Mimesis: Judith Butler, Visual Practice, Tragic Art A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the University of London by Dafna Ganani-Tomares The Department of Visual Arts Goldsmiths College University of London 2007 1 Abstract. The project grounds the use of mimesis in my video art practice. In the written element I query equivalence between mimesis and performativity in Judith Butler’s conception; I consider the tragic and hyperbolic faculties of these, as ways of promoting expansion of context in received convention. My video clips have performance in them and mime destructive regimes in mainstream conventions of visual culture, of sexual identity and of political position, to challenge these. They mobilize convention and deviation from it, through ineptitude of performance or my ambiguous relation to the convention that I use. Butler conceives the generative possibility in regulation (prohibition and/or “law”). This is my source for prioritizing failure, and conceiving mimesis a practice of power in modification. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe is an additional source in my writing, and Luce Irigaray a hovering presence. They are deployed to support my conviction that speculative theory mimes tragic art; Hegelian dialectical philosophy and Freudian psychoanalytic discourse founded in tragic art endow a mutual system of logic and belief that mobilizes rejection of difference. In these tragic discourses mimesis links death and desire. As a force in hyperbole and the constitutive site of all discursive and artistic conventions or tropes, mimesis may suspend as much as confirm the very truths it promotes. Mimesis may turn or exceed anything that can be mimed – I propose. Throughout the project (art practice and written element) I ask - how is it possible to re-conceive the terms of the representational conventions to which I object without sharing in the mechanisms that denote those terms? 2 Table of Contents. Title page, 1 Abstract, 2 Table of Contents, 3 Acknowledgements, 4 Dedication, 5 Introduction, 6 Chapter Plan, 12 Chapter 1 - The Speculative Modus Operandi: Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, 25 (A) Butler’s Objection, 25 (B) Hyperbologic, 49 Chapter 2 - Butler’s “Theory” of Performativity, 80 Preamble to Chapter 3 – Butler’s Deviation in Structuralism, 127 Chapter 3 – Butler’s Antigone, 130 (A) Mimesis and Sadomasochism: Introduction, 130 (B) The Claim and The Law, 136 (C) Confounding Distinctions, 153 (D) The Lacanian symbolic is a Death Trope, 172 (E) Demise of the Lacanian Symbolic, 196 Chapter 4 – Speculating My Art Practice, 227 Reference List and Abbreviations, 243-247 3 Acknowledgements. This dissertation was written in conjunction with my art practice. Feedback on art practice influenced my writing. I am obliged to many people who provided feedback at screenings of my videos in Goldsmiths Visual Arts Department seminars. I am grateful to the participants in ‘Gender and Violence’ - the Feminist and Women’s Studies Association (UK and Ireland) 18th Annual Conference at University of Aberdeen, Scotland 2005. I thank Nick Deville and Janet Hand for accepting my project and for supervising it. For her vital perceptions and friendship a special thanks to Jacqueline Cooke. And I thank Sandra Goldstein my partner, for everything. 4 For Ziva and Aaron Tomares my parents. 5 Introduction. The dissertation questions mutual determination between art practices and publics – organized socio-cultural terms. Concentrating on limit-practices in art and in subjectivity – unintelligible identities, it interrogates the relation between ancient Greek tragic art and speculative philosophy, stipulating that this relation is mimetic, that speculative philosophers mime tragic art in the process of speculating upon it to determine and theorize psychic life and subject formation. Critically exposing the speculative philosophical momentum as a tragic mimetic mode of definition, I consider how speculative philosophers deploy art practice - tragic literature to render symbolic intolerability, exclusionary-exclusive schemes of identity and representation. And, how mimetic speculation can be done alternatively - to expand symbolic tolerability and render more inclusive publics, via Judith Butler’s interpretation of the Sophoclean figure of Antigone in Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death. My primary concern is links between theories of representation, desire, the subject and subjection. I consider how desire emerges as formative power in speculative conventions, how subjections proceed in both complicity with and defiance of symbolic imperatives, how symbolic systems are constituted by their limits, and how mimetic appropriations in symbolic imperatives may expand the limits of representation. My aim - to develop strategies of modifying received symbolic terms and systems, to expand ideas of context and convention, to deploy these in my visual art practice. Representation is explored as a function of speculative interpretations of tragic art in the work of Judith Butler, Jacques Lacan, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Suzanne Gearhart, Renee Girard and tangentially Sigmund Freud and Luce Irigaray’s (i.e. without citing Freudian and Irigarayan texts on tragic art). These thinkers make connections between tragic art, mimesis, death, desire, sex and symbolic tolerability. I query these connections. Hegelian speculative dialectic is crucial to these various thinkers while Irigaray’s mimetic strategy of reading the philosophers is critical to my own readings, because Irigaray proffers a feminist symbolic proposition through it. Lacan’s conception of representation is likewise important, productive in thinking 6 visual cultural norms and visual art practices. In breaking the connection between signifier and signified Lacan facilitates a dynamic conceptual system of signification, which takes references and referential links as never stable. In stark contradiction to this though Lacan maintains that incestuous desire is the permanent conceptual bearing to the establishment of symbolic law - possibilities and limitations to intelligibility in representation. In incestuous desire Lacan conceives a desire for self-destruction and more than simply an intolerable deviation in the possibility of kinship formations. Symbolic law in Lacan’s view refers and fails referring to incestuous desire. Incestuous desire is forever hampered from fully manifesting symbolic terms in this view, which erases incest from deviant desire and alludes to other sexual deviants who are not incestuous, to preclude their possibilities in symbolic terms. This motivates my interest in speculative philosophical interpretations of tragic art. I consider the status of deviation in the organization of heterosexually hegemonic socio-cultural terms – how unintelligible identities manifest in terms of deviation, and how these limit subjects and their limit practices challenge hegemony in its organization of symbolic terminology. Judith Butler is my choice thinker for this project. Butler consistently engages hetero-normative imperatives in the tropological confluence of death and desire in Western metaphysics, which she does in terms of queer feminist agendas. Butler’s conception and deployment of the performative power of language are productive in terms of interpreting art practice, contemporary visual art and ancient Greek tragic art. In Antigone’s Claim Butler elaborates incest taboo as the regulative term of hetero-normative discourse and desire, as the emblem of heterosexual intelligibility and cultural coherence, its own and that of its alternatives. Reading in Sophocles, Hegel and Lacan’s texts, Butler considers how the coherence of heterosexuality is a function of its incoherent alternatives in deviant desires, how the norm and its deviation are mutually determined in tragic art and in its various interpretations, and how mutual determination as such may hamper hetero-normative law - the privileging of heterosexual desire. 7 My understanding of mimesis prizes Butler’s view of the generative power of the incest taboo (2000a, 66-68). It allows me to think that regulations establish and facilitate the terms of transgression in their own agenda, that efforts to work properly within received convention inevitably appear with their own variation. The more you attempt to accommodate convention your chances of varying convention increase. This notion that I take from Butler facilitated my readings in Butler’s texts. I think that in her writing Butler’s steadfast espousal of the conventions that she deploys transforms those conventions. In my own writing I develop this. I propose that in conceiving performativity as she does, Butler mobilizes it as a mimesis and power of modification, a mimetic strategy of alteration in language (grammar), normative discursive convention, propriety standards and conceptions of desire. Performativity is a function of iterability – she says (BTM, 95, 244n-7). Iterability, coined by Jacques Derrida, is “the logic that ties repetition to alterity (Derrida, 1977, 180)” - the idea identity consists of that which deviates from identity. It promotes Derrida’s conception of context as a temporally specific but never absolute perspective (177-178). Derridean iterability is a version of mimesis, which withdraws mimesis’s sexual edge - I suggest. In Antigone’s Claim iterability emerges as the social feature of performativity (Butler, 2000a, 29) – the idea that performing the symbolic kinship norm, like performativity in