence? Who are the non-people, the unrecognized, the excluded? By which principles does this plural form of performativity stand? And finally, who defines these principles?
The above questions are to be explored shortly in the notorious Croce/Jones case that took place in 1995: prominent American dance critic Arlene Croce once wrote a vitriolic piece of criticism about experimental dance choreographer Bill T. Jones’s multimedia dance performance Still/Here. Jones’s performance drew on a group of terminally ill people who participated in a series of experimental dance workshops moderated and videotaped by Jones.
The material that Jones gathered was the basis for his company’s performance, both as the inspiration behind the professional dancers’ movements, and as on-stage screened footage.
The wave of reaction to Croce’s critique was mainly spurred by the fact that Croce unapologetically admitted that she had not attended the performance before attacking it. The other debated topic addressed the grounds on which Croce deemed Jones’s piece as non-art, or worse, as “victim art,” which in essence rejects all attempts to stage illness, suffering, and
12 A case in point is American comedian/writer Tania Katan’s cancer activism. Having survived breast cancer twice with the cost of a double mastectomy, Katan runs marathons topless and makes fun of the condescending looks her bare yet nipple-less chest attracts. She ultimately exposes the sexist taboos and the profit-oriented media attention masked behind breast cancer awareness culture that has been thriving since the nineties (see chapter eight of this study).
Dakari 130 the encounter with the fear of death as a mere reality show which blackmails spectators into feeling pity and turns them into accomplices/voyeurs. This case becomes all the more interesting, if we consider that Sontag, who in those days was in remission for the second time, passionately sided with Croce against the “political clout” of the assembly of “victims” and their “philistine” art.
As we shall see, Croce and Sontag refuse to accept the aesthetic performativity of the diseased body. It is as if disease enforces itself upon the body as the, one and only, overarching identity. Therein comes Butler’s interpretation of the coming together of precarious, disenfranchised bodies as a site of where political power is enacted. By extending
Butler’s point to embrace the negotiation of the aesthetic potential of the performance of illness, I posit that this getting together of bodies, healthy and sick, performing and spectating, can be a site where the renegotiation of precarity,13 or inchoate, borderline existence, without necessarily following a consistent aesthetic pattern or political agenda, may as well spark the generation of affective art.
Further digging into the idea of the body as (not) ours, Butler comments on its associative and dissociative agency:
The body implies mortality, vulnerability, agency: the skin and the flesh expose us to
the gaze of others, but also to touch, and to violence, and bodies put us at risk of
becoming the agency and instrument of all these as well. Although we struggle for
rights over our own bodies, the very bodies for which we struggle are not quite ever
only our own. The body has its invariably public dimension. Constituted as a social
phenomenon in the public sphere, my body is and is not mine. Given over from the
start to the world of others, it bears their imprint, is formed within the crucible of
13 Precarity, Butler explains, “designates that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support more than others, and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death . . . precarity is thus the differential distribution of precariousness” (Notes 10). Her theory of gender performativity is an example of resistance against the induced precarity of gender norms.
Dakari 131
social life; only later, and with some uncertainty, do I lay claim to my body as my
own, if, in fact, I ever do. (Notes 26)
What emerges as a key concept in Butler’s discussion of precarity is vulnerability. Its acknowledgment can lead to new transformative political practices—or aesthetic for that matter, but as it seems, it can also further promote disenfranchisement and isolation as a self- fulfilling prophecy, as for instance, “an ill person is weak,” “cancer kills,” or “you must stay strong, you must win the battle.” Such utterances, which are mainly denotative, still carry a certain degree of agency over the subject. They may not kill as Sontag warned, but they do disenfranchise the afflicted individual. And if today such designations may not carry the burden of social stigma and isolation any more, they do interfere with employment opportunities, loan eligibility criteria, or in our case, high-standard art production—not merely the popular tear-jerking kind associated with illness testimonies.
Butler’s model of a renewed theory and practice of performativity of the assembly, however, comes with the realization that vulnerability still poses an irresolvable problem, as it may be strategically used, or serve the purposes of the dominant group (as, for instance, xenophobic protests against the immigrants orchestrated by the state, or men complaining that they are vulnerable to discrimination by feminists). The stakes of precarity, the
(dis)enfranchisement and (the limits of) the freedom of expression, could be seen as the political realization of the Lyotardian differend. In the context of the present discussion, this dispute is crystallized in the conflicting aspects of what can be aesthetically presented or not.
Butler’s model of the performativity of the assembly interestingly relates to our discussion of an aesthetic theory based on the intersemiotic and the intersubjective. Her words succinctly articulate this promising potential of the performativity of physical co- existence and the dynamic of connectedness: “If performativity has often been associated with individual performance, it may prove important to reconsider those forms of
Dakari 132 performativity that only operate through forms of coordinated action, whose condition and aim is the reconstruction of plural forms of agency and social practices of resistances” (Notes
9). Even in cases where language is completely absent, when there is only movement or even stillness, as we shall see in the second part of this study, the co-presence of performers and spectators becomes the condition of aesthetic performativity, of something happening which defies the unpresentability of the spectacle of illness. In Butler’s words, “this parking of my body in the middle of another’s action, is neither my act nor yours, but something that happens by virtue of the relation between us, arising from that relation, equivocating between the I and the we” (9).
This gathering of people, which is the fundamental theatrical condition, also possesses forms that condition individual as well as collective identities. These identities are not static but fluid, ephemeral, and overlapping. Consider, for example, the changing perspectives on gender, race, or social class as they have been chanelled through philosophy, anthropology, feminism, or politics in the course of history and across cultures. Without the potential to transgress boundaries, identity as a functional concept seems impossible, according to
Fischer-Lichte (History of European Drama and Theatre 2). A point of departure in the process of identity formation in Fischer-Lichte’s view is articulated by Helmut Plessner as conditio humana: “the distance of the self from the self,” “man’s decentered position” (qtd. in
Fisher-Lichte, History 2). In other words, a human being confronts oneself/the other in order to mold an image of one’s self as another, through the eyes of another. This dislocation outside oneself allows for a deeper observation of one’s actions and behavior. In line with
Plessner’s thoughts, Fischer-Lichte identifies this fundamental anthropological condition as a theatrical one, whereby one assumes both perspectives: that of actor and that of observer/spectator. In this sense, Lichte argues, “theatre thematizes and reflects the de- centered position of man and the potential resulting from it” both in language and the
Dakari 133 semiotic use of the body (History 2). In this fluid assembly of bodies there can be no fixed positions or identities, thus constantly reshuffling perspectives, agencies, and affects.
Further reflections on being-in-pain and its performance
The paradox of pain, which lies in the tension created by the coexistence of certainty and doubt it evokes, renders its performance all the more challenging. As Stanton Garner observes, “the performance of pain invades, and is in turn invaded by, the perceptual actuality of pain in a way that foregrounds the uncanny circuitry and ambiguity of dramatic representation itself” (45). This “recalcitrant corporeality,” as he calls it, “threatens to disrupt the stage’s aesthetic integrity” (59). My objection to the former concession by Garner is the way the aesthetic integrity of the stage is defined. It sounds rather formalistic, particularly in the way he appears to accept certain ruling principles in the representation of the recalcitrant subjectivity. I would like to juxtapose this view with the Lyotardian position with regards to the postmodern art event as detouring established aesthetic conventions and inventing its own along the way. Particularly, when it comes to performance as an art event, such restrictions can no longer hold, Lichte posits; in her anthology of terms, there can be no such thing as
“recalcitrant corporeality” or aesthetic integrity of the stage. On the contrary, performance as an art event addresses corporeality as a shared understanding of being in the world, while the aesthetics of stage have been abandoned in favor of the aesthetics of presentness, which is to be found in the here-and-now of performance.
Such a break from traditional aesthetics should not be considered in any way similar to Brechtian alienation. Unlike the disinterested reflective spectatorship Brecht proposed, the representation of pain calls for a different kind of reception. This “untellable, unactable intensity” of pain is what Blau calls “resistance to alienation” (160). As such, pain poses an acting problem, according to Blau. How could it be represented? Since “having pain”
Dakari 134 essentially means “having doubt”? Is it real or just an image of it? Either way, the audience is asked to participate by embracing it. This is when the audience oscillates between “the desire for symbolization and the nerve-wrecking immediacy of the event” (Blau 163).
Bringing this concession under the light of the present discussion, the metaphor of suffering articulated by the subject-in-pain is complemented by an assertion of the unpresentable, which expresses the recipient’s course through the uncharted territory of the sublime. There is no need for trying to make sense of the sublime; the sublime itself becomes the message. This postulation has aesthetic as well as political effects. This “minimal occurrence” in Lyotard’s words, this moment of self-reflexive intensified perception, the
“being-here” that suspends the terror of privation, not only resolves problems in representation but also creates a space of resistance to dominant discourse, echoing the dynamic of assembly Butler talks about.
The theoretical trajectories examined in this chapter map out a new theoretical ground that promises to accommodate the philosophical sublime investigated in depth by Lyotard, and suggested in Heidegger’s aesthetics as these emerge through the diseased body in performance. Taken together, the above positions ultimately suggest a way in overcoming aesthetic and political limitations of the representation of cancer.
Dakari 135
Chapter 5
The role and limits of the critic:
The Croce/Jones debate and the stakes of “victim art”
Witnessing and reflecting on the recalcitrance of the diseased body in performance is indeed problematic in terms of representation, reception, and critical response. As such, illness on stage mirrors a crisis mainly in three domains: the ontological (where to draw the line between art and life?), the aesthetic (is it high or low art? or, is it art at all?), and the political
(what agendas does it promote?). Eventually, who is to judge an art event on all the above terms? What are the working principles? Should there be any?
What this questioning invites is an investigation of the convergence of the aestheticity of the event and its pragmatic dimensions, its dialogue with the socio-political, performance art has always explored. As it was suggested in the previous chapter, the aesthetic and the socio-political should not be seen as entirely opposite directions separating theatre from performance. This is a very interesting point to consider, especially in the context of
American performance theory up until the first decade of the twenty-first century, which according to Carlson, “has on the whole and so far been oriented distinctly . . . toward pragmatic concerns and the use of performance to achieve certain specific social, cultural, personal, and rhetorical goals.” As Carlson observes, works on performance aesthetics such as Fischer-Lichte’s “[offer] the potential of developing a new dimension in the ongoing discourse of modern American performance theory” (“Introduction” 10).
What is examined here is a performance that, in the spirit of this convergence of the aesthetic and the pragmatic, experiments with the borders between art and life, health and illness, as well as with the body’s affective potential beyond conventional beauty of form.
Experimental choreographer Bill T. Jones conceived and realized—after a year-long series of
Dakari 136 what he called “survival workshops” with terminally ill participants, non-dancers—his illness-themed dance performance Still/Here, which premiered in 1994. Arlene Croce, a prominent American dance critic for The New Yorker, attacked Jones for producing dance outside “fine art.” Early in 1995, she published her essay “Discussing the Undiscussable,” a vitriolic review of Still/Here (although she had not previously attended the piece) considering it to be a blatant case of “victim art” and not canonical art—hence her not attending it, which stirred a variety of reactions: a number of artists, essayists, and critics opposed to her essentialism, as we shall see. Sontag, however, took Croce’s side in reviving the “culture wars” debate,14 bringing the issues discussed so far, especially the debate on the extent to which illness performance in general, and cancer performance in particular, can be aestheticized and thereby classified as an “proper” form of art. Finally, this discussion invites a rereading of Sontag’s aesthetic formalism—established through her most well-known critical essays—against her own shattering cancer experience in the next chapter.
Still/Here: background
Experimental choreographer/dancer Bill T. Jones describes Still/Here as a “movement meditation in the face of life-threatening disease” (Cunningham, Piontek and Jones 78). The work grew out of “Talking and Moving about Life and Death,” a series of months-long workshops across the United States. The participants were not professional dancers; they
14 The term “culture wars” refers to the clash between “high” and “low” cultures in the United States during the eighties and the nineties which implicitly reflected the antagonism between the political Right and Left. It came to be synonymous with “the successful effort by the Christian Right and conservative politicians to censure and decimate the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).” The purpose of the NEA has been to promote diversity and provide state sponsorship towards artistic development to marginal voices, i.e. racial, ethnic, or lesbian-gay minorities. Soon, artistic experimentations that fell outside “official” or mainstream art came to be in the public’s mind synonymous with “unpatriotic,” “blasphemous,” “sexually charged” or “descriptive of reprehensible lifestyles.” When the AIDS crisis broke out, and due to the fact that many performance artists were homosexual, it all became a deeper issue of physical and moral contamination. The best-known cases in point are the withdrawal of grant money awarded to the NEA performance artists Karen Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller, who were censored for being utterly corrupting and literally a waste of American taxpayers’ money; also, the 1990 obscenity trial over late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s work, which exhibited, among other subject matters, explicit nudity and homoeroticism. For further information, see Wallace167; Phelan 105; Schneider 14; Lippard 38-61.
Dakari 137 were people from different social, educational, and demographic backgrounds who were dealing with different terminal illnesses, like AIDS, cancer, or cystic fibrosis. The participants were encouraged to “capsulize or crystallize their essential situation, dilemma, in a gesture” (Cunningham, Piontek and Jones 78). Each of these “survival workshops,” thus, generated fragments of phrases and movements, a gestural vocabulary, improvised by the participants themselves (through Jones’s positive reinforcement) and videotaped by media artist Gretchen Bender. For instance, he would ask participants to create imaginary maps of their lives by moving in space and highlight landmarks with distinct gestures that would stand out. At the same time, Jones would ask them to talk about their lives, their illnesses, people who matter in their lives, or how they imagine the day of their death. There was one question that always came up in the workshop, Jones reports: “Is your body in fact your enemy because it’s where the illness is?” focusing on the tension between being a body, through which I express myself, I experience the world, and having a body that hurts me/is leaving me (Cunningham, Piontek and Jones 85). The issue of betrayal by one’s one body frequently came up during the sessions, Jones says. That was the first—difficult and yet healing—step towards a re-definition of the self. Jones says: “If the body can betray you, then who is the you that we’re talking about? That is a spiritual, philosophical, even religious question” (85).
These sessions were a laboratory of spoken and danced emotions; Jones and his group of trained dancers later manipulated this audiovisual material into dance, which was choreographed to a soundtrack on denial, birth and death, composed by Ken Prizelle. Footage of the workshop participants became part of “an ocean” of faces taken from talk shows audiences, which Bender used in a video, to address modern culture’s relationship to television and its mediating role in “late twentieth-century angst around the issue of mortality,” Jones explains (Cunningham, Piontek and Jones 79). This video was projected on
Dakari 138 mobile and suspended screens during performance, with which the dancers would enter into dialogue and vigorously group around and away into refined abstraction of the workshop participants’ recorded gestures—a hybrid spectacle that defied traditional formality of expression.
Apart from its aesthetic hybridity, Still/Here inevitably disclosed its sharply political dimension. Jones’s own background might explain why: Jones is an African-American gay experimental choreographer, and himself HIV-positive. Six years prior to Still/Here, Jones lost partner in life and dance Arnie Zane to complications of AIDS; together they had founded the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company in 1983, which has gained international acclaim and gained multiple awards and distinctions. Mid-1990s, when
Still/Here was created, was a time when the United States media and social life were saturated with the AIDS crisis, “a period of deep skepticism about the possibility of survival, a period marked by the continued acceleration of HIV infections and AIDS-related deaths,”
David Roman notes (68). In her survey of literary, political, and cultural extensions of the
AIDS epidemic in the United States of the eighties, Sontag explains its status as a sexually stigmatized infection. Given that AIDS was initially related to homosexuality and drug use, the emerging cultural myths established the disease as punishment for moral wrongdoing and a delinquent, perverse lifestyle. Stressing its affinities with cancer, she writes: “AIDS, like cancer, does not allow romanticizing or sentimentalizing, perhaps because its association with death is too powerful” (Illness 109). Under the light of the cultural anxiety the AIDS epidemic stood for, by far exceeding that of cancer of earlier times, Jones’s personal history inevitably blended in, thus turning Still/Here into an exploration of identity politics besides an aesthetic one.
Still/Here however, never proclaimed to be about HIV/AIDS alone; on the contrary, it grapples with several other terminal conditions, widening its scope beyond the morally and
Dakari 139 semantically constricting frames of a single disease (Roman 68). Through its investigation of the limits of art, mortality, and identity politics, this project gained significant reputation well before its premiere. It was precisely the visibility of the abject, excessive, and/or dying body, which, given the intense political activism of the time and Jones’s multiple “transgressions,” forced Croce into this full-scale attack on this piece.
“Dying an art form?”
It was on these grounds that Croce wrote her impudent piece of criticism on Jones’s performance, published in the December 1994 edition of The New Yorker with the title
“Discussing the Undiscussable.” “I have not seen Bill T. Jones’s Still/Here and have no plans to review it;” so begins her “review”, which proceeds to reject Jones’s project as “victim art”
(15). As she writes, in this piece,
Jones presents people . . . who are terminally ill and talk about it. . . . People are
asking whether Jones’s type of theater is a new art form. Dying an art form?. . . If I
understand Still/Here correctly—and I think I do, . . . it is a kind of messianic
traveling medicine show, designed to do some good for sufferers of fatal illnesses,
both those in the cast and those thousands more who may be in the audience. . . . [T]o
write about what one has not seen—becomes possible on strange occasions like
Still/Here, from which one feels excluded by reason of its express intentions, which
are unintelligible as theatre. . . . By working dying people into his act, Jones is putting
himself beyond the reach of criticism. I think of him as literally undiscussable—the
most extreme case among the distressingly many now representing themselves to the
public not as artists but as victims and martyrs . . . [The sick people Jones has signed
up] are the prime exhibits of a director-choreographer who has crossed the line
Dakari 140
between theater and reality—who thinks that victimhood in and of itself is sufficient
to the creation of an art spectacle. (15-17; emphasis added)
Croce’s notorious review stirred an array of reactions and spurred an ongoing debate among
American critics, cultural theorists, academics, and practitioners on “victim art” and the limits of representation. Deborah Jowitt, dance critic of the Village Voice, said that “[i]t's ironic . . . that Croce, so firmly opposed to the politicization of art, chose to turn her own critical essay into a political statement by declining to see the work at hand” (67). Others, like critic Hilton Kramer, who founded the conservative literary journal The New Criterion in
1982, praised her: “Arlene Croce's essay goes to the crux of the intellectual swindle that has consigned aesthetic standards in the arts to the sidelines” (“Letter” 12). bell hooks wrote that
“to write so contemptuously about work one has not seen is an awesome flaunting of privilege” (10). Robert Brustein felt that “to build an aesthetic theory on a work she hasn’t seen . . . is tactically unsound” (10). Adopting a very sarcastic tone towards Croce, Homi
Bhabha mockingly called her essay “a succès de scandale” (43), while Roger Copeland noticed that Croce conceived of “a daring new critical credo: Don’t even waste a minute looking at works you fear you’ll dislike. But feel free to write about them anyway” (35).15
The next major problem with Croce’s criticism arises the moment she identifies
“being ill” with “being a victim” and thus “beyond criticism.” If “in theater, one chooses what one will be” she claims, “[the] cast members of Still/Here—the sick people whom Jones has signed up—have no choice other than to be sick;” she goes thus far as to argue that they are not qualified even to appear on videotape. The only institutions appropriate for addressing this kind of experience, in Croce’s view, are not of art, but those of “the hospital, clinic, church.” The ill are thus disenfranchised of the right to self-representation in art. Instead, they can only be identified as “victims or martyrs” (16).
15 For more critical responses to Croce’s review, see Burch; Oates; Hewitt 42-68.
Dakari 141
Aesthetic parameters aside, it seems that Croce’s fallacy as to whether dying can be an art form stems from common socio-cultural preconceptions. Apparently, she considers being ill as being a victim—or a martyr for that matter, which carries a strong sense of fatality and determinism; a sense of nothing-further-to-be-done.16 Since religious rhetoric that elevated suffering to the status of martyrdom has long been removed from dominant discourse, its secular equivalent came as a substitute: namely, the clinic. 17 In the biomedical realm, suffering bore no spiritual weight, was simply meaningless, and relegated the subject- in-pain to the status of the patient/victim. In other words, the two major institutional pillars of western culture, religion and biomedicine, saw suffering as meaningful or meaningless victimization. As such, the spectacle of suffering could stir from moral condemnation, i.e.
AIDS, to pity, sympathy, and polite aversion, as in cases of the disabled or people with cancer. In both cases, illness topics constitute a deeply-rooted cultural taboo which deeply affects their representation in art.
The question at the heart of this “victim art” debate initiated by Croce and fueled by numerous other essayists, novelists, artists, and scholars is not so much whether suffering can provide the appropriate material for art or not, but whether the transition from represented to real suffering on stage is legitimate or not. This line crossing is what primarily enraged
Croce, implying that art should mainly be about imitation and the pleasure that derives from pity and fear through imitation, in the way Aristotle described it in the Poetics: “Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with
16 In Judith Perkins’ view, the status of martyr, which emerged in the early Christian era, established the self as sufferer and invested the body-in-pain with new significance (142). With the secularization of society and the advent of anatomy and biomedicine, new insight was gained into the mysteries of life, while divine authority receded; the hallowed status of martyr therefore was gradually deprived from its transcendence and came to be almost synonymous to self-imposed victimhood, the ultimate rejection of agency. 17 Commenting on the advent of biomedicine in late eighteenth century and the implications it carried in the redefinition of subjectivity as thought and society moved toward secularization, Michael Foucault writes in his seminal work The Birth of the Clinic: “Having become a public, disinterested, supervised identity, medicine could improve indefinitely; in the alleviation of physical misery, it would be close to the old spiritual vocation of the Church, of which it would be a sort of lay carbon copy. To the army of priests watching over the salvation of souls would correspond that of the doctors who concern themselves with the health of bodies” (32- 33).
Dakari 142 minute fidelity: such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies. . . . [T]he reason why men enjoy seeing a likeness is, that in contemplating it they find themselves learning or inferring. . . . Imitation, then, is one instinct of our nature” (33-34). In her response to Croce’s review, novelist Joyce Carol Oates questions Croce’s aesthetic essentialism as it is based on an unimaginative interpretation of Aristotle’s text. As she writes, “the Poetics is a meticulously descriptive, not a prescriptive, work,” which in the course of time came to be interpreted as “a set of rigid rules meant to prescribe how drama must be written, else it is not ‘art’.” To Oates, Croce belongs to this category of “less imaginative minds” and their “Neo-classic [dogmas]” (37).
Oates’s essay is meticulously composed to deconstruct Croce’s case against victim art; she fails however to subvert Croce’s thesis: not only whether illness experience can be represented in art but whether crossing the lines between theater and reality can constitute an art form. Oates asks, at first: “Why should authentic experience in art render it beyond criticism” (32)? Her argumentation is based on several cases of “a long and honorable tradition of art that ‘bears witness’ to human suffering” without being “victim art” (30): human suffering as tackled by Dostoyevsky, Fredric Douglass, Anna Frank, Sylvia Plath, or
Goya and Edvard Munch among others. However, when she turns to powerful works of drama, such as O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, Williams’s Streetcar Named
Desire, or Norman’s ‘Night, Mother, “that deal with extremes of emotional distress” (33), she fails to see that these are mimetic acts. Burch succinctly comments on Oates’s mistaken position that in each of the above-mentioned cases we are watching actors performing and that “our knowledge that they are representing painful moments keeps us at a socially acceptable distance” (126). This fact, according to Burch, leaves the problem of whether
“victim” art is indeed art still open.
Dakari 143
Homi Bhabha refines the above problematic into better-sustained terms: he questions
Croce’s idea of Aristotle’s aesthetic theory as the only legitimate rule of aesthetic judgement instead of a historically-conditioned set of standards as Oates began to suggest. Under this light, Croce’s fallacy of judgement lies in her “[confusing] the dancer with the dance,” pointing at the principles of mimetic art to be found “at the very foundation of Croce’s preferred critical criterion of disinterestedness” (46). Croce mentions that “I can’t review someone I feel sorry for or hopeless about . . . those dancers I’m forced to feel sorry for because of the way they present themselves: as dissed blacks, abused women, or disfranchised homosexuals—as performers, in short, who make out of victimhood victim art”
(17), completely neglecting to mention that it was not ill people performing on stage but professional dancers. All acts of representation and performance, according to Bhabha,
require the willing suspension of disbelief; this is paradoxically, at the very
foundation of Croce’s preferred critical criterion of disinterestedness . . . [which]
particularly demands that we acknowledge the difference between the HIV-positive
person and the HIV-positive persona as a role, especially when they inhabit the same
body. (46)
Bhabha thus discloses Croce’s uneasiness with the vernacular and communal style of merging life and art, which removes “the possibility of cool critique” (47). In Bhabha’s perspective, what Croce failed to acknowledge is the aesthetic and political dimension of
Still/Here: blurring the lines between life and art, and speaking “from and of a group” of disfranchised individuals, this work becomes a “performance of survival,” which “[counters] the privacy and primacy of the individual self” and its predicament with its “collective representation” and the reinstatement of its “group identity” through sharing (48, 49)— echoing Fischer-Lichte’s aesthetic and affective aspects of the co-presence of participants and the ongoing energy flow among them.
Dakari 144
“It’s art if I say it is” In addition to her litany of accusations, complaints, and expression of concern about the threatened position of the critic in late twentieth-century American culture, Croce also averts her gaze with derision when it comes to the abject body in performance. She writes:
“As a dance critic I’ve learned to avoid dancers with obvious problems—overweight dancers,
. . . old dancers, dancers with sickled feet, or dancers with physical deformities” (17). Poised on the righteousness of her professional loyalty to the “beauty of line” (17) and “formality of expression” (20), Croce looks down on those dancers whose “victim art” serves a certain political agenda instead of pure spiritual transcendence, and whose visible abjection emotionally blackmails audiences, especially the critics, “the most vocal portion of the audience” (17, 22).
More specifically, Croce frowns upon the cultural upheaval that began in the sixties and culminated in the AIDS crisis and its questionable artistic offspring—utilitarian art, which “justifies the [art] bureaucracy’s existence by being socially useful” (19). Searching in vain for nineteenth-century “grandeur of individual spirit,” Croce finds nothing more than
“the political clout of the group”—its late twentieth-century equivalent being AIDS-quilt collectivism, where “the wistful desire to commemorate is converted into a pathetic lumping together, the individual absorbed by the group, the group by the disease” (25). The AIDS quilt, which unified marginal voices into a vibrant articulation of the authority of experience is treated by Croce’s authoritarian essentialism as nothing but a “tear-jerking agitprop,” an enforced sympathy that has nothing to do with art, but with mere, unadorned reality.
Croce’s critique evidently brings another major issue to the surface: the status of the performer’s body. Although Jones’s team consisted of professional performers, Croce insists on ranking them as “victims” along with the ill participants who only appears on filmed clips, whom she is forced to feel sorry about and whom she thus cannot review. Her emphasis on the centrality of the immaculate, symbolic body in art reveals her commitment to the Kantian
Dakari 145 aesthetics of the beautiful, which interprets formal perfection of the human figure as “the visible expression of moral ideas,” that is, of a universally accepted notion of what human moral existence ought to be like (120). If the perfect, healthy figure is both beautiful and moral, the “flabby, the feeble, the scoliotic” or in any other way visibly deviating from the
“normal” is not only abject but also morally corrupted, especially when this abject other is associated with the subaltern portions of society in terms of race, gender and sexuality. By adding AIDS in this equation, Croce’s intention is to render this deviant other openly inflammatory, and therefore unthinkable and undiscussable.
Croce thus ends up discussing diseased bodies and performing bodies as two mutually exclusive categories. In her standards of judgement “[t]he body must bear no trace of its debt to nature: it must be clean and proper in order to be fully symbolic” (Kristeva 102); otherwise, it is rejected as “too real,” echoing Sontag’s view against the aestheticization of illnesses such as cancer and AIDS. If the beautiful possesses specific proportions and abides by certain principles of form and finitude, the abject abides by no forms, defies conventions, and challenges cool perception. Anything less than perfect, young, beautiful, slender, spotless, healthy, and fully able is not stageworthy. Its pitiable thickness can only find its place in mass-produced spectacles that aim at “[people] for whom art is too fine, too high, too educational, too complicated” to satiate their need to project their own banality to the pitiable victim (28). “If a dancer of a perfect form can create good art, the scoliotic bad art, a victim cannot engage with art at all,” Hewitt succinctly argues (56). In this sense, illness, which stands for the “real,” is not a certain state of being, but a separate being in itself, which exists outside the aesthetic (i.e. the symbolic).
In this sense, it is not only illness but also art that operates as a separate entity. In
Croce’s criticism, art proper is severely threatened by the inflammatory “real” of community- oriented, utilitarian “victim art,” as for instance the AIDS quilt, or Jones’s dance. As Oates
Dakari 146 observes, “to declare some works of art ‘nonart’ presupposes a questionable authority” (35).
Oates detects in Croce a persistent “censorious-conservative impulse . . . to define art, to appropriate art, to protect art from apparent incursions of disorder, even by artists themselves” (40), whom she rebukes as self-important philistines (Croce 23). Usurping this position of authority and speaking from it, Croce attacks the culture of the sixties and its
“self-awarded privileges:” to declare war on the critics; to coin new rules and break the established honorable ones; and to adopt the Humpty-Dumpty—from Alice in Wonderland— motto “It’s art if I say it is” so as to have philistine artists splurge on state funds (see the NEA controversy) and produce trashy art for the philistine masses. Deliberately or not, Croce adopts the Humpty-Dumpty motto herself, engaging in a disturbing bigotry of “aestheticized eugenicism” (Hewitt 45).
By reducing the less-than-perfect performing body to a simplistic, “inflammatory,” and propagandistic spectacle, and its audience to uneducated voyeurs, Croce’s biased position misses the point on the foundational condition of performing arts: that actors cannot but be and be-not themselves. This is the ruling principle behind Fischer-Lichte’s concept of perceptual multistability, or the “oscillating focus between the actor’s specific corporeality and the character portrayed,” between “presence” and “representation” (Transformative 147).
When the diseased body performs itself, its multi-layered semiotization closes the gap between theatre and reality. But Croce cannot be in the position to judge whether, when, and how diseased bodies appear on stage; she did not attend it. New York Times critic Anna
Kisselgoff who had been there, however, wrote: “[T]he experiences transmitted by the way of live dance, video and commissioned music that is integrated with the voices of the workshop participants, [stood] out in unexpected ways. . . . ‘Still/Here’ succeeds because it inevitably evokes mixed feelings; it does so with an amazing blend of simplicity and sophistication.”
Los Angeles Times Martin Bernheimer’s review, though not as enthusiastic, nevertheless
Dakari 147 admits to the piece’s aesthetic considerations in the way it negotiates thorny binaries. as he writes: “Still/Here teeters between the real and the unreal . . . offering a phony affirmation of life within a pretty dance of death.” Regardless of whether there is any message of survival put across, issues such as artistic supremacy, intensified embodiment, and degrees of engagement are certainly put to the test. The question, therefore, is not whether the presentation of illness could be aesthetic or not but what kind of aesthetic judgment it pertains to.
The critic’s role in a changing artistic landscape: prescriptive or descriptive?
So far, there has been ample evidence that Croce was not in a position to sustain her criticism against illness art simply by relying on her sophistication and expertise on aesthetics; in effect, what she was talking about was aesthetic conventions, not aesthetics in general. As it seems, Croce was not feeling at home outside her territory of aesthetic, social, and political essentialism. Falling behind a fast-pacing world of artistic production and reception, she would rather put the blame on Jones and his impure art, than consider revising her ideologies and adjusting her criticism accordingly: “For me, Jones is undiscussable . . . because he has taken sanctuary among the unwell. Victim art defies criticism not only because we feel sorry for the victim but because we are cowed by art. . . . I do not remember a time when the critic has been more expendable than now” (28), she writes, almost assuming the position of a disenfranchised victim of philistinism.
In her accusation of the rise of mass culture pastiche and the ensuing decay of modernist canons, Croce fails twice: first, by excluding a significant part of the social and historical evolution of arts in the United States and second, by doing her professional field a disservice. As Carol Martin points out, dance criticism has been too attached to the tenets of modernism that it was rendered unable to handle the escalating cultural, political, and sexual
Dakari 148 subtleties evident in modernist art (324). Siding with Andreas Huyssen in his analysis of modernism, Martin posits that its “machine aesthetics” as defined by the enterprising industrial landscape, and its traditional clear-cut distinctions which would lead to stigmatization and alienation are at the heart of the institutionalization of the distinction between mass culture and high art (325).
Indeed, the stakes are high, as Croce suspects, not only with regards to aesthetics, but also in terms of political, professional and material pursuits. Her discussion of the culture wars and the National Endowment for the Arts conflict on who is really entitled to government funding for promoting art projects has a distinctively political hue, although she avoids directing her accusations to both right and left lobbies (Croce 19). Rebecca
Schneider’s The Explicit Body in Performance cites several radical works by artists like
Jones, Mapplethorpe, Finley, and Hughes to name a few, who have openly discussed issues such as women’s rights, gay rights, racial politics, bringing the explicit deviant body at the forefront, not in a parade of victimhood, but in conscious and unapologetic display. By reducing these artists and their followers into a “pathetic lumping together” of “dissed blacks, abused women, or disfranchised homosexuals” and now “dying people,” in her own terms,
Croce was not defending the future of art; she was merely refusing to adjust her critical lens to its evolutionary course.
Where Croce sees the exhaustion of a critic’s work, Andreas Huyssen sees “a new creative relationship between high art and certain forms of mass culture,” which is “indeed one of the major marks of difference between high modernism and the art and literature which followed it in the 1970s and 1980s both in Europe and the United States;” where Croce sees the “contamination” of art by “inflammatory” voices coming from the fringes of society,
Huyssen sees “the recent self-assertion of minority cultures and their emergence into public consciousness which has undermined the modernist belief that high and low culture have to
Dakari 149 be categorically kept apart” (194). To Huyssen, the postmodernism of the 1960s as it took its shape within an American setting was in many ways “a genuine avantgarde movement”
(194).
Located into a rapidly changing political landscape, Huyssen explains, this fresh outlook on the world could not be accommodated by modern aesthetic and critical sensibilities (197). Modern western society is one of clear-cut distinctions of class, race, ethnicity, language, nation, and religion. Since the grand narratives of modernity have long ceased to attend to the new world view, artistic expression turns to multivocality and locality in order to make sense of it. Critics, in turn, are forced to re-educate themselves in the emerging forms of art. If the artist is to behave as a philosopher/experimenter, in Lyotard’s view, the critic is to observe him/her closely and be willing to track the constantly shifting itineraries and velocities of the experiment. Under this light of the dissolution of aesthetic polarities such as “high” and “low” art, what Croce actually opposes to, therefore, is not merely Jones’s non-canonical work but the entire altered landscape that cannot fit into her finite aesthetic vocabulary. Martin succinctly summarizes the point made above: “it is not the end of criticism but the advent of a new kind of criticism. . . . This is what makes [Jones’s piece] so unsettling” (326, 332).
Sullenly bearing witness to the transition from the normalizing binaries of art
“proper” to the inchoate, boundary-blurring “victim” art, Croce reveals her anxiety as this reshuffling of givens and violation of forms threatens the status of the critic’s work. In this sense, Croce discusses the “undiscussable” in terms of a certain phrase regimen, that of formal dance criticism. As Diedrich observes, Croce’s piece “signals the breakdown of the boundaries between various domains, and even the possibility of a reconfiguration of the category ‘expert’ where illness is concerned. Her piece also suggests the anxiety such a breakdown and reconfiguration causes” (149). This anxiety is situated in Croce’s position as
Dakari 150 expert in a specific aspect of art and not in illness or politics. From her perspective, works that transgress the limits of art are thus “undiscussable.”
Not only does this “non-review” of hers signal the collapse of boundaries of essentialist cultural, ideological, and aesthetic realms, it also expresses her concerns regarding the integrity and the threat of reconfiguration of what it means to be “expert” when it comes to assessing the representation of illness. For Croce, anything that exceeds the limits of normalcy, that stops being symbolic and becomes “real,” is beyond the reach of criticism because it is not art anymore, but mere reality that presses for pity and voyeurism at the same time. Anything that spoils the artificial perfection of the spectacle, and in turn disrupts distanced, disinterested criticism, is thus undiscussable.
What is at the heart of Croce’s grievance,” Adam Mars-Jones writes for The
Independent, is not that Bill T. Jones and Still/Here “are drastic, but that they aren’t classical,” that Croce’s technical vocabulary of description as a critic of an art that is so impermanent, is “routinely violated or ignored by much modern work;” also, that the phrase
“victim art” is “offensive.” Mars-Jones’s opposition to Croce’s vocabulary in particular is further substantiated by means of his hackneyed analogy between AIDS and Holocaust, as he believes that what the phrase “victim art” implies is that victims do not make art so there is nothing to review here. This totally distorted line of argumentation resembles Lyotard’s example of Faurisson who would only accept proof of the existence of gas chambers from eyewitnesses who were themselves victims of the gas chambers. However, any such eyewitnesses could not have survived in order to be able to testify. In Faurisson’s distorted rule of judgement, there were no gas chambers. Likewise, in Croce’s view, the ill are categorized as victims; victims are not performers; victims are excluded from the realm of art; therefore victims cannot produce art.
Dakari 151
New York Times columnist Frank Rich also detects this fallacy in Croce’s overgeneralizing deductions. He expresses his opposition to the way Croce wages a general war on American culture, exposing her neo-conservatist loyalties: “A critic's job is to separate the art from the junk rather than blur all distinctions out of ideological pique and dismiss the entire field. . . . To the extent AIDS is responsible for yanking death out of the
American closet, history may show that the epidemic has changed our culture in much the way that the cataclysmic carnage of World War I transformed English literature,” which Rich specifically identifies as “the story of our time,” which Croce has missed, just as “she has failed to see that dying is part of art because it is part of life.”
Presenting the unpresentable beyond the safety net of mimesis
What is confusing and infuriating to Croce, Bhabha notes, is, in essence, the theatricality of the diseased person/persona (46). This could be another articulation of the problem of subjectivity on a broader level of abstraction, holding that the subject becomes self-aware the moment it dissolves. The artist transposes his/her experience of suffering into an aesthetic experience for the audience. In this case, the idea of author as the one who disseminates and controls the meaning of his/her creation is disrupted; the artist comes in a position to attest his/her own undoing as the most genuine manifestation of truth. The teleological drive of art thus collapses, while the spectator is left to contemplate a “still/here” in all its sublime intensity. As for the subject/object of art, in this case the diseased individual, such an assertion promotes their self-awareness and boosts resistance as they benefit from the empathic feedback they receive.
What I am referring to here is not only the actual performance but the energy flow that took place during workshops, while bodies came together in a shared understanding of their being-in-the-world and being-with-others. Resembling the actor and her teeth-brushing
Dakari 152 exercise, workshop participants were forced into a re-enactment of what had been their own truth since the onset of their illnesses or their entire lives. They were asked to dance their illness in front of others. Through this “not-being-at-home” with their ill bodies, the may be said to have reached a profound state of authentic being.
To Croce, however, that was “an aggressively personal extension of the defiant anticonventionalism of the sixties, when you were manipulated into accepting what you saw as art” (21). As such, Jones’s piece did “cross the line between theater and reality,” as she wrote, but only in order to work a faceless group of victims into an “intolerably voyeuristic”
“messianic travelling medicine show” (15). Jones challenged both the generic and the ontological limits of theatre: his work was evolving well beyond the spatiotemporal frame imposed by theatrical economy. It was a lengthy process and entailed various settings. What is more, the real was brought into performance through tape recordings of the workshop participants and through re-presenting the explicitness of their condition; though the videos were repeated in each performance, their affective potential was nonetheless strong. The point missed by Croce, therefore, is that theatre is only one aspect of a much broader domain, that of performance.
It is within this domain of performance that Still/Here lends itself to be appreciated for its ambition to present the unpresentable. Various arts, like theatre, dance, video, come together, extend beyond conventional borders of their genre only to assert their inadequacy to make the terror of illness and death fully presentable. Even the title itself conveys a sense of incompleteness: a work in progress, a deferred departure, or an interval during a course to a certain end. In terms of the semiotics of the stage, “still” fractures spatiotemporal conventions of time and plot, while it becomes a statement of unmediated presence. “Still” freezes or prolongs time and condenses space. “Here” is a strong indexical signifier that is associated with the density of the here-and-now experience of performance. It also echoes Lyotard’s
Dakari 153 notion of the sublime as the result of secondary privation, the “something is happening” that suspends chaos in the eye of the beholder. Still/Here therefore can be understood as both certainty and precariousness of being, in short, a confrontation with the human condition on and off stage.
What is argued is that the title Jones gave to his performance brings together the threat induced by death, the ultimate privation, and the ensuing immobility, with the “here” of its suspension, the minimal occurrence, which is also a promise of continuation. As outlined by Lyotard, “[h]ow is one to understand the sublime, or, let us say provisionally, the object of a sublime experience, as a ‘here and now’? Quite to the contrary, isn’t it essential to this feeling that it alludes to something which can’t be shown, or presented?” (Inhuman 89).
What Jones’s piece succeeds, along with the rest of the cases to be discussed later, is not so much detouring the unpresentability of death, but bringing it to the fore and making an aesthetic thesis out of this inchoateness; to employ the sublime as a metaphor of representation itself. Performance thus comes to life even as it dissolves; this is also the condition for the threat of privation to transpire and expire, in short, the sublime in/of performance.
Apart from a spatio-temporal condition of representation, Still/Here is also a phrase— an indubitable occurrence according to Lyotard—that fulfills the discursive conditions of a différend; a case of conflict, that is, between (at least) two parties, which cannot be resolved for lack of a rule of judgment that would be valid for both arguments. A single rule cannot apply, Lyotard posits, or it would do justice only to one side. This does not refute that other side’s legitimacy. Given rules fail to resolve the differend as they address different genres. A universal rule of judgment that could apply for heterogeneous genres might be the answer; however, as Lyotard concludes, such a rule does not exist. Still/Here then becomes a differend: the conflicting states to be resolved could read as stillness and here-ness, which
Dakari 154 could also be construed as death and life respectively; the coexistence of the suffering person/persona; or, the certainty of being in pain and the doubt while witnessing pain. Croce completely ignores this perpetual tug of war, which is at the heart of art and life, and chooses instead the procrustean method imposed by (her) critical authority: whatever does not fit its standards is not art.
Could therefore illness be rendered into art? On what grounds should it be judged?
Aware of the aesthetic unpresentability of suffering and dying and the insolvency of language to suggest an effective detour, Jones explores their limits, and engages them in a fruitful dialogue. He believes that “the truth is that one of the strategies of the late twentieth century is to push the boundaries of art and life as far as you can,” suggesting that one should “mix them up” (131). His dance piece thus extends beyond the conventions of its genre: it involves speech, audiovisual projections of the participants’ interviews, “spontaneous” and imitated movements, and direct addresses to he audience. For example, one of the dancers invites the audience to “do the Mary,” asking them, that is, to imitate her while she is performing
Mary’s—one of the workshop participants—signature movement (Nereson 301). To call them by their names and establish their kinaesthetic signature is an act that reinstates the participants’ individuality. This is not a performance by a face-less group of out-of-shape victims; it is neither sentimental nor simplistic; nor does it blackmail us into the forced sympathy for the human exhibits of the medieval medicine show, or the comfortable complicity of the voyeur, as Croce insists in her critique (18).
This interaction can in fact be deeply educational and transformative for all partakers.
Jones does not perceive himself as in an authorial position that would allow him to control and disseminate meaning, or to be entitled to mourning, despite the fact that he is HIV- positive himself. In his piece there are no standard roles, no dividing lines, and certainly no normalizing aesthetic judgments. In this context, the clash between the well and the unwell is
Dakari 155 significantly debilitated, as Jones himself admits that “the piece was not made for people who were sick but made for people who were well trying to learn from people who are sick” (qtd. in Nereson 301). Jones, therefore, attempts not only a self-meditation on one’s subjectivity, but most importantly, a repurposing of the sublime feeling; how to pass through the wisdom of contemplating chaos; how to generate a new aesthetic, political and ethical space to accomodate this experience. This is not an easy task, either for artists, critics, or spectators, well or unwell. But it certainly is one worth undertaking.
From victim art to the art of survival
Marilyn Bordwell, who was among the audience members of Still/Here when it was performed in Iowa City, gives a telling example of the affective capacity of the piece. She describes the moment a list of names was spoken by different voices of the workshop participants, who stated their first names on audiotape. Hearing her own name, which is not very common, almost half-way through, dissolved the borders of disinterested spectatorship for her, inviting her “into the performance as an interested, empathetic human being” rather than keeping her at spectator-distance: “‘Marilyn’, spoken by a woman I didn’t know, jarred me into realizing that, I, too, might experience terminal illness” (370). In light of this reception case, it was not sympathy, pity, and voyeuristic pleasure this piece evoked, but empathic reflection and intensified being-there.
Simarly, Davin Roman recalls the enchanting effects of Jones’s performance:
“Still/Here, which I saw performed in 1994 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, had little relation to the victimhood charge that Croce had imagined. Instead of representing victimhood, the piece was a beautiful and moving meditation on mortality and on the various means people from diverse human backgrounds employ to come to terms with it . . . I found the work filled with hope and danced with creative resilience” (62).
Dakari 156
Upon examination, what lies behind Croce’s emphatic insistence on perfect form of a body is the visibility of illness—the physical marks, scars, and voids a disease leaves behind.
Petra Kuppers examines the performative aspect of a scar, “the place of a changed script” on the surface of a body. Like skin, Kuppers explains, “a scare mediates between the outside and the inside, but it also materially produces, changes, and overwrites its site.” This is the memory of a surface that keeps renewing itself. The scar, therefore, either as a metaphor or in its phenomenological density, is a site of hyperawareness and hypervisibility. Kuppers writes:
“You can feel your scars itching, or pulsing, or, after a time, you can experience the sensation of touching yourself but feeling the touch as strange. . . . When this place becomes unfamiliar, sense, perception, and meaning making become experiential as spatial and temporal phenomena” (The Scar of Visibility 1).
In this sense, a scar becomes the visualization of a speech act, or a phrase in Lyotard’s terms, that performs itself and carves out a new social space to accommodate the altered self.
A mastectomy scar, for instance, forever changes the body’s landscape both as embodied experience and as a spectacle others perceive. This memory of the body holds strong connotations of social awareness, identity politics, medical perspectives, or media tolerance to explicit exposure. Experience and representation are immediately involved in illness art that cannot be resolved only by aesthetic considerations.
Putting the unpresentable into presentation, therefore, is realized as both an aesthetic possibility and a “technique of survival” (Bhabha 47):
To survive, technically, is to continue after the cessation of a thing, event, or process;
to carry on in the light and shadow of a break, a trauma, a trial, a challenge. Survival
demands a bridging, a negotiation, an articulation of the moments “before” and
“after” without necessarily assuming a historical or temporal continuity between
Dakari 157
them. Survival also requires the courage to live through the flux and transition of the
moment of cessation. (48)
Bhabha effectively refutes Croce’s certainty that group identity is the sole subject of a
“victim art” that completely dissolves subjectivity into a face-less mass. He argues that the sense of community is an imagined performance enacted across the double injunction of survival—cessation and continuance. In the sense that the scar reminds the body of both cessation and continuance, the performance of this “scar” is realized as a secondary privation, in Lyotard’s terms, pointing at the privation of the privation of life.
This is, in effect, art’s ability to “short-circuit the sublime” (Bhabha 49) the necessity of new artistic agendas that will enable practitioners to search for responsive communities of audiences with whom they can share the threat of privation, establish solidarity, and re- articulate resistance as both political and therapeutic. This is what Hewitt also has in mind when he observes that “[Croce’s] critique of a performance bases itself on a recognition of the performative function of all speech acts: to speak of being a victim is to be a victim no longer” (58).
Further thoughts on Croce’s critical fallacy
Croce’s intention, upon examination, is apparently to perform a formal analysis of
Still/Here. As such, this kind of approach should mainly rely on the visual and stylistic constituents of the work, such as expression, movement, spatial distribution of bodies, rhythm etc. By not attending the performance, however, she cannot be in the position to form such a judgement on the work. By choosing instead to compose a review where she details her objections to the performance’s “content,” namely its saturation with political meaning and the artist’s motivations, she does not succeed in denying Still/Here its art-status, as she would like to, but affirms instead her own fall from the status of professional critic.
Dakari 158
What is more, Croce’s point acts as a provocation: the performers are ill people— although they are not, as it has been said earlier, however I shall adopt her line of argument to reach my point. Ill people are immediately categorized as victims, or in Butler’s term, a precarious, disenfranchised group. Illness is thus, in Austin’s terms, a performative category of utterances, which not only possesses the power to change the world around the individual, but also, as such, excludes the ill from all aesthetic judgement, which is contingent with transcendental art, or mimesis, as Croce and Sontag see it. For, when the ill, or the disabled for that matter, perform a specific aspect of their in-the-world status, illness or disability, the outcome cannot be art of significant aesthetic quality, or disinterestedness (pace Croce), but a utilitarian sort of “victim art” a critic ought to bypass. The illness art project is thus doomed to failure.
Croce’s line of questioning, in the context of the discursive genre of dance criticism she represents, generates a set of principles as to what dance art stands for and what her role as a dance critic should be. On the other side of this dispute, Jones, a renowned choreographer, whose art-making had been previously acclaimed, is also a “victim” of AIDS.
Does the state of illness cancel his capacity as artist? Croce does not give a clear answer; she only says that for her Jones is “undiscussable.” Jones, however, does not appear on the stage in flesh and bones. He directs the workshops with the ill participants and extracts material he hands to his dancers, who enact the ill participants’ original gestures. The bodies of the ill, finally, “appear” on stage through video footage, and symbolically through the professional dancers’ enactment. Jones’s face also appears momentarily in the same video clip as one among the ill, not one among the dancers. In this act of self-imposed silence, the artist merges with the forced silence of the ill, which is indeed an act of exposing the political dimension of their precarity. Jones does not provoke by directly transgressing any rules of the artistic genre; he merely acknowledges the differend that the unpresentability of illness suggests. In
Dakari 159
Lyotard’s terms, he performs the task of the postmodern artist/philosopher/researcher by bringing the unpresentable into focus and testing the limits of its containment into the dance genre, which obviously spills out into other more broadly defined genres, like multi-media performance. As such, Still/Here does politicize the stakes of victimhood and its representation even as it makes its aesthetic dimension felt.
Croce, then, is both right and wrong: She is right when she maintains that Still/Here cannot be classified as the kind of canonized art and modernist formal aesthetics she writes about. Indeed, the aesthetics of Still/Here are closer to Lyotard’s idea of the postmodern, which legitimizes fluidity, as well as intergeneric and intersemiotic experimentation only to be able to approximate what the experience of this kind of transgressive art might be like; there is no teleology of the event, the aim is the gratification of this very effort.
This attitude also echoes Lehmann’s postdramatic turn, as well as Fischer-Lichte’s aesthetics of the performative, which resides in the “as well as” threshold where all experiences converge: art and life, self and other, presence and representation. The creative engagement of the dancers with multiple media further intensifies the textural quality of the spectacle by means of the perceptual multistability of the audience’s focus. Even though it remains within the spatial limits of the stage, Still/Here points outside it, into the actual participants who transcended the physical and aesthetic limitations of their terminally ill and amateur bodies to immerse themselves into both life and art. To paraphrase Heidegger, this act acknowledges the finite dimensions of “earth” that gave rise to the infinite potentialities of the participants’ “world”.
Croce, however, is wrong to insist that the only possible response to Still/Here is a feeling of emotional blackmail, voyeuristic indulgence, or facile identification with its
“messianic medicine show,” or—its late-twentieth-century equivalent—reality-show, subject matter. Not only does she not do justice to the artist’s confrontation with the unpresentable,
Dakari 160 but she is also offending the audience by uncritically lumping them together in order to make her case against American-culture philistinism. Granted, this piece does involve spectators in profoundly emotional ways. This fact, however, does not turn it into an easy spectacle for the uneducated masses. The empathic involvement that Still/Here instigates derives from the very condition of performance, which brings into play the prospect that someone may die, to paraphrase Heiner Müller. Until everyone returns to his or her death-defying illusion of the everyday, the not-at-home liminal experience of performance forces us into a head-on confrontation with one’s finiteness. Still/Here is indeed about someone who may die, who is dying, who has already died; this is unthinkable, unpresentable, and utterly real.
Dakari 161
Chapter 6
Sontag’s “performance of certainty:” a personal story
In a letter to the editor published in the New York Times, Susan Sontag enters the Croce/Jones debate to side with “America’s greatest dance critic” against “the storm of mostly self- serving responses” to her review (“‘Victim Art’; Philistinism All Over Again”). Briefly restating Croce’s point, she writes: “That a work of art may appeal to our sympathy but is not validated by the worthiness of this appeal seems so elementary, so obvious, that one might hope this point does not need repeating.” Without even bothering to explain what the criteria of “worthiness” may be, other than her pronounced appreciation for Croce, Sontag follows her in deploring Jones’s self-delusion in trusting the artistic worth of his work (Martin 324).
She specifically targets her attack to Oates’s letter, as the same case of philistinism Croce detected in Jones’s dance. She rants about “the discrediting of aesthetic (now called ‘elitist’) standards in favor of sentimental ones,” and about “the consequences of the scourge of populism” that hatched in “the wicked 1960’s,” was fed by “philistines of all political flavors,” and led to “the current collapse of standards.” In all, she is adamant that “what
[Croce] said was right” (“‘Victim Art’”).
On the occasion of rightfully defending the intactness of art in her view, Sontag’s own ideas around illness surface once more under the guise of professional camaraderie. Nowhere does she show the slightest hint of solidarity with the people who, as she, have been through illness. Instead, she puts on her solid intellectual façade to decry the philistines’ disrespect.
She admonishes that there are limits to the legitimacy of art when it comes to the representation of illness, as it was also the case with Croce’s positioning, seen in the previous chapter. In their view, Jones broke the axioms of art’s intelligibility, committed the hubris of bringing the unpresentable into presentation, apparently offending her personally and professionally. Those who supported Jones, in her view, are equally guilty of populism and
Dakari 162 philistinism. It is my contention, regarding Sontag’s irritability, that by crudely negotiating the devastating encounter with death, Jones swiftly detoured the reality/transcendence problematic by simply acknowledging both extremes without the least ambition to boldly resolve it. In other words, what he brought into play was neither his narcissistic self- expression nor group identity politics, as Croce accused him of, but the predicament and the exquisiteness of existence in its own right.
In order to look deeper into to Sontag’s denunciation of cancer as art, we should attempt to juxtapose her above-quoted brief support to Croce, which also reflects her earlier positions expressed in Illness as Metaphor, with her other writings on aesthetics and the representation of pain; in particular, her essays, “Against Interpretation” (1964) and “On
Style” (1965), as well as her final book, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003). My intention is to disclose not only Sontag’s elitist views with respect to art, but also the discrepancies that underlie her evolution as a critic as well as the split between the detached intellectual and the ill person at the brink of chaos she was. By the end of the first part of this study, Sontag’s widely held denunciation of the aesthetics of cancer will have been deconstructed, thus paving the ground towards an exploration of the aesthetic possibilities all human experience, including cancer, presents us with.
Against Interpretation: the “erotics of art” and art’s freedom to “mean nothing”
Sontag emerged as a critic in the cultural—or better, counter-cultural—upheaval of the sixties. Her name became synonymous to the anti-intellectualism of the time, while her writings were an immense influence on the New York literary scene.18 Hans Bertens considers Sontag among critics, like Leslie Fiedler, who shaped postmodern American literary criticism of the sixties. As he explains, for Fiedler, postmodernism signifies a total
18 See Kramer, “The Evolution of Susan Sontag;” Adams 38; Bertens, “The Postmodern Weltanschauung and its Relation to Modernism” 25-70.
Dakari 163 break with modernist elitism (“Postmodern Weltanschauung” 31). In the same spirit of questioning the past, Sontag rejects the most influential doctrines of modernity, those of
Marx and Freud, as complex systems of “aggressive and pious theories of interpretation” in favor of a new anti-modern “sensibility” of spontaneity and a more sensuous response to art
“Against Interpretation” 9).
“Against interpretation,” which was also the title of one of her most influential essays on aesthetics in 1964, was Sontag’s mantra and anti-intellectual manifesto of the aesthetics of the sixties. Thinking back to those days of unprecedented radical freedom, she would write decades later:
How marvelous it all does seem in retrospect. How one wishes some of its boldness,
its optimism, its disdain for commerce had survived. The two poles of distinctively
modern sentiment are nostalgia and utopia. Perhaps the most interesting characteristic
of the time now labeled the sixties was that there was so little nostalgia. In that sense,
it was indeed a utopian moment. (qtd. in Cott xv)
This is the time Sontag wages a war on “meaning.” In “Against Interpretation,” which precedes her illness treatises by fourteen years, Sontag exposes her scepticism on the assumption that art needs interpreting, dating back to Plato and permeating western culture.
The assumption is that a work of art is predominantly defined by its content and can only be critically approached on those grounds; not as an “incantatory, magical” prehistoric instrument of ritual, but also as the product of mimesis and thus liable to interpretation, delimitation, and consequently, control. As the saying goes, “a work of art by definition says something,” which Sontag understands as: “content is essential, while form is accessory” (3).
What she means to say is that theory comes between the work of art and its audience, thus hindering the experience of its reception. In fact, the more intricate the theoretical framework, the more controllable and fixed the work of art and its implications. Under this
Dakari 164 light, art criticism becomes prescriptive and stifling; it “poisons our sensibilities” (Sontag,
“Against Interpretation” 7).
Sontag emphasizes form over content and art free of restrictive meaning only insofar as this model of criticism opposes the consumer capitalism and its pop culture in their rise during the 1960s and 1970s. She argues against interpretation, especially in modern context, as it “amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone.” She writes: “Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes it manageable, comformable” (8). And the more intricate the rules are, the more controllable the work of art.
To interpret, she thinks, is “to impoverish, to deplete the world.” She thus goes on to exhort
“all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have” (7). Sontag here shows her scepticism with regards to interpretation as a process of turning reality into allegory. This thought of hers would later be crystallized around the “encumbering metaphors” of illness and her downright denunciation of their expressive capacity.
Despite her radical position against traditional hermeneutics, Sontag does not intend on abandoning formalism. In her view, “what is needed is more attention to form in art;” that we should come up with “a descriptive—rather than prescriptive, vocabulary—for forms”
(12). Should form be an a priori codification, meaning that it exists before the work of art, or should it develop along with it as Lyotard suggests? Sontag does not move along this line of justification. What she believes, however, is that transparence “is the highest, most liberating, value in art . . . today,” and means “experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are” (“Against Interpretation” 13). This configuration resembles
Lyotard’s vision of the legitimacy of the much contested postmodern: nothing should be taken for granted; aesthetic judgments should be based upon our immediate sensory involvement with the artwork; finally, this would be an essentially sublime experience. To
Dakari 165
Sontag, however, it is an abstractly defined “pure, untranslatable, sensuous immediacy” of the way the work of art speaks to us, regardless even of the intention of the artists themselves
(9). This statement is entirely antithetical to Lyotard’s artist/philosopher.
Sontag’s plea becomes even more problematic when she shows her distrust in all art that is created and experienced in a society of commodified spectacles. As “all the conditions of modern life—its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness—conjoin to dull our sensory faculties,” Sontag’s vision for the-authentication of experience is “to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more” (“Against Interpretation” 14). Several questions arise from this point: How could we possibly recover our senses as a society when the critic takes on to censor our very sensorial apparatus—the body in performance and its non-reducible content, illness, for instance? How can an artwork be what it is if it is not allowed to address the dark side of existence, which is the abject, the obscene, the unpresentable? Sontag’s quixotic closing lines, though of good intentions, remain unsustained and utopian:
The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by
analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of
criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than
to show what it means. In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art. (14)
This plea for authenticity, however, should not be mistaken for an interest in the “authentic experience of life through art, but an authentic experience of art itself,” Hans Bertens observes (1995, 27). Interpretation hinders such an experience, in Sontag’s view. But what she proposes, in fact, poses even more restrictions than those it seeks to cancel. By privileging formal principles, she may cancel excess content, but she also cancels the boundary-crossing artistic explorations of postmodernism.
Dakari 166
Kramer characterizes this statement of hers as a “stunning declaration of independence from the traditional obligations of criticism” (“Evolution”). He perceives it, however, to be a
“sentiment” rather than an “idea.” Though never defined, it evoked a promise of “untroubled aesthetic delight” precisely in that it would not be burdened by “intrusions of moral discrimination.” In Kramer’s view, it was the cultural climate of the sixties—its radical freedom and emergence of “lifestyle”—which fueled but also sanctioned this “mindless” break from traditional aesthetic theories (“Evolution”). Sontag would later be very sceptical of that period—“the wicked 1960s,” as she writes in her letter of support to Croce—which, she deplores, have corrupted audiences and have given rise to the “scourge of populism”
(“‘Victim Art’”).
In her other essay, “On Style” (1965), Sontag refines her previous contention— articulated in the fever of the sixties—that art is or should be “entirely self-referring.” As she states, anyone who presumes to judge an artwork on the basis of whether its content is acceptable or not is not a critic, but a moralist. Principles of morality cannot be trustworthy criteria in evaluating an artwork, because, she argues, art is “finally beyond indignation and approval” and calls for a “detached, restful, contemplative, emotionally free” response (27).
In this discussion, Sontag departs from the contention that “the antipathy to style [she refers to the idea of self-referring, disinterested art and its purported obsession with form] is always an antipathy to a given style.” As Sontag sustains, the notion of style in its generic conception is conditioned by historical specifications (18). As such, it would register and examine current culture. This attitude of “putting art to use,” however, has little to do with the true nature of a work of art, which according to Sontag, is an experience rather than an answer to a question. She writes: “Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or a commentary in the world” (21). The knowledge that derives from it is not conceptual, i.e. discursive or scientific, but “something like an
Dakari 167 excitation,” which is a newly discovered way of being in the world (22). As it is obvious in this contention of hers, her previous position, expressed in “Against Interpretation” that art must shock in order to stir a truly sensuous response to the audience, is abandoned in favor of a cooler contemplation. As she argues, all great art “does not excite; or if it does, the excitation is appeased, within the terms of the aesthetic experience” (“On Style” 27). In other words, although she trusts in the sensual experience of an artwork, she considers, like Croce, art to be a separate being, a radical aspect of Kantian formalism.
Despite the strong evidence of formalist positions in her essay, Sontag does not seem to embrace such an approach. In fact, she thinks that that an art-for-art’s-sake attitude is too restrictive: “the objection that this approach reduces art to mere ‘formalism’ must not be allowed to stand.” Instead, “an approach which considers works of art as living, autonomous models of consciousness will seem objectionable only so long as we refuse to surrender the shallow distinction of form and content. For the sense in which a work of art has no content is no different from the sense in which the world has no content. Both are. Both need no justification; nor could they possibly have any” (“On Style” 27).
Where then are we to ground the experience of an artwork if not solely on its content or its form? Sontag surprisingly points back to its relation to the world, something that she has objected to in “Against Interpretation.” As she writes:
[W]e live in the world, and it is in the world that objects of art are made and
enjoyed. The claim that I have been making for the autonomy of the work of art—its
freedom to ‘mean’ nothing—does not rule out consideration of the effect or impact
or function of art, once it be granted that in this functioning of the art object as art
object the divorce between the aesthetic and the ethical is meaningless. (“On Style”
28)
Dakari 168
Though this perspective reminds us of Heidegger’s aesthetics of the inextricable relationship of an artwork to its world but also to its matter as the only authentic way of experiencing it,
Sontag does not yet embrace this proximity. She says: “To become involved with a work of art entails . . . the experience of distancing oneself from the world. But the work of art itself is also ‘vibrant, magical, and exemplary object which returns us to the world in some way more open and enriched” (28).
Rather than regressing to “the shallow distinction of form and content,” Sontag argues for art’s form as its own content, which invites a contemplation of its singularity without any further moral judgment or generalization (“On Style” 27, 29). She specifically draws on
Spanish liberal philosopher Jose Ortega y Gassnet’s contentions that “a preoccupation with the human content of the work [of art] is in principle incompatible with aesthetic judgement” and that “an object of art is artistic only insofar as it is not real” (qtd. in “On Style” 24). She thus implies that aesthetic pleasure is only attainable once even the most dreadful human condition in art is merely a representation of truth, a mimesis, and hence “free from painful consequences” (24). Interestingly, this is exactly what she opposed to in “Against
Interpretation:” that mimetic theory of hermeneutics has been too restrictive, as it has overemphasized the idea of content and has thus made art useful, manageable, comformable, and hence empty of sharp sensory experience.
Another style-related issue Sontag elaborates on is “the historic western confusion about the relation between art and morality, the aesthetic and the ethical” (“On Style” 23).
According to Sontag, the art-versus-morality is a “pseudo-problem;” anyone who takes on to judge a work of art on the basis of whether its content is acceptable is in turn not a critic but a moralist. Art cannot be judged but through a censor-free position of moral indifference.
Style—the idiomatic expression of form—is what counts and what is usually neglected in a work of art. This would mean that, upon experiencing a work of art, one would have to pick
Dakari 169
“between responsible and humane contact, on the one hand, and the pleasurable stimulation of consciousness, on the other!” (23). Instead, Sontag suggests that we perceive morality as a
“code of acts, and of judgments, and sentiments by which we reinforce our habits of acting in a certain way. . . . Morality is a form of acting and not a particular repertoire of choices” (24).
The example Sontag uses in support of her case is provocative, to say the least. She goes so far as to marvel at the “style” of Leni Riefenstahl’s films—the German filmmaker whose name went down in history precisely because she made artistic films that promoted the image of a strong Germany during the early Nazi period (Adams). Sontag writes: “To call
Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and The Olympiad masterpieces is not to gloss over
Nazi propaganda with aesthetic lenience. The Nazi propaganda is there. But something else is there, too, which we reject at our loss.” As these films, Sontag believes, “project the complex movements of intelligence and grace and sensuousness,” they eventually “transcend the propaganda or even reportage” (“On Style” 26-27). A work of art, “so far as it is a work of art,” Sontag continues, means nothing. In this sense, she finds herself seeing “Hitler” and not
Hitler, the formal role of the film, and not its content (27). What she provocatively argues, therefore, is that no matter how heinous the Nazi crimes were to humanity and no matter how deeply imprinted the image of the swastika is to the collective memory of the world, the mere admiration of their form aesthetically pleases the spectator.19
Regardless of its provocation, I doubt whether Sontag’s point, which in essence liberates the reception of art from a priori limitations to an extreme degree, could possibly sanction the ill artist’s act of merging life and art, because, as she further explains, “nor would it be appropriate for us to make a moral response to something in a work of art in the same sense that we do to an act in real life” (“On Style” 23). Sontag thus disregards the essence of the avant garde, which would be to move outside boundaries; performances, for
19 In “Fascinating Fascism” (1974) Sontag revised her provocative stance, acknowledging that nothing, not even art, is beyond good and evil, or above reproach. See Adams; Kramer, “Evolution.”
Dakari 170 example, where the perceptual multistability deriving from the performer’s person/persona questions the principles of mimesis. Still/Here, and most illness performances of this kind, lie outside Sontag’s ontology and aesthetics of representation. Ironically, and regardless of whether she reversed her provocative statement about the “beauty” of Nazism, Sontag was willing to see Hitler as “Hitler” but not cancer as “cancer.”
Though Sontag acknowledges that “all works of art are founded on a certain distance from the lived reality which is represented,” she cautions that this distance, or dehumanization of the work of art is quite misleading: “The overcoming or transcending of the world in art is also a way of encountering the world, and of training or education the will to be in the world” (30-31). There should not be a dilemma over an aristocratic, disinterested, and stylized work of art versus a utilitarian one at the service of some moral or social idea.
What Sontag trusts will resolve this misconception on the nature of art is “adopting a different, more organic, theoretical vantage point—such as the notion of will,” which will do justice to the twin aspects of art: as object and as function, as artifice and as living form of consciousness, as the overcoming or supplementing of reality and as the making explicit of forms of encountering reality, as autonomous individual creation and as dependent historical phenomenon” (“On Style” 31).
What is particularly interesting in her position is that this autonomy “invites the examination of works of art as historically specifiable phenomena” partly invented and adopted at a specific historical moment, which then emerge as a “‘realistic’ reading of a perennial human nature.” All decisions in the creation of an object or performance entail this element of arbitrariness, which is nothing but a set of rules by which both artists and audiences play. As Sontag sees it, these rules finally constitute a limit, “whether they are rules of form . . . or the presence of a certain ‘content’.” What will outweigh such limitations, in her view, is the element of the “arbitrary and the unjustifiable in art.” Following Aristotle,
Dakari 171
“critics who want to praise a work of art feel compelled to demonstrate that each part is justified, that it could not be other than it is. And every artist, when it comes to his own work, remembering the role of chance, fatigue, external distractions, knows what the critic says to be a lie, knows that it could well have been otherwise.” The only aspect of an artwork that is inevitable, according to Sontag, is its individual style. (“On Style” 33.) And what sanctions the style secreted by a work of art is the impression that it could not have been otherwise made, that it is not forced or constructed, stressing thus the difference between style and stylization (34). “An artist’s style” she continues, “is, from a technical point of view, nothing other than the particular idiom in which he deploys the forms of his art, thus identifying the affinities between form and style” (34). Instead of siding with Lyotard and the significance and precariousness of individual style, she has specific forms in mind that sanction the aesthetic quality of a work of art, such as the rhythmic and metric qualities of poetry. What is implied is that form, whose particular idiom is style, follows a certain plan of sensory imprinting, the link between immediate sensuous impression and memory.
However, if form were legitimized by a distinctive style that we see repeated among several artworks of the same form, would this not mean that a certain pattern of stylistic and formal criteria should be taken into consideration whenever one is to form an aesthetic judgement? In this respect, Sontag’s point promotes an anti-interpretational approach to art as long as it remains within acceptable criteria of intelligibility. The artist, in Sontag’s view, experiments within a restricted range of data and resources, and all deviation can only occur within the boundaries set by art form and genre. Her closing argument that art means to acknowledge the ineffable and embrace the arbitrary is thus not convincingly sustained, while her critical lens remains essentially formalist.
The positive effect of autonomy in art thus anticipates Lyotard’s delineation of a postmodern landscape of experimentation. The importance of framing surfaces in the way
Dakari 172 decisions on how a work of art is contextualized, or presented, draw our attention to certain features even as they obscure others. This constructedness should always be taken into account according to Sontag, along with the “contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible” (“On Style” 35). Why then would she accuse Croce’s detractors of populism-driven obsession with discrediting standards in art? As she wrote in her letter of support to Croce: “To affirm that there is something called art with purposes transcending service to moral and social agendas will always be a beleaguered position, attacked by philistines of all political flavors” (“‘Victim Art’”). Given that the criteria of style are not fixed but amenable to historical changes, why should the critic of the nineties disregard the anarchism of the sixties—with the anti-Vietnam war protests, and the parallel movements of African-Americans’ and women’s rights—and the emergence of the previously marginalized ethnic-minority and gay voices whose creative work claimed grants from the National Endowment for the Arts? (Oates 31; Bhabha 48). Why should not art adjust to this changing world and the critic keep up?
Sontag’s history of continuous revisions of her previous sayings might offer a satisfying answer to this question (Kramer, “Evolution;” Adams; Willis). For, although the art and the aesthetic sensibility Sontag discussed in her critical essays of the sixties were generally refered to as postmodern by the late 1970s, she never actually embraced this label
(Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern 14). In fact, as Bertens contends, Sontag’s “extreme formalism” is more likely to qualify her as modernist, especially when, in her critique of
Godard’s film “Vivre Sa Vie” (1964) she is offended by its ontological boundary crossing,
“letting the real world interfere with the fiction of the film;” in her view, that was a “false step . . . which is unforgivable” (qtd. in Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern 28).
Upon examination of her aesthetic positioning prior to her illness treatise, Sontag’s contention against illness art constitutes an aestheticist rather that aesthetic judgement, which
Dakari 173 derives from the Kantian postulation of the autonomy of aesthetic standard—the view that a work of art should be self-sufficient, without any further use or moral aim outside its own being. Indeed, aestheticism suggests that a work of art exists in its own formal perfection.
This is rooted in Kant’s proposition that the pure aesthetic experience consists of a
“disinterested” contemplation of an object that “pleases for its own sake” with no further interest in the “external” ends of utility or morality. However, as Adorno argues, “the historical moment is constitutive of artworks” (Aesthetic Theory 182); in order to get to the truth of the artwork, one must consider both its internal dynamics and the dynamics of the socio-historical context in which it exists—or, in Heidegger’s terms, the “world” it opens up to and the “earth” that shelters it. This would turn the aesthetic experience an affective one as well.
What Sontag, following Croce, has claimed is that in the case of Still/Here, content
(i.e. illness) overshadows form (i.e. artistic representation). Indeed, not all content can be an art form; certain conditions do apply in order for a content to be contextualized as art. In that sense, Croce and Sontag stipulate a hermeneutic scheme that isolates those elements of the work that best pertain to the idea of what art ought to be and proceed with the extraction of meaning. This indeed is interpretation as “revenge of the intellect upon art,” as Sontag bemoaned in “Against Interpretation.” However, her subsequent emphasis on formal standards that should be identified in an artwork in order to be an artwork (in the case of
Still/Here, or generally about the aestheticization of cancer) is in stark contrast with her plea to “feel more” and to let the artwork reveal itself to us through the senses. As Ellen Willis observes, Sontag’s call for this new perspective on art and its reception that would radically alter both is eventually abandoned in the 1970s, when she “retreats to a more conservative stance on aesthetic issues.” That was the time when Sontag expelled illness from the realm of art in her Illness as Metaphor.
Dakari 174
As it seems, it is not only a strong trust in formalist doctrines that led Sontag to agree with Croce, but a deeper, personal concern about whether illness can be acceptable content and whether it can induce satisfactory stylistic configurations. Had she openly admitted so, however, she would have become a moralist, not a critic; or, worse, herself a “victim.”
Regarding the Pain of Others: an invitation to reflect on suffering
Sontag’s last book, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), examines the ethics of representation with regards to war photography and its power of affect, which cannot be superceded by form alone. This work echoes topics she has previously addressed in On
Photography (1977), where she ranges against the benumbing of the senses through excessive exposure to the suffering of war profusely reproduced by the media. On
Photography conveys her concern that “what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment” (20). She is convinced that photographs have nurtured a profoundly inauthentic sense of experience, opening up discussions about the ethics of representation: What good is served simply by looking at images of misery and extreme suffering, i.e. photographs of Nazi concentration camps? Are they really educating us and calling for some sort of public action to alleviate this pain? Or, are they simply causing emotional detachment turning us into accomplices/voyeurs? What she suggested then was that there be “an ecology of images,” meaning that the public’s exposure to violence imagery should not be limitless (On
Photography 180). Of course, the solution of a “conservationist” approach to the dissemination of photographs could not have been plausible given the rise of the Internet and the limitless access to instantly available information (Jurecic 72).
While Sontag upholds her early distrust in all kinds of hermeneutic approach to the
“real” experience of art or life in On Photography, also evident in “Against interpretation,” in
Dakari 175
Regarding the Pain of Others she moves towards a re-examination of the role of content in shaping the ethics of representation. In this book Sontag shifts from her earlier analytical approach to photography as an act of non-intervention, to a later one of bearing witness and serving as a medium for a more ethical type of watching, which involves “coming close to the intimate pain of others,” and “letting the atrocious images haunt us.” Having second thoughts about whether the abundance of war photographs leads to emotional hardening, she comes to acknowledge that “we live in ‘a society of spectacle’” and that this has inevitably shaped our way of being in the world and interacting with it (115).
As Sontag posits, “the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost as the desire for ones that show bodies naked,” acknowledging the spell of the Burkean sublime (the kind of negative pleasure Burke calls “delight”) that is present in the way people are attracted to images of natural disaster or horrendous accidents, which as she writes, “is not only curiosity” but entails a certain degree of remotely pornographic allure (100). She regards indiscriminately these two ways of looking as natural and inexorable, as the epitome, that is, of mass culture consumerism. The excess of images disseminated daily by the media,
Sontag argues, generates a form of attention that is "light, mobile, [and] relatively indifferent to content." The whimsical kind of attention television invites—“that it is normal to switch channels, to become restless, bored”—has caused a general inability to reflectively engage with content, because this requires “a certain intensity of awareness—just what is weakened by the expectations brought to images disseminated by the media, whose leaching out of content contributes most to the deadening of feeling” (Regarding 106).
In this respect, Sontag’s contention is that the onlooker finds indiscriminate pleasure in pictures of suffering disseminated by and consumed through the media; that switching the channel, or turning the page, creates a distance that further fuels passivity, boredom, and intensified hunger for stronger imagery to maintain excitement. However, by lumping
Dakari 176 together all viewers as image-gluttonous beings who uncritically devour images without any measure of critical awareness, she once more exemplifies her beliefs of audience passivity and complicity as well as a disturbing elitism, similar to the one that surfaced in her letter of support to Croce.
Another position Sontag revises is the role of content in the process of reception. As she writes, “[p]hotographs tend to transform. . . . Transforming is what art does, but photography that bears witness to the calamitous and the reprehensible is much criticized if it seems ‘aesthetic;’ that is, too much like art.” In her view, photographs that depict suffering should not be beautiful, because a beautiful photograph “drains attention from the sobering subject” and “[compromises] the picture’s status as a document.” If the beautification of an image “[bleaches] out a moral response to what is shown” its uglification can be more didactic, inviting an active response by means of shock (Regarding 81). Here, Sontag detects a profound inauthenticity in the beautiful image, which can be merely enjoyed in a disinterested way. The irreducible content of suffering cannot exist in the aesthetic, she argues, implying that photography serves a social role, art an aesthetic one, which can only be accepted as partially true, since, as it is often the case, reality and life blur, especially in photography. The inconsistency of this argument becomes even more pronounced when in her analysis of pictorial representation of torture, she also turns to representations of wartime atrocity and torture, such as Goya’s Disasters of War, Jeff Wall's Dead Troops Talk, or
Jacques Callot's Les misères et les malheurs de la guerre, all of them being works of art that depict historic war scenes and their effect on the body as their subject matter. Sontag includes these cases in a general discussion on documentary photojournalism, which indeed requires an active awareness and ethical response from audiences, but as she says, has nothing to do with art. She thus fails to acknowledge the fact that the boundaries between art and life very
Dakari 177 often blur and that a synergy of genres, forms, and media is thus called for in order to negotiate the unpresentable.
As Sontag suggests, the moral stance one should keep and the action one should take with respect to war spectacles and their affective backwash favor the lingering power of narrative over the fleeting exposure to images. As she writes, “harrowing photographs do not inevitably lose their power to shock. But they are not much help if the task is to understand.
Narratives can make us understand” (Regarding 89). Twenty-five years earlier, however,
Sontag rejected narratives, in Illness as Metaphor, as an ineffective medium of expressing the honest and unadorned experience of suffering (Jurecic 82). This, according to Jurecic, testifies to her typical attitude of revising her previous writings but also shows how the personal experience of suffering has significantly altered her perspectives, irrespectively of whether or not she was willing to openly discuss it.
“A photograph cannot speak for itself,” Sontag argues—indeed, entirely abandoning her early positions on the autonomy of art and its break from content. As she sees it, it is always the image that someone chose to present, which only corresponds to a portion of truth.
In this sense, she writes, “to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude” (Regarding
46). Sontag states that a photograph requires an interpretative method, which she finds in the power of the text that should accompany and complement it. It depends on the writers who create the narratives around the photograph to assist the public in understanding them. For instance, photographs of New York City on 9/11 can be viewed in entirely opposite ways: as an atrocious assault to “our” country or as a justifiable revenge for America’s interventionism in “our” affairs—depending on one’s perspective. Sontag thus stresses the significance of the interpretative frame one adopts, even as she draws attention to the arbitrariness of the framing criteria that shape our understanding of an image.
Dakari 178
By drawing our attention to the performativity of photograph “to refer to the facts” but also “to build and confirm these acts” as such, Butler observes that this indecisiveness of reception present in the arbitrariness of framing can be resolved once we “learn to see the frame that blinds us to what we see,” which, of course, is not an easy matter. Questioning
Sontag’s distrust to “the final narcissism of our habits of visual consumption” during times of war, Butler suggests we should instead assume a critical role and “thematize the forcible frame agreeably and eagerly adopted by journalists and photographers” (“Photography, War,
Outrage” 826).
Transferring Butler’s observation discussed earlier into performance, one can see that similar principles apply. The stage, just like the frame of a photograph, instantly highlights as it obscures; conventionally, the sturdier the frame, the greater the distance between stage and auditorium, the more at ease the spectators, and the finer the art. There are cases when the frame is violated and the viewing and the viewed spill into each other, as in transgressive performance art since the sixties, making the experience explicit, uncomfortable, but also transformative. Acknowledging our mixed emotions upon witnessing the obscene, instead of merely directing our response to the framed event itself, we should turn our attention to the frames, and in particular, and the objects/ideas/situations they project and obscure respectively. In other words, to acknowledge the performativity of the framing process and the condition of spectatorship that substantiate it.
Butler’s idea of the performativity of the frame could also be employed to disclose
Sontag’s hoax of critical consistency, or “the uncertainties that underlie her performance of certainty” (Jurecic 68). Even though she has revised her early aesthetic positions regarding interpretation and response to art, and even though she extensively discussed the ethics of representation regarding the pain of others, she has neatly avoided to place illness in either an aesthetic or hermeneutic framework. Feeling along the edges of the frame she chose to her
Dakari 179 various discussions on pain and representation, one can thus detect the inconsistencies that arise from the fact that “she was so afraid of dying” and “obsessed with it,” as Rieff recounts
(“David Rieff on His Mother”). Sontag’s fear of dying, impossible to frame, contain, and possess, was thus kept outside her criticism.
In her letter of support to Croce, Sontag condemned “victim art” as a populist kind of utilitarian art, whose most audacious demonstration Croce found in spectacles of commemoration like the AIDS quilt. In Regarding the Pain of Others, however, she articulates an entirely different opinion. She reflects on the Holocaust Memorial Museum, or other memory museums around the world, as the affective outcome of the coming-together of art, documentation, and consumerism: “Photographs and other memorabilia of the Shoah have been committed to a perpetual recirculation to ensure that what they will show will be remembered.” But she also comments on the precarity of representation of a collective memory once this memory is judged too dangerous to social stability to activate and to create, as for example a Museum of the History of Slavery in the nation’s capital, thus acknowledging the tension between public commemoration and public offense—as in
Croce’s view of the AIDS quilt as a “pathetic lumping together.” In the case of the memory museum, Sontag sees the commercialization of photographs of suffering to be “more than reminders of death, of failure, of victimization;” they “invoke the miracle of survival”
(Regarding 39). Sontag also reminds her readers that such images are “an invitation to pay attention, to reflect, to learn” (40). In other words, she acknowledges the performative dimension of the precarity of a group as a reinstatement of agency, of being a victim no more.
Sadly, she failed to see the same prospect of survival in illness art as well.
“There is shame as well as shock in looking at the close-up of a real horror. . . . [We] are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be. In each instance, the gruesome invites us to be either spectators or cowards, unable to look,” Sontag writes (Regarding 38). If this is indeed
Dakari 180 true for photography, a still medium that forever immobilizes its object in space and time, what is the case of an object in performance? Could it be considered an object any more?
What is implied is that voyeurism derives from the objectification of a spectacle. In the case of a live performer exhibiting/performing himself, the object of our gaze is able to return the gaze. The performing subject/object no longer is a victim of our gaze, as it assumes its subjectivity by looking back. Performance becomes the condition for a performative act to occur, a phrase in Lyotard’s terms, which unsettles our habitual engagement with the unpresentable and prompts us to reconsider our role as spectators. This is the moment we stop being voyeurs; we contemplate both the subject of representation and ourselves as spectators. This way of being-there and being-with-others constitutes an authentic experience and a promise for the transformation deriving from the spectators’ affective engagement with performers.
A kingdom to live and die in: closing thoughts on Susan Sontag
Sontag’s famous metaphor, with which she opens Illness as Metaphor, has constructed a narrative framework which would better contain and elucidate the
“undiscussable,” unrepresentable, and unthinkable condition of suffering (Jurecic 91).
Sontag’s world was indeed split into two due to illness. Her repeated bouts with cancer, first stage-four breast cancer with multiple lymph metastases in 1975, and later a uterine sarcoma in 1998, brought her close to death but also inflated her optimism, that she would always beat the odds. In an interview following the Illness as Metaphor years, Sontag reveals the extremes between “the most acute kind of animal panic” and “moments of elation” she had been living in after surviving cancer the first time. She recounts how tremendously intense was to embark on the “adventure of being ill and probably dying” (“Susan Sontag Found
Crisis of Cancer Added a Fierce Intensity to Life”). At times, she presents some enlightening
Dakari 181 insights into the chaos of existence that could be understood as reconciliation with the inevitability of death: “You can’t feel angry at nature. You can’t feel angry at biology. We’re all going to die” (Cott 8).
Although this sounds like a reconstructive way of reflecting back on such a devastating experience, Sontag’s world remained un-made, divided between the ecstasy of the mind’s capacities and the dread of the body’s failures. As she states,
It feels as if there’s this person—in your head, mainly—trapped in this physiological
stock that only survives seventy to eighty-plus years. . . . It starts deteriorating at a
certain point, and then for half of your life, if not more, you watch this material begin
to fray. And there’s nothing you can do about it. You’re trapped inside it; and when it
goes, you go. (Cott 9)
What she leaves us with here is an irrevocable sense of rupture; she senses her self as outside the material and semantic load of her ill body, admitting to be trapped both physically and spiritually:
Everything in this society . . . conspires to eliminate all but the most banal levels of
feelings. There’s no sense of the sacred. . . . There’s been a collapse of the religious
vocabularies that once described that other state. Perhaps the only way people can
only imagine it now . . . is in terms of being well and being sick . . . like the difference
between the sacred and the profane (Cott 15).
She finds some truth in the romanticization of illness, if only a religious one—“because we don’t know any other way to provoke some more extreme state of consciousness.” With the collapse of religious faith and the rise of the medical and psychiatric discourses, however,
“[t]he two things spiritual values have become attached to . . . are art and illness” (Cott 15).
Given her harsh critique to “victim art” in general, she obviously rebukes any possibility of the coalescence of art and illness into a restorative union.
Dakari 182
The complete story, Sontag’s own illness and its physical and emotional torment, has been posthumously revealed in Rieff’s memoirs and essays of his own irresolvable toll of painfully witnessing his mother’s demise and obstinate optimism about her grim prognosis.
In “Illness as More than Metaphor,” Rieff recounts the “tremendous passion” with which his mother waged a war against her own body in the prospect of prolonging her life, “no matter how terrible her suffering” (55). In 2004, she was diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome, a particularly virulent form of blood cancer and technically a precursor to acute myeloid leukemia. The only hope was to receive an adult stem-cell transplant; however, with slim chances of survival. Her doctor warned her of the physical suffering such a treatment would involve and instead offered her the option of a drug that helped many patients feel relatively well but did little to prolong life. “I am not interested in quality of life!” Sontag replied (qtd. in Rieff, “Illness as More than Metaphor” 55). Having to choose between letting his mother die in false hope and physical agony by going through painful but barely effective treatment, or in psychological terror by telling her the bleak truth, Rieff went with the first option: telling her what she wanted to hear—that there are strong chances of survival through bone- marrow transplant—and “cheerleading her to her grave” (57).
As it is obvious in her illness treatises, also in the way she would deal with her own illness, Sontag overemphasizes medical discourse and informed patienthood as the healthiest ways of being ill, while she denounces metaphoric reconstruction of painful experiences as unnecessary and misleading. As it has been stressed earlier in this study, this distrust in metaphor does not stop her from beginning her book with a metaphor: “I want,” she tells us,
“to describe not what it is really like to emigrate to the kingdom of the ill and live there, but the punitive or sentimental fantasies concocted about that situation: not real geography but stereotypes of national character. On the occasion of writing an obituary for Sontag, and revisiting the above-quoted metaphor, Willis believes that Illness as Metaphor “is a book
Dakari 183 without a protagonist, set in a terrain without inhabitants; or rather they are opaque, their presence revealed only by the tropes that surround them, as black holes are detected by a bent gravitational field.” Sontag’s prosaic approach to her cancer ends up in “a somber silence”—
Willis means the author's quieted personal narrative and her actual funeral—“for death is truly the kingdom where metaphors come to an end.” Depleting the world (and her world) of any meaning that would render suffering more sufferable, Sontag, in the end, went through dying as “all too woefully” just a body.
The parallel reading of Sontag’s art criticism and private experience of illness has shown that her position in Illness as Metaphor should be employed cautiously and consciously in order to be of use in the experience and expression of suffering. Performing and narrating metaphors do offer alternative routes to the unpresentable, while intensifying its reception through empathy and connectedness. What this discussion boils down to, is that
Sontag’s diatribe on illness is essentially performative: it does not merely monitor an empirical situation, but prescribes how it should be both expressed and understood. Through juxtaposing tuberculosis with cancer, and later cancer with AIDS, she creates mutually exclusive conceptual domains that not only are heavily based on metaphors, but also indulge in their self-fulfilling prophecies. This is precisely what Judith Butler’s theory of performativity exposes: “to the extent that a term is performative, it does not merely refer, but acts in some way to constitute that which it enunciates” (Bodies that Matter 217).
Tuberculosis, therefore, has been erotically stimulating and spiritual—now it is routinely treated with medicines, cancer is (and will be) de-sexualizing and repressing, while AIDS is over-sexualized, morally as well as literally inflammatory, and overtly politicized. Her position thus resembles Croce’s attitude of aesthetic elitism and fuels the very fantasies it seeks to dissolve.
Dakari 184
This is precisely what the works to be discussed here seek to deconstruct. Each of them seeks to expose the degree of performativity that inheres within cancer performance and explore the aesthetic potential that derives from the negotiation of cancer as an empirical concept. Understanding cancer as a performative statement of existence besides a descriptive term, I argue, can significantly mitigate the impact of the metaphorical burden of disease as
Sontag detailed it. I do not intend, however, to deny the physical and emotional toll of illness, nor to imply that being ill is a role one chooses to step in and out of. Also, it should not be the biomedical domain’s duty alone to dilate its gaze over a sick subject. Looking without flinching can indeed be unpleasant, terrifying, and depressing. Rejecting the aesthetics of illness and suffering as a mere reality, or banality, that evokes voyeurism, pity, and aversion is a judgment that is not only incomplete, but also historically inaccurate and culturally encumbering. In essence, it is a self-censorious mindset that restricts the self’s expressive potential.
Restrictive social norms and aesthetic concerns should be put to question, so that uninhibited expression and empathic witnessing can be promoted in order to reshape the experience of illness. Only thus could one find a healthy way of being ill, as Sontag concluded; however, not by excluding metaphor, but properly using it. Finally, by de- institutionalizing conventional ways of looking, we might be able to engage with illness in a more constructive way, both aesthetically and socially.
Dakari 185
PART II
THE AESTHETICS OF THE UNPRESENTABLE IN PLAYS
AND PERFORMANCES ABOUT CANCER
Dakari 186
Chapter 7
The unpresentable made spectacular: Cancer on the American popular stage
The second part of this thesis attempts to trace and identify the aesthetic of the unpresentable in theatrical plays and performances dealing with cancer experience. Some of these works are conventional text-based plays that have been produced in a number of venues in the United
States, while others are time-based performances and installations, experimental dramatizations, public talks that employ the style of solo performance, even museum exhibitions. Experimental theatre and performance art have continuously tackled the limits of representation, where abject topics have always attracted artists’ and audiences’ attention.
Cancer as a theme for mainstream theatre, however, seems to have an obvious disadvantage: it is not entertaining in an escapist way and cannot, therefore, yield profit for the popular theatre industry. Additionally, it poses a problem of generic character seen earlier in Croce’s criticism: it runs the risk of being engulfed by its “too real” subject matter, canceling mimesis, which is the dominant principle of representation, and gravitating, instead, towards the highly personal, confessional documentary or verbatim theatre,20 or any other style that occurs at the intersection of art and politics and deviates from either aesthetic formalism or mainstream entertainment.
But even in cases where a “realistic” aspect of illness and suffering is to be tackled, there is a clear distinction between “realistic” and “real,” or fictive and actual, as the
Croce/Jones case indicates. In such cases, cancer is only to be addressed in metaphoric terms, associating the bleakness of the disease with severe implosive political disorder or the dramatic externalization of a character’s inner failings. This leads the discussion back to
Sontag’s critique of the punitive metaphors of cancer.
20 Ariel Nereson, for instance, approaches Jones’s Still/Here as a case of verbatim theatre in her essay “Embodying the Undiscussable: Documentary Methodology in Bill T. Jones’s Still/Here and the Culture Wars.” For further information on verbatim theatre, see Hammond Steward.
Dakari 187
The American stage, apart from a fertile ground for artistic expression, is also a marketplace where dramatic pieces are consumed on the spot. But how palatable or profitable a play dealing with cancer could be? This discussion is framed and informed by opposing views such as Sontag’s claim against the aestheticization of cancer, and Barbara Ehrenreich’s cultural evidence of a lucrative “cancer marketplace,” expressed in her famous essay
“Welcome to Cancerland.”
In absence of the suitable aesthetic criteria that could set the ground for a representation of cancer that would not be reduced to either tear-jerking melodrama or emotional blackmail, there has been a giant leap from the invisibility of earlier times, as seen in Sontag, to the oversimplification of later capitalist culture that runs on the “anything goes” basis of profit-making. Lyotard has compellingly explained this paradox: “I]n the absence of aesthetic criteria, it remains possible and useful to assess the value of works of art according to the profits they yield, . . . [accommodating] all tendencies, just as capital accommodates all needs” (Postmodern Condition 76).
The cases discussed in this chapter consistently elbow the sublime out of presentation, or prevent it from spilling out and offending the audience. Cancer or any other sort of illness and suffering that is extremely uncomfortable, pushing the bleakest aspects of human condition into view, should either stay out of focus, or should adversely be refined and “well- made” so that the public could immediately recognize and understand what it is about and still be able to derive a certain amount of comfort from this work. The ultimate goal of this processing is, according to Lyotard, to suspend artistic experimentation and maintain unity, identity, security, or popularity (Postmodern Condition 73).
The representability and marketability of a romanticized aesthetic of disease are tackled in four popular American theatrical works: Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin
Roof (1955), Michael Cristofer’s The Shadow Box (1977), Margaret Edson’s Wit (1995), and
Dakari 188
Susan Miller’s My Left Breast (1994). Though they do tackle cancer, often in gruesome explicitness of both physical and symbolic excess, these plays nevertheless mask the abject behind easily grasped metaphors (i.e. cancer as Old South’s self-consuming forces in T.
Williams’s A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), affirmation of cultural expectations regarding the public discussion of cancer (the unnamed illness that plagues characters in The Shadow Box), dualistic stereotypes, as for example mind versus body, or man versus woman (in Margaret
Edson’s Wit), or the suspension of the visual explicitness that poses a “real” threat (as in the never-revealed scar in S. Miller’s My Left Breast). Although the above-mentioned strategies do maintain a significant amount of comfort or release, they eventually keep audiences from engaging in further reflection on the complexities of suffering that lie outside their safety zone. Even when the subject matter evades all possible forms of representation, as death does, the metaphysical jumps in to save the plot’s coherence; the problematic ending in Wit, in particular, is such a case in point, as we shall see.
In brief, these plays register the aesthetic, social and political tendencies regarding cancer from mid-twentieth century onwards, and, disparate in style, form and critical reception as they are, they do share a claim for making the most painful experiences pleasant to the audience. The kind of pleasure spectators derive, as this chapter aims at showing, is accomplished through the narrative and stylistic handling of plot toward a climactic point.
Once this point of catharsis is reached, the characters’ suffering is, then, complete and self- contained, pertaining to the well-known Aristotelian standards of tragedy.
Interlude: (Un)romantic maladies
SCENE SIX. Gorgeous clouds, tinted with sunlight. EVA, robed in white, is discovered on the back of a milk-white dove, with expanded wings, as if just soaring upward. Her
hands are extended in benediction over ST. CLARE and
Dakari 189
UNCLE TOM, who are kneeling and gazing up to her. Expressive music. Slow curtain. (G. L. Aiken, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” 62)
This perennially celebrated curtain fall, which gave rise to a long tradition of a typically American melodramatic imagination, was meant to become a staple of the country’s popular theatre, surviving well into the twentieth century. George Aiken’s dramatization of
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), not only proved equally capable of shaping public opinion against slavery on the eve of the American Civil War, but also sentimentalized illness, and tuberculosis in particular, through Eva’s deeply symbolic deathbed scene, “arguably the most emotionally and historically influential of its day”
(Vrettos 101).
In nineteenth-century popular imagination, tuberculosis was thought to be connected not only to religious spirituality, as in Eva’s corporeal internalization of the slaves’ suffering, but also to excessive eroticism, and artistic passion. While early modern western culture entertained the idea of tuberculosis as “a decorative, often lyrical death,” Sontag has stresses the impossibility of adding a romantic nuance to cancer, that “rare and still scandalous subject for poetry” (20). As we have seen in the first part of this study, Sontag has understood cancer as a relentless reminder of our being perishable. All the plays discussed here, however, deal with various dimensions of the flesh and the self: the erotic, the excessive, the deviant, as well as the receding, and offer the prospect of a happy ending, be it a newborn life, a restored life, or afterlife. This handling of pleasure and suffering in the right proportions, it appears, has secured their long runs across the country’s most popular stages and their continuous critical success.
Dakari 190
Cancer goes to Broadway: Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955)
During the first half of the twentieth century, when cancer was considered far too offensive to be explicitly discussed, let alone staged, plays dealing with the disease were barely produced (Lederer 95). The best-known play of that period that directly dealt with a woman’s brain cancer was George Emerson Brewer Jr and Bertram Bloch’s Dark Victory, first staged on Broadway in 1934 with Tallulah Bankhead in the leading role. Despite the positive critical notices her performance received, the play itself was unsuccessful. However, it later attracted film producers and eventually made it to Hollywood in 1939, starring Bette
Davis, whose acting garnered enthusiastic reviews (Nugent). What could be possibly inferred from this disproportionate success of the film version is that the big screen succeeded in maintaining the necessary distance between the protagonist’s suffering and audiences in order for the latter to be able to experience the tragic gratification of the plot.
The next most popular and widely applauded theatrical representation of cancer came almost two decades after Dark Victory: Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Its central themes were closeted homosexuality, mendacity, moral decay, the precarious passage from agrarianism to capitalism in the South, and the postwar call for traditional values, which reflected the return to the domestic plot. Since there exists a massive body of criticism and theoretical discussion prompted by Williams’s idiosyncratic life and work as these are reflected in Cat, it is not my intention to expand on the play’s thick significations.21 The discussion that follows is, therefore, exclusively directed towards a consideration of the play’s cancer symbolism and its commercial success in spite (or because) of that.
As early as the 1950s, Williams not only talked about cancer and homosexuality in his
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, but he scandalously implied an association of the two, nevertheless pertaining to strictly metaphorical and poetic considerations. No need to say that the ugly,
21 For a concise and illuminating analysis of dramatic elements and production history of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, see Crandell “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (109-25).
Dakari 191 private details were held back. This play, whose constituent parts were masterly choreographed into one of his most consistent dramas, often characterized by critics as classical in terms of structure, draw primarily on cancer symbolism in the context of
McCarthy’s America. Apparently, Williams’s own imagination focused on self-destructive materialism, hypocrisy, sexual deviance, as well as on the difficulty in establishing meaningful contact, rather than on the disease per se.
Images of Williams’s South, both redolent and grotesque, are invoked at Big Daddy
Pollitt’s plantation residence—the setting of the play. Big Daddy, raised by Jack Straw and
Peter Ochello, a gay couple who owned the estate, has managed to turn their land into the richest plantation in the Delta. As David Savran observes, the land is not Straw and Ochello’s only legacy that is passed along through Big Daddy, since his favorite youngest son Brick, former football star, is said to bear the seeds of their homosexuality (“Mapping the Closet with Tennessee Williams” 53). Repelled by his wife Maggie, he is absorbed in drinking as a way to deal with the death of his friend Skipper and the unresolved nature of their “pure” friendship. Brick and Maggie, both attached to an old, unspoiled, idealistic South, have to compete with the oldest son Gooper, a successful lawyer, and his wife Mae, who of post- capitalist South, coveting the plantation (Devlin 102). Act One chronicles Brick and Maggie’s failed marriage and the role Skipper played in it. Act Two is a confrontation between Big
Daddy and Brick, during which they both have to face painful and long buried truths: Brick is forced into acknowledging his latent homosexual attraction to Skipper, the denial of which was the reason of the latter’s death; Big Daddy learns that he is dying of cancer. Act Three, as was originally written by Williams, opens with Big Daddy having left the house in anger and
Maggie announcing a fake pregnancy as the only way to inherit the plantation.
Dakari 192
Heated debates have been prompted by the alternative, emotionally loaded, third act
Williams wrote for the Broadway production to be directed by Elia Kazan.22 Big Daddy leaves in the second act but returns in the third, thus transforming the horror following his diagnosis into a magnanimous on-stage acceptance of his death. He then bequeaths his kingdom to Brick, who supports Maggie’s lie of being pregnant. By showing signs of rehabilitation and implying that he has renewed his sexual interest in his wife, Brick thus restores his wounded masculinity. Williams apparently went “straight for the Happy Ending”
(Boxill 22). This decision, however, was a source of torment for Williams, because he felt as if “he had prostituted himself artistically, compromising his integrity by changing his texts to ingratiate himself with Kazan or increase the chances of Broadway success” (Hayman 164).
Commenting on the huge success this play met with on Broadway, Savran states that “by appropriating the language of convention . . . and by absenting the homosexual subject . . . another homosexual subject, Tennessee Williams, is allowed not only to speak, but virtually to reign over the commercial theatre of the 1940s and ‘50s” (Savran, “Mapping the Closet”
61).
At a first glance, cancer seems to be a secondary ingredient of plot construction that would satisfy the need for suspense and climactic points called for by melodrama. In fact, everyone’s attention was drawn to Williams’s manipulation of Brick’s ambiguous sexuality, as well as to his reaction to the postwar culture of deceit, and the constricting tropes of virility he was forced to abide by. The fact, however, that Big Daddy Pollitt is dying of cancer is not at all incidental to the plot. And despite the fact that Williams conformed to the tendency of representing only the less offensive and more photogenic forms of the disease that was favored at that time (Lederer 96), the place where Big Daddy’s tumor rests is all but decorous.
As it is revealed to him in the second act, he is dying of bowel cancer, which in Williams’s
22 For an illuminating discussion on Williams and Kazan’s collaboration and their controversy regarding the changes that Kazan indicated for the third act, see Murphy 97-130.
Dakari 193 imagination is closely related to a latent homosexuality. Luca Prono locates “the predominantly negative attitude of 1950s American society towards homosexuality, often linking it with death and bowel cancer” (292). Big Daddy admits having “knocked around” when he was young, implying that he might have been involved with men as well. The crude masculinity Big Daddy exemplifies is nevertheless loosely defined in order to tolerate sexual deviance, as David Savran argues (“Mapping the Closet” 54), and perhaps conceal homosexuality, emphasizing the concept of deceit, or “passing.” This motif of a repressed truth that poisons the present poignantly reflects McCarthean society’s fear of sexual deviance, which, along with Communist credos, was destroying America from the inside, thus posing a threat not only to moral integrity but also to national security (Savran, Communists,
Cowboys, and Queers 84-88). More than merely a dramatic strategy, therefore, cancer in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof represents an intricate sign system that exposes deceit and mendacity as moral cannibalism, a self-destructive mechanism that eats away the Pollitts and the values they represent.
The imagery of the other within, of “unregulated, abnormal, incoherent growth”
(Sontag, Illness 64) is communicated through the setting itself, a region and a culture suspended in an uncertain between its agrarian and idealistic past and a thriving capitalist future (Devlin 102-103; Savran, Communists 89-90). The two young couples embody this conflicting attitude within the same organism, even as they reflect the “profound economic, social, and political reorientation” the American postwar South was going through (Savran,
Communists 89). Approaching Brick as the offspring of a dying system, personified by Big
Daddy, his bastardized nature clearly reflects the historical and social fabric that created him: a society that strives to resurrect a past to hold on to, reluctant to move forward and yet skeptical toward the consistency of old values. Big Daddy, then, reflects an aging and ailing
Dakari 194 body politic, afflicted by its own excesses and shortcomings, and, all the more tragically, being punished for them.
Cat’s universe, crumbling, precarious, and certainly diseased, is neatly restored when
Williams complied with the changes Kazan proposed: among others, that Big Daddy should return to face his death, and Brick be transformed into a heterosexual adult. The romanticized way in which Big Daddy acknowledges the evil within him, a “demonic pregnancy,” to use
Sontag’s words (Illness 14), and the way he caresses Maggie’s body allegedly carrying
Brick’s seed in a ritual of symbolic impregnation, may have provided a conclusion audiences applauded, but not an adequate resolution to the issues the play raised (Hayman 154-55).
Let us, then, rest on this last representation of cancer as a just or inevitable punishment and the way this would be received by Williams’s contemporaries. Even though Cat’s themes were indeed challenging, they were not, in fact, a substantial blow to the tight-lipped society of the time. The play’s melodramatic vibratos, with the looming chaos quickly restored by the vague promise of a new life just before curtain, satisfied audiences and most of the critics, and brought Williams the Broadway success he undeniably sought.
“Enough of the palatable truth:” Michael Cristofer’s The Shadow Box (1977)
Michael Cristofer’s play, The Shadow Box, was first performed at the Mark Taper
Forum in Los Angeles in 1975 and made its Broadway debut at the Morosco Theatre on
March 31, 1977, where it ran for 315 performances. It won a Tony Award for Best Play and a
Pulitzer Prize for Drama the same year. In 1980 it was adapted for a television movie and was awarded the Golden Globe. The play brings together the stories of three terminally ill patients and their families and prompts a debate on human relationships in the face of death.
Interestingly, the disease of the three patients is not specified, which points to modern medicine’s and modern society’s quietism regarding cancer. As Sontag observes, “any
Dakari 195 disease that is treated as a mystery is felt to be morally, if not literally, contagious” (Illness
6). Bearing witness to this attitude, it deliberately activates culture-driven discursive mechanisms of defence, such as the metaphor of that other place, or penetrating silence, in order to question their efficiency against the spell of disease. In either case, the effort to keep the illness out of sight and outside language imparted excessive agony.
The setting is a “secluded”—as the stage directions indicate—hospice somewhere in
California. An unnamed terminal condition is the common thread through the stories of three patients. Hospital treatments are no longer useful; yet, these patients are not allowed to return home. Instead, they have been moved into cottages in the hospital campus as part of a research, wherein they are monitored and interviewed daily. In the first act an interviewer’s voice is heard offstage, and he appears in the second. The plot occurs in the course of a day.
As the play begins, each story unfolds serially; as Shadow Box progresses, the stories increasingly overlap and interlace until they come to a simultaneous conclusion, with the last words spoken in unison by all characters.
That the illness remains obscure imparts the play with a universal subject matter, which makes it hard for the audience to remain detached. The audience, which fills the role of recipient of the onstage action, is tortured with this concealment; spectators are in fact faced with the disquieting truth of the characters’ imminent death that reflects back to their own ephemerality. Grappling thus with the fact of the human condition prompts not only spectators’ sympathy towards the characters’ drama, but also a deeper reflection on the meaning of life.
The three patients, Joe, Brian and Felicity, never actually meet, although the plots converge in the end. In the first story, Joe, a husband and father, struggles with revealing the truth of his death to his wife Maggie and his son Steve. Maggie finds hard to accept this fact and refuses to talk to Steve about his father’s condition. The second storyline involves Brian,
Dakari 196 a bisexual writer who decides to live the rest of his life to its fullest, his much younger lover
Mark and his alcoholic and flamboyant ex-wife, Beverly. The third sub-plot is about Felicity, an elderly, semi-senile woman who feels more like a corpse than a person, and her daughter
Agnes taking care of her. Unable to accept that her much loved younger daughter is long dead, Felicity survives solely on the hope that she will eventually visit her.
“Shadow box” stands for a shallow enclosing case usually with a glass front in which something (as a painting, relief, or any other item) is set for protection and display. Indeed, as suggested by the title, characters are in display for both medical and theatrical audiences.
Their geographical isolation, intensified by the difficult access to this place, is the dramatization of Sontag’s allusion of illness as the dark side of life, where they find themselves as citizens of the “kingdom of the sick.” Part of the same project and yet pinned on their restricted space, they resemble guinea pigs caged separately in a lab. They don’t see each other, even though the spectators see them act almost side-by-side. This onstage montage is conveyed through spotlights that isolate or mark out each character’s territory. All this seclusion and fragmentation foregrounds a profound personal isolation and the existential impasse illness has imposed on them.
These disparate scenes and characters are held together under the gaze of the interviewer, who not only represents the medical staff behind this experiment but the very spectatorial gaze. Far from a contemporary caregiver, he embodies the Foucaultian medical gaze, which enacts the separation of the patient’s mind and body. His gaze represents the modernist deconstruction of mortality, which has long held that “simply by applying enough raw science to the specific causes of illness it could ultimately defeat death” (Morris, Illness and Culture 237). According to Morris, this systematic institutionalized delusion has led to current postmodern impasse dying patients face: the dilemma between ongoing mechanical
Dakari 197 assistance of their failing organs or the ultimate solution of assisted suicide once the previous interventions completely fail to make the organism fully functional again (237).
In the world of The Shadow Box, the authoritative gaze is no longer able or willing to provide answers. This points towards the ultimate loss of control, if we consider the advent of modern biomedicine to carry the affirmation of the scientific elucidation of the mysteries of life. Here, the hidden interviewer-scientist performs the tasks of observing, prompting its subjects to dialogue, and monitoring their behavior. As the characters are caught in the process of dying, their exposure to the interviewer without in turn receiving any meaningful assistance causes several reactions: Joe, who is not very adept with words, stumbles, repeats himself, or simply withholds his thoughts and questions that are tormenting him. Brian, on the other hand, toys with words in a self-sarcastic manner. He is fully aware of the fact that he is a piece of research and seems to find delight in the metalinguistic extentions of such an inscription. Finally, Felicity’s angry and profane language spit out with the worn-out wisdom of her old age renders the externalization of her suffering the same as penetrating.
Seeing this play through a socio-historical perspective—United States, 1970s—one comes to agree with Sontag’s remark that an illness that is not specified “has to be cancer”
(Illness 109). Perhaps Brian’s depiction as a bisexual man dying of something irreversible would allude to AIDS. AIDS, however, was yet to be acknowledged as life-threatening disease with all the punitive notions it would eventually carry.23 The fact is that the audience members of that time must have felt extremely uneasy. At a time when, uttering the word cancer, one felt vulnerable to the disease, or even vexed by its abject connotations, the innuendoes the play posed, and the fact that the patients, their families, and the interviewer
23 As Sontag observes, “[the] view that sexually transmitted diseases are not serious reached its apogee in the 1970s, which was also when many male homosexuals reconstituted themselves as something like an ethnic group, one those distinctive folkloric custom was sexual voracity, and the institutions of urban homosexual life became a sexual delivery system of unprecedented speed, efficiency, and volume” (Illness 162).
Dakari 198 knew, must have acted as a fantasy-exciting offense, and still an open threat to everyone around.
Each sub-plot and the stage space they occupy are indicated by the interplay between light and dark, with the interview area being marked out by a pool of light. According to
Garner, “illumination and darkness constitute . . . a strong theatrical duality” (68). This duality sets the binaries of knowing and not knowing, life and death, alienation and empathy.
The very word “cancer” seems to disappear in the dark areas separating the three sub-plots, while it is agonizingly glimpsed at in medications’ labels and symptomatology. Spectators are thus directly connected to the act of seeing, as they are embodied in the medical gaze, enacted by the interviewer. Spectators, split between detached observation and empathy, are forced to remain passive observers to imminent death. This split, which tends to be ontological in the sense that the audience is simultaneously on stage, via the interviewer, and off stage, via their role as spectators representing the country of the healthy, is a trenchant critique to the marginalization of cancer patients on “the dark-side” of life and medical care.
This difficulty in talking about a taboo, like death, is obvious in Joe’s discourse the moment he is asked by the interviewer to describe his feelings:
JOE. You get scared at first. Plenty. And then you get pissed off. Oh, is that all right
to say?
VOICE OF THE INTERVIEWER. Yes, Joe. That’s all right. It’s all right for you to
be angry or depressed or even happy... if that’s how you feel. We want to here as
much as you want to tell us. . . .
JOE. Yeah, ‘cause I was. Plenty pissed off. I don’t mind telling you that. . . . You get
tired of keeping it all inside. But it’s like, nobody wants to hear about it. Even the
doctors... they shove a thermometer in your mouth and a stethoscope in their ears...
Dakari 199
How the hell are you supposed to say anything? But then, like I said, you get used
to it . . .
JOE. I mean, it happens to everybody, right? I ain’t special. (Shadow Box 13-14)
In this context, “special” is negatively loaded, meaning “singular,” “different.” He thus tries to expel the fear of otherness inherent in a disease like cancer, an otherness that alludes to something other than life, health, normality. It seems that both Joe and the interviewer feel uncomfortable with this discussion, as it appears in the way they avoid direct references to
Joe’s disease. In this way, the interviewer’s reluctance to refer directly to cancer enhances
Joe’s anxiety about it.
Joe’s wife refuses to accept the truth; this is conveyed through her refusal to get into the cottage, which foregrounds her later denial of Joe’s death. She rages against Joe when he tries to persuade her not to clean the place: “You want to live in somebody else’s dirt?”
(Shadow Box 20). In this context, dirt metonymically stands for death, in the sense that, as
Mary Douglas points out, dirt, filth, and pollution stand as the image of “matter out of place,” the image of disorder, anomaly, ambiguity, and danger, threatening human survival. The danger lies less in the filth, as a material fact, than the disorder it represents (36). To impose cultural taboos on cancer, and by extension to death, then, is “to impose system on inherently untidy experience” (Douglas 4). Deviant, treacherous, and disorderly, therefore, cancer promises death by infecting life, which indeed is the ultimate abjection, according to Kristeva
(4).
Imminent death serves as an opportunity for Brian to also reflect upon. His elaborate and fully developed discourse, however, contrasts with Joe’s linguistic ineptitude. In fact, as a writer, he consciously uses language and experiments with its meaning-making capacity:
Dakari 200
BRIAN. [T]he trouble is that most of us spend our entire life trying to forget that
we’re going to die. And some of us even succeed. It’s like pulling the cart without
the horse. Or is that a poor analogy?” (Shadow Box 25)
It appears that Brian’s reflections, as revealed during the interview, carry a strong sense of linguistic self-reflexivity: “I’m afraid I’ve really lost my touch with words. They don’t seem to add up as neatly as they used to” (Shadow Box 25). When it comes to cancer, language stumbles, and in Brian’s discourse this is clearly detected. However, he overcomes this problematic by deliberately delving into it. In other words, language may be inadequate to contain pain and fear, to handle a taboo, but even so, it is here to make a point.
Talking about taboos, Brian has two of them to live with: having cancer and being homosexual. Even though he eagerly talks about both, hospital rules force him to conceal the latter: Mark, his partner, is either noted as friend, cousin, or butler. “It was the first time two gay characters were on stage and the issue being discussed wasn’t the fact that they were gay,” Cristofer recalls in an interview to Anita Gates. In this perspective, by playing the
“unnamed illness” card, Cristofer, himself openly gay, might be said to have pushed a specific gay agenda, another taboo of the time. Brian’s self-sarcasm, saying how he
“[enjoys] being a guinea pig” (Shadow Box 29), comes both as an antidote and a bitter commentary to his disenfranchisement as the victim of both illness and homosexuality.
Unlike Joe, Brian is fully aware of his being a piece of research. His only way of resistance is his eloquence, even when he tackles his own death: “[We’ll meet] tomorrow,” he says to the interviewer, “if I’m still breathing. Or even if I’m not, I don’t think it’ll stop me from talking” (Shadow Box 29). As a research, his body will be examined after he dies, and even if his flesh recedes, his inscribed body will outlive him. Mark’s use of language operates as a means of resistance. Brian anticipates his final intextuation, autopsy, as another chance for his body to speak.
Dakari 201
Sharply contrasted to Brian’s self-consciousness as a research specimen and his “faith in [words]” (Shadow Box 27), comes Mark’s view of Brian. The idea of the abject body, inherent in cancer and death, as opposed to the ideal body image as clean and sanitized, emerges in Mark’s outburst directed to Beverly:
MARK. It soaks into your hands when you touch him. It gets into your blood . . . You
try to vomit it out of you. But you can’t. It doesn’t go away. It stays inside you. . . .
It’s sick and putrid and soft and rotten and it’s killing me. (Shadow Box 100)
To Mark, Brian’s body is divested from its former intellectuality; it is instead an excessively leaky body, which threatens him with engulfment. Language, more than Brian’s bodily presence, becomes the site of the abject. Mark’s manifesto of abjection represents the suffering body “in the mode of language, deploying the phenomenality of words to evoke a purer, more concentrated experience of corporeal violation,” according to Garner; “the stage itself is [thus] suspended, taken over by the field of language with its representational and experiential capabilities” (141). Language then hurts the body the same as cancer does.
While Joe feels awkward in talking to the interviewer and Brian sees it as an opportunity to philosophize, Felicity is the most aggressive: “Your attitude. It’s a piss poor way to threat people” (Shadow Box 44). She totally undermines the interviewer’s role, disclosing his interest as pretentious:
FELICITY. Alright. Alright. You want to talk? Let’s talk. “I feel fine.” Is that what
you want to hear? Of course it is. I feel fine, there’s no pain, I’m as blind as I was
yesterday, my bowels are working—and that’s all I got to say about it. (Shadow
Box 45).
Felicity disregards the interviewer’s authority by resisting dialogue. What is more, she acknowledges her position as the object of gaze, available not as a medical specimen but as one of a circus-like attractions, when she says that “all come to look at the dead people”
Dakari 202
(Shadow Box 45). Referring to the interviewer in the third person—“he doesn’t like me to say things like that. He’s sensitive” (Shadow Box 46), not only does she undercut his linguistic authority, but she further makes fun of the hospital protocol of asking patients how they feel. This meta-commentary becomes stronger when, addressing the interviewer, she says: “Why don’t you go hide yourself out there with the rest of them?” (Shadow Box 45).
The deictic word “there” points directly to the audience; it is her against them, a society that hides away, in the darkness of the auditorium and behind cultural taboos which dictate that people dying of cancer “feel fine” in order not to disturb the hospital’s (and society’s) complacency.
The interviewer’s efforts to establish communication with Felicity are repeatedly unsuccessful. Felicity’s anger becomes even more conspicuous the moment the interviewer asks her to help them by talking:
FELICITY. Come on. Spit it out. Don’t be shy. You’re not stupid on top of
everything else, are you? One of us is dying and it isn’t you, is it? [,,,] I’m the
corpse. I have one lung, one plastic bag for a stomach, and two springs and a
battery where my heart used to be. You cut me and you took everything that wasn’t
nailed down. (Shadow Box 47)
The inevitability of death is indeed a heavy load. Either stumbling on words, testing their efficacy with the unpresentable, or turning them into wounding instruments, all three characters and their families go through several stages as a response to the fact of dying. With regard to patients’ emotional and psychological state before their death, there has been extensive research, which provides several theoretical frameworks on impending death. The prevailing theory in the 1970s was a five-stage model of dying, which psychiatrist Elizabeth
Kubler-Ross popularized with her influential book On Death and Dying (1969). In her book,
Kubler-Ross described the five stages in the process of psychological response to dying:
Dakari 203 denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. This theory was immediately accepted because, as Copp observes, “[it] reawakened and legitimized the topic of death which had previously been taboo for many people.” This theory was further said to
“[reduce] anxiety for professionals by providing a coherent, orderly structure to dying which previously had been perceived as a vague, terrifying and overpowering entity” (Copp 383).
Indeed, the experiment around which the plot develops could as well be referring to this research. There is a direct reference to this project in the discussion between Agnes and the interviewer on her mother’s refusal to die: “She’s waiting for Claire. . . . It’s what we call
‘making a bargain.’ She’s made up her mind that she’s not going to die until Claire arrives”
(Shadow Box 88).
The Shadow Box becomes the dramatization of Sontag’s metaphor of illness as
“kingdom of the sick.” In the dark side of life, each subject has to deal with their own
“transcendental homelessness,” in Lukács’s terms (61), where the characters’ efforts to maintain the pre-illness form of their existence fail; in this encased world of shadows and changed landscape, form fails to resolve the “fundamental dissonance of existence” (Lukács
62). And if form is the prerequisite for the absurd to be restored and the necessary condition of meaning, as Lukács says, the pregnant silences, the play’s direction towards ultimate nothingness, the dissolution of the borders of the self and those among various selves as the stage directions indicate, the repeated failure to capture and analyze the unspeakable, its painful recognition as “being-there” shatters every attempt to render suffering meaningful.
The silence of the invisible interviewer that has so far mediating between spectacle and spectators, suddenly brings spectators in front of a void; no solace, no coherent order, no justification of the absurd, only being there. The chorus of voices utter “this is the moment” in self-acknowledgement, never before being so close to the end.
Dakari 204
The only end that arrives, however, is that of the play. The ending brings together the end of performance and the implied death of the characters. With the actual event of death located beyond the curtain, however, the play, in all its difficult subject matter, does not transgress the conventions of form and economy of plot. The ending is preordained—the character are to die—but is postponed by the end of representation which comes first. The threat of privation occurs on a purely symbolic level, which in turn allows for a cathartic release, the gratification of the audience’s positioning safely outside the threatening territory.
The ontological and aesthetic boundaries that protect the audience’s sphere remain intact, while the unnamed illness is forever enveloped in silence.
Ironically, the “kingdom of the sick” The Shadow Box dramatizes is located somewhere in the American Promised Land, California, where the Disney and Hollywood cultures either exclude disease or turn it into a blockbuster. Unlike spectacular death, which is photogenic and uncanny, if well-crafted, “serious illness and dying represent a wasteland devoid of redeeming images and utterly without entertainment value (Morris, Illness and
Culture 221).24 It was therefore, on the grounds of modern medicine’s delusions and modern society’s quietism regarding cancer that The Shadow Box confronted the bleakness of dying.
As New York Times Clive Barnes wrote in his 1977 review of the Broadway production of
The Shadow Box: “There is enough of the palatable truth here to make an extraordinarily good Broadway play” (50).
Broadway revisited: Margaret Edson’s Wit (1995)
Despite the fact that Williams’s popularity had sanctioned the representation of such scandalous topics as homosexuality and/as illness, in the years to follow cancer would still
24 Paul Newman made a television adaptation of The Shadow Box in 1980. In the beginning, Newman was informed that no major company would sponsor the broadcast of the film, obviously because its subject matter could not fit “the mindless sitcom level of most of television’s offering, and especially because of the frank, sympathetic treatment accorded the gay lovers.” The movie eventually won a Golden Globe in 1980 and received decent, though lukewarm, ratings (Quirk 230).
Dakari 205 remain a hardly representable topic, enveloped in silence, as plays, like Cristofer’s The
Shadow Box—or the lack thereof—testified. It was the Women’s Health Movement of the
1970s and 1980s that sufficiently paved the way to a gradual disengagement of cancer from its taboo quality, as we shall see in more detail in the discussion of Susan Miller’s performance (Diedrich 37). That was a time when the political leaked into the personal and vice versa, foregrounding the presence of body, the female one in particular, as both material and discursive (DeShazer 56). As Judith Butler notes, “the body is a historical situation;” embodiment, thus, cannot be conditioned by immanent values, but is “a manner of doing, dramatizing, and reproducing a historical situation” (“Performance and Gender Constitution”
521). This idea, which encapsulates Butler’s position on gender performativity, calls attention to the body’s theatricality in the way it affects and is affected by the world it inhabits, also pointing to Wittgenstein’s position on taught behavior in the expression of pain.
Although Wit was conceived within this socio-historical context, its universe seems to be a flip side version of nineteenth-century domestic novels that idolized the “cult of true womanhood” and emphasized separate spheres for men and women (Welter 151-74). Wit appears to ask: what would happen if a woman rejected motherhood, domesticity and female bonding, and instead pursued a childless, lonely way to academic accomplishment, like
Vivian Bearing, professor of seventeenth-century literature does? By analogy, such an assumption would lead us to trust Vivian’s concession at the beginning of the play that what we are going to witness is nothing close to a romantic story, “cast in the mythic-heroic- pastoral mode; . . . the facts, most notably stage-four ovarian cancer, conspire against that”
(Wit 2). However, even as posing such a dilemma, Edson points a finger to all these
“madwomen” like Vivian who committed the tragic flaw of living like men. Even as this genre represents a monumental effort to reorganize culture from the woman’s point of view in
Dakari 206 the nineteenth century,” as Jane Tompkins sustains (503). In Edson’s time, this model of
“proper” womanhood, as we shall see, sounds at least retrogressive and dangerous.
Margaret Edson’s Wit first opened in an Off-Broadway theater in New York in 1998, won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1999, and was made into an HBO film in 2001. It is about
Vivian Bearing, a noted scholar of seventeenth-century metaphysical poetry with specialization on John Donne’s Holy Sonnets, who is diagnosed with stage IV ovarian cancer.
Wit chronicles the struggle of a woman’s intellect to rationalize and discipline the grotesqueness of illness and the deconstructing pain that issues from it. Self-exiled within the walls of academia, she only finds pleasure in Donne’s perplexing ruminations, as well as in a self-satisfactory display of her wit. The announcement of her cancer diagnosis is strikingly performative: it has instantly forced her into a dystopic, irrational biomedical domain with its inhumane principles of healing, which brings to mind Sontag’s discussion on the spell of cancer and the way it dramatically alters the subject’s state of life.
The play opens with Vivian in a hospital gown fully conscious of her playing a role in front of an audience. Her direct address to the audience, in fact, constructs a sharp critique to the pseudofamiliar addresses of the medical staff to the patients:
VIVIAN. Hi. How are you feeling today? Great. . . . This is not my standard greeting
I assure you. . . . But it is the standard greeting here [in the hospital].
. . . I have been asked “How are you feeling today?” while I was throwing up into
a plastic washbasin. I have been asked as I was emerging from a four-hour
operation with a tube in every orifice. . . . I am waiting for the moment when
someone asks me this question and I am dead. I’m a little sorry I’ll miss that. (Wit
5)
In the same self-reflexive manner, Vivian rushes into giving away the plot: “I think I die in the end. They’ve given me less that two hours” (Wit 2), taunting spectators’ usual
Dakari 207 expectations of a happy ending; “The Faerie Queene this is not,” Vivian self-mockingly confesses (2). Several flashbacks in the past present her pre-cancer glory as a precocious toddler, an enthused graduate student, and a formidable professor in class who delights in degrading her students. The play suggests that she has placed so much emphasis on her intellect that her neglected female body is now avenging her. What can be inferred early on, therefore, is that Wit extensively draws on alienating meta-theatrical devices, in order to squarely state its departure from any kind of pure appeal to emotions and identification. It taps on the spectator’s wit, so to speak, to bring up issues such as the stereotyped commodification of the female patient by biomedicine, issues of subjectivity and agency, mind-body dualism, and the importance of simple human kindness over perplexing intellectual rigor.
Vivian holds to her claim against sentimentality in the first half of the play, were she displays her intellectual superiority, her wry humor and wit to fight her own afflicted flesh, and the dehumanizing medical authority. But as the plot evolves and cancer progressively takes hold of her, Vivian seems to become embodied to her suffering, thus downplaying both her character’s emotional detachment and the play’s tactics of postmodern alienation.
Attesting to this shift, DeShazer draws the parallels between typical romance fiction of the eighties – descending from nineteenth-century domestic novels – and what she labels as cancer romance (138). This genre bears certain characteristics that differentiate it from what is widely identified as popular romance but in essence pertains to the same goals and target groups. Also being a descendant of nineteenth-century romance fiction, it maintains several features of the old genre. Gender roles and the separate spheres women and men occupy are clearly promoted here as well. But instead of a conventional love story that develops between a woman and a man, popular cancer fiction privileges idealized love between a dying woman and the female supporters who surround her bedside. Rarely do husbands, fathers, brothers, sons, or male friends provide primary care to women dying of cancer. The thematic and
Dakari 208 structural economies of the play invest on character clichés, such as the repressed female academic, the cold doctor, the caring nurse, and the old and wise woman mentor (Vanhoutte
393), as well as the traditional rising action (discovery-denial) and denouement (acceptance- redemption) of melodrama. Romance precisely springs from the use of pathos and tragicality to “evoke an emotional catharsis that emerges from the perspective that love conquers all, outliving even death” (DeShazer 170).
The sentimentalization of plot and disclosure of the play’s romantic trajectories becomes evident in the scene wherein Vivian undergoes a pelvic exam conducted by Jason, a young oncology fellow and former undergraduate student of hers. Passionately dedicated to research, erudition and knowledge, Jason reminds her of her younger self at the beginning of her academic career. Only that now her body is the text under examination. Jason treats her the way she treated Donne’s lines, and her students, forcing both of them into submission to her mastery. The spectacle of a powerful woman exposed, her legs in stirrups, humiliated by a once vulnerable young man that is now eagerly feeling the tumor inside her to assuage his thirst for knowledge while recalling the way she used to treat him in class has faintly pornographic overtones, Vanhoutte observes (401). Yet again, she seems to be punished for living like a man: cynicism, erudition, career, and intellect, instead of compassion, motherhood, and emotion. Although pornography is probably not Edson’s intention,
Vanhoutte explains, it nevertheless reveals how deeply influenced she is by the prevailing blame-the-victim stereotypes about cancer as a disease/punishment of the self (Sontag, Illness
40, 44). Vivian, who is obliquely accused of neglecting her emotional intelligence and suppressing her sexuality, is now being punished with a grotesque pregnancy, and a humiliating penetration; she, who used to intellectually humiliate her students, is now being physically degraded by one of them. The impression that cancer strikes as a just retribution
Dakari 209 pertains not only to the economy of tragedy but also to the typical chastising of the hysteric woman of nineteenth-century literature.
Further probing into this scene as pornographic spectacle, it becomes clear that affinities are indeed striking. Linking Vivian’s suffering to “a kind of medicalized and gynecological pornography,” Pamela Cooper draws parallels between Edson’s fascination with pain and British painter Francis Bacon’s aesthetics of extremity, “exploring suffering as another modality of the beautiful” (26, 31). She argues that in both Bacon and Edson, the violent spectacle brings, along with abjection and horror, “a voyeuristic excitement and a strong shiver of arousal” (25). This interpretation does not contradict Sontag’s view of cancer as de-sexualizing. In fact, it calls attention to a perverse sensuality of the abject body as a staple of all horror literature, art, and cinema, that has always made spectators shut their eyes and still peek through slightly parted fingers.
Unlike the insensitive male doctors who have turned Vivian’s body into the object of their scrutiny, Susie, the nurse, counteracts this sterilized, medical sadism of theirs with compassion. Despite her carefree manners and casual addresses being frowned upon by the stern professor, Susie supports Vivian through moments of excruciating pain. Not only does she share popsicles with her patient, but also she is the only person who frankly discusses with Vivian the option not to be medically resuscitated in case her heart stops. She warns her that this would put an end not only to her life but to doctors’ research as well. Doctors were likely to withhold this rightful option from Vivian, because “they always… want to know more things,” Susie plainly explains (Wit 44). For the first time in the play, Vivian favors simplicity over erudition and knowledge and chooses not to be resuscitated. The following soliloquy of hers comes as a powerful moment of transformation:
VIVIAN. That was certainly a maudlin display. Popsicles? “Sweetheart”? I can’t
believe my life has become so… corny. But it can’t be helped. . . .
Dakari 210
(Quickly.) Now is not the time for verbal swordplay, for unlikely flights of
imagination and wildly shifting perspectives, for metaphysical conceit, for wit.
And nothing would be worse than a detailed scholarly analysis. Erudition.
Interpretation. Complication.
(Slowly.) Now is the time for simplicity. Now is a time for, dare I say it, kindness.
(Searchingly.) I thought being extremely smart would take care of it. But I see that
I have been found out. . . .
I’m scared. Oh, God. I want... I want... No. I want to hide. I just want to curl up in
a little ball. (She dives under the covers.) . . .
VIVIAN (trying extremely hard.) I want to tell you how it feels, to use my words. It’s
as if… I can’t… There aren’t… I’m like a student and this is the final exam and I
don’t know what to put down because I don’t understand the question and I’m
running out of time. . . .
I apologize in advance for what this palliative treatment modality does to the
dramatic coherence of my play’s last scene. . . .
Say it Vivian. It hurts like hell. It really does.
SUSIE enters. VIVIAN writhing in pain.
Oh, God. Oh, God. (Wit 45-46; emphasis in original)
As cancer is increasingly robbing Vivian of her verbal dexterity, she completely relinquishes control to Susie’s unpretentious kindness. Not only does this transformation signal the proximity of death, but it also foregrounds a strong potential for redemption, as the ending is to reveal.
During Vivian’s final hours, another woman appears to show her affection. It is
Professor Evelyn Ashford, Vivian’s former dissertation advisor and later colleague, herself a renowned scholar and great-grandmother of a five-year-old boy. Next to this woman, who
Dakari 211 seems to balance both intellectual and emotional growth, Vivian’s obsessive one-sidedness strikes as even more disproportionate and wrong. It is then that Vivian curls like a child into her arms and denounces Donne while Ashford is reading The Runaway Bunny, a child’s story, to her, which nevertheless carries a powerful allegory of God and the salvation of the soul: “No matter where the soul hides,” Ashford says, “God will find it.” She then kisses her goodbye reciting a line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “It’s time to go. And flights of angels sing thee to thy nest” (Wit 53). Even though both scholars have dedicated their lives to studying the complexity of Donne’s metaphysical queries, in the end they seem to value
Shakespeare’s sentimentality more than intellectualism, according to Vanhoutte: “[B]y engaging emotions instead, Shakespeare shows the way to a more spiritual illumination”
(404). Vivian thus distrusts her cynicism and witty discourse as a resistance to the sweeping force of cancer, and lets herself become infantilized, instead. Though a little too late, a circle of female supporters, the nurse and the scholar, envelops the woman/infant, and though they cannot heal her physical ailments, they do heal her emotional numbness by means of their love and compassion. Following a clearly romantic trajectory, the world order is about to be restored. In the economy of Aristotelian tragedy, the flaw is acknowledged and transformation is completed.
Wit’s solid surface of suffering, weakened by repeated blows of sentiment, is now falling apart, exposing the play’s emotional essence, in the final scene: Vivian eventually dies despite Jason’s unprofessional efforts to save his piece of “research.” She, then, gets out of bed, sheds her hospital gown, and appears “naked and beautiful, reaching for the light” as stage directions indicate (Wit 56). One cannot help being struck by the moralizing image of
Little Eva, the child/cherub, finding her proper place in heaven after her death. To seal this awakening into grace, Vivian’s inner beauty is likewise restored and visually glorified.
Suffering and death are therefore sublimated into spiritual illumination, while Edson’s
Dakari 212 preoccupation with oversimplified binaries burdens the play with a didacticism that almost becomes clichéd and neatly rules out any attempt for deeper probing into its conceptual ingredients, be they pragmatic, metaphysical, or political.
For all its facile sentimentality and religiosity, the ending seems to make the play’s inner darkness more palatable for the audience. As Cooper argues, “favoring glamour, and obliquely converting the difficulties of connection into an image of accessible beauty, Wit blots out suffering with sentiment” (32). The recovery of an idealized, pure, feminine beauty, which in essence is a romantic trope, “returns the audience to a representational comfort zone,” Cooper concludes (32).
Examining Wit’s epistemological background, Elizabeth Klaver turns to dualist and materialist taxonomies and construes the play’s ending as the problematic coexistence of the two. The mind versus body dilemma argues for the materiality of the body versus the immateriality of the mind/soul. In light of this interpretation, Wit’s final scene of spiritual transcendence celebrates the superiority of the intellect, as opposed to the expendable body that is left behind. This reading points toward the immortality of the soul and its transference to an elevated state of existence after it is disengaged from the flesh, as sustained by religious philosophy. The materialist interpretation, on the other hand, crystallized in Western medicine tenets, posits mind as nothing but the activity of the brain’s neurons, which gives us only “the impression of a mind-body split” (Klaver 663). If there really is no split, then what we are left with is pure matter, which essentially is a postmodern principle—the cancellation of spirituality, or, the death of God. The two alternatives the audience is faced with in the end, therefore, could be summed up in this way: either the mind outlives the body and heads for the light, or the brain’s chemical reactions lead the mind to hallucinate before it dies away with the rest of the body. Indeed, the play has, essentially, provided two conclusions: “one for the dualist and one for the materialist” (Klaver 678, 675). Whatever one chooses is consistent
Dakari 213 with the play’s economy of plot and theme – the ethical questions raised, though, are still looming unresolved. Having every confidence in our being culturally predisposed to embrace the dualist interpretation, the play does provide some comfort in the end. Klaver states in agreement that “it would be terribly depressing if it did not offer some shred of hope,” which
“postpones catastrophe” and helps spectators avoid direct confrontation with death (679).
Wit emphatically takes a rather simplistic, unscientific turn. It shifts from the mid-plot susceptibility to the terror of uncontrollable biology, as a sign of stern disbelief in the metaphysical, to divine sublimity, where the invasion of the supernatural reinstates awe in celestial greatness. This turn, which is intensely conveyed through stage directions, takes us back to Burke’s eighteenth-century philosophical contemplations: “wherever God is represented as appearing or speaking, every thing terrible in nature is called up to heighten the awe and solemnity of the divine presence” (69). Any attempt to understand nature, part of which is inevitably suffering, illness and death, outside a theological basis, leads to a contemplation of the cruel and ghastly human condition, hence Sontag’s disputing the aesthetics of cancer. Instead of going along the line of the grotesque, Edson regresses to purely holy beauty.
Philosophical backsliding in Wit’s ending also interferes with its structural and stylistic consistency. What would happen if Vivian’s postmodern meta-narrative, which has admittedly lured the audience into a liminal threshold between fiction and reality, was preserved intact all the way to the end of her performance? Let us for a minute assume that
Vivian did not reveal her restored beautiful body on its way to another ethereal state of existence, but stood up, still wearing her hospital gown and pushing her IV pole, and asked the audience all over again: “Hi. How are you feeling today? Great. Just great” and so on.
What if an exhausted Vivian/performer repeated her part, as if eternally trapped in an ontological/representational impasse, paralleled to a Dantean hell, a Sisyphean predicament,
Dakari 214 or a purgatorial anguish? If that were the case, the play would then expose its essentially claustrophobic, circular structure; it would convey an alarming sense of the deconstruction of the subject and reckon with an unfathomable loss. Her witty mind then would be engulfed by the body, “all too woefully” so (Sontag 19), in a Baconian mise-en-abyme—to borrow
Cooper’s parallelism: the glorification of aesthetically, ontologically, and symbolically expendable flesh.
Most probably, though, this version of the play would have never made it to
Broadway, as it did in January 2012. Cynthia Nixon, former Sex and the City star, lesbian mom, and cancer survivor, would play Vivian, as it had been widely publicized; Lynne
Meadow, who directed the play, has also had a bout with cancer herself. The audience, as expected, applauded this well-timed affinity among character, actor, and director; to their satisfaction, not only did Nixon shave her head to be more convincing as terminally ill, but smoothed the hard edges of both Vivian’s intellectual sternness and cancer’s truly ugly side, a number of critics noted (Haun; Farmer; Brantley). Despite the rave reviews this production garnered, there are other more skeptical ones that peered through the “sentimental haze” of the cathartic release: “The only way to get so dark a play to Broadway nowadays is to hire a big name,” Terry Teachout remarked, “and it seems more than likely that this revival . . . would never have opened there, had Cynthia Nixon not agreed to be the star.” It seems, therefore, that what this production sold was not the story of a woman painfully dying of cancer and emotional isolation, but Nixon’s. In the bottom line, Vivian, and the average spectator, were taught a lesson on how to be a better person, for, “no one ever dies meaninglessly on the popular American stage,” Lloyd Rose concluded in his review.
Attempting an evaluation of the play’s reception—especially of the latest Broadway revival—despite its dark subject, the ingredients of the success it met with boil down to the following: its reliance on traditional narrative forms ranging from Aristotelian tragedy and
Dakari 215 medieval morality plays to Shakespearean romance and Victorian melodrama, its manipulation of the politics of spectatorship through fascination with the grotesque, as well as its ambivalent critique of America’s most mistrusted institutions, the medical establishment and the academy, simultaneously rejecting and asserting their authority (Cooper 27; Klaver;
Vanhoutte). These aspects of its success, however, only succeed in calling attention to its drawbacks: The victim is blamed for her illness, reverberating Sontag’s critique against casting cancer as a disease of the self; modern medical practices are attacked as even more destructive than the disease alone; intelligence and kindness are regarded as mutually exclusive (Vanhoutte 406); and rigid gender pigeonholing is once more perpetuated, declaring any transgression as contemptible, punitive, and potentially hazardous to one’s health. The play, then, sends spectators home with a comforting prayer and a last peek at a beautiful, sufficiently famous, naked woman, in all its tabloid titillation.
Cancer at “a theatre near you:” Susan Miller’s My Left Breast (1994)
Wit’s admittedly overt sentimentality as the chief factor of its positive reception from critics and audiences is only partly true. Its Broadway revival came at a moment in history when cancer had long been established as the “topic of our times” (Miller, “My Left Breast”
319). The emergence of the Women’s Health Movement in the 1970s led to the founding of the National Breast Cancer Coalition in the early 1990s, which succeeded in drawing media attention to cancer and sought to help women be informed and involved in decision making about their treatment. As a result, an increased corporate interest in sponsoring cancer research emerged. The founding of breast cancer coalitions dedicated to the memories of women who lost the battle with the disease (i.e. the prestigious Susan G. Komen Foundation) brought breast cancer under the spotlight. The cultural appeal of this increased corporate interest can be gauged in the emergence of countless popular autobiographical narratives, TV
Dakari 216 series, hospital dramas, websites, chat rooms, magazines, as well as pink-ribbon-themed products in the service of fund raising initiatives—it comes as no surprise that cosmetics and jewelry are the industries most involved in cancer awareness and support campaigns.
Barbara Ehrenreich provides an illuminating account of what it means to be a breast cancer patient in the United States. Vexed with the “pink sticky sentiment” oozing from the pink-ribbon marketplace and its infantilizing trope of teddy bears and “ultrafeminine” paraphernalia, she states that “[p]ossibly the idea is that regression to a state of childlike dependency puts one in the best frame of mind” in order to endure long, toxic treatments. But what she believes to be the greatest danger behind this attitude that “in some versions of the prevailing gender ideology, femininity is by its nature incompatible with full adulthood . . . — certainly men diagnosed with prostate cancer do not receive gifts of Matchbox cars”
(“Welcome to Cancerland”). This immense publicity and marketability, epitomized by the thriving “pink-ribbon” industry, has taken on to educate audiences about the “dread disease” or “c word” of earlier times; it did so rather sloppily, Ehrenreich thinks.
This out-of-the-closet boom of the nineties was not only related to cancer and AIDS, as it were, but spelled out another set of taboo words, “gay” and “lesbian.” Holly Hughes and
David Román reflect on the emergence of queer solo autobiographical performance as an explosion orchestrated within the communities of queer artists and writers and with clearly set goals: to sustain the formation of a distinctly queer identity; to stand for the rights of diversified groups within the larger mainstream culture; and to assist the dissemination of their work (1-16). Susan Miller has claimed her space within this community with her autobiographical solo performance My Left Breast, which first premiered at the Actors’
Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival in 1994 with Miller playing herself. A series of successful productions with Miller as well as other actresses performing the role of Susan
Dakari 217 followed across the United States but also Canada, France, and the United Kingdom until recently.
Susan has gone through mastectomy and is now a breast cancer survivor. From the outset, she takes on to subvert the play’s dark topic employing humor and surprise. She thus comes out dancing, asks the audience to guess which of her breasts is fake, shows them her prosthesis, and talks about the most important moments in her life: a miscarriage and the ensuing frustration; a new child, her son, and his coming of age; being in love with and abandoned by a woman; and cancer of course. This is how she introduces herself to the audience:
I’m a one-breasted, menopausal, bisexual, lesbian Mom and I am the topic of our
times. I am the hot issue. I am the cover of Newsweek, the editorial in the
paper. I am a best seller. And I am coming soon to a theatre near you. (“Left Breast”
319)
In the above display of a most effective dramatic economy, Susan puts on show her twofold agenda: spelling out the “C word” and the “L word,” and subverting the cultural disavowal of
“deviant cells and deviant desires” (Stacey 78). On the one hand, she consciously establishes herself as a multifarious, transgressive spectacle of a woman that clearly departs from mainstream principles of femininity, celebrating the deviance Vivian was punished for in Wit.
On the other hand, she contextualizes her performance within the breast-cancer obsession of the nineties, preceded by the AIDS horror of the eighties, “when we all lost our innocence”
(“Left Breast” 318), and concomitant with the queer boom that was bound to revolutionize not merely a private sense of lesbian and gay identity but essentially its cultural manifestation and representation through the media and popular culture (Hughes and Román).
Susan goes on to reveal how cancer and the ensuing mastectomy have changed her life as a lesbian woman and her ability to love and be loved by other women. To this end, she
Dakari 218 attempts to remap her scar into her bodily geography, relocate her sexuality around and within it, and embody it into her post-operative self: “I miss it but it’s not a hand,” she says.
“I miss it but it’s not my mind. I miss it but it’s not the roof over my head. . . . I miss it but it’s not a conversation with my son. . . . I miss it but it’s not HER (“Left Breast” 314). “HER” apparently refers to Susan’s ex-lover Franny, whom she intensely recalls “with [her] mouth sucking a phantom flutter from my viny scar” (314). In this renewed map of her body, the scar is the ground zero where her gender identity, her body consciousness and her sexuality converge. By acknowledging the expendable nature of a missing breast, therefore, not only does she deal with its loss more effectively (DeShazer 64), but she also seizes the opportunity to explore the erotic potential of this territory.
Susan once more turns from the personal to the political implications of her scar, as she attacks long-held taboos relating cancer with sexual deviance. First, she seeks to subvert vilifying stereotypes regarding the “cancer-prone personality.” Miller obviously echoes
Sontag’s critique when she says that
There are those who insist that certain types of people get cancer. So I wonder, are
there certain types of people who get raped and tortured? Are there certain types who
die young? Are there certain types of Bosnians, Somalians, Jews? Are there certain
types of gay men? (“Left Breast” 319)
Declaring her opposition to the common belief of the time that demonized homosexuality by relating it to horrific diseases like AIDS and breast or ovarian cancer, she reminds society of the fact that “lesbians are women, women get AIDS” along with cancer, thus disturbing the illusion of “healthy” and “diseased” sexual practices. For this reason, Susan redirects spectators’ attention from such misleading stereotypes to a profoundly lacking medical and social establishment: “I miss [my breast],” says she, “but maybe I wouldn’t have to if anyone paid attention to women’s health care” (“Left Breast” 317).
Dakari 219
Taking her argument on subversion of stereotypes a notch up, Susan scandalously blends lesbian lovemaking and the aphrodisiac effect of the prospect of death in her explicit account of intimate moments with her lover:
The day after I came home from the hospital, still bandaged . . . Jane and I made love. I
didn’t care if my stitches came free. Let them rip. . . . The possibility of death nearly
broke our bed. In a few days I would start chemo, but that night I was not in possession
of the facts. I was a body in disrepair and someone was healing me. (“Left Breast” 336)
Although sexualizing a post-mastectomy body might initially give the promise of a strong statement against the traditional male-centered appropriation of the female body, it still conveys an almost pornographic sensualization of the spectacle, also seen earlier in Wit’s pelvic exam scene. Within the framework of Oprah’s Show popular media culture, Mary
DeShazer observes, such explicitness excites rather than calms voyeurism and, therefore,
“walks on a tightrope between subversion and reappropriation” (Aston 9), making Susan hoisted in her own petard.
Another point that might strike back as a little too awkward in Miller’s pornographic talk is that sexual craving obscures the severity of a post-operative condition. Is such a representation raising any awareness and inciting any action or projecting a self-indulgent fascination with sex—be it hetero- or homosexual? The implications behind this scene would be better construed if seen under the light of the queer aesthetic, “as this was formed in the context not only of the gay and lesbian movement, but in the subcultural world of queer bars, cabarets, and drag revues and in the public context of lesbian and gay people negotiating personal safety with outright defiance” (Hughes and Román 6). This is also the idea behind the park scene in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, where Louis, guilt-ridden for having abandoned his weakened by AIDS boyfriend Prior, is cruising for sex in New York’s Central
Park. In a masochistic, self-punishing burst, he invites the stranger man with whom he has
Dakari 220
agreed into a practically unprotected sexual encounter to “keep going/infect me/I don’t care”
(Angels in America 60). Although Miller’s intentions are certainly informed by her hope to
subvert the stereotype of a desexualized female cancer patient, she ends up perpetuating
another misleading stereotype, that of the oversexualized queer.
The fact that her sexuality appears at times to weigh more than cancer in her performance could be better illuminated, were we to place My Left Breast in the larger context of the queer solo performance boom of the nineties. Departing from mainstream theatre in many ways, being multiracial, congendered, multisexual, democratic, and intent on
“articulat[ing] some of the most pressing issues” of the time, queer solo performance has also been an easy target to attack on both artistic and ethical terms (Hughes and Román 1). As
Hughes and Roman observe, queer solo performance boom was almost immediately followed by a bust “caused by lessened arts funding and the encroachments of corporate entertainment on the cultural margins” (2). In 1990, as they report, the religious Right disseminated through the media the view that “the NEA was bleeding the American people so that artists could show off their privates, smear themselves with chocolate, cross-dress, and splatter the audience with
HIV-positive blood,” which inevitably led NEA to end all funding for individual artists
(Hughes and Roman 8). This is probably what Miller herself had in mind when she said that
“censorship is a complex phenomenon here in the US,” further explaining that “it is never official, but, of course, we know that sponsorship is often dictated by what is perceived as
‘mainstream and marketable’” (Miller qtd. in Jackson). Miller thus employs breast cancer,
“America’s darling,” in Ehrenreich’s words, in order to keep the funds flooding while she is making her (queer) point.
Miller wrote the play 15 years after her been diagnosed with breast cancer. As she admits, in order for her to be able to play Susan, she had to distance herself from the dense emotions that overwhelmed her when she went through these moments in her life and later
Dakari 221 when she put them into a play: “See,” Miller tells us, “that Susan—she isn’t me. She’s a character, which by this time many other actors have played, and although open to interpretation and modern contextual theoretical exegesis, she’s written to be who she is where she is what she is for all time” (Miller, “Casting Myself”). This urgency to disengage herself from the character is very similar to Sontag’s desire to disengage herself as a patient when she wrote Illness as Metaphor. Although Miller strives to prove that she has moved forward, that cancer cannot be more significant than other life experiences, she only manages to convey the opposite: that is, a strong sense of disorientation and a considerable amount of difficulty in handling the aesthetic imprint her polymorphous identity as a lesbian, bisexual, Jewish single parent has on her art.
Further fueling this sense of her dis-identification with her character, Miller rejects the autobiographical dimension of the play, admitting that “Susan” is “someone who exists somewhere in time, who is real but also a fiction.” Irrespectively of whether “the character has life beyond its creator” or not (Miller “Casting Myself”), which, after all, is endemic to all dramatic and performance art, the case of someone who survived to tell the story is a distinct feature of autobiographical theatre. In that sense, Miller does not seem to do justice to the autobiographical claims of her play, therefore falling short of fully embracing it as “the most immediately understood form of queer self-representation” and “part of a larger collective and ongoing process of revisionist history” (Hughes and Román 4).
Miller’s is a happy-ending story. She ends her performance with the same upbeat tone
of her opening lines:
I miss it but I want to tell all the women . . . that we are still beautiful, we are still
powerful, we are still sexy, we are still here (I unbutton my shirt to reveal my scar as
the LIGHTS FADE). (“Left Breast” 339)
Dakari 222
Despite Susan’s cheerful attitude, these final lines seem to be robbed of the spunk that ran throughout her piece. By choosing to reveal her “mark of experience” under dim lighting,
Miller eventually downgrades the scar scene, which is aesthetically and thematically the most pivotal one in her performance. As she claims in support of that decision, “the play is as powerful without that moment . . . so there is an alternative to that, in which the lights go dim as someone starts to unbutton their blouse, or they don’t even, and you can omit the line, ‘I’m going to show you my scar,’” thus allowing for the play to be performed by other women actors that do not have any such scar (qtd. in Wieder). The play has been successfully staged, we are informed, in the service of breast cancer fundraising plans not only across the United States but also in France and the UK, with audiences embracing it everywhere. In fact, post-performance discussions with spectators who wished to share their own experiences and thoughts have been reported as profoundly engaging by the critics as well as Miller herself. These discussions seem to have been made part of the performance and performers other than Miller have adopted it
(Miller, “Playing Susan” 73-75; Kerr). However, as critic Curt Holman wrote in response,
“there is a world of difference between being a cancer survivor and playing one.”
Paradoxically, as Miller has repeatedly stated in interviews, she never wanted to write
about cancer: “It wasn’t until I found a metaphor to encompass the other things I did want to
write about that I was able to attempt a play incorporating my experience of having breast
cancer at 36” (“Playing Susan” 74). Her purpose was to write about all kinds of loss both
straight and gay people face and the chance to mine the potential for transformation out of
them, which posits breast cancer not as a dreadful disease that necessitates prevention, but as
a makeover opportunity—echoing the “relentless brightsiding” of breast cancer marketplace
Ehrenreich cautioned against.
Departing from the shock tactics employed earlier in the play, Susan’s reassuring
confirmations of beauty and sexuality in spite of the scar, perhaps even because of it, add a
Dakari 223 sentimental tinkle to suffering as if to “keep chaos at bay” before the curtain (“Left Breast”
336). What happens if someone dies before being transformed or if someone fails to see the bright side of her chance with cancer? This very popular play does away with such queries and stays focused on soothing rather than provoking spectators’ anxieties, lest “the breast- cancer cult’s obsession with survivorhood” be not sustained (Diedrich 52).
Offending or entertaining the audience? Marketplace aporias
It seems appropriate to end this chapter by acknowledging that the aporetic representability of cancer raises more questions than those it answers: “How is it that a subject so utterly taboo, for so long, has become so commonplace so quickly, taking up residence in every cultural medium, from soap operas to sculpture?”(Leopold 2) Do such performances essentially alter our perception of disease? Is overexposure the solution to previous silence and demonization? Does speaking it out erase the stigma? Where are “the limits of representability” drawn, “so that our national melancholia becomes tightly fitted into the frame for what can be said, what can be shown,” as Butler would ask? (Precarious Life 148).
What can be articulated in response, however, is one’s skepticism “toward the simplistic belief that joy and happiness can come through personal transformation without a concomitant social and political transformation” (Diedrich 43). This is a most poignant inconsistency in the plays discussed here, which reminds us of the post-capitalist ideology of
“compulsive happiness” of American society (Sakellaridou 357) and the predominantly escapist principles of commercial theatre that substantiate it. One cannot but admit that popular plays, as those discussed, do bring under the spotlight a persistently “closeted” issue like cancer. However, trying to present it as “commonplace” entails the risk of “sanction[ing] overexposure to pain as yet another marketing strategy” (Leopold 215), and, therefore, inevitably leading us back to the trappings of metaphor Sontag sought to denounce.
Dakari 224
Chapter 8
Cancer and its performative aporias:
When the representational collapses into the real
As it was shown earlier, the negotiation of cancer through popular forms of theatre has yielded questionable results regarding its presentability, since it generally has to follow specific rules of the market and respect the public’s tolerance. As such, popular cancer plays may have schooled a more mature attitude with subsequent abating of cultural biases, but have not succeeded in adequately answering the question of its aestheticity, its potential to be considered an art form.
This chapter tackles the idea of performance as research and as a public debate. By means of their corporeal presence in front of an audience, performers under discussion experiment with the aesthetic possibilities of existing illness in presentation. The attempt to trace the aesthetic principles within the performative potential of cancer—that is,
(re)presenting the non-(re)presentable—constitutes the primary focus of this section.
Additionally, the stakes of the collapse of the safety provided by the wall of illusion are examined.
The act of witnessing a performance substantiates its aestheticity, since the conditions for a performance event to occur is the co-presence of actors and spectators framed by a pre- arranged space, as Lichte has theorized. The most challenging and transgressive quality of performance is when the performer standing in front of us is (re)presenting her disease; when we have to confront the self-referentiality of a diseased body in all its material density and intensity; when we bear witness to this phenomenal moment of our encounter with the obscene, the abject, the excessive materiality of existence itself; and most dangerously, when
Dakari 225 we acknowledge our being part of it. Without precluding the hermeneutic contextualization of the spectacle ordered by our cognitive system, this moment is primarily an experiential one, when the performer’s physicality expands to embrace ours in a shared moment of embodied existence.
The performances I use as cases in point are grouped into three sections: the first section discusses Marianne Paget’s “The Work of Talk” (1989), the experimental dramatization of a social science article; the second section is a comparative analysis of
Angela Ellsworth’s Hemaderby (Icehouse, Phoenix, Arizona, 1998) and Pam Patterson’s
Bodysight: A Reclamation Project (Goddard College, Vermont, 2004); and the final section examines alternative performances in three TED talks: Eve Ensler’s “Suddenly My Body”
(TEDWomen 2010), Tania Katan’s “The Power of Voice: Survivability, Sustainability, and
Nudity” (TEDx Scottsdale 2011), and Ananda Shankar Jayant’s “Fighting Cancer with
Dance” (TEDIndia 2009). The performances under discussion were conceived and realized by the authors/performers in an attempt to come to terms with their cancer. Examining both their own and the spectators’ experience, my intention is to capture these performances’ articulation of a new aesthetic idiom as well as their potential for transformation, encompassing performers and spectators as co-participants in a ritual of healing.
I. The “c” word as differend: Marianne Paget’s “The Work of Talk” (1989)
In 1988, phenomenological sociologist Marianne Paget published The Unity of
Mistakes: A phenomenological Interpretation of Medical Work, in which she argued that error is intrinsic to medicine—in essence, an experimental and uncertain activity (3). In her research, she focused on medical negligence as well as on miscommunication and silence as equally the cause and product of error in medicine. In the meantime, she discovered that she was a living example of such erroneous medical practices. Her chronic back pain, which was
Dakari 226 initially diagnosed as muscle spasms, turned out to be a symptom of a rare form of cancer that went undetected for too long; she died of the complications of cancer in 1989.
The year before she died and immediately after the dire diagnosis she received, she worked on putting together various aspects of her experience with cancer both on professional and personal levels. Published posthumously in 1993, A Complex Sorrow:
Reflections on Cancer and an Abbreviated Life is a multi-layered account of the irony of her life’s mirroring her work. In this difficult and insightful work, she writes as a scholar who dissects and analyses stretches of dialogue, as an experimenter with various genres of representation, bringing science on stage, and as a chronicler of her own experience with illness and dying, enmeshing scientific writing, personal musing, a playscript, as well as diary entries and letters to friends.
Well before discovering her illness, Paget had come up with the idea of presenting the findings of her research not in the usual manner of obscurely scientific journal articles but in the form of a play. To gain first-hand insight to the discourse of negligence, Paget attended court trials where she could investigate how lawyers talk about medical mistakes in the courtroom; “the trials were troubling and compelling dramas of mistakes” where,
“paradoxically, the term mistake was rarely used” (5). Her objective was to prove that
“negligence is widespread, not because incompetent physicians practice, though they do, but because error is endemic to the practice of medicine” (4). Observing the way the meaning of words were distorted and spurred a completely different chain of reactions in clinical, legal, and political settings, she aspired to address these distortions as unfortunate yet pervasive as forms of discourse about personal misfortune (4).
“The Work of Talk,” which is presented and discussed in detail in Complex Sorrow, is the performance of Paget’s work on the construction of an erroneous diagnosis of depression on a woman with cancer. This article first appeared in a collection of papers on
Dakari 227 social science in 1983. Even though its dramatization occurred at about the same time with her cancer, she sees the two events as nothing more than merely a stunning coincidence. The dramatized version was first performed at Northwestern University in 1988 under Emilie
Beck’s direction. Paget mentions how early in the preparation of the script, Beck wanted to smooth out the precise and technical language of her text. Paget, however, thought that this would undermine the science of the work. That performance was a work in progress, which later led Paget to provide her own version of doing science on stage—the script to be analysed here. Paget, however, did not live long enough to see her artistic creation performed.
“The Work of Talk” is highly experimental precisely because it departs from standard dramatic trajectories: the characters Narrator, Physician and Patient co-exist with their doubles, fracturing time-space unity, as they merge narration and enactment of the narrated event. Death is also a character in the play, in fact, the most omniscient of all. Discourse and its shortcomings are consciously brought into attention; the text is rife with metacommentaries, thus shaping a linguistic site upon which the patient’s suffering and fear are enacted, narrated and assessed, ultimately stressing the paradoxical role of language as both meaning-making and meaning-destroying agent.
Departing from Sontag’s claim that “an illness that is not specified has to be cancer”
(Illness 109), previously examined in The Shadow Box, we notice the failure of spoken discourse to contain and explain the disease and the ensuing physical and emotional pain, as it is realized in doctor-patient exchanges. Language stumbles over its very denial to signify, echoing Elaine Scarry’s assumption that pain resists and actively destroys language, leading the subject back to a pre-linguistic state of cries and moans (Scarry 4). This discontinuity is evident in the problematic utterance of the word cancer, which is either whispered by the
Dakari 228 narrating characters but never directly phrased in the direct exchange between physician and patient.
In this perspective, Paget’s script registers the unpresentable in its very phrasal recalcitrance. Silences, whispers, and unfinished sentences reflect the secrecy around cancer as a topic for discussion even withing the medical domain. This is also obvious in Shadow
Box; Paget’s text, however, openly criticizes this silence, as it brings the unpresentable itself into presentation. The documentary character of the performance perhaps explains why theatre critics and scholars have so far overlooked Paget’s piece, which could partially affirm
Sontag’s and Croce’s strict aesthetic standards when it comes to illness as the subject matter of art.
As in a differend, the “victim” of the dispute suffers a loss, which is “accompanied by the loss of the means to prove the damage,” as Lyotard explains (Differend, 5). The differend here is detected in the opposing idioms the physician and the patient use respectively. The physician derives his idiom from his authoritative position as the controller of discussion.
The patient, on the other hand, is not in the position to confront him on the basis of his medical jargon, which she hardly understands. She derives her idiom from the depths of her own experience with previously detected cancer and the fear and pain this generates. As it is the case in medical encounters, doctors interview their patients following a certain pattern of questioning and categorizing. Any information provided by the patient that does not fit this pattern is neglected by the professional. In absence of a common code that would resolve this miscommunication, the doctor fails to see the true cause of pain. In fact, the more he is in control of the exchange, the less information he is able to extract from it, as his perplexing idiom further plunges the patient into silence and confusion.
Early in the text the doctor’s repeated indifference in his patient’s signs regarding her fear of metastasized cancer is made present and stressed throughout. Communication gap
Dakari 229 between them is mediated through the narrator, physician and patient pairs narrating and acting out in turns. The play opens with the first and second narrators talking about the doctor-patient encounter, while the first physician and the first patient report part of their conversation:
1ST NARRATOR: They met three times in the early months of 1972 in a large
university-affiliated clinic to discuss her medical problems. . . . Each
encounter exuded misunderstandings.
2ND NARRATOR: Their talk was awry with disagreements, odd semantic
constructions, radical breaks and shifts in discourse topics, and allusions to
an operation that were not clarified.
1ST NARRATOR: The central tension of their talk was his assessment:
1ST PHYSICIAN: that her basic health was good and that the problem was her
“nerves.”
1ST PATIENT: But throughout their meetings, she reported a number of minor
and serious symptoms that challenged his assessment.
1ST NARRATOR: The stretch of talk that follows . . . will be used to examine
the speaking practices of physicians, particularly their practices of
questioning patients. (“The Work of Talk” 44)
Here, the participants of the narrated event (First and Second Narrators) and the participants of the speech event (First Physician and First Patient) share the same performance space, merging the here-and-now of live performance with the there-and-then of narrative discourse.
This dissociation of the performing body from the speaking self, as indicated by the characters’ doubles and third-person narration, creates a distance between the participants of the narrated event and those of the speech event as well as between characters and spectators.
Dakari 230
Language then stands out as the stage in its own right, where physical action subsides in favor of linguistic performance.
Further rejecting standard dramatic discourse, Paget constructs a “montaged” text, which “freezes” for purposes of discussion and analysis and is often repeated for the sake of argumentation. The author’s presence is indisputable, which makes clear that the metalinguistic purposes of discourse analysis are substantiated through readership (and spectatorship for that matter). Quotation marks in written text become felt in performance as
“boundary markers” (Elam 88) through various narrating voices, thus framing and reframing the staged event. Narrators are the framing agents, who, despite being framed by stage space and by the very ontology of performance, since they are characters in it, break these constructed frames at will, moving in and out of them. In that sense, their role is to mediate the speech act to the audience, thus offering a hermeneutic key, which “influences the procedures of interpretation the audience consciously or unconsciously will adopt” (Rokem
168). On the one hand, they guide spectators through an essentially discontinuous and fragmented description of pain; on the other hand, they subliminally “[induce them] to reflect on . . . [their] role and experience as spectator[s]” (Rokem 170). By means of placing an on- stage audience, therefore, Paget establishes a connection with the actual audience granting them a multitude of perspectives to draw on. Death, though conceived by Paget as a beautiful young woman in white, nevertheless emphasizes a dark metaphysical aspect of viewing, bringing the underlying fatality of the situation to surface.
Whereas language seems to be all-powerful in this self-reflexive linguistic network, it still fails to contain the word “cancer,” which is never directly mentioned in the original doctor-patient exchange, or is whispered or laughed out by characters and their doubles. The male physician represents a team carrying out a research. The female patient, although already having had a tumor removed, finds it difficult to talk about it. Cancer is euphemized
Dakari 231 in their conversation as ‘scar,’ ‘tumor,’ or ‘remaining kidney.’ Words are emphasized over characters, while meaning is dispersed through several speaking positions. All characters, however, whisper ‘cancer’ simultaneously, with the hissing effect of this utterance standing out in the middle of a chaotic patter.
During examination, discussion focuses on the patient’s painful scar, by far the most prominent metonymy of her cancer. After this part is played out by the First Physician and the First Patient, Death repeats it in direct speech, playing both roles:
DEATH. “Oh, that hurt.” “Where? Oh, that’s in the scar.” “Oh, is that in the
scar?” “That is the scar.” “Is it, is that… I had… is that supposed to hurt
like that from a—” (“Work of Talk” 57-58)
The patient’s question here is interrupted before she utters the potential source of such pain, which would be a tumor. The tension caused by such a prospect is further channelled through a sequence of fragmented utterances. The physician’s failure to “read” this fear of hers further stresses their disparate codes of communication, which boil down to their conflicting reactions to the scar. In response to the physician’s reference to the mark as ‘beautiful surgery’ the patient counterpoises: “It was terrible” (72). Under his gaze, which apart from medical is also male, her body is cut open as if on an anatomical display, and employed as a set of symptoms. Echoing Foucault’s assumptions regarding the medicalization and reification of the female body by male-centred western science, Paget focuses on the woman patient as spectacle as well as on the modes of viewing, ranging from detached clinical to voyeuristic. Moreover, she draws attention to the paternalism of medical discourse and “the atrophy of feeling,” which were typical of American physicians in 1970s (Complex Sorrow
38).
The patient’s scar becomes a contested site of meaning, since for the physician is merely good work, or, a well-written text. From the patient’s perspective, however, this text
Dakari 232 speaks volumes about her life in relation to what this scar signifies. “If skin renews itself constantly,” Petra Kuppers states, “producing the same in repetition, the scar is the place of the changed script: mountains are thrown up, the copy isn’t quite right, crooked lines sneak over smooth surfaces” (Scar of Visibility 1). The patient’s scar oozes fear, pain, and memories she tries to suppress, as it is implied by her oblique references to her life before and after surgery, particularly having to do with her deteriorating relationship with her husband. Language, just like scarred skin, loses its smooth texture. Her scar is metonymically employed to stand for fear of abandonment, of pain both physical and emotional, and most crucially, fear of death. Though privileged with the power to control discourse and direct it through questions, the physician fails to detect these subtle signs and is thus caught in a maze of misunderstandings.
The play reaches a closure returning to the narrative style in past tense with which it opens. Direct speech gradually recedes in favour of reported statements. This shift signals lack of control in the way the interlocutors handle conversation. These dialogues, we are informed, were taped in 1972. Both physician and patient filled in a questionnaire. The physician “reported that he was certain of his diagnosis” (‘Work of Talk” 79). This statement is made by the First Physician laughing, which utterly undercuts his authority both as a doctor and as a speaking subject—hence the use of third-person statement. Ironic attitude toward the physician is accentuated in the end, wherein the chorus of characters and their doubles break into laughter:
1ST PATIENT: (Laughing) Like so many physicians,
1ST NARRATOR: (Laughing) she said,
1ST PATIENT: (Laughing) this physician told her that there was nothing
wrong when she had
ALL: (Laughing and whispering) cancer.
Dakari 233
1ST NARRATOR: (Laughing) She also said that since their last exchange she
had gone to another hospital where she was told
2ND NARRATOR: (Laughing) that she has
ALL: (Laughing and whispering) cancer
1ST PATIENT: (Laughing) of the spine.
DEATH: (Laughing) No further information is available on this woman and
her search for care. (Laughing) (“Work of Talk” 79)
Even though this chorus has been omniscient until this moment, the end of performance does not coincide with the end of the narrated event. The audience is now left to struggle with an open ending, without the elaboration afforded by the narrators. What happened to that patient? Did she successfully pursue treatment? Did she manage? The fact that the last line is spoken by Death laughing, though, ironically questions any possible positive prospect.
In the actual doctor-patient instance, an effective idiom that would resolve the differend was never to be reached. Performance attests to this impasse by keeping the resolution—the patient’s condition—outside its premises. Echoing Lyotard, this differend “is signaled by this inability to prove. The one who lodges a complaint is heard, but the one who is the victim . . . is reduced to silence” (Differend, 10). The female patient in this perspective is wronged both by the medical system and the end of performance, even if the doctor’s mistake is finally acknowledged.
Despite these difficulties, performance eventually becomes the idiom that promises to resolve this differend. More precisely, it is the activation of an intersemiotic constellation of codes that renders the negotiation of the unpresentable possible in performance. In a phenomenological perspective, the intimate relationship between body and voice, as well as the shifts in the tonality ranging from screams, laughter, whisper, and silence bring forth an engaging process of embodiment, according to Fischer-Lichte (Transformative Power 125).
Dakari 234
The disputing utterances of physician and patient that were obscured and distanced in the tape recordings, are now materialized by performance. The utterances now become bodies moving through space, generating various pitches of sound, or even impart pervasive meaning to silence. As such, their impact on the audience is undeniable. Besides the obvious symbolism of the acquisition of agency that voice suggests, the materiality of voice in particular “reveals the performance’s materiality in its entirety. . . . Through it, the bodily being-in-the-world of the articulating subject expresses him/herself and addresses those who hear him/her in their own bodily being-in-the-world,” Fischer-Lichte explains
(Transformative Power 129-130). This multimodal coexistence is what establishes not only the re-enfranchisement of the wronged subject but also the aestheticity of performance.
Finally, this is what suggests, I argue, a solution to the previously irresolvable differend.
Closing comments
Reflecting back on the linguistic inexpressibility position, pain and suffering is abundantly channeled through Paget’s intersemiotic and multimodal work. Paget’s editor and close friend, Marjorie DeVault draws our attention to one of her moments of pain, as it was condensed in her last diary entry, revealing how hard she fought against a disease that was draining her of life and eloquence: “I was not surprised to find an illegible scrawl—a final entry that does not speak in words” (“Epilogue” 141). It was precisely out of her shattered discourse that Paget practiced alternative modes of expressing pain.
Living in the world she analysed, and making herself present as author/narrator, Paget experienced the ultimate irony: “This work,” she wrote, “is a text constructed from my own life and from errors in my life” (Complex Sorrow 9). Being a victim of a medical error even as putting together this piece for theatre has become an integral part of her work. Her attempt was to break free from cancer’s perhaps most persistent trapping: that of talking about it.
Dakari 235
Despite the fact that Paget seemed compromised due to her life’s irony, and even though she carefully designed her last narrative to inform readers on the “trappings of metaphor,” it is inevitable for us not to ignore this fact.
“Situating the stage within language, and language within the stage” (Garner 125),
“The Work of Talk” manifests Paget’s aspirations for breaking free of the way in which sociology scholars—and Sontag—have privileged the (detached) written text, bodying forth the plasticity of dialogue and the originality of experience. Her own “presence” in the text is at once corroborated and cancelled by her absence. The open-endedness of the playscript is hence outbalanced by the solemn finality of her life-narrative. This excessive text keeps stretching out, both challenging the limits of performance and threatening audience premises through endless mirroring. In her effort to make sense of pain, Paget managed to disclose the essence of representation by holding the mirror to the very nature of existence and theatre, to promote social reflection and to reveal an array of intriguing possibilities in professional healthcare and medical education.
Paget’s intentions to create a pulsating text out of a detached scientific article are thus fully substantiated. She wanted to see the physician and his patient talk in order for her and the audience to track down the workings of pain, the way it both swept through the patient’s body, mind and voice, and was neglected by the doctor. If listening to the taped discussions seemed lifeless, staging them brought all the latent performative possibilities of the text to surface. Even as discourse is dissected and analysed from multiple perspectives, spectators are free to follow the original talk and make their own assumptions. Her experiment therefore proves that performance, which “reawakens and recovers the audience’s capacity to participate and feel” (Paget, Complex Sorrow 39) allows for a both transgressive and liberating experience.
Dakari 236
II. Engaging the community: Angela Ellsworth and Pam Patterson
Existing illness, which previously lurked at the margins of Paget’s aesthetic project, becomes the focal point of the following collaborative works by Angela Ellsworth and Pam
Patterson. Analysis is based on Fischer-Lichte’s theory of the aestheticity of performance through the co-presence of performers and audience, as well as Butler’s view on the performativity of the assembly as this is activated by specific collaborative art events that engage members of a community. What these works aim at is to generate an ongoing feedback loop among participants that has an immensely transformative effect. On the one hand, the performers come up with a creative outlet of their illness; on the other hand, they
“educate” and engage with others.
Transcending the boundaries of their bodies and of performance, Ellsworth and
Patterson form temporary communities around their acts, thus establishing a new idiom of presenting the unpresentable. This osmotic process of engagement rediscovers the sacred in one’s own flawed, yet ever-mutable being-in-the-world.
Ecstatic embodiment in Angela Ellsworth’s Hemaderby (1998)
In 1993, during her graduate studies, interdisciplinary artist Angela Ellsworth was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease, an ‘invisible” cancer of the lymphatic system that spreads through the circulatory system. Like all cancer patients, she was re-introduced to her mutating body through blood tests, scans, and x-rays. This is a moment when the lived body, previously lost in the background of her ecstatic being in the world, dys-appears, in Leder’s terms, as a body in pain: a medical, post-surgical, or mutilated body, which is slashed and burnt for its own sake. This “other” body, hosted by and fed on the former one, and held under the skin with occasional leaks, scars, and disfigurement, forces the subject into an object-like position, displaces and disembodies the self, threatening its existence.
Dakari 237
Almost immediately after her diagnosis, Ellsworth turned her new evolving experience into the subject matter of her art. She collaborated with her friend and colleague
Tina Takemoto in Her/She Senses Imag(in)ed Malady. That was an ongoing project that involved visual rhymes, Intravene Carotene (Icehouse, Phoenix, 1994) and Caffeine and
Carotene (Hartnett Gallery, Rochester, New York, 1994). The last two were time-based collaborative performances that portrayed the ongoing struggle of the ill body to sustain itself, as well as the stakes of caring for an ill friend (Ellsworth 142).
Skin was the primary sight of their experimentations with (re)presentation of illness in their early project, visual rhymes. Even though Hodgin’s lymphoma is well-hidden underneath the skin, the effects of chemotherapeutic treatment have exceptional visibility.
Ellsworth would take polaroid photos of her blown veins, scars, lesions and would send them to Takemoto. Her friend, in turn, would try to recreate on her skin what she saw in the photos using toys, food and other everyday objects. The rhyming pictures would circulate among friends and would be sent to galleries.
Takemoto grew particularly obsessed with recreating what she saw in the exact proportion, size, and shape—to the point of causing herself a severe burn on her arm in her attempt to recreate Ellsworth’s chemotherapy injections. “Through playful repetition,”
Takemoto observes, “mimicry makes visible the inadequacy of its own repetition and demonstrates the impossibility of direct equivalence between sign and referent, self and other. Within the conceptual framework of our project, the visual rhyme always missed its mark” (111). The empathic attentiveness to the suffering of the other has in Takemoto’s case transcended the boundaries separating both art from life, and illness from health, disclosing the futile attempt to make the unpresentable presentable through mimesis as well as the melancholy of illness and the suspended grief that both resists and anticipates the possibility of loss of a loved person” (116-119).
Dakari 238
The precarious borderline between a healthy body and a sick body receives its most extensive elaboration once the individual enters the remission period. While Ellsworth’s early performances happened “in the presence of illness” (140), when she negotiated the expressive potential of the sick body the very moment its mutation was underway, her installation/performance Hemaderby took place five years after her diagnosis, and once she was proclaimed to be in remission. This state oscillates somewhere betwixt and between health and illness. It carves a liminal space of cautious hope, which, however, does not guarantee a return to the pre-cancer state of the self. It could potentially lead both ways. The outcome is beyond any prognosis or control; but then, so is life. Within this existential cleft, the very essence of our being-in-the-world comes into play in a most authentic way.
Spurred by his own experience with cancer, Arthur Frank terms “the remission society” as the new status identity of “all those people, who, like me, were effectively well but could never be considered cured” (Wounded Storyteller 8). While in modernist thought people are either well or sick, which is what Sontag’s allusion of dual citizenship expressed, the postmodern, or “postcolonial” remission society is to be found somewhere in between the two sides, as “either a demilitarized zone in between them, or else it is a secret society within the realm of the healthy” (Frank, Wounded Storyteller 9).
This socially defined role carries not only its histrionics, certain patterns of behavior in order for the “actor” to either draw or escape attention, as Wittgenstein has argued, but it also becomes performative in the way it changes the subject’s being-with-others. From this socially-imposed disenfranchised position, Ellsworth wonders:
Can anyone be certain it won’t come back? . . . Although I am labeled not sick and
look healthy there is still the bulging medical file and the fear of filling out health
insurance forms for a job application. The box I am required to check near the word
cancer is a constant reminder of my body’s history. (147)
Dakari 239
In this sense, one’s personal history becomes profoundly political, echoing Diedrich’s concept of “politicized patienthood.” This is a new narrative genre which, according to
Diedrich, is expressed in the patient’s counternarrative to the dominant disenfranchising medical discourse, aiming at “[bringing] into being various techniques for doing illness in new ways,” and which subsequently yields “new forms of writing illness” (26).
Hemaderby was such a counternarrative, Ellsworth’s rereading of her bulging, and in many ways disenfranchising, medical history. This performance was a two-day twelve-hour skating derby that spatially magnified the organism’s blood system in its struggle to get itself rid of cancer. The walls of the room became the membrane of the veins, or the skin/border of the body. Ellsworth stood in the middle of the room, wearing a sequined silver dress and suspended from the ceiling, enacting the lymph node. She slowly spun around herself, while live skaters with mirrored glass helmets, re-presenting white blood cells, platelets and red blood cells whirled around her. Among them there were two skaters in green, with non- reflecting helmets, enacting bacteria and disrupting the flow of the white blood cells, red blood cells, and platelets, while they were also moving threateningly close to spectators. As light refracted through their outfits, it cast “organic cell formations” on the walls, filling the space with flickering colors—a virtual projection of the live battlefield—while Ellsworth kept spinning around herself, amidst this visceral universe of motive energy and cosmic plasma sounds.
The sixteen skaters involved in Ellsworth’s performance were members of the
Phoenix community. Ellsworth explains her choice of cooperating with “unchoreographed volunteers” as adding “an unstructured element,” “extend[ing] the piece into a community event by encouraging artists, non-artists, students, children, and families to get involved”
(Ellsworth 146). This polymorphous group gave the performance not only a flux and non- repetitiveness, as each skater contributed differently, making the system from “highly
Dakari 240 energized” to “sluggishly calm,” depending on their skill and number, but also negotiated the uncontrollability of the body, as the rhythm of the cell production was not regulated by the self/performer. Cancer is predominantly about one’s losing control of his organism, of acknowledging one’s body as other, of being acted upon by one’s own physical existence.
This bodily state, along with the pain it engenders, is essentially experienced as a self- betrayal, Scarry explains, where the individual “experiences [one’s] own body as the agent of
[one’s] agony” (47).
After cancer has taken control of the body’s functions, it is medicine’s time to take hold of the body and assault disease with invasive treatment, perpetuating this disintegrating circle of pain and once more turn the body into the torture room of the self (Scarry). Out of this ordeal the self emerges, utterly enfeebled and fragmented. To convey this idea, Ellsworth released herself from the head traction and the immobilizing dress and, while being disorientated and dizzy, she joined the rest of the skaters. Her breathing set the pace, as a microphone accentuated it. Once she reached a high state of energy, she slowed down and returned to her spinning position. Her representation as such attests to the “embodied paranoia” of both the disease and the methods for its treatment, the self-body disintegration that renders the body painfully present and colonized by the uncontrollable sovereignties of both illness and the medical system, while the self drifts away in self-doubt (Frank, Wounded
Storyteller 172-73).
Attempting to restore her subjectivity and bodily integrity, Ellsworth summons the help of the community in her struggle to produce white blood cells. As she reports, the performance was preceded by casual conversations with the volunteers around the idea of translocating the internal workings of the body and the changes effected by illness onto a staged environment, a mise-en-abyme endlessly framing the body in its agonizing metamorphoses. This engagement brought forth even more stories of cancer, this time by
Dakari 241 members of the discussion groups, bearing resemblance to Jones’s pre-performance workshops and the creative way he interacted with the community.
Contextualizing this piece on medical premises, she stresses the importance of white blood cell production as the organism’s tools for fighting invasive bacteria. Volunteers therefore were assigned a significant role. These discussions not only provided the blueprint of the performance, but also initiated a symbolic relinquishment of control: Ellsworth was asserting her dependence on the participants’ help to perform this ritual of healing. This public pre-performance acknowledgement, which revolutionized the ontological dimension of performance by way of dissolving its spatio-temporal demarcation, also attests to Fischer-
Lichte’s postulation that “the realms of art, social life, and politics cannot be clinically separated in performance” (Transformative Power 51). Once the borders between the private and the public, as well as between art and life ceased to exist, the personal-versus-communal extremes began to oscillate; Ellsworth’s bodily history spurred the retrieval of similar personal stories that the community members shared with her, thus “engag[ing] in the conversation and discover[ing] their own interpretations as they moved in the blood system”
(147). “By publicly confronting the disfigured and diseased body in performance,” she admits, “I attempt to reevaluate, cope with, and challenge notions of being sick, being beautiful and being alive” (147). This act of hers, therefore, can be appreciated for its profoundly transformative and invigorating flow of feedback among the community by dissolving the asphyxiating clots of secrecy and preconceived notions around the experience of cancer.
The concept behind this piece was to redefine the ill subject’s position amid the ecstatic dimension of its being-in-the-world. Leder defines human beings’ automatic existence that keeps visceral awareness in disappearance in the background as “ecstatic” (11).
Ellsworth’s piece brings the body’s inner surface into direct interaction with the world
Dakari 242 beyond the body’s frame. While the inner body becomes felt only when pain or illness strike, what Leder defines as “dys-appearing” (71), Ellsworth brings the inner world in communion with the outer for healing purposes. As self and other come together, a flow of energy among bodies is activated and substantiates Fischer-Lichte’s concept of transformative interaction.
Getting under the skin: Pam Patterson’s Bodysight: A Reclamation Project (2004)
Performed at Goddard College in Vermont, Pam Patterson’s Bodysight: A
Reclamation Project (2004) oscillates between art event and social event, as it combines the co-presence of the artist and participants interacting in a staged environment, as well as the interaction among scholars within an academic space. As Kuppers reports, participants were initiated into her performance by witnessing her undressing and putting on a white gown, followed by a ritualistic choreography to floating sounds from a recorder. In-between the undressing and dressing acts, they had a glimpse at her recent mastectomy scar (Kuppers,
Scar of Visibility 11). Having now entered the liminal space of the event, spectators could perceive Patterson’s body, at once, as the object and the vehicle of action: the signifier dissolved into the signified. Unlike Ellsworth’s figurative/virtual body expanding to envelope the performance environment and the entire community, Patterson’s stage collapsed into her wounded corporeality, as this was condensed in her scar. The visibility of scar thus fused with the scar of visibility; the re-membering of this painful loss was rhymed by the painful act of perception spectators were forced into. The breast, whose absence had been haunting the performance so far, returned as a revenant, multiplying in front of spectators in the shape of actual breast prostheses: a signifier of loss (of health, beauty, normalcy) and an unnatural and restraining object. Dissolving the boundaries between the fixity of text and transience of performance, she also incorporated a reading of Emile Zola’s Nana—passages that focus on
Dakari 243 the woman’s body as essentially decadent, toxic, and grotesque—as well as excerpts form her journal where she registered her own experience with breast cancer and mastectomy.
Her piece fused live and mediatized presence, since Patterson not only performed her own physical presentness but also her re-membered corporeality through photography.
Dispersed in the stage environment were several single slide viewers enshrined on stones that were paced on the floor. No longer fixed onto their chairs and transfixed by the performer’s physical presence, spectators had the chance to move about as if in a museum or gallery environment. Several stones on the wooden floor of the stage formed a half-circle, while a single slide viewer stood on each stone. Kuppers provides an intensely experiential account of the act:
As I held the viewer to my eye, and looked away from Patterson and out toward the
open side door of the theater, into the sunlight streaming in, I saw a small area of skin.
During the performance, I moved to different stones, seeing different parts of skin,
and exchanged viewers with others . . . In that half-circle, a translucent body had been
laid out for us, allowing us a visualization of [Patterson’s post-operative] body. Like
X rays, the slides needed external light to be seen, and we needed to look away from
the flesh-an-blood performer. . . . As an audience member, I had to make decisions,
and I experienced the prize of vision every time something happened as I looked
away. The visual bits were seductive, gorgeous, and so was the presence in the middle
of the stage. (Scar of Visibility 13)
Within this liminal space of transgressive presence and absence, spectators’ gaze became self-referential. Not only were they invited to investigate stage arrangements, but they also crossed the limits of illusion as they invaded the performer’s realm, and as they acknowledged their spectatorship through their interaction with the other spectators and through the mediated perspective offered by the slide viewers. Sleuthing the scattered pieces
Dakari 244 and the missing parts of the virtual/prosthetic body, they re-membered it once they redirected their gaze onto the live/postoperative one in the middle of the stage. In this instance of perceptual multistability, spectators’ perception did not oscillate between the character and the performer behind her, as Lichte sustains, but between the body’s past and present existence, that is, its mutability through time. Transforming visibility into embodied presence, both the performer and the participants experienced a shared being-in-the-world; the latter crossed the threshold of pain as an essentially private and incommunicable experience, while the former reclaimed her bodily voice.
The photographic portrayal of discontinuous patches of scarred flesh operates on a metaphorical level as the objectifying clinical gaze, which penetrates the body layer after layer in order to treat the “mechanical failure” leaving the person behind, further accentuating the mind-body split—a by-product of the industrial and biomedical revolutions. This deconstructing effect, however, is juxtaposed with the unmediated and fully embodied presence of the performer. Kuppers’ indecision as to where to direct her attention—the pictures or the live performer—conveys much more than the perceptual multistability effected by the spatio-temporal frames of the enacted and unmediated presence of the performer. Her dismay at the way “seductive” pictures distracted her attention from the
“gorgeous presence” in the middle of the stage disclose the underlying voyeurism that resides in the act of witnessing a wounded body part in isolation, and which is evident in both medical and artistic encounters.
This dilemma also articulates a critique on the dehumanizing effect of modern medicalized representations of the patient’s body as the site of disorder, a close-up on the faceless organ, resembling Bacon’s paintings of bodies portrayed inside-out, which entirely obscures the personality of the subject. Removing human proportions from the person and ascribing them instead on the disease or the disability creates the condition for the
Dakari 245 construction of stereotypes and social categories of health and illness on both biological and metaphorical levels.
Having spectators try to put the body pieces together by looking at the original in front of us, Patterson initiates a discussion on the politics of representation, resembling the technique of phototherapy that late British photographer Jo Spence invented so as to represent and cope with her cancer. Deliberately exhibiting the progress of her disease and the marks it left on her body in all their ugliness, she sought to “resist medical dominance of the body and to render problematic the functioning of healthcare” (Lupton 81), which, on the one hand, hallows medicine, while, on the other, fuels metaphorical thinking that additionally burdens and disenfranchises the individual.
Exiled is a photographic presentation of Spence’s post-surgical body, part of the her photo sequence Narratives of Dis-ease (1990), which stems from a therapeutic session with a doctor, where she seeks to address the feelings of aggression and fear a cancer patient experiences (Kuppers, Disability 28). Depicted is her torso, lower half of the face and upper half of her thighs. Half of her face is covered with a mask; she is wearing a surgical gown, and across her neckline the word “monster” is written. As Kuppers comments, “a range of different meaning-carriers are at work.” Written language and visual signifiers, out-of-frame body parts and age, gender, health status specificities coalesce, “from the medical photo to the art historical nude” (Disability 20). Escaping traditional inscriptions even as it reverberates them, the monstrous body affirms its inchoateness by means of its excess. That said, it still reminds us of Spence’s authorship and control of what is eventually framed. In this perspective, “Exiled is what culture exiles” (Kuppers, Disability 29).
In a similar pattern, the multimodal environment of Bodysight conveys the body’s self-affirmation in the convergence of its material, semiotic, and performative aspects. Its unpresentability is not suggestive or philosophical, but actually taking place in front of
Dakari 246 spectators. Its power lies precisely in its ability to communicate its condition, echoing Tracy
Warr’s discussion of body art: “Every body is implicated in the sufferings or pleasures of other bodies. It cannot be an objective observer” (4). Warr reflects on Schilder’s view that “to say that one never suffers alone, is not a simple cliché. The laws of identification and of communication between images of the body make one’s suffering and pain everybody’s affair” (qtd. in Warr 4). Unlike the mute witnessing of the still body of photographic art, whose challenge can be contained much more easily, according to Kuppers (Disability 20),
Patterson’s performing body calls for an alternative categorization: it affirms its deviant aesthetics by deliberately questioning its aestheticity. The spectators’ expectations are challenged by its self-reflexive immediacy and incompleteness.
Having agreed to intervene in Patterson’s performance and conduct a workshop,
Kuppers invited spectators to gather at the center, in a symbolic crossing of separating lines between actor and spectator, art and life, or health and illness (Scar 15). While this came as a post-performance sharing and discussion, it was in fact part of the performance itself. During this time, the fabric prostheses were handed out to all participants to touch and feel under their shirts. Apart from an intense tactile experience spurred by the ecstatic materiality of the object, this gesture emerged as a highly political one, directing their attention to the tactics of normalization of bodies and appearances, by means of fixed concepts of beauty, sexuality, and femininity. What is more, they broke the spell of cancer, contained in the absurd taboo of contamination entertained in earlier times, as Sontag explained. In this radical act of crossing, private/public, personal/political, health/illness, signifier/signified, past/present, prosthetic/physical, sensuous/grotesque extremes collapsed and dissolved. The experimental nature of Patterson’s piece, denoted as “project” in its very title, once more endorses performance not only as a laboratory, but also as a space of ritualized liminality, a shamanistic environment where the practices of healing involve all the participants. Against
Dakari 247 the fragmenting experience within the medical domain that objectifies the body and erases subjectivity, performance space offers itself for the reclamation of the self and the transformation of all participants.
Closing comments
Apart from performing their disease as a way toward self-healing, Ellsworth and
Patterson have attempted to redefine the very concept of the border, accentuating the process of transition from one state into another. The aesthetic experience of performance, therefore, constitutes “a passage in itself,” Fischer-Lichte observes (Transformative Power 199), while the border now turns into a threshold, which, according to Fischer-Lichte “does not separate but connects” (204). This is an experience shared by all cancer patients who are in remission: a double citizenship, as Sontag described it. Cancelling the concept of border as end-point, exclusion, invalidation (Fischer-Lichte, Transformative Power 204), they negotiate their art through their cancer and their cancer through their art: “while borders create clear divisions, thresholds mark a space of possibilities, empowerment and metamorphosis” (205).
Although disease and pain can be indeed highly metaphorized, these artists debilitate their symbolic dimension; they are concerned with the tangible flesh, in all its unadorned, transient presentness and performative presence, the existential ephemerality as well as aesthetic and semiotic depth (Fischer-Lichte, Transformative Power 205). Thus braiding art and life, they fulfill what Fischer-Lichte has identified as the aim of the aesthetics of the performative: the reenchantment of the world. Against the erasure of self through post-
Enlightenment, post-modern medical abstractions, they instead seek to restore its primordial energy in full acknowledgement of its rotundity: its materiality and elusiveness all the same
(207).
Dakari 248
Audiences of performances such as Hemaderby or Bodysight are thus left with no satisfying or cathartic closure to this cancer spectacle. Their aesthetic experience had to do with “perceiving the ordinary” (Fisccher-Lichte, Transformative Power 179), the physiological process of becoming, which is completed once life stops and the organism dies—they were shocked back into their bodies. By acknowledging this inevitability through their presence, though, they have communed to an utterly transformative liminal experience: taking this enlightening break from the cultural restrictions of normalcy with performance allowing the ordinary materiality and ephemerality of the body to be transfigured as extraordinary through its own biological, motoric, and affective rhythms, they have been given the opportunity to participate in the mystery of life itself; they have reflected upon their own being as ever-changing, precarious, and yet mesmerizing; their life energies have been tuned to one another and to the artists’ expansive, transgressive, pulsating organisms, thus acknowledging and sustaining their self-healing rituals; they have thus “[made] the ordinary conspicuous” (Fischer-Lichte, Transformative Power 180). With several bodies merging into a single mass of energy, Ellsworth’s and Patterson’s “meta-bodies” aestheticize their illness and repurpose its previously disorientating and fragmenting metaphorization: from repugnant to radiant, from clandestine to communal, “from abject to subject,” as Ellsworth admits. It is in the collapse of binaries engendered through/as performance that the artists are empowered, the spectators are transformed, and their world is momentarily re-enchanted.
III. The TEDtalk Cure: storytelling as transformative performance
One of the key features for a captivating TED talk is the mastery of storytelling,
Carmine Gallo, communication expert, writes (Gallo, Talk like TED 41)—“the act of framing an idea as a narrative to inform, illuminate and inspire” (The Storyteller’s Secret xvi). Telling a good story, though, is not enough; it has to be transformative. Transformative stories,
Dakari 249 according to Gallo, have sprung out of adversity; storytellers who inspire with their stories have been through hardship and have lived to tell the tale and share the lessons they have learned. But how do you turn a cancer story into a short yet memorable talk? A talk that not only thrills the physically present spectators but also stirs fervent discussions in cyberspace long afterwards? And, finally, how can such a talk heal, educate, and please the senses?
Telling stories of illness is the attempt, instigated by the body’s disease, “to give voice to an experience that medicine cannot describe” (Frank, Wounded Storyteller 18). From archetypal figures, like Tiresias—the blind seer in Oedipus Rex—and the biblical patriarch
Job, to the modern ill subject, wounded storytellers, according to Frank, corroborate the validity of their story by means of their wounds and suffering, in order to recover their voice and heal others (Wounded Storyteller xi, xii). In this respect, the performativity of suffering lies precisely in that “the disease that sets the body apart from others becomes, in the story, the common bond of suffering that joins bodies in their shared vulnerability.” The wounded storyteller is the person who has gone through suffering and illness, whose body has been marked by this torment, and who has managed to return to life, fully healed or not, carrying the wisdom of passage. It is their wounds that give them their narrative powers (Frank,
Wounded Storyteller xi).
Anthropologist Dwight Conquergood detects the same healing effects of psychoanalytic practices in shamanic rituals (41). In non-western or primeval cultures, shamans are healer-figures in possession of spiritual powers that can affect humans, non- humans, and the entire cosmos alike. Unlike the healers of western medicine, though, shamans enter a dialogic relationship with their patients. They re-enact their initial sickness, becoming vulnerable like their patients, who also partake in the ritual. The dynamics of healing is thus directed both ways, affecting both shaman and patient and re-mystifying the medicalized body.
Dakari 250
Leder elaborates on the split between our ecstatic body, which extends beyond its outer surface and engages us with the world, and our recessive body, the depths of which reach deep down our viscera and which recedes in the background of our daily existence.
While in a state of health, the visceral density of our bodies easily recedes in the background disappearance so that we, as immaterial minds, can fully engage with our world, according to
Leder (11). Only in cases of pain and illness is our materiality recalled. As a result, the dysfunctional body emerges—“dys-appears”—while the self is detached by means of a mind- body split: from “I” as a body to “I” versus the body (Leder 69).
Leder further elaborates on the philosophical extensions of the body’s dys- appearance. In fact, “[that] the body is remembered particularly at times of error and limitation helps to explain the Cartesian epistemological distrust of the body” (86). In this sense, if the mind is traditionally associated with the Self, the Male, the spiritual, the civilized, and civilizing, the recalcitrant body becomes the Other, the Female, the material, the non-human, the primitive. As such, the Cartesian hierarchy has yielded a certain kind of metaphorical thinking that sanctions subordination and stigmatization of various Others: female, non-white, underprivileged, or non-human. The metaphorical extensions of this split, therefore, render the experience of illness all the more unbearable.
TED has been established as both a cultural event and a hybrid genre. It was designated in 1984 as a conference on technology, entertainment, and design. In 2006,
TED.com website developed around the main conference event, now being a massive archive of talks, each with a transcription, translation into several languages, interviews, and comment areas. Held at various venues worldwide, it brings together people and stories from a multitude of disciplines and cultures. As such, TED events often acquire the character of support groups, the contemporary equivalent of modern one-to-one psychoanalysis, providing
Dakari 251 evidence that shared narratives of suffering can hold healing powers (Morris, Illness and
Culture 201).
Pressing on the raw nerve of articulating cancer, the TED talks discussed here can be deeply transformative both for the one who talks and those who listen. The storytellers’ aim is to heal this split, bringing together irreconcilable extremes and making peace with the philosophical and material Other. In their performed storytelling, the West meets the East, humor meets shock, and inspirational narration meets the aesthetic bliss of music and dance.
The sublime feeling is enacted not only through the negotiation of the unpresentability of illness and suffering but also of the dynamics of presence the presenters employ. Their aim is to remember, educate, heal and be healed. Finally, by abandoning the restrictions of traditional aesthetic and narrative patterns, they reach out to a diverse, both present and virtual, global audience.
Playwright/performer/activist Eve Ensler, performer/author/ activist Tania Katan, and performer/choreographer/scholar Ananda Shankar Jayant are women who have been through cancer. They are three wounded storytellers who mold metaphors, which will accommodate their experience of suffering and their transformed identity. This is what sustains them in their ongoing being-in-the-word, and what enfranchises them as healers. The connection these storytellers have established with their own bodies aids them in perceiving the pain of others. Narrative shows that “silence is not simply an experience of the solitary individual but a social consequence almost built into the interpersonal structure within which suffering occurs” (Morris, Illness and Culture 197).
“Suddenly, My Body”
In “Suddenly, My Body,” American author of The Vagina Monologues and activist
Eve Ensler gives an account of her journey from being separated from her body, to finally
Dakari 252 being a body, as seen in her published work, In the Body of the World: A Memoir of Cancer and Connection (2013). Ensler attributes her pre-cancer denial of her body to “her violent past,” the trauma of being sexually abused at an early age, which she has repeatedly negotiated in her writing.
Acknowledging the problematic existence of her body beside herself, Ensler recalls the various ways she abused it, suggesting in retrospect that she may have unwittingly contributed to her unexpressed trauma. Ensler reports that her body became a new kind of commodity, “something I was selling.” And while aging, she started hating it, as it was a reminder of her many failures: of not being fit, of not bearing children, of not being in peace with nature. It was about this time when cancer appeared to explode her “wall of disconnection.” It was also her exposure to other stories of violence against women that she heard during her journey to the Democratic Republic of Congo, some of which she actually presents in raw details.
The previously held illusion of immortality is shattered once the visceral depths of the body dys-appear, Leder writes. It is the moment Ensler withdrew from her ecstatic being-in- the-world and was forced into the “foreignness of this inner body” (Leder 48). Inhabiting this alien space, she realized that
suddenly, I had a body, a body that was pricked and poked and punctured, a body that
was cut wide open, a body that had organs removed and transported and rearranged
and reconstructed, a body that was scanned and had tubes shoved down it, a body that
was burning from chemicals. . . . Suddenly I understood that the crisis in my body was
the crisis in the world . . . happening now. (“Suddenly”)
This impressive strand of monologue, which she delivers in a single breath, Ensler shatters not only the wall of her disconnection but also the entire organism of the systematic disenfranchisement of the Other, starting with the alien within.
Dakari 253
As all stories bled into one another, hers reflected the story of the crimes against women, the poor, animals, the Earth itself that is polluted by the “cancer of our carelessness.”
“Suddenly,” she says, “my cancer was a cancer that was everywhere, the cancer of cruelty, the cancer of greed, the cancer inside the coal miner’s lungs, the cancer of [pollution] . . . the cancer of buried trauma.” Cancer, therefore, becomes a metaphor for the catastrophic dichotomy between a disciplining mind and a disciplined body. By drawing parallels between cancer and a polluted ecosphere as the downside of centuries of industrial development,
Ensler also reminds us that it is a partly culture-related disease, therefore opposing the modern beliefs of cancer as a personal failure. This view has been sustained by western religious and cultural discourse and has long burdened those who have to face it.
Her journey to reembodiment culminates in the account of a healing ritual a community of women prepared for her. Gathered around a bowl of water, a symbol of the elements of nature in unison with the human, these women bathed her bald head while praying for her life. This ritualization of life becomes performative as it effects change: the cleansing of mind, body, and spirit from plaguing ailments, and the transformation of the patient into a shaman/storyteller in possession of the healing powers of narrative.
The healing effects of re-inhabiting her body and the cosmos are what rendered her fully aware of her moral responsibility as a shaman and storyteller: “you don’t have to get cancer to come back into your own body,” she says. “I got it so you don’t have to.” Her story thus ends with the viable promise of regeneration: her own, once she decided to reconnect to her body; of the Earth, once humans decide to respect and protect it; of women in Congo and the underprivileged around the world, once they decide to rise and unite into a single body of revolution.
Dakari 254
Her presence on the TED stage, therefore, acquires new meaning: she is there in order to enact the healing capacity of her narrative. The act of listening, indeed of agreeing to play with the rules of this assembly of bodies, makes change possible.
“Survivability, Sustainability, and Nudity”
The next story takes us from the inner trauma of cancer to its explicit scars. As comedian and activist Tania Katan reveals in her talk “The Power of Voice: Survivability,
Sustainability, and Nudity,” she has survived breast cancer twice; this came with the price of a double mastectomy. Her experience with illness inspired her to write a memoir, My One
Night Stand with Cancer (2005). Katan later adapt it for the stage as a one-woman show,
Saving Tania’s Privates, which made its New York premiere at Frigid New York Festival in
2011 and won the Audience Choice Award for Best Show and the Sold Out Run Award.
Katan’s account, specially created for the TED event, is humorous, upbeat and oddly refreshing. She admits, however, that “I didn’t know I was a survivor until I put my story out into the world, and then people just started telling me that I was a survivor; but this word
‘survivor’ . . . felt really odd.” Although she is sceptical as to whether survivor should be considered a political identity to begin with, she does locate herself in a community of breast cancer activists when she quotes a few lines from “A Litany for Survival”—a poem by Audre
Lorde, African American lesbian poet and breast cancer activist: “When we speak we are afraid/ our words will not be heard/ nor welcomed/ but when we are quiet/ we are still afraid/
So it is better to speak” (32).
Katan’s decision to speak, however, brings about the debate on where the limits of the politically correct are to be drawn. Running topless taught her that explicit mastectomy scars, which are indicative of the complete absence of the censored spectacle of breasts, cannot be easily handled in everyday situations, thus revealing the system of perverse analogies that
Dakari 255 apply here. Katan remembers being the odd one out at the Survivors’ Café after the race: surrounded by women dressed in pink, she is admonished by one of the organizers to “put
[her] shirt back on, there are children here.” Who are really these children? And why pink for breast cancer? As Ehrenreich suggests, pink is used as a euphemistic cover-up for the ugliness of the disease, while it reduces women to infantile status; they are victims of cancer, in need of care by an adult, preferably male and doctor.
This “pink sticky sentiment” is what opposes the instructive potential of Katan’s deviance. A breastless woman is indeed a spectacle that violates the culture of voyeurism: the voyeur is caught in the act, while the obscene spectacle returns their gaze empty of expectations. Rather than dangerous for children, this sight is offensive and confusing for the eyes of patriarchy, violating normative discourses of gender performance. And it should be mentioned here that Katan’s presence was perceived twice as offensive, since she is vocal both about her lesbianism and her mastectomies.
What Katan wittily criticizes is that fund-raising is often restricted to a feel-good act, without the willingness to see behind the pink blinds into the “ugly” facts of living with cancer. Unlike grassroots actions, industry-funded initiatives often turn awareness-raising efforts into a corporate market plan. Will making a donation suffice to bring an emotional catharsis and cancer-proof patrons? And why was Tania shown the exit from this, to all intends and purposes, supportive community?
Reiterating the Kantian aesthetic of the beautiful as that, which generates comfort through its finiteness, breast cancer market culture turns direct and uncomfortable discussion around the disease into a pink metonymy, trying to beautify and keep it in check. In this sense, cancer becomes beautiful only as far as it is a profitable commodity. This however reflects not a society’s schooling in accepting the unpresentable within presentation, but the tendency to mask uncomfortable topics under the one-size-fits-all awareness-raising
Dakari 256 enterprise, echoing Ehrenreich’s views discussed in the previous chapter. In this perspective, the facile politicization of art renders the work easily consumable, without however endorsing further discussion on its aesthetic qualities.
Kata’s embodiment finally occurs when a group of teenage girls approach her outside the café—the place to celebrate survivorship. It is in this odd company, who gasps at her scars and wants to know if “this is what breast cancer looks like,” that survival happens. This is the moment she arrives into a full understanding of the power of voice when heard. She ends her story in the same upbeat tone giving a piece of advice: “on every occasion that you have to deal with something that makes you feel, small, odd, or uncomfortable, take your shirt off, metaphorically—or literally, and show your community who you are; our survival depends on it.” Adding abundant self-sarcasm to the account of this awkward moment, Katan reinstates its creative possibilities: “Humor,” she says, “springs from a place of fear, discomfort, vulnerability, and otherness.” Laughing at cancer, therefore, breaks the taboo of silence, pity, and pretentious political correctness, and turns out to be both transforming and liberating.
“Fighting Cancer with Dance”
The last story restores the rich expressive qualities of the cancer-as-battle metaphor previously vilified by Sontag. Classical Indian dancer Ananda Shankar Jayant’s “Fighting
Cancer with Dance” weaves together the authority of contemporary medical discourse and the dynamics of Hindu spirituality and art. Rather than gravitating towards the supernatural, the metaphor she employs draws on the Jungian concept of a collective unconscious; Durga, the eighteen-armed warrior goddess of Hindu pantheon, who rides a lion and battles Evil, becomes her muse and role model.
Dakari 257
Shankar Jayant’s storytelling is a purely rasic performance the way it combines narration, music, and dance. She draws from the nine rasas of Indian theatre, each rasa corresponding to a basic emotion common to all human beings. The emotion she focuses in particular is fear. She describes how cancer taught her anew what fear is but also how to overcome it. She gives an account of how dance set her on a journey inwards, where she could mine the strength to subsequently rise above the constraining borders of her diseased body and become connected with the cosmos.
The spirituality of her dance, which in Hindu philosophy holds the healing powers of prayer, is also aesthetically rendered as a pictorial metaphor. Shankar Jayant sees Durga as a symbol that encompasses all human experience, therefore choosing to attribute human rather than divine proportions to the goddess: “I think that we human beings created the gods we believe in, so those stories really reflect our own,” she says (“Q&A”). She, therefore, imagines herself as the goddess in possession of a powerful arsenal to battle cancer.
Through this tapestry of metaphors, Shankar Jayant rediscovers the inborn predisposition of human beings to storytelling, which we have unlearned to possess through centuries of positivist education and scientific abstraction. Hers is a call to reconnect with the
Jungian collective unconscious that runs through all human beings regardless of cultural and historical specificities. Stories are not just stories, but the path towards the re-mystification of our existence and the re-enchantment of the world. Thus, speaking in English on an internationally-accessed platform further substantiates her argument on universal connectedness.
Shifting from narration to performance, she impresses a multisensorial experience to the audience. This becomes particularly felt once she starts performing a traditional Indian dance. The expressiveness of her face concurs with the symbolic gestures of her arms and hands, and the ritualistic labor of her feet. Each part of the body delivers its own performance
Dakari 258 and rhymes with the rest weaving a layered kinaesthesia. As she dances, her feet, painted in vermilion, sketch the outline of a lion, on a white piece of cloth spread on the ground, which is raised high and is fully visible to the audience. This is the visualization of the battle metaphor that has sustained her journey through illness and has informed her dance aesthetics.
What Shankar Jayant’s intersemiotic performance proposes is a radically altered perception of the diseased subject. She constructs the image of the diseased female subject as a cancer Amazon, echoing the way Lorde imagined herself in her fight against cancer. Even though Sontag has consistently criticized the militaristic metaphor of cancer as warfare,
Shankar Jayant mobilizes it to strengthen her inner resources and affirm agency over her body. She entirely rejects the role of victim and creatively explores the aesthetic possibilities of battle metaphors. Transforming her inner strength into narration, dance, and painting she wants to be known not as a cancer survivor, but as a cancer conqueror. To conquer is not only to win in battle; it also means to possess, to make one’s own, and expand around it. This is perhaps the most radically expressed embodiment, which reconciles the warring states of the self and attempts to tame the errant part to obedience.
Closing comments
By means of the TED global platform, Ensler, Katan, and Shankar Jayant commemorate their losses, even as they educate audiences. They talk about survival even as they make it happen. The three storytellers thus disengage themselves from the modern politics of victimhood and the market aesthetics of survivorship to accept the role of witness.
Becoming a witness, seen in Frank’s and Lorde’s writings, means being responsible for telling what happened, and giving pain a voice so that the pain will not be wasted.
These TED stories are successful not only in sharing the pain but also in making art
Dakari 259 out of it. Cancer aesthetics, a contradiction in terms for Sontag, has been long barbed behind stereotypes that considered cancer to be too blatantly associated with death to be aesthetically pleasing as an artifact. In the times of a thriving pink-ribboned industry and black-comic TV culture, when words like “Hollywood” and “mastectomy” appear in a single headline, it is understood that, regardless of whether cancer stories can be made into art, they have certainly been made into a best-selling product. And even if breaking the silence on cancer is indeed a victory in its own terms, popularization is no better to demonization. As Katan’s case, in particular, illustrates, the best-selling and the obscene are only two scars apart.
Cancer aesthetics, as seen in these TED talks, is now acquiring a solid disciplinary character. As such, it has also been observed to transform performance aesthetics the way it fuses the performative, the informative, and the transformative. These cultural events expand beyond the conference venue and the hear-and-now of the stage to the infinite web space towards a virtual and diverse audience. Rather than compromising the robustness of live theatre, however, they breathe new air to the Arts and the Humanities, where TED hybridity and cancer-related performance can be accommodated and implemented.
Conclusion to the chapter: Towards a pedagogy of suffering
If the previous chapter shed light on the marketability of suffering and its ways of subsuming the unpresentable under the spectacular, this chapter has examined the dynamics of the embodied presence of the “wounded storyteller” and its transformative pedagogy. By means of the “pedagogy of suffering,” Frank states, “agency is restored to ill people; testimony is given equal space alongside professional expertise” (Wounded Storyteller 145).
Frank’s concept of a pedagogy of suffering rhymes with Lyotard’s view of postmodernism as a rereading of modernity and as the mining of alternative idioms that adequately accommodate this new accumulation of knowledge on the past, as well as current
Dakari 260 experiences. Frank’s model does not replace modernist medical discourse, but rather acknowledges the “possibility for shifting between frameworks as required by responding to the ill” (145). Postmodern illness culture has, in this sense, parted from modernist medicine’s tendency to simplify, explain, and eradicate all suffering; it has now redirected its focus on making suffering accepted as an intrinsic feature of the human condition and, on this basis, negotiating the need for this human condition to be aesthetically as well as politically elaborated.
The problematic co-existence of the suffering and the performing body has yielded rich aesthetic output in the cases examined here. Far from inexpressible and incomprehensible, the experience of cancer can be made into highly affective art that has certainly a lot of transformative knowledge to impart on everyone involved.
Dakari 261
Chapter 9
Schlingensief’s “Death” in Venice: art in (spite of) suffering
The great power, however, rests in uncertainty, in the conviction that there are no solutions but only transformations and changes of form . . . that, to me, is not fatalism, it is a very big yes to life.
Art becomes interesting when we face something we cannot altogether explain.
(Schlingensief qtd. in Schweeger 328, 329)
Christoph Schlingensief (1960-2010) was a West German filmmaker, stage director and artist whose highly provocative work presented a critical approach to taboo political topics primarily in German cultural history and society. Throughout his career, which extends from experimental film, theatre, and opera to street performance, pseudo-serious political intervention, and debatable human rights activism, he negotiated the very idea of borders in their national, political, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions. Repeatedly “casting himself as himself” (Cornish 191) Schlingensief’s art and life was hard to distinguish well until the moment of his untimely death of cancer; that too, was explicitly thematized in his art.
It should be noted that Schlingensief’s work for the theater is a true challenge for a non-German-speaking researcher, as it has not been systematically translated or fully digitally archived in English.25 It is also difficult in so many other ways, as it was almost
25 The website www.schlingensief.org is the most inclusive and immediately accessible introduction to his multifarious art for a non-German audience, as it contains digital platforms for his works for the theatre and opera, installation projects, action performances, etc. with adequate description and criticism in English, accompanied by photos, footage, and useful links. Additional information that puts his entire body of work and his artistic legacy into perspective can be found in the catalogue for the German pavilion at the 54th Biennale international exhibition of art in Venice, edited by curator Susanne Gaensheimer (2011). However, the most
Dakari 262 never based on standard script or other literary sources. His work for the theater as well as his various performances were an inter-generic, inter-semiotic pastiche of everything that he could get inspiration from. He was an unapologetic plagiarist—he even plagiarised himself, repeatedly copying and pasting his older film and video material into later works—which was perhaps the only constant in the breathtaking volume of styles, genres, and subject-matters he dealt with. The present analysis therefore can only give a hint of the depth and breadth of his aesthetic idiom, focusing on a milestone in both his life and art: the thematization of suffering and dying as sources of collective anxiety and as occasions for political and aesthetic debates.
Politicizing theatre/theatricalizing politics: Schlingensief’s idiom
Schlingensief’s work has sprung out of the new Europe and its evolution since the fall of the Berlin wall. The unification of Germany had a sweeping effect in the rearticulation of
European territory, especially with regards to inclusion and exclusion criteria the thriving
American capitalism posed. Borders were no longer discernible, while oppositions reaching deep into the ideological core of national identities were seen as fascist remnants.
The post-wall era was a transitional state in the history of the European constellation, a “work in progress,” as Birringer comments, verging between “a common culture” and “a growing consensus that would overcome the many historical particularities and the mosaic- like regionalism of cultures in Europe,” while its former-Eastern part was striving to catch up with the capitalist evolution of Western Europe (27).
As an artist, Schlingensief represented post-unification Germany in the nineties, “a period during which peace-loving Europe failed to understand its own worst nightmares,” in
Johannes Birringer’s words, namely the racist/nationalist outburst in the increasingly
noteworthy academic collection, in fact the first one in English, that offers significant critical insights to Schlingensief’s hybrid art through three decades of practice and across diverse genres including film, television, activism, opera, and theater is Christoph Schlingensief: Art Without Borders, edited by Tara Forrest and Anna Teresa Scheer (2010).
Dakari 263 multiethnic and transnational Europe (31). Anticipating the precarious unity of European states under a loosely defined state of peace and equality, he belonged to a generation of politically alert artists who used the post-wall East German bankrupt socialism to “make—as malignantly as possible—the disease in the national body of Germany the subject matter of theatre and to create feelings of uncertainty” (Castorf qtd. in Umathum 59).
His works, ranging among film, opera, theatre, street performance, and installation projects, register his “struggle with tradition” be it historical, cultural, or aesthetic (Seesslen
333). His primary source of stimulus was Germany’s Nazi past and the chain of events that led to the reunification of Germany.26 It was some time around the foundation of the
European Union soon after the fall of the wall and shortly before the Balkan massacre was to take place. This is a period of precarious unity, of globalized economy and its double standards and of a loosely defined peace among nations. And while warfare in its WWII conception has been (almost) eliminated, “[the] widening gap in living standards between the prosperous North and the impoverished, chaotic, and self-destructive regions of the South” have been some of the new political challenges (Habermas 59). This explains the notoriety
Schlingensief gained with his trashy cult German Trilogy films, made between 1989 and
1992. The second part, in particular, The German Chainsaw Massacre, is a low budget film released shortly after the reunification of Germany, which portrays the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall as a cannibalistic slaughterhouse where West German butchers turn East
Germans into sausage.
Schlingensief was a “modern-day Joseph Beuys” (Diez and Reinhardt). He redefined art by dissolving its principles of separation from life, employing form, style, and content in a self-neutralizing way, pairing art with non-art in his open-plan aesthetics. Ranging from
Dadaism and Surrealism to pop art, Fluxus, Happening, Situationist art, and Beuys’s “social
26 For a discussion of Shlingensief’s filmography, see Vander Lugt 39-56.
Dakari 264 sculpture” (a conception of art that sprang form the experimentation of the sixties and sought to engage the entire community into a living and changing work of art), an array of tendencies and techniques have been major sources of influence for Schlingensief—the list of his aesthetic tools could go on endlessly.
Most significantly, his performances verged between appropriation and disappropriation, between who gets to be member of “we the people” as opposed to the others who do not, along with each side’s clashing idioms and the problem of compromise.
Schlingensief’s public space actions brought forth the dynamics of the assembly as Butler approaches it, and its political, ethical and aesthetic stakes. This spirit of fluidity and questioning was also obvious in the participants he chose to collaborate with in his various projects, people carrying a certain stigma or representing a certain issue: unemployed and destitute (Chance 2000), mentally disabled (Freakstars 3000), ill (Art and Vegetables), foreigners (Please Love Austria; Via Intolleranza II), or former neo-Nazis (Hamlet). 27
Schlingensief himself was always out there, constantly making his presence felt through megaphones, costumes, and media coverage, “[conveying] precisely the idea of the commodified spectacle and mass consumption of art” (Ginwala 50). He was very fond of confusing his audience through blurring the boundaries between art and life and thus putting the limits of representation and theatricality into test.
In 1999, for instance, he boarded on a ferry in New York in order to “sink the garbage of German history,” which he carried in an urn, into the waters of the Hudson River (Diez and Reinhardt). For what audience was he performing this ritual? The passers-by, the media, or himself? What is undeniable, though, is that this act, among others, anatomized the process of theatricality, “which has to do with a ‘gaze’ that postulates and creates a distinct, virtual space belonging to the other, from which fiction can emerge” (Féral 97).
27 For further information on Schlingensief, see http://www.schlingensief.com/start_eng.php. For an insightful, contextualized critical assessment of most of his works, see Forrest and Scheer’s collection of essays.
Dakari 265
Instead of merely politicizing theatre, which Croce and Sontag would have perceived as pushing a specific agenda or serving the art market, Schlingensief “[theatricalized] politics” (Irmer 62) in a disturbing and confusing way: the agenda, if there were any really, was certainly not that clear, while its marketability was highly dubious.28 A case in point is his site-specific interactive performance/public action Foreigners Out (Please Love Austria!) that took place in Vienna in 2000. The title ironically censures Austria’s xenophobic and nationalist sentiments. The occasion that triggered this project was a government coalition that for the first time included the right-wing and nationalistic Freedom Party of Austria.
Please Love Austria took place in front of the Vienna State Opera house, within an offhand detention centre consisting of shipping containers and steel fencing. Part performance and part reality TV show, in the then omnipresent Big Brother-like format, it broadcast live 12 asylum seekers as they competed for sympathy votes from Austrian citizens in order to assure their stay in Austria.29 Life inside the container was broadcast via the internet, with members of the public invited to vote on who should be evicted, while the entire project was filmed for a documentary. Schlingensief’s role constantly and ambiguously oscillated between showman/ presenter and himself.
In a brief evaluation, this piece created a multi-layered multimedia experience that blurred the boundary between art and politics, exposed the manipulability of the public, repurposed public space as a site for political action and art, and provoked the audience to think and speak for themselves, while being politically and aesthetically educated. Most
28 Schlingensief’s early cult films and public interventions that exposed Germany’s uneasiness with its fascist past as well as the precarious unification after the fall of the Berlin wall turned him into “a source of friction in the political machinery” (Irmer 62). Zoe Lescaze notes that a large part of the audience would leave the theater midway through any given screening, not only because they were offended by the film’s graphic imagery, but also because they felt “uncomfortable with his relentless interrogation of Germany’s post- reunification culture and its fascist part.” Cinematographer Voxi Bäerenklau, his friend and collaborator in The German Chainsaw Massacre, said that “[Schlingensief] was not very successful in the movies in Germany, because everybody hated him,” while recounting how “I had to deny that I worked with Christoph here in Germany because I couldn’t get a job at that time . . . until 2008” (qtd. in Lescaze). 29 For an analysis and commentary on Please Love Austria!, see Varney 105-121; Cornish 191-97; Bishop 41-4; Thompson 24; and, Poet’s documentary film Foreigners Out!: Schlingensief’s Container (2002).
Dakari 266 significantly, Please Love Austria, like all of Schlingensief’s fluid works, involved the spectators creatively, allowing them to complete the artwork in their own right, and substantiating Lichte’s view of the performative aesthetics of co-presence of actors and spectators.
“And you don’t understand, ‘cause it’s bigger than you:”30
Schlingensief performing/dying
Cancer stroke Schlingensief early in 2008. He was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer (though a non-smoker) and had one of his lungs surgically removed. Despite several months of chemotherapy, new metastases were detected in the remaining lung. The onset of his illness was some four years earlier, the doctors said. That was when Schlingensief was directing Wagner’s opera Parsifal for the Bayreuth Festival in 2004. The dark insinuations of that work, which Schlingensief saw as “Wagner’s work of farewell to the world” planted in him the idea that art had started overwriting his life and that one day Parsifal would bring on cancer and death (Hegemann 199).
Schlingensief was vaguely implied to be a hypochondriac, obsessively trying to persuade himself and others that he was sick. As Hegemann ponders in retrospect,
“everything he did during the years before his cancer diagnosis [his obsession with illness as a metaphor and the ritualization of suffering in his films and early theater and opera productions] only served to prepare him for the final public engagement with his illness and slow death” (203). Instead of glorifying dying, however, he rather sought to learn from it, and teach others how to “fail splendidly” (qtd. in Hegemann 204). This is why he went public about his condition soon afterwards. Beuys’s “show your wound” art manifesto became his motto in life and in art. Obviously he was not in possession of any unique insight that he
30 Schlingensief qtd. in Hegemann 205.
Dakari 267 wished to share. He only wanted to show how “annoyed and offended and hurt [he was] by this thing” at the age of 47, opening up his inner torment to a public discussion (“I Sensed
Death”). With respect to his attitude toward his declining health, Schlingensief once said:
I can of course remain silent about my illness, my fear of death, but I don’t want to. I
want to talk about sickness, dying and death. To talk against this culture of ostracism
that bans the ill from speaking. I am moulding a social sculpture from my illness. And
I am working on an extended concept of illness. It isn’t about being a delegate for the
suffering; it is simply about [generating] visibility” (qtd. in Malzacher, “Citizen”
191).
Schlingensief’s art would thus take a personal turn, which was no less aesthetic. Once actual illness stroke, Schlingensief was forced back into the painfully unbearable reality of his own body. And yet, instead of allowing his health condition to destroy the conditions of theatricality, what Féral calls “the actor’s return to the point of departure” (104),
Schlingensief reincorporated the toll of cancer into his art: he merged person and persona and developed a new contract with his audience, shifting the perceptual dynamics of his presence from subject to object of the artistic process.
Schlingensief channelled his experience into several productions, thematized as
"wanting to live and having to die": Der Zwischenstand der Dinge ([The Current State of
Things] Maxim Gorki Theater, Berlin 2008) the Fluxus Oratorio Eine Kirche der Angst vor dem Fremden in mir ([A Church of Fear vs. The Alien Within] Ruhrfestspiele 2008), and the
Ready-made Opera Mea Culpa (Vienna Burgtheater 2009). In 2009, Kiepenheuer & Witsch published his So schön wie hier kann es im Himmel gar nicht sein! Tagebuch einer
Krebserkrankung [It Can’t Be as Beautiful in Heaven as Here: Diary of a Cancer Victim], which became a bestseller in Germany. In his memoir, Schlingensief explored his fears and
Dakari 268 hopes in the face of illness, as well as his idiosyncratic spirituality and connection with
God.31
Schlingensief’s Project Africa
In 2008 Schlingensief also began working on the ambitious large-scale project of an opera village in Burkina Faso—located in West Africa, one of the world’s poorest countries.
Its name would be Remdoogo and would include a school, film and music classrooms, leisure and housing facilities, accommodation for visitors, and a theater stage with festival hall and rehearsal rooms. The idea was to create a space not for the dissemination of Western culture, but one where local students and people could access and understand their own culture, create their own images, and integrate art, and world art in general, into their lives. His ambition was to mold a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art, or all-embracing form of art as Wagner had imagined and as Beuys crystallized in his idea of “social sculpture:” art’s potential to effect major transformations through its involvement with society and environment (9).
As Schlingensief himself stated in his address at the groundbreaking ceremony for the opera village in early 2010: “Art has more to offer than l’art pour l’art. Art, when it is at its best, is an organism that grows out of life and allies itself with life, allowing entirely new forces to emerge. Politics, too, must be artful, and the ways people relate to each other ought to become our world’s greatest form of art!” (“Address” 103). In keeping with Beuys's idea of the social sculpture and the expanded concept of art, therefore, this project sought to merge art and life and to serve as a research laboratory for the reunion of art and non-art.
In the Africa project, Schlingensief also saw the link between heaven and earth, and the spirituality and joy that flows out of the “necessary connection of art and non-art”
(“Address” 104). Being connected to other human beings and to nature would thus lead to
31 For an analysis of Schlingensief’s individual religion as crystallized in his cancer memoir, see Popp- Baier.
Dakari 269 spiritual and physical healing, reminding us of Ensler’s newly acquired desire to be in the body of the world, bridging the inner universe with the outer. Also, as his still-evolving live sculpture of Remdoogo proves, Schlingensief embodies Lyotard’s idea of the artist/philosopher that is attentive to the demand for new idioms and mines aesthetic principles out of his ongoing artistic research and practice. Well after he is gone, his artwork continues to disclose itself to the world. 32
Schlingensief’s final production, Via Intolleranza II (2010), sprang out of his encounter with Africa, is the synthesis of Schlingensief's years of looking closely at African and German culture. In this work, which was inspired by Luigi Nono’s ground-breaking opera Intolleranza 1960 (1960) that deals with racism and intolerance towards refugees, he articulated his concerns for the Third World, while he also performed a self-critique as a representative of the dominant Western culture that has always leeched on the rich resources of those virgin lands. Between the remnants of colonial politics and the vision of a future artistic transfer between the two continents, Via Intolleranza II attempts to go beyond historical prejudices and mutual resentment to instigate a process of shared educational and cultural exchange.
The play featured actors and artists from Burkina Faso and Germany. The plot is divided into ten tableaus. Stage-left there is a hut and a bench, in the centre a presenters’ table and next to it a lectern, while on the right there is the interior of a hut; in between these installations there are two white curtains on which chapter headings and films are projected; in the background there is a band. As always, he used a variety of media: projections, music, dance, and words. The play premiered at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich in June 2010
32 On 5-6 February 2015, a two-day interdisciplinary conference was hosted by The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, London, with the title “The Transformative Power of Art – Richard Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk and Christoph Schlingensief’s participatory experiment: Opera Village Africa.” The aim of this conference was to explore Christoph Schlingensief's participatory art project, Opera Village Africa, against the backdrop of Richard Wagner's idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk from the perspective of multiple disciplines including anthropology, art history, cultural studies, history, musicology, philosophy, postcolonial studies and theatre studies (see conference page).
Dakari 270 and was subsequently performed at the 2011 Theatertreffen Festival in Berlin, as well as other festivals across Europe after Schlingensief died.33
Although this play was not directly related to his illness, Schlingensief was indeed very ill while producing it. While being healthy enough to perform, Schlingensief would appear on stage at the end of the play attacking European culture, giving in to “a rather
German selfhatred” and his overemphasized personal guilt as representative of dominant
European culture (Brembeck). Fully aware of his progressive illness, Schlingensief had an actor play “him” and interact with a hologram-like projection of himself and a screening of his trip to Africa, in a multi-layered display of mediated presence and physical absence
(Cornish 192).
Critical responses to this play expressed scepticism over its ethics. Cornish, for example comments on its unclear stance between art and “neocolonialist charity” (192), especially in the caricature-like way natives from Burkina Faso were presented. He writes:
“Schlingensief uses metatheatrical techniques to comment on colonialist representations of
Africa, even as he (a privileged European) puts Africans onstage as ‘African’ characters and, thereby, represents them.” Indeed, one cannot but agree with Cornish, that “Schlingensief
[brought] dancing Africans to his European audience and [asked] for our money” (196, 194).
Similarly, in his review of the play, Brembeck observes that “Schlingensief despairs of Europe’s culture, its global claim, coupled with a lack of vitality, its apolitical attitude, and its inability to accept what is foreign as foreign, and not just merely as exotic ornamentation,” which cannot in effect articulate a clear solution to the problem of African self- representation. In Brembeck’s view, Via Intolleranza II is profoundly problematic:
Africa for [Schlingensief] doesn’t open up an alternative, and the old Europe with its
cultural institutions (Goethe-Institute, Bayreuth, etc.) that support him stands in the
33 For more production details see VIA INTOLLERANZA II web page.
Dakari 271
way of his concept of a politically radical and existential theatre . . . Now it remains to
be seen whether he wants to take Artaud’s path into artistic isolation and loneliness,
or whether he prefers to endure the increasingly radical conflict between his dreams of
revolution and the event-hungry culture of Europe that is in love with pure aesthetics.
It thus becomes obvious that Schlingensief’s artistic practises prior to his illness had stirred multiple reactions on both aesthetic and ethical grounds.
Such debates, however, dissolved after Schlingensief’s death. Nevertheless, Via
Intolleranza II would continue without his live presence. His hologram, his filmed self, and his recorded voice were a self-sarcastic final touch upon it: “Schlingensief will not be coming tonight. He won’t be here ever again. . . . Christoph is, I mean, I am . . . ” the actor playing
Schlingensief says (qtd. in Cornish 196). The play’s focus then is redirected to its creator, mourning/mocking his absence and articulating his last will regarding a rebirth in Africa, which was perhaps the most effective part of his love/hate response to neocolonialist neocolonialism. In fact, Schlingensief’s final lines before the curtain become all the more powerful once reflected upon through his absence, approaching death not as the end of life, but as a chance for relocating life elsewhere: “I want you to eat my dead body, digest me, and shit me out. I want you to spread the shit on plants as fertilizer, and nourish yourself again”
(qtd. in Cornish 196).
This is the difference between standard testimonial art related to the experience of cancer—or, even worse, in Croce’s derisory term, “victim art,” and Schlingensief’s art of cancer: that he consciously turned himself into an artwork. Shifting from political parody to personal tragedy, his theatrical pieces on illness and death reveal his existential fear along with deep-seated catholic/capitalist guilt, “a mixture of disgust and fascination” (Diez and
Reinhardt), which, as will be discussed later, engenders a sublime feeling through the presentation of the unpresentable. Most interestingly, these works merge suffering—his
Dakari 272 personal devastating experience of cancer, with recovery—the Opera Village project in
Africa.
The Current State of Things (2008)
The first part of Schlingensief’s cancer trilogy is based on tape recordings he started to put together shortly after his diagnosis in January 2008. Resisting the cultural taboos that traditionally have enveloped cancer in silence, this was his first attempt to open himself up and talk about illness and dying. Resisting the disintegrating effect of pain on language, as
Scarry posits, his later art was dedicated precisely to talking in defence of the ill and the disabled that have been banned by society as a sight that is offensive, obscene, and troubling.
“I am moulding a social sculpture of my illness,” he said; “[it]t is simply about [generating] visibility” (qtd. in Umathum 191).
During performance, Florian Malzacher reports, a screen was placed very close to the first rows of seats, making the spectacle extremely intimate. In these tapes, he was heard dictating report of medical exams:
Have this death cut out of you . . . as soon as possible. . . . And what comes then . . .
is a new life. . . . It’ll be quite different from your previous one, with no big plans for
the next year or so. . . . The prognosis for this kind of thing is not good. . . . Only a
few people make it . . . (qtd. in Malzacher, “Citizen” 192)
With respect to the above display, Malzacher asks: “Do we want to see this? Do we want to get so close to him? Is it honest sharing, exhibitionism, or emotional blackmail?” (“Citizen”
191). These tapes are thus indicative of his overall problematic attitude toward illness, as a blessing befallen on the artist, and as a visceral fear of one’s encounter with death. His questions echo Croce’s objections to Jones’s piece as a narcissistic projection of the artist and as emotional blackmail. Malzacher does not take a clear stance as to whether he considers
Dakari 273 this to be aesthetically legitimate or not. Considering his comments to be an honest response as a member of the audience, an undeniable discomfort is evident here.
When these recordings were later reproduced at the Biennale exhibition, the artist’s mediated presence remained the same as penetrating, as it was intensified by the reality of his death. One could see and hear him cry, which was in complete juxtaposition with his childhood images looping around, or the visual accounts of his dynamic presence in his performances; it politicized the primal fear of death that is immanent in all human beings.
Appropriately moderated through a computer, it also played out society’s fascination with fetishized suffering, the way we are all familiar with, absorbing it in controlled numbing doses through a screen. Either way, it demanded that we listen.
The Church of Fear vs. the Alien Within (2008)
This work was conceived for the 2008 Ruhrtriennal and brings together Christoph
Schlingensief's own personal experiences and the universal and existential themes of life, suffering, and death. As its title indicates, this piece draws on the metaphorical association of cancer with the Abject, the way it was approached by Julia Kristeva, as the other that, even though part of the self, threatens the self with death. Sontag, in particular, detects serious distortions in the rhetoric that surrounds cancer that have to do with the disease as the
“overwhelming or obliterating of consciousness (by a mindless It).” This is the disease of the
“Other,” which lends to the science-fiction scenario of “alien” or “mutant” cells invading the organism and obliterating normal cells (Illness 69). The motif of a gigantic cancer cell dividing and multiplying that loops over in the projection screen above the stage substantiates the thingness of cancer, which in Sontag’s words, is the ultimate degeneration, “the body tissues turning to something hard,” or the other within (14). The cells’ equipmentality is thus
Dakari 274 overcome by their thingness, which could be seen as the ultimate biotic narcissism and a strong metaphor of Schlingensief’s self-absorbing obsession with illness in his work.
In Christian discourse, this alien invasion becomes a “demonic possession—tumors are ‘malignant’ or ‘benign,’ like forces,” urging patients to “seek out faith healers, to be exorcised” (Illness 70). Staged as a Catholic Mass, the performance thus brought into play the idea of guilt imposed on Christians by the Catholic Church—an allusion to
Schlingensief’s own troubled relationship with religion and God, and his ongoing negotiation of Christian Heritage and the troubling language of Old Testament (Hoff 218). By means of a series of associations between his internalized Catholic guilt and the practice of his art, in particular the lure of death he experienced while directing Wagner’s Parsifal, cancer is implied to having befallen on him as the consequence of guilt, both spiritual and artistic.
The unpresentability of suffering is further tackled in Schlingensief’s usual style of bricolage, as indicated in the montage of quotations by Heiner Müller, Joseph Beuys and others, and music by Wagner and Bach, interlaced with Schlingensief’s recordings of medical reports and filmed sequences portraying him at a young age playing on the beach. A quote taken from Salvador Elizondo, a Mexican writer of the sixties, evocatively captures the painful awareness of our ephemerality that cannot be fully contained in institutionalized discourse, be it literature, art, science, or religion:
Is it possible that we are nothing but a lie? Are we a film, maybe, a film that merely
lasts for an instant? Are we the thoughts of a madman? Are we a typo? . . . A future
fact that not yet unravels? Are we but an unintelligible sign, scribbled on a steamed
window on a rainy day? . . . Are we creatures and things, conjured up by a formula of
dark art? Are we something forgotten? Are we just a heap of words? The proof that
nobody acknowledges? Are we an incident, perpetuated in unreadable writing? . . . I
don’t know. (“CHURCH OF FEAR - Fluxus-Oratorio by Christoph Schlingensief”)
Dakari 275
Schlingensief’s preoccupation with Christian symbols is obvious in the exact reconstruction of the nave where he used to be an altar boy, where a blasphemous imitation of catholic rituals is about to take place. The props of this liturgy are as follows: Schlingensief’s x-rays are exhibited on a lit board, a hospital bed, an assortment of Fluxus-inspired objects, for example Beuys’s dead hare, and a large-scale drawing of a skeleton-beast with the skull of an animal, erect penis and red lungs, intensifying the twisted ritualization of the setting. Filmic projections of the artist’s childhood are counterpoised by his much older—ravaged by illness—self. Big screens were spread around the walls, projecting Schlingensief’s usual abstract motifs, extracts from past productions, and his own dictaphone recordings.
Schlingensief’s mediatized scream is at once estranging and real: “Please don’t touch me.
Please don’t touch me now. I don’t want anyone to touch me anymore” (qtd. in Malzacher,
“Citizen” 191). The pews that have replaced normal theater seats turn the audience members into a congregation of this neo-Dada “sect.”
The play takes an interesting turn towards the end. Impersonating Jesus during the mass/performance, Schlingensief himself appears on stage, which brims with a mixed crowd of actors and audience members, and distributes the Eucharist; however, unlike Christ, he would say to the spectators/communicants, “This is not my body. This is your body” (Diez and Reinhardt). This could be seen as the ultimate act of blasphemy or as the artist’s self- assured hubris. In all its eccentricity, this scene most significantly crossed the borders of performance, as it reminded the part-takers of the dying performer and of the uncontestable reality their own deaths.
Hoff parallels A Church of Fear with the public suffering of John Paul II as he lay dying, witnessed by millions of people. This, however, was not a theatrical production controlled by directors. As the dying man would burst into tears while lifting his arm to bless the crowds outside his window, what one witnessed was plain and simple suffering. For him
Dakari 276 and those who believed, this was the triptych of suffering, dying, and overcoming death, which is what the Liturgy celebrates (Hoff 217). In the case of Schlingensief the dying artist, the motif of Christian martyrdom and the rise of the artist to the sanctity of the crucified
Christ is played out only to be disrupted by means of the very language that has rendered it sacred: “And yet Jesus isn’t there. And God isn’t there either. And Mother Mary isn’t there either. It’s all completely dead . . . The whole petit-bourgeois shit is no longer there . . .
Amen” (Schlingensief qtd. in Hoff 218). Apart from the privation of sanctified language, the artist articulates here the ultimate privation, God. The collapse of the “petit-bourgeois” metaphysical fable is not only suggested by the deconstruction of religious language whose ritualistic performativity is now canceled to the point of blasphemy. Actors and spectators are immersed in this “fraud,” the grand scale replica of a church.
Re-investing this religious performative with new meaning, Schlingensief’s provocation is not only moral (at least to those whose Christian sensibilities might be offended) but also meta-theatrical. The assembly of bodies occasioned by the art events though not entitled with the capacity to generate those conditions that would constitute it a performative, that is, legitimate, religious ritual—hence the blasphemy—validate another form of performativity: that of giving up on the authority over the work of art. In this way,
Schlingensief lets the work of art be, in Heidegger’s terms. By standing on its own, the art event is released of all previous meaning; it is reified, and thus susceptible to original contemplation.
Despite the apparent self-gratification in his messianic descent to death, doing this performance along the way, Schlingensief’s act does not glorify suffering and death as ends in themselves. Rather than “a masochistic mysticism of suffering” though, this piece celebrated life even in suffering” (Hoff 217). The metaphysical void the privation of God left behind is cancelled by performance, by the here-and-now actors and spectators share. The
Dakari 277 sublime feeling lies precisely in the affirmation, by means of the ontology of performance, that “something will happen, despite everything, within this threatening void, that something will take place and will announce that everything is not over” (Lyotard, Inhuman 84). To
Lyotard, and to Schlingensief as well, “that place is mere ‘here’,” in performance, and in life.
Mea Culpa: A ReadyMade Opera (2009)
Circular motifs, intertextual loans, and bricolage are also at the centre of Mea Culpa.
In particular, as indicated by its title, this piece was inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s readymades: ordinary manufactured objects that were detached from their milieu of equipmentality, modified and repositioned, and subsequently exhibited as art. The best- known example is his 1917 work Fountain, an ordinary porcelain urinal that was submitted for the exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists but was rejected by the committee, even though it was claimed that all works submitted would be exhibited. Duchamp’s readymades sought to knock standard art off its pedestal by turning to non-aesthetic sources for inspiration with practically no intervention by the artist. Asserting its self-representational nature, the readymade artwork plays with approval and rejection, aestheticity and banality, as well as the sovereignty of the artist as the originator of art (Masheck 10-13).
In fact, Duchamp may be the first modern artist to literally practice God's prohibition against “graven” objects by merely placing the object in view, rather than creating it. As Jerry
Saltz comments,
Duchamp adamantly asserted that he wanted to "de-deify" the artist. The readymades
provide a way around inflexible either-or aesthetic propositions… Fountain is what's
called an "acheropoietoi," an image not shaped by the hands of an artist. Fountain
brings us into contact with an original that is still an original but that also exists in an
altered philosophical and metaphysical state.
Dakari 278
In Saltz’s view, such an art is “a manifestation of the Kantian sublime: A work of art that transcends a form but that is also intelligible, an object that strikes down an idea while allowing it to spring up stronger.”
Another parameter in the criticism that the readymade invites is the issue of the true being of the artwork. The matter-of-factness of the equipment, its everyday purpose, or what
Heidegger refers to as its “readiness-to-hand,” is circumscribed by its estranging new existence outside the ordinary (Being and Time, 136). Heidegger posits that the isolation and displacement of the thing outside the pragmatic premises of its usefulness “[dwindles] the equipmental being” of the thing, and reveals instead its thingness. This reallocation of focus from equipmentality to thingness is only possible, according to Heidegger, when we bring ourselves before the artwork, the picture, painting, sculpture, or other visual representation of the thing (“Origin” 15).
It is within the above theoretical framework that Schlingensief’s Mea Culpa occurs as a readymade, in the margins of the principles of the creation of art and yet at the heart of the essence of being. The piece is realized as a montage of live performance, video material, sound, music, and projection of script. Passages taken from Goethe, Nitzsche, Žižek, Beuys,
Nancy, or Jelinek, are paired with Schlingensief’s own dictaphone notes, projections of older films and productions, or other already existing material, with “the principles of sampling, quoting, and steeling” as Malzacher remarks, “[being] carried to an extreme” (“Citizen” 196).
The action is broken down to three parts, and delivered on a rotating stage, spinning naturalistic scenery, like African landscapes or sanatorium rooms like those one encounters in
Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain, together with more abstract settings. The three parts reflect three concepts of healing: the first is wellness and Ayuverda; the second,
Dionysian orgy, shamanism, and Catholicism; and, the third, seeking recovery in Africa. The third aspect, in particular, reveals Schlingensief’s ambitious project of constructing an opera
Dakari 279 village in Africa: a place of ongoing cultural exchange and freedom from the stifling aesthetic principles associated with Eurocentrism, but also a place where he could seek his own healing (Malzacher, “Citizen” 197).
Amid this hailstorm of readymades, the artist/plagiarist wants from us to descent into the darkness of his illness as he experiences it, to bear witness to his progressive loss of command over his language and his body as those recedes to shattering effects of his cancer and suffer along with him. We do suffer, not only because we are swept by empathy for the tragic character, but also, and most significantly, because of the profound disconnection from all that is meaningful and given: control over language and our bodies/selves. Language as a discursive code is measured against its own effectiveness in containing suffering. The artist tests the trustworthiness of language, which is already always there, against the immensurability of the unpresentable: suffering and dying.
Scarry’s contested position on the failure of language to contain pain and illness informs Boris Groys’ approach to Schlingensief’s manipulation of discursive codes in Mea
Culpa. “In this instance,” Groys posits, “the failure of language does not mean that it breaks off, that it is interrupted and passes into silence . . . Language instead freezes, becomes a mere thing, a readymade” (192). Losing its capacity to signify, Groys implies, language is fossilized, and so is the metaphor of pain as a language-destroying agent. The feeling of sublime, then, which according to Kant should transpire once we are faced with the very limits of our reason to conceptually contain the object, becomes possible through the reification of the privation of language. Although the montage of quotes in sonic and pictorial fragments might be naturally fraught with a priori inscriptions, the fact that
Schlingensief disengaged them from their meaning-making context and dispersed them on the stage space cancels their equipmentality, an act that Heidegger perceives as the ultimate
Dakari 280 return of the object to its thingness, to what it really is without its history of assignment and purpose. The invisible essence of art is thus made visible.
In this perspective, the silence of symbols by means of their dislocation from their preset environment does not signal the end of representation; quite the contrary. The aestheticity of the event is relocated from standard representation to self-presentation. Groys identifies the ability of art to turn language into things rather the other way round as part of the modern artistic project of evacuation of meaning. With illness and death engendering an irreversible incapacitation of language, the artist responds with ritualizing this very process of privation.
Groys evocatively incorporates Schlingensief’s own suspicion that it was his work on directing Wagner’s Parsifal that brought cancer, the way it was infected by Wagner’s music,
“by the yeaning of death that sustains and shapes his music from within.” He takes
Schlingensief’s words further to interpret it as the impact of art on his body, as
Schlingensief’s own religious mystification and absorption: “As the Christians of a distant past believed that not only their happiness but also their suffering could come solely from
God, Schlingensief regards art alone as the source of happiness as well as suffering” (196).
Despite its critical insights, Groys’s analysis of the manipulation of language in Mea
Culpa does not go so far as to evaluate the reception of the artist’s ritualization of personal torment. How is the viewing congregation involved in the artist’s revelation of his extremely vulnerable state? In Groys’s view, Schlingensief’s thematization of personal fears would be reduced to a mere narcissistic self-affirmation, a blissful disobedience to the rules of the theatrical game, a solipsistic take on the torment of the subject. As such, it should only fall under a specific category of self-serving art that entirely disregards the invigorating communion between artist and audience and feeds on itself. This entirely opposes the
Beuysian principles of the energising power of chaos, as opposed to the inertia of the
Dakari 281 absolute order. Turning the fact of his own death into an obscure kind of personal religion, would therefore lead to the petrification of the chaos invoked by death. This chaos, however, by means of the fears, gut empathy, and reflex defence responses it triggers, is what involves the viewers who partake to this sharing. In order for art to provoke the mind and emotions, it has to be both de-institutionalized and desecrated in order to “[emerge] as real, chaotic, at times destructive menace” (Gebbers). The concept of religion, even if it is art that is idolized instead of a deity, has its own safety constraints: you either choose to believe it or not. The sublime experience of chaos, on the other hand, cannot but be total and inescapable. It also cannot be so easily contained. In this light, Groys’s argument does not do justice to the evocative sublime experience Mea Culpa is for audiences, the ground it breaks in the exploration of dark territories both in life and performance, but falls back instead on the stereotypical contemplation of the Romantic artist of earlier times as he consumes and is consumed by his art. This returns us to Sontag’s handling of the romanticized stereotypes of illness.
Subsuming this kind of transgressive art under the limiting framework of modernist tradition as Groys does, fails to acknowledge the postmodern aspect of the work as it is affirmed by the inter-semiotic techniques Schlingensief used. I use the term postmodern cautiously only to suggest the multitude of perspectives and judgments this work lends itself to. In this sense, a modernist critical framework would not be able to accommodate the artist’s experimentation past the failure of givens, which Lyotard outlined in his description of the artist/philosopher who contemplates on the work while on the process of creating it, constantly revising, adjusting and rediscovering its qualities. As such, Lyotard’s understanding of the task of the postmodern artist boils down to an understanding of the sublime as a profound acceptance of indeterminacy. Schlingensief himself had always valorized uncertainty as an essential component of aesthetic experience. Making art his
Dakari 282 religion, by which he lived and died, therefore not only does it not give Schlingensief full credit of his accomplishment to turn art into research and as such tackle the unpresentable, but is also culturally misleading: it returns us to the unfortunate conceptions of illness that plagued Sontag and prejudiced Croce.
(Un)ghosting the site: The German Pavilion and Schlingensief’s “death” in Venice
In May 2010 Schlingensief was appointed to design the German Pavillon for the 54th
Venice Biennale in 2011. This is one of the world’s oldest and most distinguished contemporary art events, held every two years at the city of Venice. It is distinguished from other art biennials by principle of national representation through country specific pavilions—thirty permanent national pavilions, located at the Giardini public gardens, showcase each country’s artistic contribution (Aus Dem Moore 15). As this event offers the opportunity to contemporary artists to present their work to an international audience, it was a major opportunity for Schlingensief to introduce his multifarious art to the world outside
Germany.
Apart from an international art venue, the German pavilion was fraught with meaning to Schlingensief. This stone neoclassical “tomb of history,” built in 1909 and redesigned by the Nazis, was a “suspicious representational building,” he admitted (qtd. in Gaensheimer,
“Introduction” 19). This modernist monument is the articulation of Hitler’s megalomaniac architectural plans, which involved the reconstruction of Berlin as a grand Fascist city in glorification of the myth of Germania. It was also another exemplification of the catastrophic expansion of Germany beyond its borders (Rectanus 56-58). Schlingensief’s intention was thus to make the world see this building with new eyes, to “[challenge] the preceptual habits of the pavilion’s visitors and [confront] them with the need to rethink this highly ideologically charged site” (Gaesnsheimer, “Introduction” 19). With no interest to address the
Dakari 283 pavilion as such or present himself as artist, Schlingensief imagined the site as a live sculpture, which would invite visitors to partake and complement it. His idea was to weave the three major motifs of his work, namely Eurocentrism, cancer, and the Africa project, into a grand wellness center, to be called “Wellness Center Africa” or later on, “German Center for Wellness and Prevention.” There would be functional spa facilities, like sauna and a swimming pool, and services to be offered like, massage and cryotherapy. Promoting the significance of prevention, the visitors would also be able to get computer tomograph scans taken and have their DNA checked to discover their genetic ancestry. Large-scale panoramic projections of African landscapes as they change through seasons would immerse visitors into a calm and healing natural setting. These images would momentarily shift to those of a starving African child, or a child soldier, or even to images of torture and violence from his own early cult films on Germany.
Verging between idealization and exoticization, his African wellness center would, therefore, become a scathing commentary to Western societies’ hedonism and “helper- syndrome” as a means to self-gratification and as an indication of their profound inability to help themselves: “Why are we constantly trying to help the African continent even though we cannot help ourselves?” Schlingensief himself would persistently ask. This project, therefore, would bring self-questioning well into the shrine of Eurocentrism, and the destination for wealthy tourism the Venice Biennale is associated with (Gaensheimer, “Introduction” 20-21).
Most significantly, a universal audience would be given the chance to know Schlingensief.
As those plans were disrupted by Schlingensief’s untimely death on August 21, 2010,
Susanne Gaensheimer, museum curator and commissioner of the German Pavilion, decided to devote the exhibition to his career as symptomatic of a double-edged suffering,
Germany—the political, and cancer—the personal (Diez and Reinhardt). She was convinced that it was precisely this existential as much as socio-political split this retrospective
Dakari 284 installation should present. The exhibition therefore combined the three milestones of
Schlingensief’s art: film, theatre, and the Africa project. Aino Laberenz, Schlingensief’s longtime companion and collaborator, was artistic director. The homage to Schlingensief the two women put together won Germany the Golden Lion for Best Pavilion.
On the right wing there were projections of his early splatter films about Germany, which dig into the debris and the horror of his country’s Nazi past and the chain of events that led to the division and reunification of Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall, mixing
Nazism, obscenities, disabilities, and sexual perversions. In particular, his Germany trilogy:
100 Years of Hitler—a documentary-like parody of Hitler’s last hours in his bunker; The
German Chainsaw Massacre, a horror film about the cannibalization of East Germans by
West Germans shortly after the fall of the Berlin wall; and Terror 2000, which tackles xenophobia and right-wing violence. Other similarly-themed films included were: Menu
Total (1985), and Egomania (1986) (Vander Lugt 39 ).
The left wing was dedicated to his Opera Village project in Burkina Faso, featuring the projection of a filmed expedition to the construction site. Images of peaceful African landscapes were juxtaposed with scenes from Via Intolleranza II, commenting on the ways
Africa has been parasitized by the West and its “goodwill initiatives,” located at the heart of
European social and artistic elite that has traditionally populated the Biennale venue. This portion of the pavilion featured a panoramic filmic projection of natural scenery and the construction site. Far from his initial plans for a functional wellness center, this part, nevertheless, maintained the idea of achieving well-being through a utopian escapade.
Finally, the main hall was furnished with the sets of his 2008 Fluxus Oratorio A
Church of Fear vs. The Alien Within. The stage was an exact recreation of the altar of the
Catholic church Schlingensief used to serve as an altar boy and where his funereal ceremony was held. The looping films, the pews, the Fluxus props, the x-ray display, the beast with the
Dakari 285 red lungs, and the entire interior of the church were still extant. Without the presence of live actors, as in the 2008 production, the objects were silenced, standing there in a fossilized stillness, which itself commemorated another death, that of performance as an unrepeatable event. The church-like space, in all its suggestive power, was thus open to everyone for silent contemplation, prayer, meditation, or the most basic act of conscious witnessing.
The church-space stood between the Germany-themed right wing and the Africa- themed left wing, which articulated a rich spatial metaphor of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory.
This arrangement could also be read as a temporal metaphor, with German atrocities belonging to the past, the africa project to a promising, albeit utopian future, and the church- space to the here-and-now as a profoundly sublime experience of both art and life.
The architectural performativity of the German pavilion, which could be perceived as the concretization of one of the bleakest grand narratives of modernity, Germany’s nationalistic affirmation, is repurposed through Schlingensief’s self-critical lense into a layered site of guilt, commemoration and hope. Turning this monument into a sepulchral container for the ashes of the myth it stood for, into a symbolic personal sarcophagus, and a into a breeding place of hope for the future, an affirmation that something is still happening, which defers chaos, in Lyotard’s terms.
The tripartite exhibition in the pavilion’s site echoes the three versions of postmodernism Lyotard identified. The first one carries a sense of “a simple succession . . . a new direction from the previous one,” which reflects the postmodern as a new historical period, or style, that came to substitute the previous ones. The second version expresses “a kind of decline in the confidence that, for two centuries, the West invested in the principle of a general progress of humanity;” development in this perspective cannot be sees as progress, which continues in a rather arbitrary fashion of its own accord, rendering humans completely incapable of controlling it in any way. Finally, the third version presents the postmodern as “a
Dakari 286 long, obstinate, and highly responsible work concerned with investigating the assumptions implicit in modernity;” a re-reading of modernity as it were (qtd. in Malpas 43-45). In this perspective, the German Pavilion becomes at once a temporal metaphor of evolution weaving past, present, and future; a trenchant spatial commentary of the stakes of evolution, extending to environmental considerations of a diseased West overburdened with civilization versus a virgin, life-giving ecosphere located at the heart of the Third World; finally, a self-reflexive metaphor of postmodern art, as it questions and embraces experimentation, reproduction, and commodification, also the very pillars of Schlingensief’s art.
Although the spatially determined stage space is empty of director, performers, or anyone who would traditionally be assigned the allocation of meaning in the arts, the entire pavilion is reconfigured as a performance space, as it is populated by an international crowd of visitors. Space is literally and figuratively given to them to mourn the national and private tragedies exhibited: Germany’s as well as Schlingensief’s. Yet, as the author/artist is literally and figuratively dead, spectators find themselves in front of an unprecedented freedom. The spectacle is released from all meaning, allowing for a limitless perception and reception: each member of the audience performs the mourning of personal and national failures, maladies, and losses, as they gravitate toward the semio-ontological cleft caused by the absent artist.
Schlingensief’s performative absence subsequently poses a challenge on both aesthetic and hermeneutic grounds: what remains of performance once its generic constituents cease to apply? Does the death of the performer (actual and represented) equal the death of the spectacle? Since the ontological precondition of performance is the co- presence of actor and spectator, as Fischer-Lichte postulates, Being-ness is substantiated through the exposure to others (Transformative Power 32). The absence of spectacle in live performance relocates the founding principles of society into society itself, which is to say,
“society is the spectacle of itself,” Jean-Luc Nancy remarks (67). By forming this temporary
Dakari 287 community, spectators became partakers; as such, they also turned themselves into spectacles. Framed by a space of dense historical and political signification, spectators were left to complete the unfinished artwork themselves. In Thies-Lehmann’s words “[they] are asked to become active witnesses who reflect on their own meaning-making and who are also willing to tolerate gaps and suspend the assignment of meaning” (6).
Even though this spectacle reveals its postdramatic inter-semiotic profile, it also bares itself down to its primitive roots, returning the theatrical spectacle to its most basic principle: sharing a space together with other people. As a liminal space, like all performative spaces, the German pavilion represents a threshold, which, according to Richard Schechner, is a
“space that both separates and joins spaces,” a celebration of “the inbetween-ness” (Between
Theater and Anthropology 295). Spectators are clearly apart form the performer, as they are alive while he is not, but also in communion with him, as they are partakers to the spectacle that he consciously created for them before he died. Schlingensief’s performance is a blaring enactment of the sublime as it reifies its own (im)possibilities: to perform, to witness, and to reflect upon. The performer’s absence becomes thus materialized by means of performance and as such is relocated into presence.
Schlingensief (un)ghosting Schlingensief
The paradox of Schlingensief’s “absent presence” in Via Intolleranza II performed after his death, or even more intensely so the 54th Biennale in Venice, has caused mixed reactions. Matt Cornish sustains that “a Schlingensief is not a Schlingensief” without the man himself on stage (197). As he explains, Schlingensief liked to aesthetically and politically layer his performances but also to confess his ego as an artist and activist (193). In this sense, the fact that the prefix “Ego-” was written over the word “Germania” which is carved on top of the pavilion’s main entrance, could be seen as an attempt to pair Germany and
Dakari 288
Schlingensief’s illness, both fraught with national and personal implications that needed to be boldly phrased. It is not mentioned though who authored this pun: Schlingensief, in his usual self-mocking flair, while working on this project, or the pavilion commissioner who suggestively commented on Schlingensief (and Germany)? Eventually, who really haunted this “tomb of history”?
Schlingensief’s obsession with citation, parody, and self-repetition echoes Marvin
Carlson’s view of theatre as a haunted place:
All theatre . . . is as a cultural activity deeply involved with memory and haunted by
repetition. Moreover, as an ongoing social institution, it almost invariably reinforces
this involvement and haunting by bringing together on repeated occasions and in the
same spaces the same bodies (on stage and in the audience) and the same physical
material. (Haunted Stage 11)
Similarly, Elin Diamond notes that even performance terminology suggests its ongoing dialogue with memory: “‘Re’ [as in remember, reinscribe, reiterate, restore] acknowledges the pre-existing discursive field, the repetition—and the desire to repeat—within the performative present . . . ” Only if we discard this prefix, will we be able to impart performance with the possibility of something happening “that exceeds our knowledge, that alters the shape of sites and imagines new unsuspected subject positions” (Diamond 2). And
Schlingensief did.
In reviewing his “absent presence” at the Venice Biennale, Diez and Reinhardt, on the other hand, think that “only Schlingensief without Schlingensief reveals the true
Schlingensief,” as “his death and his absence clear the way and create a view of a body of work characterized by defiant energy and cheerful despair.” Taking Diez and Reinhardt’s observation a step further, Schlingensief’s “absent presence” could be paradoxically seen as
Dakari 289 an act of un-ghosting to its extreme. On what terms should this Death of the Author be construed therefore?
Schlingensief’s untimely death gave a literal dimension to his aesthetics of the unfinished, substantiating Derrida’s postulation that the intention of the author must be absent in order for the linguistic sign to function” (Limited Inc 5, 6). The aesthetic potential of the artifact is then released, for, according to Barthes, “to give a text an Author is to impose limits on that text . . . to close the writing” (147). In its empowerment of the audience, this art event, suggestive of a postmodern, post-ideological, postnational culture that is engulfed by the chaotic multiplicity of perspectives it promotes, pertains to what Barthes sees in narrative as the gravitation of the text’s unity towards its destination, the reader, rather than its origin, the author—and “the birth of the reader” must occur “at the cost of the death of the Author.”
This new orientation can no longer be personal; therefore, the reader, therefore, according to
Barthes, is one “without history, biography, psychology” (148)—an impromptu, universalized, and fluid assembly of both physical and virtual bodies. The reification of absence and the reversal of roles it generates can be understood as the shifting dynamics of interchangeable positions of artist and audience. With the artist entirely absent, is there still a looping feedback that is supposed to fuel the aestheticity of the event? Or should we consider performance over?
What was eventually celebrated in the German Pavilion was the “ventriloquistic potential of performance” (Franko and Richards 4) to prosthetically account for
Schlingensief’s missing lung, his absent body, in a place of artistic pilgrimage. In this sense, the prosthetic operation of performance affirms the sublime nature of this experience as it stands for the privation of privation, in Lyotard’s terms. Absence, both ontological and performative, was re-covered by the impromptu assemblies of humming interchangeable groups of spectators, reflecting on the pragmatic, political and aesthetic nuances of the
Dakari 290 exhibition, as well as themselves through the spectacle of the other. In this way,
Schlingensief’s aesthetics of (dis)appearance not only politicized the collective dimension of the human condition but also aestheticized its unpresentability.
Schlingensief’s spectral virtuality: a cyber-sublime aesthetic
If closure transpires in the very finiteness of a finished artwork, when for example it is showcased in a museum-like environment, or in filmic or photographic archives, could the idea of closure also apply to Schlingensief’s Biennale retrospective exhibition, his hologram- double in Via Intolleranza II, or the Schlingensief.com cybernetic platform which is still fully functional and up to date? What kind of spectatorship does it generate?
In his discussion of the uncanny performer in the space of technology, Matthew
Causey turns to Freud’s outline of the aesthetic of the uncanny in order to examine the process of mediating subjectivity, the presence of the double, in web-based performance, interactive installations, and virtual environments. What is really sensed when, for example, one enters a dark room and senses a reflection in a distant mirror? This is the moment when
“an almost sublime experience of the uncanny occurs; the uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression” (Freud qtd. in Causey 18).
In other words, Causey explains, the ego does not believe in the possibility of its death. The uncanny experience of the double, or what is approached as sublime here, is death rendered material, present, and screened.
This is also the case in Schlingensief’s illness performances that linger well after his death, where technology-incurred fragmentation affects the discursive relationship between disappearance and mediatized (re)appearance. The digital simulation of the now-deceased performer spills out into real-time space and performs (in spite of) himself; this is the
Dakari 291 ultimate form of the uncanny, a replicated identity that breaks the ontological barrier between life and death, and emerges as a revenant into the here-and-now. Schlingensief’s hologrammed, videotaped and x-rayed self reappears to remind us not only of the unbearable suffering he went through, but of the very persistent patterns of his illness, the endless replication of what has long ceased to exist. The spectator’s ego is openly faced with the certainty of its own mortality, as they recognize themselves outside of themselves.
In line with the exploration of an aesthetic framework to accommodate the unpresentable, the experience of mediated, fragmented, (im)material subjectivity in
Schlingensief’s performances emphasizes formations over forms, and abandons authorial sovereignty to relocate its power source in the audience. The sublime moment of the here- and-now wherein the ontologies of appearance and disappearance disperse and collide is precisely what informs the present exploration of the aesthetics of pain, illness and death in performance.
The Church of Fear cyber-platform, which is available on Schlingensief’s website, is much more than a digital archive: it offers the visitor/spectator a multiplicity of audiovisual material and digital environments related with the performance to interact with. Looping microscopic screenings of cancer cells proliferating, out-of-focus grayscale photographs, performance fragments, eerie operatic music, and endless philosophical quotes, interlaced with the artist’s thoughts, turn the computer screen into an collaborative playfield: with each click of the mouse a new interface appears and the fragments of quotations, pictures and odd clips go on.
In the “Reveal your wound!” section, Schlingensief quotes himself in what appears to be his final confession: “I have lost and I regained myself every day. My thoughts are swirling in fast motion. I can ask myself all kinds of questions and never get answers. No one dies autonomously.” As his last will, he pleas for the completion of his Opera project, which
Dakari 292 he cherishes as a prosthetic lung to make up for his lost one as well as his final resting place:
“The opera house must be built out of those materials that can be found in Africa. That is the last breath I want to take. It’s uninteresting to die in a hospital . . . it’s interesting to enter a vegetation free area, and to breathe the dust that one will later become.” Articulating the metaphysical preoccupations of the artist, the interface leads the visitor to a rather enigmatic
URL, “Asking for God,” only to ironically direct him/her to a “page not found” error. The artist thus provokes his cyber-audience by means of their own religious fantasies; echoing
Christ’s moment of desperation on the cross, the artist implies that God has forsaken not only his own existential quest, but also the visitor’s cybernetic one. The lingering despair of death, therefore, cannot be assuaged by any metaphysical hope.
We are not, however, left without a way out of such an existential and virtual dead- end. Schlingensief’s motto, inspired by Joseph Beuys’s Neo-Dadaist art and philosophy, appears as a hyperlink and demands that we take action: “Show me your wound! What happened to you? Show your wound!” The moment visitors click on this sentence, they are redirected to their mail server, prompting them to compose a new message and send it to [email protected]. As one’s attention is drawn to the pulsating text cursor waiting for a message to be composed, a pressing question arises: who is going to be the receiver on the other side of the screen? This is the moment the visitor contemplates the sublime possibilities of his/her partaking to this odd interaction with truly unpredictable feedback.
The otherworldly presence of the performer and that of the audience are connected in a mutual awareness that exists, literally, outside time. Schlingensief’s wound is now merely remembered, or better, digitally archived and exhibited. Does this, however, offer a closure, in the way all finished and exhibited artworks do?
Empowered by the death of the performer, spectators are invited to complete the artwork by acknowledging their wound and becoming performers themselves. Performing for
Dakari 293 what audience, though? What remains of a virtual audience’s interaction with the virtual double of the dead performer? And, most significantly, how could this interaction scheme generate a feedback loop, a flow of energy between performers and spectators, which
Fischer-Lichte considers to be essential for a meaningful affective output? It is precisely in this transient performativity of the unpresentable that the experience of the sublime is acknowledged, even if not eventually made presentable.
Slavoj Žižek’s words exceptionally capture the stakes of performativity suggested by the performer’s (dis)appearance in a virtual here-and-now. As he writes,
computerization undermines performativity. By claiming this, I am not resurrecting
the myth of the good pre-computerized times when words really counted. . . . [T]he
performative can always, for structural reasons, go wrong . . . What tends to get lost in
virtual communities is this very abyss of the other, this very background of
undecidability: in the wired ‘universe,’ the very opaqueness of the other tends to
evaporate. In this sense, the suspension of performativity in virtual communities is the
very opposite of the suspension of performativity in the psychoanalytic cure, where I
can tell my analyst anything . . . (The plague of Fantasies 166)
Such a position, however, does not mean that the project of the aestheticity of absence is doomed to failure. This uncertainty is the ground on which the sublime occurs. With no other hermeneutic regimen to sustain us in this interaction, we abandon the comforting finite zone of the “we”—for a riskier but also more rewarding quest for one’s own being. The request to show ourselves, then, returns us to a more meaningful co-appearance, an understanding of community that is essentially spectacular, according to Jean Luc Nancy: “We do not have to identify ourselves as we, as a ‘we.’ Rather, we have to dis-identify ourselves from every sort of ‘we’ that would be the subject of its own representation, and we have to do this insofar as
‘we’ co-appear” (71). Schlingensief’s postmortem digitization, therefore, is all but hollow: it
Dakari 294 creates a time/space continuum that attests to Lyotard’s minimal occurrence, or Dolan’s utopian moments in performance, that accommodates the unpresentable and the ensuing experience of the sublime. Should one feel a slight elevation above the mundane, the point is made.
Neo-romantic illness? Some parameters to consider
Christoph Schlingensief’s extraction of art out of the darkest territories of human existence, especially his art of dying, takes us back to the Croce/Jones dispute on the limits of representation and Sontag’s basic renunciation of a cancer aesthetic. What substantiates
Schlingensief’s artistic endeavor is that raw material of his illness was consciously put together by himself. As it was the case with most of his public space actions, here, too, he self-reflectively directs and plays out his own persona. The borders separating empathy and voyeurism are particularly challenged when one witnesses Schlingensief’s self-recording of his excruciating pain and numbing ear. Although this might strike as an overexposure of
“reality” suffering, it was Schlingensief who controlled what should be exposed to an audience; it was real as well as staged.
Theatre, grounded on the conditio humana, as Fischer-Lichte states (History of
European Drama and Theatre 2), is at once a liminal and communal space that weaves together the defamiliarization affected by suffering and dying with the undeniable reality of the diseased author/performer. It thus cannot be approached selectively as either art or life.
As Fischer-Lichte suggests, it has to be both art and life in order to stir an affective response to those who participate. The conditio humana of the theatrical situation renders everybody at once actors and spectators. The fluid borders between formerly fixed categories therefore do not cancel but enable art’s effective and affective processes.
Dakari 295
It is an undeniable fact that, while always been considered beyond representation, death has nevertheless tapped on artists’ persistent need to channel it through their work.
Could cancer, therefore, be the new romantic disease? Florian Malzacher asks, in defiance of
Sontag’s polemic. As a case in point, Malzacher discusses Schlingensief’s appointment as the director of Wagner’s Parsifal, an opera piece that brims with religious motifs, and the comparisons that were made between him and the title figure: “Parsifal the ‘pure fool’ who, as a Germanized figure of salvation, redeems the world through compassion, and
Schlingensief—for whom compassion and redemption, albeit often misunderstood as irony, were always central motifs in his work.” He further notices how Schlingensief “did not resist the temptation of ennobling his life and art with the possibility of its early end” (“Citizen”
198). In fact, Schlingensief’s reaction to his cancer exudes the pride of a megalomaniac: “I am convinced I’ll get cancer after Parsifal, like Heiner Müller” (qtd. in Malzacher, “Citizen”
198)—who was also directing Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde the year he died; or, that “I sometimes think that perhaps I instigated it [cancer] somehow” (qtd. in Malzacher, “Blurring
Boundaries/Changing Perspectives” 213).
No catharsis is offered by such an exploration, though. If Schlingensief might emerge as a Neo-Romantic artist of sorts does not uphold the least hope for transcendence the way the Romantics of earlier times pursued it. Schlingensief approached illness as a metaphor of what society has suppressed, of a profound corruption that can no longer be held back, indeed partly verifying Sontag’s aphorisms. He did so, however, merely to “[bring] the truth to light” without imposing further insight or demanding reflection (Malzacher, “Citizen” 188). Indeed, he managed to turn normative doctrines against their perpetrators by confusing the borders between art and life, center and periphery, and “we” versus “they.”
Conclusions to be drawn and action to be taken remained outside his scope. Even when he was severely attacked for his Austria action, which was confusing beyond belief for
Dakari 296 the onlookers as it reiterated the xenophobic messages it saught to attack, and which was deliberately flirting with/assaulting the legacy of Austro-German state fascism, he would not disagree with those accusing him for ethical irresponsibility in the expense of the disenfranchised: “Amnesty International would have done it differently . . . It wasn’t that we wanted to get green cards for all twelve of [the asylum seekers]. In some aspects this venture was swinish to the highest degree” (qtd. in Schmidt 31).
What Schlingensief did succeed in, however, that is of immense interest for this discussion, was to extract a new aesthetic idiom from previously jettisoned topics, negotiate the unpresentable as both a political and aesthetic category, and transform the art event into a participatory experience. He came so close to the universality of his project as to substantiate
Beuys’s oft-quoted lines:
Only on condition of a radical widening of definitions will it be possible for art and
activities related to art [to] provide evidence that art is now the only evolutionary-
revolutionary power. Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a
senile social system that continues to totter along the deathline: to dismantle in order
to build ‘A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART’ . . . EVERY HUMAN
BEING IS AN ARTIST who—from his state of freedom—the position of freedom
that he experiences at first-hand—learns to determine the other positions of the
TOTAL ART WORK OF THE FUTURE SOCIAL ORDER. (capitals in original; qtd.
in Tisdall 48)
This is, also, what novelist and playwright Elfriede Jelinek suggests in the obituary she wrote on the occasion of Schlingensief’s death: “Schlingensief was one of the greatest artists who ever lived. . . . I always thought one like him cannot die. It is as if life itself would be dead.
He was not really a stage director (in spite of Bayreuth and Parsifal), he was everything: He was the artist as such” (qtd. in Birnbaum).
Dakari 297
Liberating illness and performance art from their various limitations Schlingensief emerges as the total artist, or the “artist/philosopher,” as Lyotard envisions, who “[is] working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done”
(Postmodern Condition 81). By denying itself and us the comfort of good forms, and the agreement of a taste that would make the collective indulgement in the beautiful/unattainable possible, his art lets us “be witnesses to the unpresentable” (81). Schlingensief’s work thus articulates an illuminating underpinning to philosophical, temporal and political notions of performance, as well as an insight to the unpresentable.
Conclusion
Schlingensief’s death as author and the empowerment of spectators as authors in their own right convey the unpresentability of cancer in interesting ways. The assumptions made in this section echo Heidegger’s ideas of the re-authentication of Being and the release of the artwork in its own thingness. They insightfully complement Butler’s concept of the precarity of the assembly as well as Lyotard’s exploration of alternative idioms that will effectively contain the aesthetics of the unpresentable. In Marcel Proust’s words, “the only true voyage of discovery would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another” (657). The artist’s practice of actively forgetting given codes, therefore, proposes creative new ways of channeling performance dynamics, forming connections, and exploring the unforeseen aesthetics of the unpresentable that illness art presents us with. Theodor Adorno’s thoughts, though articulated in a different context, evocatively summarize the idea of this discussion:
The abundance of real suffering tolerates no forgetting; . . . [T]his suffering . . .
demands the continued existence of art while it prohibits it; it is now virtually in art
alone that suffering can still find its own voice. (“Commitment” 188)
Dakari 298
CONCLUSION
This study has detected a unique aesthetic idiom present in cancer performances that needs to be further explored and tested in order for it to unpack its properties. That said, it is understood that theory alone is not adequate to reveal the nuances of pain, suffering, and illness, nor can it render their ethical and aesthetic implications into more graspable terms.
Sontag’s essentialist criticism disregards the pragmatics of experiencing and witnessing pain.
Unadorned experience can indeed be chaotic, discontinuous, obscene, unpleasant, and non- commercial. Under the right conditions, however, performance of illness and suffering can become an agent of identity reconstruction, ethical education, and transformation. And, as it has been argued so far, it can also be of significant aesthetic value. It may expose the limitations of language when it comes to expressing pain, but it also offers us an alternative semioticity, which can lead to a robust aesthetic idiom that allows space for the unpresentable.
The “there is” of performance and the suspension of chaos
In his 1947 essay, “The First Man Was an Artist,” the American abstract expressionist painter Barnett Newman reflects on the inborn artistic capacity of human beings. In a way similar to Heidegger’s exploration of authentic being in art and life, Newman approaches the
“totemic act of wonder,” the terror in the face of the unknowable, as the first attempt of human beings to address the unknowable: because “the aesthetic act always precedes the social one,” one’s first expression—dream, cry, or fear—is an aesthetic articulation (59).
Searching for the creation of new forms that would be entirely disengaged from previous names, images, or symbols, Newman came up with a pattern in his abstract paintings, a bold
Dakari 299 vertical line separating two identical color planes on the canvas, which imparted the feeling of starting over: art from scratch.
Experiencing terror in the face of the sublime, human beings can only overcome it by channeling this awe into acts of creation. But how could performance be entirely disengaged from previously accumulated meaning? The artist/philosopher who discovers new paths of expression, whom Lyotard identifies in Newman, provides only half an answer. This question can be fully addressed and thus suggest an effective framework for the exploration of the unpresentable can be suggested only when the spectators actively assume a role in the aesthetic process. By letting the work be, the artist/performer/philosopher bears witness to the there is, and spectators/partakers respond to this announcement of being in the imperative.
There is no fixed and predetermined end art should serve, as for instance the pleasure of the addressee, nor is it a game whose rules we have to discover, Lyotard states (Inhuman 88).
In all their eventfulness and inchoateness, performances of pain, illness, and dying, such as the cases considered here, assign a chronological task without completing it,
(Lyotard, Inhuman 88). By means of a self-generating feedback loop, grounded on the co- presence of performers and spectators facing the philosophical, aesthetic, and ontological cleft of the unpresentable, the performance affirms the minimal occurrence of the unpresentable without the intention to disrupt, expel, or explain it. Something happens here and now, suspending chaos at least for the duration of this minimal occurrence. In this sense, whatever suffering is, is here and now, and is no less ours than it is the artist’s to face up to.
Seeing with new eyes: some closing thoughts
Virginia Woolf’s short essay, “On Being Ill,” is a piece of autobiography that has been considered eccentric for its time (Lee, Introduction xiii). Woolf offers an interesting insight to a sufferer’s world. Her original outlook on the body’s life can be appreciated anew
Dakari 300 for its refreshing tone and clarity of perspective in the context of the present discussion.
Woolf’s text is more than a meditation on illness; according to Kimberly Engdahl Coates, it employs illness as an aesthetic strategy in the way it brings together the elegiac with the existential into her subversive and unconventional art of being ill (25).
In health, Woolf writes, “the genial pretense must be kept up . . . to communicate, to civilize, to share... In illness this make-belief ceases” (“On Being Ill” 12). Also unmade is the eloquence with which “people write . . . of the doings of the mind” (5). On the contrary, she thinks, “to look [the great wars which the body wages while sick] squarely in the face would need the courage of a lion tamer; a robust philosophy; a reason rooted in the bowels of the earth.” Once the “miracle” of pain takes over the body, Woolf writes, “the poverty of language” emerges, which hinders its description in literature. At this time,
[there] is nothing ready made for [the sufferer]. He is forced to coin words for
himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as
perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a
brand new word pops out. (7)
As I see it, Woolf’s is a truly avant-garde perspective not only on the subject of illness but also on writing, which incorporates the dynamics of a performative act: Woolf actually performs an altered perspective on being ill. Contrary to Sontag’s prodigious mission to trace the source of evil in cultural metaphors of cancer (her cancer, too), Woolf quietly stays in bed and reflects: she calms down and retunes her sensory receptors through this angle. She fully accepts her lay perspective, even indulges in it: looking up at the clouds and looking sideways on to the world, she rediscovers not only its beauty but also the beauty in writing about illness and the world. What Lee identifies in Woolf’s “writing in bed” is an idiosyncratic idiom that is “at once romantic and modern” (xxvii).
Woolf’s perspective convinces me about her claims on authenticity of experience.
Dakari 301
Woolf’s existential anguish, typical of the modern subject, is not only an oblique reference to her personal hell of depression and suicidal thoughts that tormented her throughout her life
(Lee xxxiii), but also an insight to the privacy of pain from the patient’s perspective. The ill subject is forced through a redefinition of selfhood, a process that is generally concealed by the illusion of the body’s disappearance into the background of ecstatic existence, a construct plotted by the mind so as to overcome matter and its afflictions. As Leder has pointed out, when the body strikes back in dys-appearance, it breaks the illusion of health. The focus shifts from the ecstatic to the visceral, and mind becomes subject to the body, as it were. In the painful and unfathomable depths of this newly discovered land, each pain is uniquely threatening, be it a toothache, an embolism, or a lump.
By being forced to adopt a lay perspective on the world, Woolf discovers a loophole in the fake linearity of health. Illness opens up a new world in front of her, as she lies in bed and observes the sky, clouds, and flowers, while obliquely glancing at the upright people going by around her. Instead of being terrified by the solitude and privacy of her suffering, she is intrigued by the necessity to coin new words, to mold a new code that would be able to tame the linguistic recalcitrance of the body-in-pain. Arguing for the inexpressibility of pain and the vicious metaphorical thinking that accompanies illness, therefore, does not do justice to the expressive potential of the being-in-pain. There can never be only just the body, as
Sontag claimed with respect to cancer. And Scarry’s observations on the inarticulateness of pain, in all their brilliance and lucidity, seem less than complete when compared with
Woolf’s unorthodox appraisal of the necessity of a “more primitive, more sensual, more obscene” language for illness (7). Ironically, this is also what Sontag envisioned in “Against
Interpretation,” which—radical for its time—established her as the enfant terrible of the
American intelligentsia of the sixties: the need for “an erotics of art.”
Woolf did not make any distinction between “beautiful” and “ugly” diseases, as
Dakari 302
Sontag did. She only spoke of the “kingly sublimity” of illness, which sweeps aside all criticism on the styles and genres appropriate for accommodating undisciplined pain once the illusion of health collapses: illness “leaves nothing but Shakespeare and oneself” (23). Why
Sontag did not see this potential in cancer, especially when she was in remission (i.e. during the AIDS and Its Metaphors period)? Why was she reluctant to explore this new land, its geography, climate, inhabitants, and vernacular in more depth? Woolf, in short, took a step back and contemplated on the hidden, obscene poetry of illness while Sontag squarely rejected it.
No doubt Sontag was formidably intelligent and intellectually deft. No doubt her views on illness and its metaphors struck a cord in academic and public discussions on illness
(Clow 293).34 In fact, Jurecic acknowledges the merits of her vibrant metaphor of illness as
“the night-side of life,” which “[makes] available new ways of thinking about the unthinkable” and which constructs a narrative scaffold for engaging with the suffering of others (91). For instance, inspiring narratives such as Frank’s The Wounded Storyteller,
Morris’s delineation of postmodern illness as a biocultural phenomenon, and Jackie Stacy’s combined empirical, philosophical, and theoretical analysis of cancer (her cancer, also) in
Teratologies have creatively drawn on Sontag’s famous metaphors. These texts, however, do not go so far as to acknowledge how complicated her argument becomes once she projects her absolute confidence in modern medicine simultaneously with the solution of eliminating all metaphor from cancer discourse (although Stacey argues that it is not “metaphor of which we should be wary per se, but the cultural uses to which its heightened applications may be put” (63). Sontag’s claim against the metaphorization of disease, therefore, seems to be fueled by the very metaphors she seeks to challenge, eventually “entrenching her own view as the latest mythology” (Clow 311).
34 See also Jurecic’s and Diedrich’s discussions on Sontag’s contentious legacy.
Dakari 303
Sontag’s fallacy, which has mostly gone undetected, lies in the fact that nowhere in her illness essays did she embrace the aesthetic capacity of metaphor to address human experience. Stoddard Holmes, who has been through ovarian cancer, and possesses both insight of the “night-side of life” and intellectual prowess as a scholar and writer, recalls how her scholarly adherence to Sontag’s writings, especially the disbelief in metaphors as an expressive tool for suffering, dried out her words when it came to express her own experience with cancer, chemotherapy, and the fear of death. At first, she admits, Sontag’s legacy had an immense impact on her writing and thinking, diminishing her intellectual productivity:
I internalized her rhetorical position as a powerful prohibition against metaphorical
thinking about my own illness, and remained subject to whatever metaphors—and
narratives—were available to me from others. It wasn’t until quite a bit later (during
and after chemo) that my metaphor-making capacity returned. Even before my hair
sprang out from my bald pate, my creative writing returned. Both were bizarrely
recursive to my early teens: one exploded in curls; the other recorded dreams and
overheard conversations, filling journals with poem fragments and metaphors. My
cancer experience generated some form of creative renewal, bringing with it not only
the expression-killing pain that Elaine Scarry writes about, but also a surge of words,
a period of accelerated growth in my imagination, and. (“After Sontag” 267)
Detecting a newly acquired kind of “creative renewal,” Stoddard Holmes also saw the language-shattering effect of pain—that Scarry describes—receding. In its place, “my hunger to articulate what this strange experience was like” spiked. By breaking Sontag’s spell, therefore, she also managed to break the spell of cancer and embrace its creative potential.
Echoing several of the performers discussed here, American writer and literary critic
Anatole Broyard, who died of prostate cancer in 1990, adopts a radically altered perspective on his cancer by resisting traditional narratives of dying. His posthumously published
Dakari 304 autobiographical work Intoxicated by my Illness (1992) is about what its title states: seeing illness with new eyes. “Once we had a narrative of heaven and hell, but now we make our own narratives,” he writes (42), reflecting Lyotard’s treatise on the discrediting of the grand narratives in favor of new ones. Convinced that “technical explanations flatten the story of illness” (62), he restores faith in metaphor and its healing, “detoxifying” powers: “I saw my illness as a visit to a disturbed country, rather like contemporary China. I imagined it as a love affair with a demented woman who demanded things I had never done before” (21-22).
Although this idiosyncratic metaphor cannot be relatable to the experiences of others, or comforting to anyone but Broyard himself (Morris, Illness and Culture 45), it nevertheless attests to the expressive force that flows out of a single human experience and its creative channeling into narrative. He has no delusions of a magically restored health while penning his memoir. Fully aware of his terminal condition and yet radically opposing the metaphorical trope of cancer as an energy-depleting agent, Broyard believes that “a dangerous illness fills you with adrenaline and makes you feel very smart” (6). This is in fact an accentuation rather than effacement of the self, which not only echoes the sublime aesthetic output of the unpresentable but also substantiates Broyard’s idiosyncratic voice as essentially postmodern. Cancer to Broyard is not an enforced silencing, but the breaking of silence, an opportunity for us to “experience both our bodies and ourselves anew” (Morris,
Illness and Culture 52).
Having thus far examined the aesthetic, cultural, and political aspects of the representation and reception of cancer in contemporary performance, as seen in cases drawn from a western milieu, this study meets the end of its determined frame even as it aspires to go beyond its limitations. In fact, it ends with the aspiration to stretch out to new territories of knowledge and the promise of a fresh outlook on human experience across the world. Cancer performance, apart from aesthetically and politically intricate, can also be a resource for
Dakari 305 pedagogical and therapeutic implementation, promising to shape anew the way societies and individuals experience and understand illness.
Dakari 306
Works Cited
"About the Film." CANCERFILMS.org. Web. 06 Dec. 2016.
Abramovic, Marina. "An Art Made of Trust, Vulnerability and Connection." TED.com. TED,
Mar. 2015. Web. 02 Feb. 2016.
Adams, Michael Vannoy. "Sontag vs. Sontag." The New Criterion 1.3 (November 1982): 83.
NEWCRITERION.com. Web. 12 Dec. 2015.
Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. Trans.
Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: Continuum, 2002. Print.
---. "Commitment." Aesthetics and Politics. By Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst
Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, and Georg Lukács. Ed. Ronald Taylor. Trans. Ronald Taylor.
London: Verso, 1977. 177-95. Print.
Ahrensdorf, Peter J. The Death of Socrates and the Life of Philosophy: An Interpretation of
Plato's Phaedo. Albany: State U of New York P, 1995. Print.
Aiken, George L. "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Representative Plays by American Dramatists. Ed.
Montrose Jonas Moses. Vol. 2. New York: Dutton, 1925. 31-62. Print.
Aristotle. "‘Poetics’ and ‘Rhetoric’." Dramatic Theory and Criticism: Greeks to Grotowski.
Ed. Bernard F. Dukore. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974. 31-62. Print.
Aston, Elaine. Feminist Theatre Practice: A Handbook. London: Routledge, 1999. Print.
Aus Dem Moore, Elke. Foreword. Gaensheimer, German Pavilion 15.
Austin, John L. How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at
Harvard University in 1955. Oxford: Clarendon, 1962. Print.
Bakan, David. Disease, Pain, and Sacrifice: Toward a Psychology of Suffering. Chicago: U
of Chicago P, 1968. Print.
Dakari 307
Barnes, Clive. "Stage: Inside the Shadow Box." Rev. of The Shadow Box. The New York
Times 1 Apr. 1977: 50. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Web. 14 Dec. 2015.
Barthes, Roland. "The Death of the Author." Image, Music, Text. By Roland Barthes. Trans.
Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. 142-48. Print.
Berger, Maurice, ed. The Crisis of Criticism. New York: New, 1998. Print.
Bernheimer, Martin. "Art Versus Truth in 'Still/Here': Bill T. Jones' Work Grew Out of a
Series of Interviews With Terminally Ill Patients." Rev. of Still/Here, by Bill T. Jones.
Los Angeles Times 29 Apr. 1995. Los Angeles Times. Web. 12 Dec. 2015.
Bertens, Hans. The Idea of the Postmodern: A History. London: Routledge, 1995. Print.
---. "The Postmodern Weltanschauung and Its Relation to Modernism: An Introductory
Survey." A Postmodern Reader. Ed. Joseph P. Natoli and Linda Hutcheon. Albany:
State U of New York P, 1993. 25-70. Print.
Beuys, Joseph. What Is Art?: Conversation with Beuys. Ed. Volker Harlan. Trans. Matthew
Barton and Shelley Sacks. Forest Row: Clairview, 2007. Print.
Bhabha, Homi. "Dance This Diss Around." Berger, The Crisis of Criticism 41-50.
Birnbaum, Daniel. "Holy Terror." Artforum International 50.1 (2011): 282-83. QUESTIA.
Web. 11 Dec. 2015.
Birringer, Johannes H. "A New Europe." PAJ 25.3 (2003): 26-41. PROJECT MUSE. Web.
16 Dec. 2015.
Bishop, Claire. "Participation and Spectacle: Where Are We Now?" Living as Form: Socially
Engaged Art from 1991-2011. Ed. Nato Thompson. New York: Creative Time, 2012.
34-45. Print.
Bitte Liebt Österreich [Please Love Austria]. Dir. Christoph Schlingensief. International
Festival, Vienna. 2000. Performance.
Blau, Herbert. The Audience. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990. Print.
Dakari 308
Bodysight: A Reclamation Project. By Pam Patterson. Goddard College, Vermont. Aug.
2004. Performance.
Bordwell, Marilyn. "Dancing with Death: Performativity and 'Undiscussable' Bodies in
Still/Here." Text and Performance Quarterly 18.4 (1998): 369-79. JSTOR. Web. 12
Dec. 2015.
Bourke, Joanna. The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkiller. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014.
Print.
Boxill, Roger. "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Ed.
Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2002. 19-27. Print.
Brantley, Ben. "Artifice as Armor in a Duel With Death." Rev. of Wit, by Margaret Edson.
Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, New York. The New York Times 26 Jan. 2012.
NYTIMES.com. Web. 4 Jan. 2016.
Brembeck, Reinhart. "King Midas in Burkina Faso: In Brussels, Schlingensief Laments His
Failure in Afrika in Via Intolleranza II after Luigi Noni." Rev. of Via Intolleranza II,
by Christoph Schlingensief. Koninklijke Vlaamse Schouwburg, Brussels.
Süddeutschen Zeitung 17 May 2010. VIAINTOLERANZAII.com. VIA
INTOLERANZA II. Web. 03 Dec. 2015.
Broyard, Anatole. Intoxicated by My Illness: And Other Writings on Life and Death. Ed.
Alexandra Broyard. New York: C. Potter, 1992. Print.
Brustein, Robert. Letter. The New Yorker 30 Jan. 1995: 10. Print.
Burch, Steven Dedalus. "Imitation of Life: A Meditation on 'Victim Art'" Journal of
Dramatic Theory and Criticism (Fall 1997): 121-31. Print.
Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Sublime and Beautiful. 1756. Ed. James T.
Boulton. London: Routledge, 2008. Print.
Dakari 309
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex." New York: Routledge,
1993. Print.
---. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge, 1997. Print.
---. Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2015. Print.
---. "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist
Theory." Theatre Journal 40.4 (1988): 519-31. JSTOR. Web. 14 Dec. 2015.
---. "Photography, War, Outrage." PMLA 120.3 (2005): 822-27. JSTOR. Web. 13 Dec. 2015.
---. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2006. Print.
Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies. Dir. Barak Goodman. PBS.org. PBS. Web. 6 Feb.
2016.
Carlson, Marvin. The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine. Ann Arbor: U of
Michigan P, 2001. Print.
---. Introduction. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. By Erika
Fischer-Lichte. New York: Routledge, 2008. 1-10. Print.
Causey, Matthew. Theatre and Performance in Digital Culture: From Simulation to
Embeddedness. London: Routledge, 2006. Print.
Charon, Rita. Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006.
Print.
Christoph Schlingensief. German Pavilion, Venice Biennale. 2011. Exhibition.
"CHURCH OF FEAR - Fluxus-Oratorio by Christoph Schlingensief." KIRCHE-DER-
ANGST.de. Web. 16 Dec. 2015.
Clow, Barbara. "Who's Afraid of Susan Sontag? Or, the Myths and Metaphors of Cancer
Reconsidered." Social History of Medicine 14.2 (2001): 293-312. Print.
Cole, Thomas R., Nathan S. Carlin, and Ronald A. Carson. Medical Humanities: An
Introduction. New York: Cambridge UP, 2014. Print.
Dakari 310
Connor, Steven. Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary.
Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1997. Print.
Conquergood, Dwight. "Performance Theory, Hmong Shamans, and Cultural Politics."
Critical Theory and Performance. Ed. Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach.
Michigan: U of Michigan P, 1992. 41-64. Print.
Cooper, Pamela. "Violence, Pain, Pleasure: Wit." Peering Through the Curtain: Disability,
Illness, and the Extraordinary Body in Contemporary Theater. Ed. Thomas Richard
Fahy and Kimball King. New York: Routledge, 2002. 24-34. Print.
Copeland, Roger. "Not/There: Manipulating the Myth of Victim Art." American Theatre 12.4
(Apr. 1995): 35-37. Web. 20 Nov. 2015.
Copp, G. "A Review of Current Theories of Death and Dying." Journal of Advanced Nursing
28.2 (1998): 382-90. PUBMED.gov. Web. 14 Dec. 2015.
Cornish, Matt. "Art Is Magic/It Cannot Succeed: Christoph Schlingensief's Via Intolleranza
II." TDR/The Drama Review 56.2 (2012): 191-97. JSTOR. Web. 16 Dec. 2015.
Cott, Jonathan. Susan Sontag: The Complete Rolling Stone Interview. New Haven: Yale UP,
2014. Print.
Crandell, George. "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." Tennessee Williams: A Guide to Research and
Performance. Ed. Philip C. Kolin. Westport: Greenwood, 1998. 109-25. Print.
Cristofer, Michael. The Shadow Box. New York: Avon, 1977. Print.
Croce, Arlene. "Discussing the Undiscussable." Berger, The Crisis of Criticism 15-29.
Cunningham, Nicole J., Thomas Piontek, and Bill T. Jones. "Still/Here: An Interview with
Bill T. Jones." Discourse 16.3 (1994): 78-85. JSTOR. Web. 20 Nov. 2015.
Der Zwischenstand Der Dinge [The Current State of Things]. Dir. Christoph Schlingensief.
Maxim Gorki Theater, Berlin. 2008. Performance.
Derrida, Jacques. Limited Inc. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1988. Print.
Dakari 311
---. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New
International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. London: Routledge, 1994. Print.
DeShazer, Mary K. Fractured Borders Reading Women's Cancer Literature. Ann Arbor: U
of Michigan P, 2005. Print.
DeVault, Marjorie L. "Epilogue." Paget, A Complex Sorrow 129-45.
Devlin, Albert J. "Writing in 'A Place of Stone:' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." The Cambridge
Companion to Tennessee Williams. Ed. Matthew Charles Roudané. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1997. 95-113. Print.
Diamond, Elin. Performance and Cultural Politics. London: Routledge, 1996. Print.
Diedrich, Lisa. Treatments: Language, Politics, and the Culture of Illness. Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 2007. Print.
Diez, Georg, and Nora Reinhardt. "Death in Venice: Resurrecting Schlingensief at the
Biennale." Spiegel. Spiegel Online, 06 Mar. 2011. Web. 5 Apr. 2014.
Dolan, Jill. Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan
P, 2005. Print.
Donoghue, Denis. "Disease Should Be Itself." Rev. of Illness as Metaphor. The New York
Times 16 July 1978. NYTIMES.com. Web. 6 Dec. 2015.
Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. 1966.
London: Routledge, 1993. Print.
Edson, Margaret. Wit. London: Nick Hern, 2000. Print.
Ehrenreich, Barbara. "Welcome to Cancerland." Harper's Magazine 1 Nov. 2001. Web. 10
Oct. 2014.
Eine Kirche Der Angst Vor Dem Fremden in Mir [A Church of Fear vs. The Alien Within].
Dir. Christoph Schlingensief. Ruhrfestspiele. 2008. Performance.
Elam, Keir. The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. London: Routledge, 1980. Print.
Dakari 312
Ellsworth, Angela. "Performing Illness: Crisis, Collaboration and Resistance." Contemporary
Theatre Review 11.3-4 (2001): 137-48. Print.
Engdahl Coates, Kimberly. "Phantoms, Fancy (And) Symptoms: Virginia Woolf and the Art
of Being Ill." Woolf Studies Annual 18 (2012): 1-28. Print.
Ensler, Eve. "Suddenly, My Body." TEDWomen. Dec. 2010. TED.com. Web. 02 Dec. 2015.
Farmer, Jim. "Atlantan Margaret Edson's Play about Confronting Cancer Finally Heads to
Broadway." Georgia Voice. 20 Jan. 2012. Web. 02 Dec. 2012.
Fischer-Lichte, Erika. History of European Drama and Theatre. Trans. Jo Riley. London:
Routledge, 2002. Print.
---. The Show and the Gaze of Theatre: A European Perspective. Trans. Jo Riley. Iowa: U of
Iowa, 1997. Print.
---. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. New York: Routledge,
2008. Print.
Foreigners Out! Schlingensief's Container. Dir. Paul Poet. Perf. Christoph Schlingensief.
Bonus Film, 2002.
Forrest, Tara, and Anna Teresa Scheer, eds. Christoph Schlingensief: Art without Borders.
Bristol: Intellect, 2010. Print.
Forte, Jeanie. "Focus on the Body: Pain, Praxis, and Pleasure in Feminist Performance."
Critical Theory and Performance. Ed. Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach. Ann
Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1992. 248-62. Print.
Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. New York:
Vintage, 1994. Print.
Féral, Josette. "Theatricality: The Specificity of Theatrical Language." SubStance 31.2
(2002): 94-108. Web. 20 Nov. 2012.
Dakari 313
Frank, Arthur W. Letting Stories Breathe: A Socio-narratology. Chicago: U of Chicago,
2010. Print.
---. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.
Print.
Franko, Mark, and Annette Richards. "Actualizing Absence: The Pastness of Performance."
Acting on the Past: Historical Performance across the Disciplines. Ed. Mark Franko
and Annette Richards. Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 2000. 1-12. Print.
Gaensheimer, Susanne, ed. Christoph Schlingensief German Pavilion, 2011; 54th
International Art Exhibition La Biennale Di Venezia. Berlin: Sternberg, 2011. Print.
---. Introduction. Gaensheimer, German Pavilion 19-25.
Gallo, Carmine. The Storyteller's Secret: From TED Speakers to Business Legends, Why
Some Ideas Catch on and Others Don't. New York: St. Martin's, 2016. Print.
---. Talk like TED: The 9 Public Speaking Secrets of the World's Top Minds. New York: St.
Martin's, 2014. Print.
Garner, Stanton. Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama.
Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994. Print.
Gates, Anita. "Time and 'The Shadow Box'" Rev. of The Shadow Box. The New York Times
13 Nov. 1994. The New York Times. Web. 13 Dec. 2015.
Gebbers, Anna Catharina. "The Metabolism of Risk." SCHLINGENSIEF.com. Web. 14 Feb.
2016.
Ginwala, Natasha. "Christoph Schlingensief: Fear at the Core of Things." C Magazine 114
(2012): 50-51. CMAGAZINE.com. Web. 16 Dec. 2015.
Groys, Boris. "When Words Fail." Gaensheimer, German Pavilion 192-96.
Habermas, Jurgen. The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays. Ed. and Trans. Max
Pensky. Cambridge: MIT, 2001. Print.
Dakari 314
Hammond, William, and Dan Steward, eds. Verbatim: Contemporary Documentary Theatre.
London: Oberon, 2008. Print.
Haun, Harry. "For Cynthia Nixon and Lynne Meadow, With Wit Comes Understanding."
PLAYBILL.com. Playbill, 5 Jan. 2012. Web. 10 Mar. 2013.
Hayman, Ronald. Tennessee Williams: Everyone Else Is an Audience. New Haven: Yale UP,
1993. Print.
Hegemann, Carl. "GER[EGO]MANIA: Art and Non-Art in the Work of Christoph
Schlingensief." Gaensheimer, German Pavilion 197-207.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. 1927. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson.
Malden: Blackwell, 1962. Print.
---. "The Origin of the Work of Art." 1935-36. Off the Beaten Track. By Martin Heidegger.
Ed. and Trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002.
1-56. Print.
Hemaderby. By Angela Ellsworth. Icehouse, Phoenix, AZ. 1998. Performance.
Hewitt, Andrew. "Victim Art: Critique And/of the Family Business." Acting Out in Groups.
Ed. Laurence A. Rickels. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999. 42-68. Print.
Hoff, Johannes. “Schlingensief’s Deconstruction of (Post)Modernism.” Gaensheimer,
German Pavilion 214-222.
Holman, Curt. Rev. of My Left Breast by Susan Miller. Creative Loafing Atlanta. 7 Feb.
2007. CLATL.com. Web. 10 Nov. 2012. hooks, bell. Letter. The New Yorker 30 Jan. 1995: 10. Web. 6 Oct. 2015.
Hughes, Holly, and David Román. "O Solo Homo: An Introductory Conversation." O Solo
Homo: The New Queer Performance. Ed. Holly Hughes and David Román. New
York: Grove, 1998. 1-15. Print.
Dakari 315
Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism.
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986. Print.
Irmer, Thomas. "Out with the Right! Or, Let's Not Let Them in Again." Trans. Claudia
Wilsch. Theater 32.3 (2002): 61-67. Project MUSE. Web. 16 Dec. 2015.
Jackson, Eric. "‘My Left Breast:’ An Artistic Success, Learning Experience for Theatre
Guild." The Panama News 23 Nov. 2003. THEPANAMANEWS.com. Web. 10 Nov.
2012.
Jameson, Fredric. "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism." New Left
Review I.146 (1984): 53-92. Print.
Jones, Bill T. "Bill T. Jones in Conversation with Thelma Golden." 1997. Art Performs Life:
Merce Cunningham, Meredith Monk, Bill T. Jones. By Merce Cunningham, Meredith
Monk, and Bill T. Jones. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1998. 126-35. Print.
Jowitt, Deborah. "Critic as Victim." Village Voice 10 Jan. 1995: 67. Print.
Jurecic, Ann. Illness as Narrative. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2012. Print.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. 1790. Trans. Paul Guyer and Eric
Matthews. Ed. Paul Guyer. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Print.
Katan, Tania. "The Power of Voice: Survivability, Sustainability and Nudity."
TedxScottsdale. 13 May 2011. TED.com. Web. 02 Jan. 2015.
Kerr, Stacey. "A Different Kind of Healing." Sonoma Medicine Magazine: International
Medicine. July 2005. Web. 10 Nov. 2012.
Kisselgoff, Anna. "Bill T. Jones's Lyrical Look At Survivors." Rev. of Still/here, by Bill T.
Jones. The New York Times 2 Dec. 1994. The New York Times. Web. 12 Dec. 2015.
Klaver, Elizabeth. "A Mind-Body-Flesh Problem: The Case of Margaret Edson's Wit."
Contemporary Literature 45.4 (2004): 659-83. JSTOR. Web. 14 Dec. 2015.
Dakari 316
Kramer, Hilton. "The Evolution of Susan Sontag." The New York Times 9 Feb. 1975. The
New York Times. Web. 13 Dec. 2015.
---. Letter. The New Yorker 30 Jan. 1995: 12. Web. 20 Nov. 2015.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New
York: Columbia UP, 1982. Print.
Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth. On Death and Dying. New York: Macmillan, 1969. Print.
Kuppers, Petra. Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge. New York:
Routledge, 2004. Print.
---. The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art. Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 2007. Print.
Kushner, Tony. Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. New York: Theatre
Communications Group, 2013. Print.
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live by. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980.
Print.
Leder, Drew. The Absent Body. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990. Print.
Lederer, Susan E. "Dark Victory: Cancer and Popular Hollywood Film." Bulletin of the
History of Medicine 81.1 (2007): 94-115. JSTOR. Web. 27 Nov. 2014.
Lee, Hermione. Introduction. On Being Ill, With Notes From Sick Rooms. By Virginia Woolf
and Julia Stephen. Ashfield: Paris, 2012. Xiii-xxvi. Print.
Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramatic Theatre. Trans. Karen Jurs Munby. London: Routledge,
2006. Print.
Leopold, Ellen. A Darker Ribbon: Breast Cancer, Women, and Their Doctors in the
Twentieth Century. Boston: Beacon, 1999. Print.
Lescaze, Zoë. "The Holy Fool From Oberhausen: Christoph Schlingensief’s Riotous Art
Comes to New York." Observer. 19 Jan. 2015. Web. 16 Dec. 2015.
Dakari 317
Lincoln, Ivan M. "Play Relates Cancer Victim's Journey." Rev. of My Left Breast, by Susan
Miller. Deseret News 31 May 2002. Web. 10 Nov. 2012.
Lippard, Lucy. "Too Political? Forget It." Art Matters: How the Culture Wars Changed
America. Ed. Brian Wallis, Marianne Weems, and Philip Yenawine. New York: New
York UP, 1999. 38-61. Print.
Lorde, Audre. "A Litany for Survival." The Black Unicorn: Poems. New York: Norton, 1995.
31-32. Print.
Lukács, Georg. The Theory of the Novel; a Historico-philosophical Essay on the Forms of
Great Epic Literature. Cambridge: M.I.T., 1971. Print.
Lupton, Deborah. Medicine as Culture: Illness, Disease and the Body in Western Societies.
London: Sage, 2003. Print.
Lyotard, Jean-François. "Complexity and the Sublime." Trans. Geoffrey Bennington.
Postmodernism: ICA Documents 3 and 4. Ed. Lisa Appignanesi. London: Institute of
Contemporary Art, 1986. 10-12. Print.
---. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988. Print.
---. Driftworks. Trans. Roger McKeon. New York: Semiotext(e), 1984. Print.
---. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby.
Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991. Print.
---. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and
Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. Print.
Malpas, Simon. The Postmodern. London: Routledge, 2005. Print.
Malzacher, Florian. "Blurring Boundaries/Changing Perspectives: An Interview with
Christoph Schlingensief." Forrest and Scheer 201-16.
---. "Citizen of the Other Place: A Trilogy of Fear and Hope." Forrest and Scheer 187-200.
Mars-Jones, Adam. "Victims Don’t Make Art." The Independent (1995). Web. 12 Dec. 2015.
Dakari 318
Martin, Carol. "High Critics/Low Arts." Moving Words: Re-Writing Dance. Ed. Gay Morris.
London: Routledge, 1996. 320-33. Print.
Masheck, Joseph. "Chance Is Zee Fool’s Name for Fait." Marcel Duchamp in Perspective.
Ed. Joseph Masheck. Boston: Da Capo, 2002. 1-24. Print.
Mason, Jeffrey D. Melodrama and the Myth of America. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993.
Print.
"MEA CULPA - Eine ReadyMadeOper." MEACULPA.com. Web. 16 Dec. 2015.
Mea Culpa. Eine ReadyMade Oper [Mea Culpa: A ReadyMade Opera]. Dir. Christoph
Schlingensief. Burgteater, Vienna. 2009. Performance.
Melzack, Ronald. "The McGill Pain Questionnaire: Major Properties and Scoring Methods."
Pain 1.3 (1975): 277-99. JSTOR. Web. 11 Nov. 2015.
Miller, Susan. "Casting Myself." HowlRound. 27 Apr. 2011. Web. 10 Nov. 2012.
---. "My Left Breast." Humana Festival '94: The Complete Plays. Ed. Marisa Smith. Lyme:
Smith and Kraus, 1994. 311-39. Print.
---. "Playing Susan." American Theatre 21.4 (2004): 73-75. Web. 21 May 2012.
Morris, David B. The Culture of Pain. Berkeley: U of California P, 1991. Print.
---. Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age. Berkeley: U of California P, 1998. Print.
Mukherjee, Siddhartha. The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. New York:
Scribner, 2010. Print.
Murphy, Brenda. Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan: A Collaboration in the Theatre.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992. Print.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. Being Singular Plural. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000. Print.
Nereson, Ariel. "Embodying the Undiscussable: Documentary Methodology in Bill T. Jones's
Still/Here and the Culture Wars." Studies in Musical Theatre 5.3 (2012): 297-304.
Web. 12 Dec. 2015.
Dakari 319
Newman, Barnett. "The First Man Was an Artist." Tiger's Eye 1 (1947): 59-60. Web. 21 Dec.
2015.
Nugent, Frank S. "Bette Davis Scores New Honors in 'Dark Victory.'" Rev. of Dark Victory,
by George Emerson Brewer and Bertram Bloch. The New York Times 21 Apr. 1939.
Web. 13 Dec. 2015.
Oates, Joyce Carol. "Confronting Head-on the Face of the Afflicted." Berger, The Crisis of
Criticism 30-40.
Paget, Marianne A. A Complex Sorrow: Reflections on Cancer and an Abbreviated Life. Ed.
Marjorie L. DeVault. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1993. Print.
---. "The Work of Talk." Paget, A Complex Sorrow 43-79.
Patsalidis, Savas. "Langscapes of Death, Inscapes of Memory, and Philoktetes’ Postmodern
Painscript." The Future of Flesh: A Cultural Survey of the Body. Ed. Zoe Detsi-
Diamanti, Katerina Kitsi-Mytakou, and Effie Yiannopoulou. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009. 61-77. Print.
Perkins, Judith. The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian
Era. London: Routledge, 1995. Print.
Phelan, Peggy. "An Open Letter." Theatre Topics 6.2 (1996): 105-08. Web. 20 Nov. 2015.
Plato. "Phaedo." Plato I: Euthyphro. Apology. Crito. Phaedo. Phaedrus. By Plato. Trans.
Harold North Fowler. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1960. 193-403. Print. The Loeb
Classical Library.
Popp-Baier, Ulrike. "Religious Turbulence in Christoph Schlingensief’s Cancer Diary."
Religious Voices in Self-narratives: Making Sense of Life in Times of Transition. Ed.
Marjo Buitelaar and Hetty Zock. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013. 149-71. Print.
Prono, Luca. Encyclopedia of Gay and Lesbian Popular Culture. Westport: Greenwood,
2008. Print.
Dakari 320
Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past. 1871-1922. Trans. C. K. Scott-Moncrieff and
Stephen Hudson. Vol. 2. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 2006. Print.
Quirk, Lawrence J. Paul Newman: A Life, Updated. Lanham: Taylor Trade, 2009. Print.
Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Trans. Gabriel
Rockhill. London: Continuum, 2004. Print.
Rectanus, Mark W. Culture Incorporated: Museums, Artists, and Corporate Sponsorships.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002. Print.
Rich, Frank. "Journal; Dance of Death." Rev. of Still/Here, by Bill T. Jones. The New York
Times 8 Jan. 1995. The New York Times. Web. 12 Dec. 2015.
Rieff, David. "David Rieff on His Mother, Susan Sontag." The Observer. Guardian News and
Media, 18 May 2008. Web. 02 Dec. 2015.
---. "Illness as More than Metaphor." The New York Times Magazine. 4 Dec. 2005. Web. 20
Dec. 2015.
---. Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son's Memoir. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008. Print.
Rokem, Freddie. "Witnessing Woyzeck: Theatricality and the Empowerment of the
Spectator." SubStance 31.2 (2002): 167-83. JSTOR. Web. 15 Dec. 2015.
Roman, David. Performance in America: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the Performing
Arts. Durham: Duke UP, 2005. Print.
Rose, Lloyd. Rev. of Wit. Washington Post 3 Mar. 2000. Law, Literature & Medicine. Web.
14 Dec. 2015.
Rosson, Doug. "Re-examining Heidegger to Uncover Creativity in the Iteratively Bound
Performer." Embodied Consciousness: Performance Technologies. Ed. Jade Rosina
McCutcheon and Barbara Sellers-Young. London: Palgrave McMillan, 2013. 179-94.
Print.
Dakari 321
Sakellaridou, Elizabeth. "The Right to Unpleasure as Social Critique and Creative Method:
The Example of Contemporary American Theatre." Reconstructing Pain and Joy:
Linguistic, Literary, and Cultural Perspectives. Ed. Chryssoula Laskaratou, Anna
Despotopoulou, and Elly Ifantidou. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008. 357-69.
Print.
Saltz, Jerry. "Idol Thoughts." Village Voice. 21 Feb. 2006. Web. 06 Dec. 2015.
Savran, David. "By Coming Suddenly into a Room That I Thought Was Empty:’ Mapping
the Closet with Tennessee Williams." Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2002. 45-61. Print.
---. Communists, Cowboys, and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the Work of Arthur
Miller and Tennessee Williams. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992. Print.
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York:
Oxford UP, 1985. Print.
Schechner, Richard. Between Theater & Anthropology. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P,
1985. Print.
Schlingensief, Christoph. "Christoph Schlingensief's Address at the Groundbreaking
Ceremony for the Opera Village on February 8, 2010." Gaensheimer, German
Pavillion 102-05.
---. "'I Sensed Death. It Was inside Me. I Struggled.'" Interview by Georg Diez. Süddeutsche
Magazine 38, 2008. Church of Fear. Web. 16 Dec. 2015.
"SCHLINGENSIEF." SCHLINGENSIEF.com. Web. 16 Dec. 2015.
Schmidt, Theron. "Christoph Schlingensief and the Bad Spectacle." Performance Research
16.4 (2011): 27-33. TANDFONLINE.com. Web. 17 Dec. 2015.
Schneider, Rebecca. The Explicit Body in Performance. London: Routledge, 1997. Print.
Dakari 322
Schweeger, Elizabeth. "A Personal Perspective on Christoph Schlingensief." Gaensheimer,
German Pavilion 327-30.
Seesslen, Georg. “Art in Films? No. Art as Film.” Gaensheimer, German Pavilion 332-35.
Shankar Jayant, Ananda. "Fighting Cancer with Dance." TEDIndia. Nov. 2009. TED.com.
Web. 15 Dec. 2015.
---. "Q&A with Ananda Shankar Jayant: The Power of Myth and Metaphor." TED Blog. 22
Jan. 2011. Web. 15 Dec. 2015.
Shaw, Philip A. The Sublime. London: Routledge, 2006. Print.
Sontag, Susan. "Against Interpretation." 1964. Sontag, Against Interpretation 3-14.
---. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966.
Print.
---. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. 1978, 1989. London: Penguin, 2002.
Print.
---. "Man With a Pain: A Story." Harper’s Magazine Apr. 1964. Web. 10 Oct. 2015.
---. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977. Print.
---. "On Style." 1965. Sontag, Against Interpretation 15-36.
---. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. Print.
---. "‘Victim Art’; Philistinism All Over Again." The New York Times 5 Mar. 1995. Web. 10
Oct. 2015.
Stacey, Jackie. Teratologies: A Cultural Study of Cancer. London: Routledge, 1997. Print.
Steiner, George. Martin Heidegger. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991. Print.
Stoddard Holmes, Martha. "After Sontag: Reclaiming Metaphor." Genre 44.3 (2011): 263-
76. Academia.edu. Web. 15 Feb. 2016.
Stoddard Holmes, Martha, and Tod Chambers. "Thinking through Pain." Literature and
Medicine 24.1 (2005): 127-41. JSTOR. Web. 20 Dec. 2015.
Dakari 323
"Susan Sontag Found Crisis of Cancer Added a Fierce Intensity to Life." The New York
Times 30 Jan. 1978. NYTIMES.com. The New York Times. Web. 12 Nov. 2015.
Takemoto, Tina. "Open Wounds." Thinking through the Skin. Ed. Sara Ahmed and Jackie
Stacey. New York: Routledge, 2001. 104-23. Print.
Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the
Americas. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. Print.
Teachout, Terry. "Into the (Spot)light." The Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones & Company, 27
Jan. 2012. Web. 03 Dec. 2015.
Thompson, Nato. "Living as Form." Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991-2011.
Ed. Nato Thompson. New York: Creative Time, 2012. 16-33. Print.
Tisdall, Caroline. Art into Society, Society into Art. London: ICA, 1974. Print.
Tompkins, Jane P. "Sentimental Power: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Politics of Literary
History." 1978. Uncle Tom's Cabin. Ed. Elizabeth Ammons. New York: W.W.
Norton, 1994. 501-22. Print.
The Transformative Power of Art – Richard Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk and Christoph
Schlingensief’s Participatory Experiment: Opera Village Africa. Conference. The
Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London. 5-6 Feb. 2016.
COURTAULD.ac.uk. Web. 16 Mar. 2016.
Umathum, Sandra. "Theatre of Self-Questioning: Rocky Dutsche, ’68, or the Children of the
Revolution." Forrest and Scheer 57-70.
Vander Lugt, Kristin T. "An Obscene Reckoning: History and Memory in Schlingensief’s
Deutschlandtrilogie." Forrest and Scheer 39-55.
Vanhoutte, Jacqueline. "Cancer and the Common Woman in Margaret Edson's W;t."
Comparative Drama 36.3-4 (2002): 391-410. JSTOR. Web. 12 Nov. 2012.
Dakari 324
Varney, Denise. “'Right Now Austria Looks Ridiculous’: Please Love Austria! – Reforging
the Interaction Between Art and Politics.” Forrest and Scheer 105-21.
Via Intolleranza II. Dir. Christoph Schlingensief. Theatertreffen, Berlin. 2010. Performance.
"VIA INTOLLERANZA II." VIA INTOLLERANZA II. Web. 16 Dec. 2015.
Vrettos, Athena. Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture. Stanford: Stanford
UP, 1995. Print.
Wallace, Michelle. "The Culture War Within the Culture Wars." Art Matters: How the
Culture Wars Changed America. Ed. Brian Wallis, Marianne Weems, and Philip
Yenawine. New York: New York UP, 1999. 166-81. Print.
Warr, Tracey. "Sleeper." Performance Research 1.2 (1996): 1-19. Print.
Welter, Barbara. "The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860." American Quarterly 18.2
(1966): 151-74. JSTOR. Web. 12 Apr. 2015.
Wieder, Tamara. "Battle Scars: In My Left Breast, Playwright Susan Miller Chronicles Her
Struggle with Breast Cancer." Rev. of My Left Breast, by Susan Miller.
BOSTONPHOENIX.com. The Phoenix Media, 4-11 Apr. 2002. Web. 10 Nov. 2012.
Williams, Tennessee. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. New York: New Directions, 1975. Print.
Willis, Ellen. "Three Elegies for Susan Sontag." New Politics. Summer 2005. Web. 01 Apr.
2016.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. 1953. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967.
Print.
Woolf, Virginia. "On Being Ill." On Being Ill, With Notes From Sick Rooms. By Virginia
Woolf and Julia Stephen. Ashfield: Paris, 2012. 1-28. Print.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso, 1997. Print.