Gesture, Haltung, Ethos: the Politics of Rehearsal
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Gesture, Haltung, Ethos: The Politics of Rehearsal Swen Steinhäuser Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds, School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies May 2016 2 3 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is his own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. ©2016 The University of Leeds and Swen Steinhäuser 4 5 Abstract Drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida and Samuel Weber, the thesis discerns a theoretical description and demonstrative performance of theatrical iterability as the structural crisis of meaning and mastery in mediated self-relation. In this context, the concept of a politics of rehearsal imposes itself as a modality of acting, which demonstratively affirms, exposes and aggravates a constitutive breach in self-presence qua mediation. The thesis links this modality of rehearsal to a concern with the political effectiveness of bearing certain effects of virtuality, possibility and potentiality. As a repetition that maintains a simultaneous reference to the future and the past, the rehearsal is further associated with an attitude of ex-appropriation that follows the task of inheritance as a perpetual re-work of mourning. In actively resisting all limited tendencies towards closure and non-sharing in the transmission of cultural history, the politics of rehearsal becomes the model attitude of an amateur’s participatory desire. With brief recourse to Bernard Stiegler the thesis develops the figure of an “amateur” who perpetually seeks for renewed possibilities of a transforming and transformative participation in the socio-individual de-construction of a precarious ethos from within an affirmed position of limited security. It finds amateurs at work and play in the context of Benjamin’s writings on Bertolt Brecht, Franz Kafka and the German Baroque Trauerspiel, as well as the performance practices of Yvonne Rainer, Goat Island and Every house has a door. In their overt exposure of a body’s inextricable relation to the archive, these experimental theatre and dance practitioners are found to employ a method and style of appropriative restrained, which seeks to demonstratively re-launch a cultural inheritance by aggravating its future response-ability. The thesis analyses their compositional strategies of interruption, citation and virtualisation as an amateur’s appeal to the participatory coming of the negative infinity of justice as infinite perfectibility. 6 7 List of Contents Introduction Gesture, Vorstellung, Schwelle: Rehearsing the Future to Come. __ 11 Chapter One Engaging the Self-Deconstruction of Sovereignty: Crisis, Finitude, Immanence, Swelling and Allegory in the German Baroque Trauerspiel. __ 57 Chapter Two Test-Performances in the Time of Reproducibility. __ 101 Chapter Three Clumsy Creatures: Walter Benjamin in the Bestiary of Edwina Ashton. __ 147 Chapter Four Of Secret Signals, Absent Masters and the Trembling of the Contours: Walter Benjamin, Yvonne Rainer and the Repeatability of Gesture. __ 163 Chapter Five A Virtuosity of Trembling: The Body and the Archive in Goat Island and Every house has a door. __ 189 Conclusion An Amateur’s Courage: Cunning and High Spirits for the Task of Inheritance that Remains. __ 287 Bibliography __ 299 8 9 List of Illustrations Fig. 1. Seven Sites launch party, August 2011. Edwina Ashton. __ 147 Fig. 2. Walter Benjamin, 1937. Photographed by Gisèle Freund. __ 147 Fig. 3. Walter Benjamin at the Bibliotèque Nationale, Paris 1937. Photographed by Gisèle Freund. __ 155 Fig.4. Warm Hand of History (film Still) 2008, Edwina Ashton. __ 155 Fig.5. My Beautiful Pot (film still), 2008, Edwina Ashton. __ 161 Fig.6. Walter Benjamin, 1937. Photographed by Gisèle Freund. __ 161 10 11 Introduction Gesture, Vorstellung, Schwelle: Rehearsing the Future To Come The space of the theatre, of the stage, of the theatrical scene, is defined not just by its physical perimeter but rather by the far less definable, heterogeneous others to which it appeals, and which through their responsiveness retroactively make places into theatrical stages. […] It is therefore a Schwelle, not in the sense of a transition or interval situated between two fixed points or places, but as a zone of indefinite expansion and inflation reaching out to others on whose response it depends. This zone is theatrical in being internally split, divided into spectacle and spectators, stage and audience, inseparable and yet distinct. Such an audience marks the intrusion of the outside on the ostensibly self-contained interior of the place, “swelling” it, as it were, inflating it, making it larger than life, and yet also dislocating it in principle by rendering it dependent on a perimeter that is essentially displaceable, involving not just other places but also other times. For a theatre is always also a place of memory and of anticipation, where what has been is rehearsed and repeated as what is to come.1 Schwelle In Limited Inc – Jacques Derrida’s elaborate response to John R. Searle’s confrontational “Reply” to his own reading of the speech act theory of J.L. Austin in ‘Signature, Event, Context’ – Derrida expresses at more than one point an uncertainty over the spatio-temporal locatability 1 Samuel Weber, Benjamin’s –abilities. (Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press 2008), 235-6. 12 of a “confrontation”, as he puts it always in inverted commas, of which it is difficult to ascertain if it will or will have been able to take place. ‘What I like about this “confrontation” is that I don’t know if it is quite taking place,’ he says, ‘if it ever will be able, or will have been able, quite, to take place; or if it does, between whom or what’.2 For Derrida, what troubles the place and the taking-place of the “confrontation” is its irreducibility to two identifiable interlocutors or adversaries. Playing on the consequences of a general impossibility to assure the link of an utterance to its source – the structurally necessary drift in the function of every mark cut from its guaranteed arrival at a destined address as well as from its contextual affiliation to a source of “origin” – Derrida repeatedly refers to the author(s) of the Reply as Sarl, the French abbreviation for a “Society with Limited Responsibility”. Replacing the proper name Searle with the acronym Sarl, Derrida seriously pokes fun at a certain, perhaps over-serious legal and narcissistic concern with the copyright of a text. He does so throughout by impeccably explicating as well as playfully demonstrating – beginning with the title of his essay – the necessary limits of all such common phantasms of filiation, ownership and the possibility of a narcissistic re-appropriation of marks that must be able to stand the test of time in order to be legible in the first time.3 For Derrida, it is precisely the implications that follow from the necessary temporal movement of the mark’s survival that links the possibility of its repetition to alterity. Iterability, Derrida’s term for this general structure, is nothing but ‘the irreducible possibility of indefinite repetition as 2 Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc. (Illinois: Northwestern University Press 1990), 37. 3 Elsewhere, Derrida describes the common illusion of the possibility of narcissistic reappropriation as follows: ‘The infinite paradoxes of what is so calmly called narcissism are outlined here: suppose that X, something or someone (a trace, a work, an institution, a child) bears your name, that is to say your title. The naïve rendering or common illusion [fantasme courant] is that you have given your name to X, thus all that returns to X, in a direct or indirect way, in a straight or an oblique line, returns to you, as a profit for your narcissism’ [Derrida in Pleshette DeArmitt, The Right to Narcissism. A Case for an Impossible Self Love. (New York: Fordham University Press 2014), 93]. 13 alteration, as a reproduction that constitutes what it repeats différance, both altered and alterable’.4 The immediacy with which the mark breaks with any given context of production by the force of the sheer possibility of its graft, citation or counter-signature, haunts it from the beginning. The signature – paradoxically singular yet iterable mark – as much as every text signed, dated and sealed – echoes and calls forth the other time in(stead of) the first, ‘the time and place of the other time already at work, altering from the start the start itself, the first time, the at once’.5 The limited authorial responsibility of which Derrida therefore speaks springs from an inevitable network between the “same” marks in different contexts that always lies in excess of the limited control of an author’s conscious intentions, or indeed any other, more or less institutional efforts at containing its structural over-determination. Put differently, the play of the text, which is always also a (virtual) play of the inter-text – between other times and places, past and to come – can never be fully contained by the copyrighted seal of an author’s work or any historical archival or disciplinary schema. Instead, the network of the inter-text subjects it to a multiplication of “authorship” as so many (possible) intrusions of the outside. In the context of Derrida’s reading of the ‘Reply’, the latter stretches