Undone in the face of Not I:
aesthetic encounters with affective screens
Celia Graham-Dixon 10877177
Thesis - rMA Cultural Analysis Supervisor: Dr. Timothy Yaczo
Contents
Introduction 3
Chapter 1. Aesthetic encounters with texture close-up 9
i. Performing images 13
ii. Compassion 19
iii. Mechanical reproduction 21
Chapter 2. Matrixial screens/surfaces of affective encounter 26
i. Matrixial borders 29
ii. Intersubjective membranes 33
iii. Matrixial communities 37
Chapter 3. Demythifying analysis, rethinking the archive 40
i. The canon 41
ii. Dislodging phallocentrism 44
iii. Transformative aesthetics 48
Conclusion 54
Introduction
“I found so much of myself in Not I. Somewhere in there were my entrails under a microscope.” (Whitelaw, Billie Whitelaw…Who He? 117)
Plunged into complete and utter thick black darkness, I remember waving my hand in front of my face to try and understand where my body had gone before the play began. As the distant sound of a voice emerged, a small human mouth turned on like a light from within the dark – “….out…into this world…this world…tiny little thing…” (Beckett, Not I). Having been initially able to apprehend the lips, the teeth and the tongue as sites of recognisability and anchoring within the darkness, this familiarity gradually faded away as the mouth
transformed into a dot of light dancing and shifting within the darkness – “flickering away like mad” (Beckett, Not I). Losing the ability to register the mouth and what it was saying in any purposeful way, its endless repetition and constant return to vaguely recognisable
moments drove my mind even further into itself. With each horrifying scream that it expelled, my awareness would suddenly be restored, only to return me to that unfathomably dark space, where I would lose myself once again. As wholly familiar as it was resolutely unknowable, the petrified mouth confronted and challenged me to stick with the loss of control that it had sparked.
This first encounter with Not I was an accident. Knowing nothing of the play before I saw it performed by Lisa Dwan that night at the Royal Court theatre, my relationship with it has been ongoing ever since. I have found myself returning to it again and again, somehow seeking out the performance’s initial affective impact. But, when I say, ‘the performance’, what do I mean? As the specificities of that evening and the particular inflections of Lisa
Dwan’s voice faded from my memory, so too did the staggering feeling of disarmament that had been so present in the minutes that the performance was taking place. After that night, I tried to find the performance on YouTube; I was keen to find a recording or some sort of documentation that might reignite, or at least substantiate that first dizzying encounter. In my search, I came across Billie Whitelaw’s performance of the play that had taken place at the Royal Court in 1973, or at least that’s what I thought it was. It was only through further research that I discovered that this was not a recording of her theatre performance, but rather a film remediation of it specially made for television broadcast. The contract to make a film of the play was drawn up in 1973, but it wasn’t until 1975, after much negotiation between Whitelaw, Beckett and the production team, that the film was produced. The film only aired two years later, when it was presented alongside two other plays, Ghost Trio and …but the clouds…. BBC2 eventually broadcasted the plays in April 1977 as part of a programme entitled, Shades: Three Plays by Samuel Beckett. Shades was included in The Lively Arts, a series that presented the work of living contemporary writers working mainly in literature or theatre (Bignell 106, 107).
In the latter part of 2016, I managed to track down a recording of Shades, which is stored in the BFI archive amongst an impressive collection of film and television spanning the whole history of the moving image. Able to take a DVD of the recording home with me, I watched it on my laptop and then used a projector to watch it on the wall of my living room. By experiencing the performance in all these different ways, it soon became evident that each screening disarmed me differently. The ongoing work that the performance was having became all the more clear with the realisation that every time I watched the version for television on YouTube, I was pausing, rewinding, or fast-forwarding the video at different points, creating new experiences of the performance each time I watched it. It was this that
helped me appreciate the YouTube version of the performance as a remediation in its own right.
Transformed from a stand-alone encounter to an experience that can be revisited and reconsidered via digitisation, the remediation of Not I communicates the vital role that the screen plays in undoing static forms of interpretation. In the first shift of the performance from stage to screen, a process of remediation was initiated that has had a continuing impact on the cultural status and identity of the play. I will demonstrate the realms in which this is occurring by exploring three operations: in chapter one, I present my understanding of the screen performance as aesthetic, which works to open-up and diversify the engagement with the play. In chapter two, I offer a theorisation of the screen’s surface as a shared and
permeable border between multiple subjectivities, and in chapter three I challenge the workings of phallocentric analysis, which fails to give a voice to the work that the remediation continues to do in the here and now.
By rearranging analysis into an ongoing process, rather than a static exercise, the remediation of Not I exceeds capture as ‘remediated’, inviting the consideration of the performance as ‘remediable’. This allows remediation to be considered both as a conceptual move that initiates a series of events, and as an outcome, which is materialised in specific aesthetic and affective operations. The aesthetic outcome, which emerges from the transfer from theatre to screen, will be analysed in chapter one, where I will take up selected images from the remediated performance. These are screen-shots that I have created myself from the YouTube video in order to get closer to a visual understanding of the screen performance. My haptic intervention produces images that perform independent of the video from which they are cut; but this action, which extends the pausing, rewinding, or fast-forwarding of the video, also establishes the crucial part of the viewer in the formation of the performance(s).
The question of the viewer extends to and initiates the feminist debate that runs throughout the thesis. This discussion emerges from the scholarly climate surrounding Not I, which has revealed that all paths lead to Beckett. By analysing Not I solely as Beckett’s work and only giving him the authority to speak, we miss entire inflections of who and what is doing the work to make the remediable performance so affectively compelling. The activity of the viewer, questions of mediatic agency and the work Whitelaw is doing are all quashed by traditional forms of analysis that only allow Beckett to speak. In drawing out the
specificities of the remediation’s affectivity, I am indebted to the affective attention I have been encouraged to give aesthetic objects by feminist art historian Griselda Pollock. Often limited to the formal and material aspects of artworks, traditional art history has been guilty of attributing the power of artworks wholesale to an all-seeing maker. It is because of this that attention paid to affect and performativity within visual analysis can be seen as a feminist pursuit in itself. My commitment to feminist aesthetic theories throughout the thesis serves two concurrent purposes. First, it carves out a path that allows me to discuss the remediation of Not I as an artwork that does aesthetic and performative cultural work. Second, feminist aesthetics alerts me to the subjectivities involved in a remediated performance-encounter. By staging a feminist debate around the television remediation that is concerned with the
medium used and its effect generated on both the play and the viewer, I will take up the question of compassion to consider what is at stake for the performance in this new incarnation.
Establishing a feminist case for the accessibility and connectivity of the screen, chapter two will extend the question of compassion to consider the relationship that takes place across and through other screens. Having been so taken that night at the theatre, this section of the thesis analyses the operations by which subsequent screens have re-connected me with the affective confrontation that left me so undone. To conceptualise this affectivity, I
turn to Bracha Ettinger’s “radicalizing feminist theory” of the Matrixial, which “discloses parallel strings of yearning for connectivity and an inescapable potential for hospitality and compassion towards the other” (Pollock, After-affects, After-images xxiii). Approaching the screen as a membrane, a Matrixial analysis helps invite this surface as a radical location of connectivity and compassion with the other, or the Not I. The notion of coexistence with the other is extended beyond the relationship between the single viewer and the screen to consider the plurality of viewers that the remediation sparks up. Through a consideration of both television and online communities, the remediation expands the affective sphere to enfold whole groups of unknown others that are united through their shared encounter with the screen’s surface.
In the third and final chapter, I take stock of the broader implications and motives of the analysis that I have performed, considering in what way the remediation of Not I resists classification, therefore working to demythify phallocentric artistic evaluations and
canonisation. Working with Pollock’s interpretation of Freud, which aligns the idealisation of the father during infancy with the “idolisation of the white Hero and white Father” in western modernism and culture, I argue that an ongoing affective relationship with the play’s
performances helps to dislodge harmful and undue valorisation of the artist figure (Pollock, Differencing the Canon 18). Considering my affective disarmament in the face of Not I along with Billie Whitelaw’s, as described in her autobiography, I explore how the ‘body’ of Beckett criticism threatens to overtake individual bodily experiences of the performance, which can tell us more about the ongoing work the play does in the here and now. Rather than a pursuit of Beckett and his oeuvre, I have embarked on a journey with the performance that has brought me in contact with multiple aspects and multiple actors that have contributed to its formation and reception, which come together in the remediation through an
is that the following analysis might join this rattling performance in its political and feminist destabilisation of the canon.
Chapter 1: Aesthetic encounters with texture close-up
“With the close-up, space expands” (Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction 238)
The play’s performance in the theatre differed greatly from the television performance that was recorded for television both in terms of what we see and how we see it. While efforts were made to achieve a similar affective response in the television version, inevitable changes and revisions that accompanied its remediation made way for different aesthetic aspects and thus new affects to emerge. Originally taking place at the Royal Court, which is a traditional proscenium arch theatre, there was a complete absence of interior or stage lighting in the 1973 performance. This was so that viewers’ eyes were directed solely at Whitelaw’s mouth, which was faintly lit from close-up and below. Strapped into a chair elevated about eight feet above stage level, Whitelaw followed Beckett’s direction to speak the lines at “the speed of thought” (Jeffers 112), which demanded she employ the energy and strength of her entire body so that she could speak at an Olympian pace whilst still enunciating and
projecting each word with precision. Engaging in such physical arduousness caused her entire body to move and convulse, which resulted in the additional decision for her head to be placed in a clamping device to help keep it still while she rattled through the lines (Fig. 1). Despite her strapped and clamped state, the mouth naturally still stretched and moved. Amidst the cavernous theatrical space, her mouth would have appeared very small, creating the illusion of mid-air suspension, as if floating.
Fig. 1 “Billie Whitelaw in rehearsal for the Anthony Page production of Not I in 1973 […] Photos © Zoë Dominic” (Wakeling, “Only Her Mouth Could Move” 1995)
The introduction of close-up and the presentation of the play on black-and-white film account for the most stark and significant changes in the transfer of the play from theatre to television. Filmed with a camera equipped with an especially large film reel so as to avoid any cuts, the viewer confronts the close-up view of a gaping orifice that hurtles along at breakneck speed, barely ceasing to move for the 12-minute duration of the performance (Bignell 107). Whitelaw’s mouth fills the entire screen, giving the viewer the feeling that they are somehow going to fall into the wet mouth, right down past its fleshy tongue and into the cavernous throat. The framing device of the close-up and the additional framing of the screen present a viewer with a stand-alone image. On the one hand, this disembodies the mouth as it denies any sense of the person to whom it belongs or the performer’s presence as a composite physical being. On the other hand, it is the intense close-up that entices us even further
towards the physicality of the mouth and the workings of the rest of the body, that fuels it like a well-oiled machine to produce the successful intensity of this oral display. Whitelaw’s entire physical energy is directed towards – and is funnelled through – her mouth, which shapes and constructs the image that we see on the screen. Like the version for theatre, the audience’s attention is directed exclusively towards the mouth; however, the mouth fills the television screen’s entire allocated space: it declares itself by actively occupying every inch of the canvas available. Threatening to overrun the screen’s territory, this image’s
capaciousness urges us to experience the muscular movement of the tongue, the curl and stretch of the lips, the hard white of the teeth, and the lubricating strings, blobs, and bubbles of the saliva.
The closeness and intimacy that we have with this image draws us in to the textured depth and tensile, painterly qualities of the screen. The 12-minute recording prompts us to explore the feminist debates surrounding these features later in the chapter, but I will first consider the mechanisms by which the image takes up a privileged position in the
screen-performance version. Notably, the painterly nature of the image I observe is not solely attributable to its texture. Aspects of framing, composition, and the immobile position of the figure (which are key features of painting) are also important elements. While these concerns are valid and all equally worthy of discussion, they are more exterior and structural, and I therefore locate them alongside Beckett’s and the production teams’ authorial intentions. It must be noted that existing Beckett scholarship gives considerable space to these concerns and to Beckett’s indebtedness to the visual arts and to film.1 In this chapter, I will
demonstrate how the remediation of the performance produces a series of close-up images that invite affective and aesthetic engagement. Through a visual analysis of these images, as well as an exploration into the social and political capacity of the screen, I will lay the groundwork for a feminist debate that is centred on whether the remediation of the performance has emancipatory or repressive effects. Making a claim for the substantial connectivity and accessibility of the screen, I propose that the remediation of the play usefully resists this binary opposition, which leads to my conceptualisation of it as a productive tool for feminist theories of looking.
I first analyse the way Whitelaw’s physical performance both effects and joins with the surface of the screen to create a visual performance of its own. I then consider the ways that this effects the viewer’s relationship with and to this performance. Existing Beckett
scholarship tackles the transfer of this specific performance from stage to screen, and
includes substantial contributions from feminist theory as well as from media, television and performance studies. While these disciplinary frames agree that the transfer prioritises the image, by way of fragmenting the body, the significance and implications of this shift remains an interpretive conflict. It is here that I will locate my intervention. Moving my analysis away from Beckett’s interest in the visual arts as well as the perceived damage that
1 This is discussed in Jonathan Bignell’s book Beckett on Screen, but is also addressed more fully in Anthony
the shift into image might cause to female subjectivity, I am concerned with laying out precisely how it is that the play becomes an image or series of images. Having done this, I will go on to argue that the specific playing out of these images on and for the screen offers a more accessible terrain of engagement than the theatrical space. It is through this expanded field that the performance can come to stand not only as an ongoing location of aesthetic encounter between performer, performance and viewer, but also as a significant surface of mediatic relationality between all three.
i. Performing images
The first line of John Berger’s seminal work Ways of Seeing is “Seeing comes before words” (7). With this, Berger explains that not only do humans see before they can speak but also that language cannot transcend or overcome the atmosphere or reality in which we are enveloped. He continues:
[S]eeing establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. (7)
With the verbal performance of Not I so difficult to cling onto or comprehend and the image so visually arresting, Berger helps to understand the play as staging this optical-cognitive tension. While Mouth desperately wants the audience to listen to and to understand its story, it expels a disrupted, broken, disordered, jarring, and unfixed narrative. The audience too tries to build a coherent narrative, but in foraging for an intelligible story it soon becomes clear that this cognitive exercise remains all but provisional given the audio-visual bombardment. It is with this that the viewer must instead try and negotiate a relationship with the
screen and the images that this presents that emerge here as urgent vectors of mediatic relationality.
The inherency of a screen changes what is seen as well as how the viewer relates to what is seen. The performance requires a tangible material surface – a ‘surrounding world’ – upon, against, and through which to negotiate a relationship with the seen and the known. By no means a smooth or unproblematic relation, it does invite extended engagement as an ongoing process over time. This element of ongoingness accompanies the remediation of the play for the screen, which comes to stand as a revived form of communication and
connection. Television offers, Linda Ben-Zvi explains, “the mechanical reproduction of the event, the camera freezing the moment, acting as a bridge between the viewer and the image mechanically captured on the screen” (246). Through the use of close-up and textural, tensile black-and-white film, we focus less on what Mouth verbalises and more on the physical behaviour of the image. Here, our focus highlights a visceral and inescapable performance not only of materiality in the form of the body but also materiality in the form of the screen.
By staging the interplay between the body and the screen, this performance produces a unique surface of communication that calls on the viewer to engage with the languages of both mediums simultaneously. Much Beckett scholarship has focused on the fragmentation and the non-figurative presentation of the body in this piece, which has been said leads to the anthropomorphic yielding to the image. Jonathan Bignell’s 2009 book Beckett on Screen, for example, draws attention to Beckett’s interest in non-anthropomorphic performance in his later plays. Non-anthropomorphic, for Bignell, alludes to the technological content and props of the plays, such as the use of tape recorders and other recording devices, but it also names a set of aspects that concern the form of his plays, which were presented in different
close-up and lighting fragment the body to such an extent that it is overwhelmed and replaced by the televisual image. He says:
It is certainly the case that the use of close-up, high key lighting to create contrast, and the separation of the body from the set or a sense of surroundings, tends to reduce the anthropomorphic and realist aspects of Beckett’s later television work. The body can be fragmented, separated from its visual background, and manipulated as an image in relation to other non-figurative images within the television frame. (111)
In my argument, it is not so much that the performance of the screen replaces or supplants the performance of the body, but that the two enter a mechanical partnership that produces a series of images, which, like the body and screen, also enjoy the capacity to perform. The movement from text to performance that takes place through Whitelaw’s body creates this image, or series of images, that shift and mutate on the screen. It is in this passage and via this transit that her mouth moves and behaves in certain ways that build, deconstruct, shift, and alter the images that we see on the screen. By attempting to speak “at the speed of thought”, all ordered narrative is overthrown in favour of an anarchic and profoundly carnal outpouring (Jeffers 112). In his book, Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama, Stanton B. Garner, Jr. argues that it is with the “increasing
subordination of the human body to specifically visual components and effects” that “language continues to govern the narrative dimensions […] but it is increasingly
subordinated to visual modes of address” (53, 54). Indeed, as already mentioned, Mouth’s “steady stream” of words attempts to reign supreme as the prime form of communication, but is overtaken by the visual display that it builds and presents (Beckett, Not I).
In her contribution to Women in Beckett: Performance and Critical Perspectives, the 1990 collection of essays edited by Linda Ben-Zvi, Ann Wilson corroborates this statement in
her reminder that language is not the only, nor the best, form of communication in Not I. She explains that:
Mouth is not just a torrent of words uttered so quickly that they are almost reduced to incomprehensible sound; Mouth is also the striking visual image of a pair of lips, divorced from the body, rapidly moving as they articulate the story. The image of lips and the sound of the fractured story issuing from them mutually reinforce the
impossibility of Mouth fully constituting identity in language. (191)
Such sentiment is supported further by the screen performance in which the spatial and abstract qualities of the screen are formed of visual patterns that are shaped and built by the repetition, rhythm, emphasis and inflection of the language that Mouth expels. While Mouth might be “a figure who marks the limits of language”, the way that this language is handled and operated – quickly, repetitively, rhythmically, gutturally, physically – constantly transforms and re-forms the surface of the screen (Wilson 191). Faced with such a close-up and interior view of this oral performance, Mouth communicates visually as well as aurally. With the shapes and movements that Mouth produces becoming familiar, they come to stand as visual markers that provide an alternative form of communication to the linguistic
narrative.
The repeated line throughout the play – “what? … who? ... no! ... SHE! ...” – only takes up five-second chunks; nevertheless, screenshots I made from the YouTube video demonstrate that its reoccurrence displays a variety of radically different images from one second to the next. With the voice gradually increasing in volume on each word, the phrase begins with the mouth slowing down into a small round “O”-like shape (Fig. 2) before
stretching into a wide, toothy grimace as the word “SHE!” is exclaimed (Fig. 3). Having used a substantial amount of energy to gradually build up to shouting this last word, the mouth then shuts tightly to catch its breath and regain control before moving on again. Within this
five-second chunk – repeated five times throughout the duration of the play – the image presented on the screen drastically shifts and alters. Although the pause that takes place at the end of the phrase is only two seconds long, and even though, desperately seeking some relief, we wish the pause was longer, this moment introduces an image in dramatic contrast to the one that has been taking up most of the time and space of the screen. Having grown
somewhat familiar with the fleshy grey wetness of the gums, lips, and tongue, and having learnt to lean on the reliably solid frame of the hard white teeth to anchor our eye within the image, it is visually disorientating when the painted black chin suddenly locks all of this away. The skin surrounding Whitelaw’s mouth was coated with black-out paint so that the light would only reveal both the inner workings of the mouth and the lips that encase them. As the mouth clamps shut, the lower lip raises and folds inwards to reveal the puckered chin, which, gathering, forms a curiously textured surface that resembles the ghostly shapes and patterns of light displayed in an ultrasound (Fig. 4).
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
ii. Compassion
The use of close-up and textured black-and-white film are the primary mechanical tools that help initiate an active and ongoing relationship between the viewer and the images that take place on the screen. Such a relationship is expanded even further with the remediation of the performance on YouTube, where the viewer is able to pause, rewind and fast-forward the performance at their own will and leisure. In doing so, personal images can be created by the user, which adds another dimension to the idea of an active and ongoing relationship.2 As the source of light that is used to illuminate the inner workings of Whitelaw’s mouth instead falls on the chin, the texture of the screen takes on a haptic quality that contributes to and alters our relationship with the image. This signals a moment that will reoccur in a similar fashion on four more occasions. Because of this repetition, which occurs not only in the language but in the visual behaviour of the screen, this point provides an opportunity for brief rest in which the textures of the image invite the viewer to reconfigure their relationship with what is taking place on the screen.
The decision to use a close-up initially emerged from the removal of the Auditor.3 Despite the reintroduction of the character in subsequent theatrical performances, the Auditor does not feature in the 1977 television version, as Mouth would appear too small on a
television’s screen. In Whitelaw’s original 1973 performance, Mouth is accompanied by this looming silent figure, who is dressed head to foot in a black hooded djellaba, and is “shown by attitude alone to be facing diagonally across stage intent on Mouth, dead still throughout but for four brief movements where indicated” (Beckett, Not I). The original stage directions describe these movements as “simple sideways raising of arms from sides and their falling
2 This idea will be expanded in chapter two.
3 The Auditor appears in earlier productions of Not I, but was seen to cause various technical difficulties in
production. In some cases, it had been felt that the Auditor dwarfed Mouth and in others it had been hard for the audience to see the figure at all, due to the size and layout of the theatre (Ben-Zvi 247).
back, in a gesture of helpless compassion” (Beckett, Not I). The issue of compassion is key, as it traces a central conflict at stake in debates about the Auditor’s removal.
For Linda Ben-Zvi, the Auditor fulfils several roles of compassion, all of which are abandoned in its removal. In her chapter from the self-edited Women in Beckett collection of essays, she discusses the use of close-up in the version for television:
In close-up Mouth on television resembles a vagina. A pulsating orifice attempting to give birth to the self, the image marks an elision of mouth and vagina, the female reduced to genital identification, more blatant but no less familiar than the use of female body parts in this and other consumer media. Since the Auditor is also absent, the camera taking the place, compassion gives way to the stare, and the act becomes voyeuristic, the female as vagina reduced to a pornographic entertainment or a hard sell. (247)
For Ben-Zvi, omitting the Auditor in favour of the close-up mismanages the compassion and the compassionate force possible in the play. The mouth becomes objectified as a vagina and the viewer becomes a voyeur. What is key for Ben-Zvi is that the television (and, by
extension, the screen) re-frames and re-packages the play as something that can be nothing but thoughtlessly consumed. Referring to television as “that most depersonalizing of all media” (247), she argues that in the transfer of Whitelaw’s mouth from living and live to mechanically reproduced and fixed into a frame, the humanity of the viewer and their capacity for empathy is ripped away. For Ben-Zvi, compassion is somehow usurped and supplanted by the mechanical apparatus, which according to her can do nothing other than record “the scene of pain” (246). Ben-Zvi’s interpretation positions the real-life presence of the living breathing “suffering actor” (246) as the only setting that affords the viewer the ability to remain active and compassionate. In this reading, feelings towards what one sees are basic and even base without the Auditor’s help to guide a viewer’s emotional response.
One of the key examples of the Auditor guiding the audience’s response to Mouth is found in the placing of its gestures, which interestingly occur just after Mouth has exclaimed “what? … who? ... no! ... SHE! ...”. As I suggested earlier, this moment of the play represents a verbal red flag within the script and a visual red flag on the screen. That is, as a repeated moment, its earned recognisability and familiarity as a resting point presents a chance to reconfigure our relationship with the screen and the images that are produced on it. While Ben-Zvi insists that the affective climate of the televisual encounter can be nothing other than commercial and voyeuristic, my own exertion sees the camera not as a cold recording device, but as a facilitating means with which a new surface of engagement is created. With the removal of the Auditor and his gestures of ‘helpless compassion’, the capacity for connection with Mouth is not removed, as Ben-Zvi would have it. Rather, the screen becomes a potential surface of compassion that can be engaged by the viewer in an aesthetic encounter. Mouth does not become a “fixed image incapable of alteration” (Ben-Zvi 247), but a constantly mutating dance of shapes and patterns that the viewer engages with aesthetically and affectively in different ways and at different times.
iii. Mechanical reproduction
The disagreement that I have staged between myself and Ben-Zvi emerges here as a divergence in interpretation of Walter Benjamin’s idea of ‘aura’, which he presents in his 1932 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. ‘Aura’ for Benjamin alludes to uniqueness, tradition, authenticity, and ritual. These traits and characteristics, he says, are sacrificed in the process of mechanical reproduction. In the essay, Benjamin specifically refers to the transfer of plays from theatre to screen and explains that “the aura that envelops the actor vanishes, and with it the aura of the figure he portrays” (341). While Ben-Zvi clarifies that “Benjamin’s intentions are to demystify art, not to denigrate film”
(246), she maintains that the remediation of Not I fragments the human body to such a violently objectifying point that the viewer is fixed in a position of voyeuristic onlooker. While Benjamin insists on the ability of mechanical reproduction to bring about a “deepening of apperception” (351), Ben-Zvi argues that this comes at the price of “the possibilities of escape – that tenacity which the flickering, live mouth seems perhaps capable of exercising – is lost” (248). In her building of a feminist argument against the television remediation of the play, Ben-Zvi overlooks the usefulness of Benjamin’s argument for feminist theories of looking, which I argue are reliant on the demystification that Benjamin locates in reproduction.
This is something that will be expanded on more fully in the following chapters, but to set up the basis of this argument, I must first be clear about the conditions that make it possible, namely that for Benjamin, “mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual” (332). This not only allows us to consider the way that the screen performance disrupts the spatial authority of the proscenium, but also to consider what this might mean for the emancipation of the viewer. This aspect is two-fold. In the first sense, the performance of the play for television multiplies the number of viewers that can see the play. In the second sense, it is because of this multiplication that the type of viewer is diversified. As Benjamin states, “technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself. Above all, it enables the original to meet the beholder halfway” (327). By entering the home, the play is inserted into a less formal setting, emancipating the viewer from the dominant theatrical setting and altering the type of engagement available.
In Ways of Seeing, Berger builds on Benjamin’s idea that reproduction destroys the uniqueness of a work making it more available for more people. He extends this idea by
describing what happens when a television screen reproduces a painting. Much like the reproduction Not I for television:
[t]he painting enters each viewer’s house. There it is surrounded by his wallpaper, his furniture, his mementoes. It enters the atmosphere of his family. It becomes their talking point. It lends its meaning to their meaning. At the same time it enters a million other houses and, in each of them, is seen in a different context. Because of the camera, the painting now travels to the spectator rather than the spectator to the painting. In its travels, its meaning is diversified. (24)
The meaning of the work multiplying and thus diversifying is a process that happens alongside the multiplication and subsequent diversification of the audience. So, while Ben-Zvi argues that the use of close-up and the framing of the mouth fixes and objectifies the female body, it is important to note what this and the process of the play being televised could do to free up and engage a multiplicity of other diverse bodies. Berger points out the important fact that, “means of reproduction are used nearly all the time to promote the
illusion that nothing has changed” (43), in the sense that images of art are reproduced with no reference to how their cultural identity has developed into that which is “ephemeral,
ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, free” (43). If no change is registered then the depletion of authority remains a fact that is locked away and hidden. What is key about the specific shift of Not I from stage to screen is that an entirely new work is not only created but also explicitly alluded to.
I previously presented the uses of close-up and black-and-white film as crucial features that reinvent this play as distinct. With colour television first broadcast in Britain in 1967, the use of monochrome film ten years later makes specific reference to an earlier time and the changes that have developed since that period. Jonathan Bignell explains that “The plays broadcast in Shades would have been perceived in 1977 as anachronistic in form and
realisation […] the productions are dislocated from the temporality of television’s present at the time of their broadcast” (43). Its out-of-sync aesthetic demonstrates how the remediation of the play incorporates and presents a self-conscious and reflective process that takes place within the home. In his book, Bignell outlines the role that television played in the home during this period, explaining that at this time:
[t]elevision is embedded in social life and popular culture to a degree that matches the significance of radio in the earlier twentieth century, and because the television set occupies a place in the home it is arguably more embedded in the routines of daily life than cinema, even compared to the years in the mid-twentieth century when cinema attracted diverse audiences in enormous numbers. (128)
By occupying a place in the home, the television performance introduces a different surface of reception that stands in contrast with the formality and tradition of the theatrical setting. This is extended further by the digitisation of the performance, which allows the screen remediation to be transported and carried around on various other devices. The use of close-up and the texture of the screen sparks close-up a new surface of mediatic relationality in which the screen can be examined not as a superficial or objectifying surface, but as what Giuliana Bruno, in her 2014 book Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality and Media, calls “a substantial plane of relational transformation that has texture and depth” (108). In this book, Bruno argues that it is not just the screen that is tensile and haptic, but also the visual text, which she says is itself “fundamentally textural” (108). An acknowledgment of visual text speaks to my argument about the way Whitelaw uses the activity of enunciating language to shape the surface of the screen, qualities which Bruno terms “surface tension” and “the question of depth” (108). Tracking these qualities offers opportunities to analyse the relationality between performance and viewer. For Jonathan Bignell these textural and painterly qualities situate the television remediation of Not I “at an intersection of art and the
popular” (108). But, unlike the painting in the museum or the play in the theatre, the screen performance presents a more accessible form of engagement, which, for Benjamin, extends “the entire spectrum of optical, and now also acoustical apperception” (351).
Chapter 2: Matrixial screens/surfaces of affective encounter
“Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something.” (Butler, Precarious Life 23)
Samuel Beckett referred to performances transmitted through the medium of television as “peephole art,” because, according to him, televisual art “allows the viewer to see what was never meant to be seen” (Smith 183). Both the name and the description he gives of this genre enfold an attitude about looking and architectures of looking: the one who peeps at a televised performance (the viewer) optically protrudes through the screen-crevice upon art – or some aspect of art – that is otherwise concealed. In The Savage Eye, a collection of New Essays on Samuel Beckett’s Television Plays from 1995, Toby Zinman explores Beckett’s consideration of television as “peephole art” (53), but interprets Beckett’s conceptualisation as somewhat more sinister:
[p]eepholes have two sides; the person peeping (with those implications of voyeurism, auto-eroticism, isolation, and the insularity of self-absorption) and the person peeped at (with those implications of paranoia, commodification, and surveillance.) The teleplay aesthetic is thus defined by guilt and fear, and further defined as ‘peephole’ as a consequence of the smallness of the screen on which people are reduced to a mere few inches high, a rectangulated view through the wrong end of the binoculars. (53)
Zinman’s interpretation of peephole art as loathsome and menacing does not represent high praise for the television performance genre. Her detection of intrusiveness in Beckett’s construction may not be far off the mark, but what interests me most when I reflect on what this attitude enfolds is the uncritical equating of screen size with aesthetic potential. In this
construction, claustrophobia frames television’s capacities to mobilise art, because the screen’s “mere few inches” symbolise a crevice, a crack, and, therefore, a flaw to art’s otherwise capacious generosity. The screen escorts its onlookers “through the wrong end” to art, ‘reducing’ a relationship that is ‘meant to be’ into something contrary: “a rectangulated view” exposing a secret “never meant to be seen.” In its remediation, Not I demonstrates a different conception of the screen, which sees it less as a crack or a flaw that positions the viewer as a gawking intruder, and more as a relational surface and membrane that engages what is seen and who is looking over a shared and permeable border.
The conceptualisation of the screen as a membrane opens a discussion about the demarcation between the performance and the viewer and what this relationship can tell us about the object’s ongoing contemporary work. Having explored the performance’s shift from theatrical to aesthetic encounter, chapter one interpreted the increased presence of the play as a series of images that invigorate emancipatory and repressive effects on female subjectivity. Working with Walter Benjamin’s proposal that performance in close-up “lends itself more readily to analysis because it can be isolated more easily” (352), I argued that the presentation of the play on screen produces a series of images that increase the opportunity and accessibility of aesthetic and affective analysis. The stakes involved in that endeavour began to build a feminist debate around the process and outcome of Not I’s remediation. This chapter will be dedicated to the next step in this analysis, and focuses on what these initial broadening and widening effects of the screen can yield for feminist theories of looking. Like Linda Ben-Zvi, who posits that Mouth on screen becomes fixed in a frame “incapable of alteration and of respite […] trapped and naked, writhing before the indifferent perceiver” (247), Toby Zinman draws on similar themes of voyeurism and denigration, which she argues are at play in Beckett’s works for television. Chapter one already went some way to explore Ben-Zvi’s approach to Benjamin’s ideas in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction. What is of interest here is that Zinman, like Ben-Zvi, locates reductive and sinister properties in the screen. In so doing, both theorists stand in contrast with Benjamin’s insistence that mechanical reproduction “reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject” (352). Here, this chapter extends Benjamin’s wager in order to explore the expansive work that Not I’s screen(s) percolate.
Athwart the two poles of expansion or reduction, this chapter will introduce a
conceptualisation of the screen that resists binary opposition. Not I, which engages so heavily with the complex staging and negotiation between self and other, demands a more instructive analysis of the screen(s) it enfolds. Moreover, a methodological – as much as a theoretical – resistance to binaries is required to construct, or at least contribute to, productive tools for feminist theories of looking. In chapter one, I explained how Linda Ben-Zvi locates a dent to the female subjectivity at work in the televised performance. Ben-Zvi regards the close-up Mouth as so squeezed into such a close and intimate frame that it evacuates any space left for distance or perspective (which she argues can open up a compassionate realm within the viewer’s affective experience of the performance). While I cherish her premise that a feminist argument of any kind pivots on the question of compassion, this thesis’ previous chapter detects the screen’s material agency and ability to act as a surface of compassion. Consequently, a viewer can engage these screen faculties over time via the process and outcomes of remediation.
This chapter departs from my prior conclusion, and will consider Not I’s screen(s) as membranes of engagement. Here, my use of the concept membrane emerges from an understanding of screens as permeable borders that name a different kind of interaction among the embodied (and therefore impassioned) performance and the receiver, the viewer. Having introduced the idea of the screen as a surface of mediatic relationality in chapter one, I will turn to Bracha Ettinger’s notion of the Matrixial in this chapter’s first section to explore
the way the screen’s relationality functions as a compassionate exchange between the performance and viewer that takes place via the permeable border of the screen. The second part of the chapter will take up the permeability among Billie Whitelaw, another Beckett actor – Lisa Dwan, and myself by way of the screen, and the third part will explore the transformative capacities of the aesthetic zone.
i. Matrixial borders
As a painter, theorist and psychoanalyst, Ettinger works within these fields to establish Matrixial theory. For her, Matrixial theorises a way of reading the process of artistic creation, as well as the process of artistic reception. As a child of parents who survived the Holocaust, Ettinger’s work is engaged with questions of inter-generational trauma. Locating the aesthetic zone as an affective place of potentially transformative encounters that might move away from trauma, Ettinger makes work that Griselda Pollock has described as inciting
“compassionate hospitality that does not pathologize or abject the suffering of others” (After-affects, After-images 17). While Not I guides me to work with theories inflected and driven by issues of trauma, the question of trauma neither leads nor structures this thesis. The
problem of suffering is undoubtedly at stake in Not I and in the feminist debates around it, but my analysis moves away from the discourse of trauma to operate in an affective sphere, which might better describe the circulation of emotions at play within a work that is produced and reproduced within dominant social conditions. My desire to take this stance is reflected in my own academic interest and trajectory, which has moved away from trauma studies towards affect studies. This move is influenced by the work of Lauren Berlant and Sara Ahmed, who are both concerned with the way that emotions are “embedded in the ordinary” (Berlant 10) and “accumulate over time” (Ahmed 11). By approaching the performance and the specificities of its remediation with a “reparative reading” (Sedgwick 123), my aim is to
explore the aesthetic and political function of Not I, and how it offers transformative affective possibilities despite the various forms of oppression that indelibly and inescapably mark it. While trauma and oppression certainly inform Ettinger’s theory, my present embrace of Matrixial theory values its insights on the relational work it foregrounds.4 Attending to the Matrixial qualities of Not I’s screen performances opens my understanding to a relationship it produces between the performance and the viewer. Crucially, this relationship is not
voyeuristic, indifferent or pathologising, but productive and ongoing.
In a model that breaks with traditional psychoanalysis, that is the Freudian and Lacanian paradigm, Ettinger intercepts the idea that subjectivity should be seen through the castration model. With a theory that does not replace the phallus, but “operates along a different unconscious track”, Ettinger expands the Lacanian Symbolic, which only makes room for one signifier in the form of the phallus (“Matrixial Trans-subjectivity” 220). Through her introduction of the Matrix, Ettinger conceptualises human subjectivity as a feminine encounter that can be seen as multiple and shared, rather than based “on the separations and cuts that define Freudian and Lacanian ideas” (Pollock, Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum 189). In doing so, she responds to the problem that:
Psychoanalytic theory has struggled to overcome the limitations imposed on the understanding of the formation of subjectivity because of the reliance on the Freudian theory of the unconscious which privileges the phallus as signifier of the dynamic between lack and desire, and which supports the model of repression based on the castration complex and its male perspective. (Ettinger, “Matrixial Trans-subjectivity” 218)
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In the next chapter I will explore the ways in which a Matrixial reading of this performance troubles the play’s position within the established theatrical canon or archive, which would consider it fundamentally as Beckett’s work and as theatre. By producing a reading that tries to break with traditional modernist visual analysis, I challenge the very notion of canon or archive, which is already “overdetermined by facts of class, race, gender sexuality and above all power” (Pollock, Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum 12).
Through her concept of the Matrix, Ettinger “marks a historic break within the canon of psychoanalytic discourse that has made femininity almost unthinkable” (Pollock,
Differencing the Canon 33). By working to theorise subjectivity as a multiple and shared encounter, Ettinger rejects the idea that subjectivity is based on the castration model that positions the other as that which must either be rejected or assimilated. By framing
subjectivity instead as an encounter that takes place between “I and un-cognized yet intimate non-I neither rejected nor assimilated” (Ettinger, “Matrixial Trans-subjectivity” 218), the other – here, the ‘non-I’ – is approached not as an object, but as a part of an ‘I’ that co-exists and co-emerges with me, despite being outside of me. In Ettinger’s theorisation, this process takes place in the pre-natal, intrauterine womb and “arises from the sexual specificity of the feminine that every subject, irrespective of later sexuality or gender identification encounters in the process of becoming, and from artworking” (Pollock, “Thinking the Feminine” 8). It is the stage in Ettinger’s theory where ‘becoming’-subjectivity and ‘artworking’ merge that I will use as a springboard for my conceptualisation of the screen as encounter.
By considering subjectivity as a shared encounter that takes place as a process between several parties, Ettinger builds a theory that Griselda Pollock has stated “might suggest ways to think not only subjectivity in this abstracted theoretical form, but also aesthetic encounters of viewers and artworks” (The Matrixial Borderspace 3). A Matrixial reconsideration of the remediation of Not I unfocuses the formal or structural qualities of the performance that make something visible, and, instead, interests us with the formal material poetics of the screen, and what is charged or made possible by way of the viewer’s
participatory activities. Rather than engaging with the performance as an object or thing to be viewed from a remote outside, a Matrixial understanding invites us to think about what kind of subjectivities the work enjoins. As Griselda Pollock has explained, the Matrixial contains the capacity to alter “our understanding of viewing, reading, responding not ‘to’ so much as
‘with’ artworking” (After-affects, After-images xxv). Ettinger’s verb ‘artworking’ denotes the dynamic and continuing nature of making and responding with art. The distinction between ‘to’ and ‘with’ describes the Matrixial relationship with the other/‘non-I’, which underscores the ‘working’ that is involved with a co-existence and co-emergence of subjectivities.
Ettinger has described this as “wit(h)nessing” the ‘non-I’, as opposed to ‘witnessing’ it (Ettinger, “Matrixial Trans-subjectivity” 218). Here, a suspended ‘h’ semantically invites a non-voyeuristic and compassionate space for experiencing the suffering of the other in art. These concepts spark up a radically different relationship between the artwork and the viewer, offering new insights into the affective entanglement we might find ourselves when encountering works of art.
Not I hails its viewer dramatically. If we are to respond ‘with’ the ‘non-I’ of Not I, then how are we and with what are we responding? Judith Butler’s 2004 work on precarity and vulnerability helps to answer this question. In Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, Butler describes how one is “undone” in the face of the other (23). She explains how “the very ‘I’ is called into question by its relation to the other, a relation that does not precisely reduce me to speechlessness, but does nevertheless clutter my speech with signs of its undoing” (23). The experience of Not I certainly resonates with what Butler describes. Even the title of the play ‘does’ and ‘undoes’ a merging of subjectivities in its simultaneous pronunciation and denunciation of its own identity. What Butler goes on to express and what Ettinger offers in her idea of the ‘non-I’ is to incorporate this otherness within the I –
suspended by the dash that links the ‘non’ with the ‘I’ – over a border that contains a link, or what Ettinger names, a “borderlink” (Ettinger, “Matrixial Trans-subjectivity” 218).
Responding ‘with’ the ‘non-I’ of Not I, we can come to understand that the subjectivities existing within Mouth not only exist within the viewer, but emerge by way of the links that Mouth and the viewer work into existence through their encounter.
ii. Intersubjective membranes
Investing in the emergent work Not I and the viewer co-create highlights the performance’s intersubjective characteristics. Some key factors contribute to the intersubjectivity at play in this performance. In chapter one I referred to the screen as a location that provides the opportunity for an ongoing aesthetic encounter. Specifically, I argued that in the process of remediating the performance for the screen, it acquires the status of remediable (e.g., after the initial opening-up of its accessibility on the television screen, it obtains a mechanical status that has allowed it to develop, grow, and reproduce with the seemingly inexhaustible
development of technology). My own encounter with the performance began when I saw the play performed at the theatre in 2014. In this production, Mouth was played by Lisa Dwan, who has spoken at length about her indebtedness to Billie Whitelaw’s performance of the piece, which she was able to use as a guide through repeated encounters with it on YouTube. I too have used the remediation of the television performance that is available on YouTube in order to revisit and work with this piece. With the ability to watch the recording on my laptop and my phone, I have been able to carry this performance with me, picking it up and putting it down again when I need. There is more at stake here than just portability and accessibility. Seeing this performance in the theatre left me undone. I was disarmed. Shocked into a sensory overload, I experienced something that I could not name, but that I was driven to pursue.
As a 12-minute piece, what we see presented belies the labour, energy, and physical and psychic pain that it holds under its surface and within its complex net of meanings. The onslaught of its all-consuming affective pathos is explored and displayed on the surface of the screen, but also exceeds it and moves outside of it: I as a viewer am left vulnerable at the hands of this performance, open and exposed to a realm of my subjectivity that I was not planning to be or could not know I would be faced with in this or that or those moments. As I
mentioned in the previous chapter, this is not in any way a smooth or unproblematic relation, nor one that I necessarily welcome. I have encountered profound feelings of difficulty and exhaustion through the repeated exposure to this oral and visual assault that sparks something within me, and those that I show it to, that would often rather be ignored. I have nevertheless found, much like Butler’s meditations on vulnerability affirm, “We cannot, however, will away this vulnerability. We must attend to it, even abide by it, as we begin to think about what politics might be implied by staying with the thought of corporeal vulnerability itself” (29). Butler’s proposal urges us to stay with Not I and the subjectivities it enjoins and to consider what a compassionate approach to intersubjectivity might yield for both political and ethical relations.
Intersubjectivity does not seize Not I through the peephole of a singular encounter, nor does it confiscate the performance’s relational work solely as my own. My own
entanglement with the performance has been very much wrapped up in attending to, abiding by, and staying with it. I have mentioned already my need to pursue the affectivity that I was caught up in having seen the play on stage. The initial encounter of the remediation was that of a recording, a record of the event. Through sustained engagement I have come to
understand it less as a recording or as an event, but as a series of images and as such, a series of events. My repeated going over of the performance was fuelled by the experience of thinking, feeling, and seeing different things each time I watched it. With the aim of speaking “at the speed of thought”, along with the use of rhythm, repetition, and emphasis, it follows that we register this disordered and musical narrative less on a logical or explicable level and more on an affective and physical level (Jeffers 112). Indeed, Beckett himself said that he wanted Not I to “work on the nerves of the audience, not on its intellect” (Gontarski 148).
My repeated viewing of the remediation of the play on YouTube and the exertion this entails is not just echoed by the content of the play – which revisits and returns to certain
points repeatedly in a desperate attempt to “hit on it in the end” (Beckett, Not I) – but also echoes within Billie Whitelaw’s experience as represented in her 1995 autobiography. The parallels that I observe and the relationality that occurs between us marks an intersubjectivity central both to this performance and to Ettinger’s notion of the Matrixial. Describing the intensive process of preparation involved in this performance, Whitelaw tells of the arduous physical and psychic labour that enmeshed her. In rehearsal, this involved going over the lines again and again until she got “to a point where an interior flame ignited” (120). The process of repetition and staying with the text, or, as she describes it, making “contact with what comes off the page” (120), is not a process that can be rushed. “If you allow the words to breathe through your body, if you become a conduit, something magical may happen. There are no shortcuts working in this way”, Whitelaw writes (120). Required to speak at an athletic speed, Whitelaw explains how she used an Olympic clock to build her pace, learning to count from one to ten in a second, whilst still maintaining clarity and precision: “I began to understand what an athlete feels like, as he goes through training. The work was painful” (122). The limitlessness of the repetition required to learn the piece and the discomfort involved with what Whitelaw refers to as “rehearsal ‘agonies’” (125) can be seen to both result from and emerge from the need to go inwards to access the heart of the role. Faced with the other in the form of Mouth, she describes being led into the otherness of her own subjectivity. The parallels between Whitelaw’s and my own experience reveals the
intersubjective formation and reception of the performance, which initiates a collaborative and productive approach to vulnerability prompted by our ongoing involvement.
The permeable nature of the membranous screen is initiated by the nature of the play’s text and what it calls on from the performer. At once irrational, inconsistent and entirely familiar, Mouth imparts a tide that sucks us in and pushes us out with a simultaneity of dizzying affect. The language Whitelaw uses to describe what the role demanded
repeatedly returns to a sense of vulnerability or giving over to a part of herself that resides under the surface. Her initial reaction to reading the play presents an encounter that leaves her undone. She has an uncanny sense of recognition at the plight of Mouth, whose voice seems to hijack her own whilst simultaneously erupting from within her. Her young son was very ill at the time and because of the intense care that this entailed, she had been out of work for some time. On receiving and reading the script, Whitelaw describes how:
I started reading, and three-quarters of the way through it I found I couldn’t stop crying. By the time I’d got to the end of the play, seven closely typed pages later, I couldn’t even speak. […] Had anyone asked me why I was crying, I couldn’t have told them. Looking back, I think I understand my reaction. What hit me was an inner scream, an endless nightmare that poured out of this old woman of seventy, who kept saying she was sixty. In her outpourings I recognised my own inner scream. (116) Whitelaw describes an exchange and a relation. From Mouth’s outpourings, she recognises something about her own interiority, and, from this interiority, she produces her own
outpouring. This passage occurs and is reflected in her description of what was needed from the performance:
It also seemed to me that Mouth was not going out to an audience; the audience had to be sucked in to this rioting, rambling hole. It certainly wasn’t a case of projecting. Very often in the theatre one is told to project, but here the reverse was necessary. (118)
There is a passage taking place here that opens outwards at the same time as it invites us inwards. The interchange that takes place reflects a co-existence and a co-emergence of self and other, which emerge here as both linked and shared. In performance, Whitelaw’s body comes to stand as the membrane through which the audience and the play create activity. With the presentation of her mouth in full detail on the screen, its surface becomes the
permeable border with which to interact with her body. The corporeal permeability combines here with an affective permeability that is negotiated via the membrane of the screen. Just as in Butler’s formation, the ‘I’ “is called into question by its relation to the other”: the one summons the other, and in this summoning it finds itself. Somewhere within the “rioting” and “rambling” garbled mess that is Not I, Whitelaw encounters “one’s most private, unformed, semi-conscious, uncensored thoughts” (Whitelaw 118). This recalls the Matrixial zone, that in Ettinger’s conceptualisation is “a compassionate alliance with otherness” (Ettinger “Matrixial Trans-subjectivity” 221). Taking my experience of the play, my ongoing
relationship with its remediation(s), and Whitelaw’s account of her own encounter together, the concept of the Matrixial helps illuminate the affective environment of compassion that is being built up and fostered around the central otherness that is Mouth. What this sort of relationality yields, according to Ettinger, and as shown in Whitelaw’s pronouncement that “this short play proved to be the most telling event of my professional life. After Not I, I was not quite the same person I was before” (132), is a sense of transformation.
iii. Matrixial communities
For Ettinger, the notion of transformation is located in the aesthetic zone. With aesthetic transformation as one of the results of a Matrixial encounter, we can start to understand how an analysis of the performance as Matrixial benefits feminist theories of looking. As Griselda Pollock states:
The matrix as symbol is about that encounter in difference which tries neither to master, nor assimilate, not reject, nor alienate. It is a symbol of the coexistence in one space of two bodies, two subjectivities who encounter at this moment is not an
either/or…This feminist theorization is not an alternative in opposition to the phallus; rather, the opening up of the symbolic field to extend possibilities which, in a
nonphallic logic, do not need to displace the other in order to be. (quoted in de Zegher, Inside the Visible 22)
The sense of commonality that Pollock observes in Ettinger’s notion of the Matrixial speaks to the earlier part of this chapter, which established that the opening up of the play’s
accessibility would become a foundation on which to build a feminist argument. An enlargement of the audience that experiences the play comes hand in hand with the
remediation and extends even further to the online community that can experience it now. For Toby Zinman, the lack of physical community that assembles bodies side by side seems to add to the idea that remediation must lead to reduction. She explains that:
Television, with its co-genre, video, the new art form of the second half of the
twentieth century, speaks the Zeitgeist. While film, like theatre, assumes an assembled audience and therefore a communal experience, television, with all its “millions of viewers” is an isolated and isolating experience, individuals masquerading as a group, each in his own home, sometimes each in his own room in his own home. And while television-watching assumes that people are all watching the same thing at the same moment, but are not in the same place, video-watching, like novel-reading, is temporarily private and exclusive (i.e., people don’t all read the same book at the same time). (53)
There is a sense here that adaptation and modernisation quarantine a community of ‘Is’ from one another: we share the activity of ‘television-watching’ but each of our experiences with that activity does not accumulate an emerging ‘we’.
Coming back to Zinman’s earlier analysis of the remediation as “peephole art” (53), I have used the bulk of this chapter to try and build a path away from an understanding of the screen as an impossible boundary that divides the voyeuristic viewer from the exploited performer. Using Ettinger’s notion of the Matrixial, the screen can be explored as a Matrixial
surface of relationality that can be understood as a shared border, linking disparate
communities through the connections it makes. It is through a surface of this nature that we might begin to envisage a transformation of the viewer, away from the voyeuristic and objectifying and towards the participatory and compassionate. Bringing multiple
subjectivities together from unknown different worlds, the performance of this play on the screen demonstrates a Matrixial model of subjectivity:
[i]n which the several exist in a space that has radical effects on the constantly modified – returned – subjectivities which are then defined not by a gap and either rejection or assimilation, but by creative – or traumatic – joint border space. In this border space are two unknowns to each other, lacking the drive either to assimilate or to destroy each other. (Pollock, Differencing the Canon 211)
A conceptualisation such as this makes space for an affective experience that is not ordered by a binary logic, to which the remediation of Not I is feverishly resistant. Having been alarmed and entirely unravelled by my first experience of the play, my relationship with it over time has revealed less the need to understand this feeling and more the demand to live with it. A lengthy engagement has helped me appreciate this relationship as an ongoing interchange, rather than a fixed or one off stand-alone event. Apprehending the remediated performance as a series of reproductive events acknowledges the spreading and circulation of affect. As such, Matrixial subjectivity helps to envisage the community that might well be alone in its consumption of the performance, but is decidedly linked through the shared membrane of the affective screen.
Chapter 3: Demythifying analysis, rethinking the archive
“If I am ‘moved’ or touched or changed by an encounter with/through an artwork […] I am not merely a passive recipient of a coded message. Nor am I the mastering interpreter of a code.” (Pollock, After-affects, After-images 15)
Befriending Ettinger’s Matrixial theory as a means to explore the affects and subjectivities that are at play in the remediation of Not I, I have employed a feminist aesthetic theory that focuses on what the performance is specifically “doing and where and when that doing occurs” (Pollock, After-affects, After-images xxvii). An analysis of this nature has led me to consider the role and nature of the screen, the work that Whitelaw’s performance continues to do, and the integral part of the viewer in activating or charging the various subjectivities at work. By considering the performance as aesthetic and the images it presents as dynamic, my analysis has traversed the boundaries between performance and visual art. In doing so, I have exposed the resistance to classification that the remediation stages, as well as raised questions about who and what is doing the work to make this remediated performance so aesthetically and affectively powerful.
Through my analysis of the remediation of Not I for television and subsequent screens, I have had the broad aim to invigorate feminist theories of looking, which function here to break with traditional art historical analysis, which is based on what Amelia Jones, who is known for her research into the convergence between feminism, queer studies and
performance in the visual arts, has described as “the Enlightenment-based logic of viewing, classifying, and hierarchizing (visual) objects according to a schema of relative values” (Performing the Body, Performing the Text 39). In this chapter, I will establish how the remediation of Not I helps to productively realign the way art-historical analysis has been traditionally performed. To do that, I will first explore the notion of the art historical archive
