subjectivities and the shared cultural context

The other week, during a seminar one of the students asked why do we have to focus all the time on subjectivity in gender studies and not move into "the big picture". She was quite annoyed with it. I didn't answer it right away because I tried to avoid being dismissive with the student in case but there was a good debate in class on this issue.
Today, in a vintage article from 1988, I found a good answer. Let the Butler speak: "...the feminist claim that that the personal is political suggests, in part, that subjective experience is not only structured by existing political arrangements, but effects and structures those arrangements in turn. Feminist theory has sought to understand the way in which systemic or pervasive political and cultural structures are enacted and reproduced through individual acts and practices...my pain or my silence or my anger or my perception is finally not mine alone, and that it delimits me in a shared cultural situation which in turn enables and empowers me in certain unanticipated ways."
Subjective experience is not detached from the political matrix and politics cannot exist without the internalized ideologies at work. Leaving one side out of the picture limits any understanding of personal OR political processes. And this is why, for example, psychoanalysis is still useful in understanding sexuality and sexual difference in patriarchal cultures.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009)

Yesterday was Parnassus day at Puskin Cinema. Last Terry Gilliam flick makes you think a lot, besides the escapist joy of the theatricalities of his filmmaking. The story(ies) (autobiographical somehow..) have so many levels and they trick you somehow by actually breaking with any narative line. The jump into the unconscious of various characters is hilarious and engaging. Not to mention the pleasure of watching the evilness of the Bekettian Mr.Nick (Tom Waits). Reading some reviews by proffesional film critics I discovered the shocking easyness to tell everyone things like: "makes you wish Gilliam would get outside his own head a little more and try harder to get inside of ours" (James Kendrick), "There's a fine line that separates fantastical from nonsensical. Too often, Gilliam's film comes down on the wrong side." (Mike Scott), "Once again Gilliam has made a movie probably only he can truly understand or find very interesting." (Jeff Bayer) or "As for who other than Terry Gilliam might enjoy it, I'm at a loss." (Eric D. Snider)

What I found engaging was Johnny Depp's rather long comment on the movie: "Maestro Gilliam has made a sublime film. Wonderfully enchanting and beautiful, 'The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus' is a uniquely ingenious, captivating creation; by turns wild, thrilling and hilarious in all its crazed, dilapidated majesty. Pure Gilliam magic! It was an honor to represent Heath. He was the only player out there breathing heavy down the back of every established actor's neck with a thundering and ungovernable talent that came up on you quick, hissing rather mischievously with that cheeky grin, "hey... get on out of my way boys, I'm coming through..." and does he ever!!! Heath is a marvel, Christopher Plummer beyond anything he's ever done, Waits as the Devil is a God, Lily Cole andAndrew Garfield, the very foundation, are spectacular, Verne Troyer simply kicks ass and as for my other cohorts, Colin Farrell and Jude Law, they most certainly did Master Ledger very proud, I salute them. Though the circumstances of my involvement are extremely heart-rending and unbelievably sad, I feel privileged to have been asked aboard to stand in on behalf of dear Heath."

Chautauqua!

Chautauqua! from UTRFestival on Vimeo.



What is Chautauqua?  According to New York Times, it was an American theatrical educational movement from the 19th century based on traveling performances where professors, scientists, preachers, musicians and artists had to share some form of knowledge. James Stanley, writer and performer explained the idea: "Brown tents would go from town to town with scholars who enlightened people with knowledge. It was all based on the idea of civic duty and creating a common culture through education." A theatrical project of rediscovering Enlightenment.

The National Theater of the United States of America designed a performance with the same name & concept that addresses contemporary issues in a 75 minutes format. It includes  "speeches, monologues, puppetry, musical numbers, history lessons and a sing-along". Different guest speakers are lecturing on various topics, the format proves to be succesful nowadays in order to "explore cultural production, knowledge production, commerce and community." I would be curious to see this performance and to explore the concept myself: the Brechtian techniques can do wonders in such a well-thought format where entretainment, political, scientifc and academic discourses met.

on originality in theatre

The canonical modernist theatre is still the norm in theatre studies, performance studies and institutionalized nowadays theatre all over the Western world (including Eastern Europe). Why? I try to answer this tough question by looking at one concept: originality. The modernist ideas of acting/staging/writing are still treated as strikingly original or fashionable. That happens while other contemporary forms of theatre are described as derivative, deviant, old-fashioned and second-rate (for example, feminist theatre is often described as a pale/boring copy of Brechtian political theatre).

My assumption is that in order to assure the existence of various hierarchies through the discourse of modernism in the theatre world nowadays, there is a need to reinforce the primacy of originality or novelty. The binary opposition original/copy functions in theatre as a complex mechanism with exclusionary effects, “for differentiating between and evaluating various forms of deviance and marginality”.[1] One of the effects of original/copy dichotomy marks the masculinity/femininity separation and becomes essential in masculinist reconstructions of the modernist theatre. Some authors such as Rosalind E. Krauss identified the theme of originality as the only constant in the discourse of the modernist avant-garde. I have to agree with them when it comes to theatre. Modernist theatre depends exactly on the repression of the second term of the binary. Originality, daringness or being-interesting are valorized in the modernist discourse as masculine features with no critical attention to the social implications of such reconstructions. While the unoriginal or repetitive work was feminized, modernist avant-garde was constructed in the masculine. Contemporary theatre is modernist to the bone and promotes same exclusionary practices. Especially the margins of contemporary theatre follow the modernist formula and become feminized while those actors, directors or dramaturges stay insignificant unless they accept a masculine individualist approach and produce acceptable original work.

Ezra Pound’s expression to “make it new” never left Western theatre and is here to stay because theatre people don’t give any critical attention to the political/social engagements that they reproduce through their novelty/originality. The obsession to be original as an exclusion of the copy has other not-so-innocent implications: the unqueering of theatre practitioners and reinforcement of heteronormativity. From Peter Brook to some of my friends too afraid to affect their work by coming out, the obsession of an “original” is still at work: queer sexuality and cross-dressing are regarded as pale copies of heterosexual norms when they form the basis of artistic production. And no one wants to be an unoriginal artist, right?

---

[1] Bridget Elliott and Jo-Ann Wallace, Women artists and writers, 1994, p. 34

and what about Jocasta?

I am currently reading “Jocasta’s children” by Christiane Olivier and lately everyone around me talks (usually in bad terms) about motherhood. It makes me wonder why… But I won’t write about the book now. There are too many thoughts based on this book and the charming style of the apparently pop writing on very complicated concepts. What I want to explore a bit is Winnicot’s idea of the “good-enough mother”. Because I had too much Freud and Lacan lately, I need a break from the phallic fathers. For Winnicot the mother is not absent and she is not frustrating the child, she is the positive presence. The real question here is if Winnicot’s theoretization of the mother is positive or not. And I think not. The mother is important but she has no desire, she is not scary, she is not aggressive, she has no orgasms, she is just an objective presence, the good-enough mother. Running away from Lacan, I end up in a bigger trap: Winnicot’s mother is not a real woman, she is just another misogynist myth, a male phantasy, a beautiful ideal. The good enough mother is the source of ultimate blame for real mothers. Because no one can achieve the good-enough high standards that patriarchal cultures impose for women (where the mother is the only one responsible for child care). This social aspect is devastating for the individual mothers, for children and for society at large. The good-enough mother has to be repressed by society for her too much power, for the fear of infantile helplessness. Men deny their helplessness and construct their domination attitude towards the world and their heterosexuality, where the gender roles are kept imbalances and mothers are in control, just not to become too good and too powerful.  The external ideal of the mother is the perfect patriarchal blame in the Oedipal travel. And that brings back Olivier’s book and what we still tend to forget: what about Jocasta’s desire for Oedipus?  

The single story

Chimamanda Adichie gives a mind blowing lecture on single stories (with a lot of personal examples and a focus on the single story of Africa). Her criticism on the single storytelling is very convincing and makes you wonder about your own construction of stereotypes, easy readings of  otherness and the function of tourism (I always had in mind this type of single story when I hear touristic stories from far away lands and people, all these stories are so similar and unidimensional). After hearing Chimamanda Adichie, all my single stories came to mind and I was fascinated by her not-so-Foucauldian definition of power: Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. 

The single story has serious implications when power is involved: besides the othering/objectification of a person or a group of people as an unified universalized/atemporal object, the single story is "what they become" and no one can beat the white colonial man at telling single stories (I am just curios, aren't they bored by the monotony of their own storytelling? I am. completely. ). But better watch the whole 20 minutes of wisdom:




via Sociological Images

Falling in love

Minsky explains it so nice and simple in her chapter on Freud: "Before we are able to fall in love with another person, we fall in love with our mother's breast, our faeces, our clitoris or penis because they give us pleasure, and importantly, our first primitive sense of identity." I always think of this when I observe children or I hear remarks related to them: experiences of self are based on pleasurable sensations. When old people apparently "become children" they return to pleasurable sensations: their pleasurable pain is an expression of love and getting in touch with a body that is feeling (beyond sexual difference, phallic phase and Oedipus). This does not necessarily apply to heavily sedated Americans.