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Scenes of Imagination
Getting close with 21 pornographies (2017) by Mette Ingvartsen
Photo: Jens Sethzman
MA Thesis International Dramaturgy Student: Julia van der Putten
Student number: 10400230 Date: August 31, 2020 Supervisor: dr. Sruti Bala Total word amount: 22.797
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Contents
Foreplay p. 3
Episode I. Crossing through the field of simply good ol’ porn p. 7
Episode II. Getting lost or how to imagine a labyrinth p. 13
Episode III. Softening spectatorship and scenic worlding p. 18
Episode IV. Pornographic you know ... pleasure p. 26
Episode V. Poetic imagination and seeing gloom p. 28
Episode VI. From phantasmatic pornographic to theatrical pornographic snuff p. 39
Episode VII. Feeling up the folds of corpses p. 44
Episode VIII. Cruel control and spinning icons p. 55
Afterglow p. 70
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Foreplay
Pornography. When you hear or read the word, you probably have an image of what it is and an opinion or immediate feeling towards it. In casual conversation, pornography is often referred to as good old Porn to masturbate to and forget about, a laughable parody of sex or disgusting misogynistic objectification women's bodies. This apparent known quality is what peeked my research interest as I was left with the question 'What even is pornography?' after I saw 21 pornographies. 21 pornographies is a solo piece by the Danish contemporary dance choreographer Mette Ingvarsten. It is part of a series of performances by Ingvartsen called The Red Pieces in which she “explores relationships between sexuality and the public sphere.”1 In 21 pornographies, she stages her own body and acts as both as dancer and storyteller of a whole array of different historically
inspired pornographies. Her appearance is formal at first: dressed in black pants and a white dress shirt, though she gradually removes them as part of the different stories.
The stage is bare except for three horizontal rows of white fluorescent lights. As a spectator, I recognized the first story as the 19th-century novel 120 Days of Sodom by Marquis de Sade, popularly regarded as the first pornographer, which takes place in an old labyrinth-like mansion. It is a cruel and horrific story where excessive power and abuse form the source of sexual pleasure for four old male French Libertine aristocrats. She choreographs a dazzling trip through imagined film scenes with a woman performing a chocolate-covered striptease and a large fantastical ecstatic group dance which are cut with gruesome military invasion scenes in which soldiers abuse and humiliate their enemies. The storytelling trip returns to the mansion that becomes an even more surreal place when she describes its basement as a mortuary that holds naked dead bodies. As a spectator, I continuously imagine these speculative scenes that Ingvarsten conjures via word and movement. The performance ends without language. I viscerally remember seeing her perpetually turning naked body with her head covered by a black sack, while she held a bar of fluorescent light above her head. This image of her body as stripped-naked got burned on my retina. The flashing light in the otherwise black space forced me to, at times, to close my eyes. Loud monotonous heavy metal attacked my eardrums. I remember feeling trapped in a never-ending torturous repetition of that image of her
1
“21 pornographies,” Mette Ingvartsen, last accessed May 20, 2020, http://www.metteingvartsen.net/performance/21-pornographies/.
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spinning body combined with the assault of light and sound on my senses. I became numb to the image and felt pain at the same time. The black hood immediately reminded me of pictures of bodies of dehumanized victims of torture. Later I learned about the photographs from Abu Ghraib, which showed American soldiers taking pleasure in posing for the camera with the Afghani prisoners that they were torturing. One of the less
explicit pictures of a hooded man standing on a box with his arms spread became the icon for the U.S.' War on Terror and its false narrative of freedom. Another new genre in the ever-growing digital archive of internet-based pornography was born called war porn.
This thesis grew from my interest in the moments of disorientation that I experienced during and after seeing the performance 21 pornographies. Inspired by both the dramaturgy of the performance as well as pornography's aesthetic and structural genre conventions, I adopted an episodic structure during my writing process. The reasoning behind this decision is dealt with in-depth in the first episode. Episode I., IV, and VI are focused on philosophical and aesthetic questions around pornography as well as pornography as a subject of
academic study. In the other episodes, the focus is a specific scene or element of the performance that deals with the perception of pornography, how pornography is brought onto the scene, and how the performance questions or invites different forms of
spectatorship and imagination concerning pornography. My literature research into the dirty history of pornography and its relation to art let me to an array of academic fields from porn studies, art history, gender studies, critical race studies, aesthetics to French postmodern philosophy. During the research and writing process, I found myself on a learning curve to challenge my way of thinking that often snaps back into a binary logic when the terrain gets muddy. What aided me to stay with the sense of disorientation was the work of scholars that is situated in or draws upon queer theory. Scholars such as Sara Ahmed, Paul B. Preciado, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, and Leo Bersani. My knowledge of the academic field of queer theory is still limited as my academic training is in theatre studies and dramaturgy, not philosophy or queer studies. In this sense, this thesis also functioned as a way for me to familiarize myself with queer theory and how it emerged as a political and critical way of thinking and encountering the world.
Kosofsky Sedgwick gave in her foreword to her book Tendencies the following web of associations wherein the term 'queer' resides:
5 Queer is a continuing moment, movement, motive—recurrent, eddying, troublant. The word ‘queer’ itself means across—it comes from the Indo-European root -twerkw, which also yields the German quer (transverse), Latin torquere (to twist), English athwart. [...] Keenly, it is relational, and strange.2
Kosofsky Sedgwick thus describes queer as a continuing movement that goes across or trans, not against. Perceptively it stays within a feeling of strangeness while being relational: it is inside without assimilating. In its crossing movement, queerness questions.3 In the American historical context of queer theory, queer refers to a crossing of the assumed binary relation of heterosexuality as a stable natural norm to which lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex people (LGBTI+) solely form a minority. This brings me to philosopher Judith Butler whose early work on the deconstruction of gender via the concept of performativity was a cornerstone of queer theory. Her argument of gender as "a stylized repetition of [habitual] acts" allowed a re-imagining of subject formation and the possibility to societal agency.4 In a conversation on her life's work, Butler articulates how her personal being (or not-being) in society as a lesbian identifying woman dictates her entry into her philosophical research. An example of the relational formation of queerness that Sedgwick described. She ends her reflection with: "[H]ow do certain kinds of sexual lives call into question the grids of
intelligibility that have conventionally ordered sexual existence? I suppose this last question, one that I consider distinctively queer, continues to trouble and guide me.”5 These grids of intelligibility structure and render perceivable what is understandable, speakable, knowable, and what is in that sense other or is perceived as an 'unknown.' The aimed result of a queer questioning of these 'grids of intelligibility' is not to replace them with another rigid frame. Queering as approach works on “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality are not made (or cannot be made) to signify monolithically.”6 Taking in a queer perspective is thus to look for the gaps and feel and articulate the
dissonances, there where twists and deviations occur in conventions or norms. Not to
2
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durnham: Duke University Press, 1993): viii.
3
Next to this relational characterization of queer there is also a strand in queer scholarship which departs from an antirelational standpoint. For a short overview on these different approaches see the introduction to The
Ethics of Opting Out by critical studies and gender and sexuality scholar Mari Ruti. 4 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge: 2007): 191.
5
Jordana Rosenberg, “‘Serious Innovation’ A Conversation with Judith Butler,” in A companion to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer studies, ed. George E. Haggerty and Molly McGarry (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007): 382.
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straighten them out but to see these gaps as an opportunity to interrogate and shift our relationship to certain norms by which new and other possibilities and meanings can enfold. However, it is critical to note that a queer perspective is not inherently unbiased. The
establishment of queer studies as an academic field during the 1990s in the United States is tied with the globalisation of academic research and Western liberal politics. Because of this queer studies and politics have also been critiqued as another imperial normative
universality. To incorporate this critique of queerness within queer studies from, for
example, a postcolonial framework that deals with the intertwined history of queerness and globalisation has proven to be difficult, as Ashley Tellis and Sruti Bala point out in their introduction to The Global Trajectories of Queerness: Re-thinking Same-sex Politics in the Global South.7 In their volume, Tellis and Bala set out for a more “historicized, political and critical delineation of ‘queerness’ and globalization, without romanticizing the Non-West or blindly accepting the discourses of the West.”8
It is this queer perspective that I have aimed to incorporate into my analysis of 21
pornographies and within my manner of understanding. It follows that in my research, I am
not interested in a moral argument for or against pornography, though I am also not
claiming to speak from a neutral position. I have lived my life as a white cis-gender woman in the Netherlands, which filters how the performance and the topics I engage with resonate with me and my embodied intellectual capacity. My analysis is based on my experience, feelings, and thoughts that the performance evoked upon which I will critically reflect from an array of different theoretical frameworks. I saw the performance during the annual dance festival Julidans in Amsterdam in 2018. Thankfully I was also provided access to a digital recording by Great Investment, the company of Mette Ingvartsen, which aided me to perform a close and detailed analysis. I also want to acknowledge and express my gratitude towards my thesis supervisor Sruti Bala who stuck with me; I would not have been able to finish without her support. Also, my parents Joop van der Putten and Truus Dees, supported and aided to keep moving forwards. Lastly, I want to issue a content warning as my analysis of the performance focuses on parts that deal with cruelty (sexual) violence, and in episodes that deal with war pornography I discuss real events of torture.
7
Ashley Tellis and Sruti Bala, “Introduction: The Global Careers of Queerness,” in The Global Trajectories of
Queerness: Re-thinking Same-sex Politics in the Global South, ed. Ashley Tellis and Sruti Bala (Leiden: Brill
Rodopi, 2015): 15-19.
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Episode I. Crossing through the field of simply good ol’ Porn
I have known of and consumed (internet) pornography since my teens and read parts of the novel 120 Days of Sodom by de Sade before I saw the performance. Still, I left the theatre that night with the question: What is pornography? Moreover, I was left wondering why I could not answer it sufficiently anymore. Different pornography
researchers attest this paradoxical ‘known’ status of pornography in part to its low-class status, episodic genre conventions, and repetition of sexual acts creating the assumption ‘when you have seen one you have seen all of them.’ Moreover, in our contemporary visual landscape, pornography has an ever more increasing (and contested) public visibility or ‘onscenity’ with the emergence of different media technologies.9 This
apparent continuous growing presence has led to ‘pornography’ being used as a general shorthand to serve as a “cultural metaphor, symbol or symptom” in both popular and academic discourse for any political, social, or ethical issue.10 Examples of which are the modern and postmodern anxiety around spectacle and commodification, misogynist violence against women, expression of women’s sexual agency, degenerate perverse pleasures, heteronormative sexuality, individualization of sexual relations, or in more recent years pedophilia. However, a meta-analysis of international scientific research on pornography showed that even the scientific paradigm is still “characterized by an essentially negative conception of pornography.”11 Porn researcher Susanna Paasonen argues against such framing of pornography: “Indeed, discussions on porn often involve the logic of synecdoche according to which any example [...] can be invested with the power to stand and speak for the genre as a whole.”12 This assumption of pornography as
9
Linda Williams, Porn Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004): 3.
10 Susanna Paasonen, “Diagnoses of Transformation. ‘Pornification,’ Digital Media, and the Diversification of
the Pornographic,” in The Philosophy of Pornography, contemporary perspectives, ed. Lindsay Coleman (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014): 10. The emergence of critical academic discourse on pornography took shape mainly U.S. from 1970 to early 1990 during the so called ‘porn wars’ which categorized pornography along the lines of soft core and hard core. In which hard core’s main focus on violent imagery was determined in court as degrading to women by the united radical anti-pornography feminist and conservative ‘family values’ moralists. For an in depth analysis of the debate which gave rise to positions as anti-pornography and the anti-anti-pornography or pro-sex feminists see chapter 1 of Linda Williams’ book Hard Core written in the midst of the ‘porn wars’ or a more recent analysis by Christian Klesse in the by Katherine Harrison more recent edited collection Pornographies (2018).
11
Brice. Yassamine Hentatib Gouverneta, Maria Teresa Rebeloa, Amine Rezrazia, Fabrice Sebbea and Serge Combaluziera. “Porn studies or pornology? Network analysis of the keywords of scientific articles published between 2006 and 2017.” Porn Studies 7, no. 2 (2020):242.
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a unified whole is an untenable position as the hyperlinking interface and click-economy of the internet defines contemporary pornography. Pornography in the internet era has become more diversified than ever before in its modes of production and distribution, as well as in its endless possibility of classifications through labeling and tagging of its metadata.13 An argument for or against or description of pornography as such is not critically viable. This is not to claim that pornography does not contain any depictions of misogyny, heteronormative sexuality, or that it does not function through the
commodification of bodies. However, that as Paasonen concludes, if analyses of
pornography are “to have critical edge or political salience, they need to be specific and based on an understanding of both the dynamics of pornography as a contingent genre and of its (equally contingent) technological underpinnings.”14 To ask the question that I posed, ‘What is pornography?’ thus creates a critically unproductive frame.
Paasonen’s proposal is indicative of most current research on pornography within cultural studies, which is examined through a variety of critical frameworks such as gender studies, film studies, trans studies, and critical race studies. These considerations lead to the question of terminology as pornography researcher Katherine Harrison, explains in the introduction to Pornographies: Critical Positions:
Instead of attempting to define pornography, then, this volume reflects and recognises the variety of types of pornography in circulation and the manifold interpretations of these by referring to pornographies in the plural: a diverse, polysemic assemblage of pornographic texts and sites that are produced in different material and cultural contexts with distinctive
authorial intentions and variable effects, and consumed by heterogeneous audiences within particular interpretive frameworks and with mixed subjective responses.15
The plural ‘pornographies’ thus means to indicate not different genres but the variations and differences that are present in every part of the assemblage of production, distribution, and reception.16 Similarly, there is an indication with the choice of the title 21 pornographies that Mette Ingvarsten’s artistic approach of the topic can be placed along these lines. Ingvartsen uses three distinct historical pornographic texts, 120 days of Sodom by Marquis de Sade and the film adaptation Salò or 120 days of Sodom (1975) by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Danish sex comedies of the 70’s and war porn archive of which Ingvarsten specifically mentions the Abu
13
Paasonen, “Diagnoses of Transformation”, 11.
14 Ibid., 14. 15
Katherine Harrison, Pornographies: Critical Positions (Chester: University of Chester Press, 2018): 2, 3.
16
Throughout this thesis I sometimes still use the word pornography for the purpose of readability, however my usage of the singular word is meant in the way that Harrison’s explanation of pornographies not in order to refer to pornography as a whole.
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Ghraib photographs. These three function as entry points into pornography as a historical phenomenon. I am interested in how Ingvarsten explores and figures these historical pornographies and how the performance creates different notions and functions of the ‘pornographic’ via her speculative choreographic approach.
Ingvarsten not just evokes the different pornographies via physical movement, but also via what she terms language choreography in the form of speculative storytelling. Before I encounter her body, I hear her voice. Dance scholar André Lepecki noted on earlier work of Ingvarsten how in her speculative treatment of historical material “we see this openness to the dimensions of the historical past coming from their multiple virtual futures, [...] with specific pieces that she does not necessarily re-enact but rather storytells-
speculatively.”17 Ingvarsten acts as both storyteller and dancer of the pornographies. Ingvartsen retells these pornographies “in such a way to keep them vaguely hovering between factuality and fiction.”18 However, 21 pornographies differs from the performance 69 positions that Lepecki refers to, in that as a spectator, I am not informed within the performance about the historical context or origin of the different pornographies that Ingvartsen evokes. Only via paratexts such as program notes or interviews available on Ingvarsten’s website could a spectator find these various sources as points of origin. It indicates that the performance itself is not set up to determine what pornography is by historicising, nor does it promise a frame of judgement for the audience to bracket it safely at a distance.
In her retelling of these different pornographies, Ingvarsten does use a form of narrative framing called mise-en-abyme. Mise-en-abyme is a compositional technique coined by the French writer André Gide.19 In his dissertation on mise-en-abyme as a literary analytic tool, Marcus Snow describes Gide’s conception of the term as “an effect in the arts, which he takes to mean, a link between various components and the way in which these unify the whole work, but remain disparate.”20 Other than the notion of mise-en-abyme as defined by Gide, the different pornographies do not necessarily refer to each other or a
17
André Lepecki, “The politics of speculative imagination in contemporary choreography,” in The Oxford
Handbook of Dance and Politics, ed. Rebekah J. Kowal, Gerald Slegmund and Randy Martin, (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2017): 163.
18
Lepecki, “The politics of speculative imagination in contemporary choreography,” 164.
19
Marcus Snow, “Into the Abyss, A Study of the Mise en abyme” (PhD Diss, London Metropolitan University, 2016): 10.
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larger whole. Within the narratives of the different pornographies, there is the mise-en-abyme framing of a story in a story, but this is not used as Gide proposed to understand the work as a whole via its separate elements. For me, as a spectator, there is a lack of a clear point of orientation from which to comprehend the relation between the different
pornographies. Alternatively, rather, this point of orientation is at the beginning figured as a point of disorientation, which I explore in the episode ‘Getting lost or how to imagine a labyrinth.’ In the field of theatre studies, Patrice Pavis notes several different common usages of mise-en-abyme in theatre. For instance, the device of a play within a play, which is used to parody or comment via the theatrical analogy on the themes of the play itself.21 The most well-known example where this device is used is Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It is a form of theatrical reflexivity, another example of which is the scenographic device of placing a stage on a stage. In 21 pornographies mise-en-abyme is used as a self-reflexive form of narrative framing of a story in a story, or scene within a scene, which draws attention to the
mechanism of the frame and the medium. As a narrative device, it reflexively suggests the narrated pornographies as reiterations that stem from different material and cultural contexts without having to determine or specify the specific origins. In its form, it creates space for Ingvartsen’s speculative approach to both draw attention to its speculative nature as well as to keep its imaginary potential. Besides it being used as a narrative device to switch from the different pornographies mise-en-abyme quickly, it also appears as a
mirroring of the theatrical situation of spectators facing a stage evoked by Ingvartsen via her speculative language choreography. In different scenes, Ingvartsen uses the theatrical situation as an analogy to explore other notions of the pornographic. In 21 pornographies, there is this type of mise-en-abyme framing of ‘within,’ but there also is another type of ‘with’ that structures the different stories in an episodic manner.
In her book Pornography and Seriality, Sarah Schaschek remarks on the episodic structure of pornography, as found in De Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom to “be understood as an attempt to translate pleasure to narrative.”22 She specifically looks at the serial structure of
21
Patrice Pavis, Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms, Concepts, and Analysis, Trans. Christine Shantz, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998): 215, 216.
22
Sarah Schaschek, Pornography and Seriality, The Culture of Producing Pleasure (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014): 128.
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pornography to analyse its capacity to produce pleasure “rather than concentrating on the sexually-explicit contents and on the system of power.”23
Schascheck discusses the episodic structure of pornography in terms of its relation to the experience of narrative endlessness and continuity “located in the permanent recurrence of the sex scene.”24 Because of its closed episodic narrative structure, pornography calls into question “the traditional markers of temporal and spatial progression themselves.”25
Moreover, Schascheck comments on this episodic nature of pornography and its relation to an original context: “the episode is so central to pornography— in that it can be repeated and duplicated, thereby challenging any original context— the episode is for pornography what the sign is for communication proper: a unit of iterability or citationality.”26 In the book Networks, the Argentinean research group Colectivo Situaciones describes this promiscuous serial networking and its relation to disorientation.27 They use the idea of the promiscuous to understand a mode of socio-political networking that, in their view, structures
contemporary neoliberal life:
The promiscuous is the terrain of the “and”: everything fits, everything is superposed, nothing seems to exclude one thing or another. No general criteria achieve to organise a clear
comprehension of the world. In promiscuity a high degree of disorientation is required.28
The promiscuous is, in this sense, not a moral qualification but a notion of a particular type of proximity created by the grammatical structure of ‘and’ that serializes.29 The requirement of disorientation relates to Collectivo Situaciones' assertion that this promiscuous terrain should not be approached to order it. I would contend that pornography can also be seen as such a promiscuous terrain. Furthermore, their description of promiscuity as a serial
structure of ‘and’ tied to the experience of disorientation articulates elements of my experience of 21 pornographies. I aim to gain an understanding of this disorientation, but this has proven to be a tricky process. My strategy for this thesis was, therefore, to write in an episodic manner similar to both the performance as well as pornographic aesthetic
23
Schaschek, Pornography and Seriality, 3.
24 Ibid., 124. 25 Ibid., 125. 26 Ibid., 140. 27
Colectivo Situaciones “seek forms of justice and politics that are not a priori but rather are conceived through a rigorous and extensive social process.” See: Thom Donovan, “5 Questions with Colectivo Situaciones”, Art 21, published 16-03-2011, http://magazine.art21.org/2011/03/16/5-questions-with-colectivo-situaciones/.
28
Colectivo Situaciones, “Promiscuidad”, from “Inquietudes en el impasse”(2009): translated from the Spanish by Lars Bang Larsen, 2013. In Networks, edited by Lars Bang Larsen, Cambridge: MIT Press (2014): 220.
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conventions. In analysing the performance, I take a phenomenological approach, based on both my own experience as a spectator of the performance, supplemented with later
reviewing of a digital recording of the performance. Via this phenomenological methodology my aim is to analyse the theatrical folding of virtual-actual and imaginative-embodied
concerning pornography as a subject as well as different philosophical notions of the pornographic. As the title of my thesis, Scenes of Imagination suggests, I am particularly interested in how imagination works within this performance. In the second and third episode, I explore imagination as a virtual place via my embodied phenomenological experience as a spectator. In the third episode, I draw specifically on the work of Sara Ahmed on queer phenomenology and disorientation and how this frames the subject of pornography at the beginning of the performance. In the fifth episode, I explore the politics of imagination and seeing through the work of dance scholar André Lepecki and dramaturg and dance and philosophy scholar Bojana Cvejiç. What intrigues me about this in relation to pornography and the pornographic is that as sexual representations, they intimately evoke questions around dichotomies of real-staged, embodied-imagined, virtual-actual both on the level of the pornographic representation as well as in its embodied reception. The
dichotomy of the virtual-actual is based in Deleuzean thought, and my engagement with it stems from Mette Ingvartsen’s choreographic practice of soft choreography and language choreography for the series performances on sexuality the public realm to which 21 pornographies belongs called The Red Pieces. This will be dealt with first in the following episode. However, when the content of the pornographic sexual representation - the
depicted acts and, or narrative - deals with pleasure in the face of cruelty, these dichotomies become more and more pressing. From the fourth episode onwards, this relation between pleasure and power, I explore these via different conceptions of the pornographic. Such as the pornographic as phantasmatic as theorized by Judith Butler or the pornographic as theatrically actualized snuff as discussed by queer philosopher Paul B. Preciado. In the final episode, I address the historical context of the Abu Ghraib photographs and how they were foundational to the phenomenon of war porn. For the other episodes in which I engage with the content of the pornographies, I do not delve into their source. However, as war porn is based in extremely violent recent past events, it is crucial to historicise this in order to analyse the final scene of the performance that stages this iconic pornographic imagery.
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Episode II. Getting lost or how to imagine a labyrinth
In this episode, I will focus on the virtual place of the mansion as a labyrinth that is created via the language choreography that Ingvarsten employs. This specific virtual place is where the beginning and end of 21 pornographies takes place. I describe this place as virtual to evoke this notion in it in its Deleuzean sense. Both the virtual and the actual are real, according to Gilles Deleuze, as he defines the virtual to be opposed to the actual instead of the real.30 He thinks of the virtual and the actual as counterparts that together make up reality and are equally real but different in how they are real. He states that the virtual is real but not yet actualized. Not yet indicates that the virtual is a space of potentiality: the virtual can potentially be actualised.31 The actual holds the possible realizations, and the virtual holds the potential realizations. Dance scholar André Lepecki emphasises this difference in his description of Ingvarsten’s usage of the virtual. He states she employs the virtual as “a modality of engaging with dimensions of social and political connectedness unavailable in the limited world of possible realizations.”32 I am interested in how this virtual socio-political connectedness is structured in the form of this imagined mansion-labyrinth. This episode aims to understand the theatrical functioning of the virtual as a scene of imagination as well as the experiential mode that this place creates in its structuring.
30
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994): 208-209.
31
Ibid.
32 André Lepecki, Singularities, Dance in the age of performance (New York: Routledge, 2016): 69.
Fig. 1 View of the stage from the auditorium. Still from 21 pornographies. Performed by Mette Ingvartsen. Digital recording, 2018.
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As I look at the stage as a spectator the first sound I hear is an amplified female voice that speaks in a calm and articulate tone. She addresses the audience all at the same time but as individuals: “Imagine you are looking at a huge mansion. It is a luxurious and excessively detailed architecture, composed of endless corridors, rooms, and halls, that follow one another.”33 The voice directly appeals to my individual imagination whilst also creating a virtual scene I share with the other spectators in which the speaking voice acts as a guide. “The front doors are made of heavy wood, and to open just one of them, you need to press your shoulder in towards it.”34 Her tone is almost neutral, and she sounds like an onlooker who describes the details of a scene without differentiating between them. It is a nearly gliding manner of speaking. For instance, an expressive description like ‘beautiful marble staircase’ has the same inflection as ‘flowerpot.’ It is a guiding voice that lets me imagine this place without ascribing a specific emotional attachment to what I am seeing before me. The voice continues to describe my journey through this imagined or virtual space: “On the wall between two pillars, there is a drawing framed in glass. It is of an immense garden labyrinth, the kind labyrinth where you could easily get lost in, where one path resembles another.”35 In her book A field guide to getting lost, Rebecca Solnit defines ‘lost’ in two ways; one can lose things, or one can get lost. “Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing. [When] you get lost [...], the world has become larger than your knowledge of it. Either way, there is a loss of control.”36
The image of the labyrinth functions as a metaphorical blueprint of the virtual mansion and sets up an experiential mode of getting lost and loss of control in this virtual place of the mansion. On the labyrinth, as a manner of organizing space, Gilles Deleuze notes: “A
labyrinth is said, etymologically to be multiple because it contains many folds. The multiple is not only what has many parts but also what is folded in many ways.”37 The fold is used by Deleuze to envision how an oppositional pair such as, for instance, inside and outside
coextend in their doubling.38 In Ingvartsen’s description of the virtual mansion-labyrinth, the
33
Transcribed from 21 pornographies. Performed by Mette Ingvartsen. Digital recording, 2018.
34
Ibid.
35
Transcribed from 21 pornographies. Performed by Mette Ingvartsen. Digital recording, 2018.
36
Rebecca Solnit, A field guide to getting lost (Edinburgh: Canongate books), pdf e-book, chap. Open Door.
37
Gilles Deleuze, The Fold, Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (London: Athlone Press, 1993): 3.
38
Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. and ed. Sean Hand (London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006): 118, 119. Deleuze understands folding through Foucault’s notion of doubling: “But the double is never a projection of the
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possibility of getting lost rests on the endless folding and doubling of space, and the inability to orientate oneself linearly. Through this infinite process of folding, the mansion-labyrinth is structured like a mise-en-abyme-like space in which each mirroring does not reflect but creates another fold. Wandering through these virtual corridors of the mansion-labyrinth means a loss of control and experiencing a sense of disorientation.
The sense of disorientation that I experience through the virtual place of the mansion-labyrinth can be theorized as what theatre studies scholar Andrew Sofer calls theatrical dark matter. Sofer argues that the invisible phenomena that remain incorporeal (such as off-stage space and ghosts) constitute theatrical dark matter, which accounts for felt absences that are not to be reduced to indexical signs. With the metaphor of scientific dark matter, Sofer argues that theatrical dark matter acts as the gravitational pull that holds performances together and structures the audience’s imagination:
Distinct from the free play of an audience’s imagination, [...] dark matter subtends any theatrical performance. Exerting irresistible force over our imaginations [...], it pulls the visible elements of theatrical representation into a pattern. Dark matter comprises whatever
is materially unrepresented onstage but un-ignorable.”39
The theatrical dark matter of a performance thus creates an immaterial force that exerts itself on the imagination of the spectator. In his book, Sofer argues for a whole range of different interpretations of theatrical dark matter. I use it specifically to take into account the force of the place of the virtual mansion-labyrinth, not of the pornographies that Ingvarsten storytells. Sofer argues with the example of seeing the dagger in Macbeth that theatrical dark matter hovers between percept (representation of what I perceive) and mental image. Sofer bases this distinction between mental images and percepts on the work of philosopher Colin McGinn: “although both perception and visualization are kinds of seeing: ‘We might say that the image is created by the act of attention, while the percept is generated by an outside stimulus.’”40 The audience’s mental image of the dagger is conjured by language, but because of its effects, it is “not reducible to language.”41 This is also the case with the virtual mansion-labyrinth, it is evoked by Ingvartsen’s language choreography
interior; on the contrary, it is an interiorization of the outside. It is not a doubling of the One, but a redoubling of the Other. It is not a reproduction of the Same, but a repetition of the Different. [...] I do not encounter myself on the outside, I find the other in me [...] It resembles exactly [...] the act of doubling in sewing: twist, fold, stop, and so on.” Deleuze, Foucault, 98.
39
Andrew Sofer, Dark Matter, Invisibility in Drama, Theater, & Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2013): 4.
40
Andrew Sofer, “Spectral Readings,” Theatre Journal 64, no.3 (2012): 334.
16
(a term I will explain in a moment), but its effect of disorientation is not reducible to it. McGinn’s work is interesting because he distinguishes between percepts and mental images on another point, namely bodily relation:
the percept includes a specification of spatial relatedness as between perceiver and object, even when the object is very distant. The image, by contrast, is neutral about spatial relatedness; it does not specify any particular spatial relation to the perceiver’s body.42
He moves on to examine this difference of spatial relatedness, as seeing an imagined object differs from seeing an object, which includes perceiving its surroundings. This leads McGinn to conclude that imaginary space functions as a frame, as a medium as it is “not the space in the image but the space of the image. We might say that this space is the medium of the image, not its object.”43 McGinn continues how “in the case of pure imagery, there is a sensation of the object imagined being suspended in a kind of spatial limbo, exhibited in a curious kind of quasi-space.”44 However, my mental image of this mansion-labyrinth that is not a percept as I do not perceive it on-stage does evoke a spatial relation to my body. The frame of the mental image of the mansion-labyrinth is not set up as neutral. Through her speculative storytelling or language choreography, as Ingvartsen calls it herself, she directs my perception of this quasi-space by specifically creating a virtual spatial relation to the perceivers' body or spectator’s body. Ingvartsen explains her intended use of speech choreography to create a virtual immaterial place in the performance 69 positions: “I like to think about how the creation of an immaterial ‘word-reality’ through speech choreography could materialize a specific expression of inter-medial subjectivity.45 With the notion of inter-medial subjectivity, Ingvartsen refers to how our subjectivity and body “are already composed by the digital, the mediated, the immaterial and the imaginary.”46 Language is thus choreographically employed by Ingvarsten to use my imaginative space as inter-medial space that is materially corporeal and virtual. In terms of an immaterial place or word-reality, I visualise the virtual mansion and experience it as a disorienting labyrinth. I do not imagine seeing of the virtual mansion-labyrinth as a bodily neutral. Instead, my
42
Colin McGinn, Mindsight, Image, Dream and Meaning (London: Harvard University Press Cambridge, 2004): 30. Italics in original.
43 McGinn, Mindsight, Image, Dream and Meaning, 60. 44
Ibid.
45
Mette Ingvarsten, “Expanded Choreography: Shifting the agency of movement in The Artificial Nature Project and 69 positions” (Phd diss., Stockholm University of the Arts and DOCH School of Dance and Circus, 2016), 94.
17
body becomes implicated through the act of seeing. The rigorous bodily distinction between precept and mental image, between perceptive seeing and sensory imagination, that McGinn makes seems to be blurred in 21 pornographies. In this regard, Sofer’s notion of theatrical dark matter based on McGinn’s notion of the mental image needs to be expanded to take into account the affective nature of its imaginative force on the corporeality of the spectator. What his concept does offer is a way to take into account the force of imagination on what is materially perceived on stage in 21 pornographies. The virtual mansion-labyrinth in this sense is not superimposed on what I materially perceive on stage. Still, as I imagine this virtual place, it sets up a manner of perceiving and understanding according to a logic of disorientation.
18
Episode III. Softening spectatorship and scenic worlding
In her dissertation, Ingvarsten describes her notion of soft choreography. In a letter to the public of the performance 69 positions, she explains that softness relates not just
to human physical movement, but also to the organization of space, the organization of you in the space and of our collective behavior. [...] the sensation in the space had to be
transformable and [...] your bodies had to be part of constructing this transformation of sensation.”47
Soft choreography refers to a relational organization of bodies among each other in the place of performance. With the word sensation, Ingvarsten indicates an interest in the atmospheric aspect of space that is not pre-determined by what she calls a ‘hard’
choreography, but transformable through the physical movement of all bodies as well as social behaviour. This is an approach to space as transformable through the organization of social bodies connects with scenographer Rachel Hann’s general conception of scenography as place orientation as argued in her book Beyond Scenography. I arrived at Hann’s
approach of scenography because it intersects with Sara Ahmed’s notion of disorientation, as proposed in her book Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, and Others. A queer and intersectional feminist exploration of phenomenology to explore the question of how we become (sexually) oriented. In this episode, I use Hann’s concept of the stage-scene and how this orients the spectator’s phenomenological encountering of the world that the stage-scene crafts. She defines stage-stage-scenes in their function as an intervening orienting act which scores (through revealing and affirming) ongoing processes of ‘worlding.’ Because of this definition, Hann can tease out different ideologically and historically formed stage-scenes such as the ‘scenic’ that create specific spectatorial ways of encounter. I close this episode with a phenomenological analysis of the opening scene to inquire how the orientation of place contributes to the framing of pornography in 21 pornographies.
Hann approaches scenography from the phenomenological perspective of the spectator as an act of felt place orientations and a crafting of scenes:
the crafting of a ‘scene’ - inclusive of the orienting qualities of light and sound as well as costume and scenery - encompasses a range of distinct methods for atmospheric transformation that score how encounters of ‘world’ are conceptualized and rendered attentive.48
47 Mette Ingvartsen, “Expanded choreography,” 3.
48
19
To scenographically craft, a scene thus entails a transformation of atmosphere and creates a specific encountering of a world while drawing attention to this at the same time. In this sense, Hann is concerned with the intervening and inherent self-reflective quality of the scene. Therefore Hann is insistent in the use of ‘place’ instead of the abstracting term ‘space’ to enable an analysis of the aesthetic-politics implicit in different historically formed
techniques of staging:
My focus on place orientation stresses how the practice of scenography exposes the material and immaterial assemblages that are inclusive of ideological frameworks that inform any experience of place. Scenography does not 'make' place, but rather navigates place.49
According to Hann, scenography navigates the felt experience of place, which over time, has been both materially and immaterially formed via certain ideological frameworks. In order to analyse our sense of place and how it is given to us, Hann makes use of Sara Ahmed’s critical conception of orientation, as outlined in her book Queer Phenomenology. Hann mainly focuses on Ahmed’s analysis of how our sensory bodily encounters with the world are entangled with orders of knowledge (in a Foucauldian sense).
Ahmed studies the concept of orientation as historically conceived within the writings of Western phenomenologists like Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. She asks how bodies become orientated by how they take up time and space from the intersection of feminist, queer, and critical race studies.50 In her own words: “how bodies are gendered, sexualized, and raced by how they extend into space.”51 She argues that orientations towards others are never neutral; instead, they shape and affect:
[T]he orientations we have toward others shape the contours of space by affecting relations of proximity and distance between bodies.[...] [O]rientations involve different ways of registering the proximity of objects and others. Orientations shape not only how we inhabit space, but how we apprehend this world of shared inhabitance, as well as "who'' or "what'' we direct our energy and attention towards.52
Orientations are felt and situate us in a bodily manner within the world by directing relations of proximity and distance towards objects and others. Moreover, they shape the direction of our attention. Over time our bodies are formed and scripted through how we performatively align ourselves and others with historical, cultural, and social normative orientations.
49
Hann, Beyond Scenography, 23.
50
Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, orientations, objects and others (Durnham: Duke University Press, 2006): 5.
51
Ibid., 5.
52
20
Ahmed, for instance, analyses heteronormativity through the spatial notion of ‘straightness’ as the result of continuous work, a ‘tending to’ staying in line. This work fades into the background, which allows the orientating direction of ‘straightness’ to appear as already given or natural. When we are in line, we can extend into space, inhabit the world in a way that people who are out of line are not. They are ‘othered,’ but in a dual movement, they also ‘other’ the space they are in.53 Furthermore, Ahmed states how this upright alignment conflates with a value judgement of being good. It is only when our orientation gets slanted or wonky, for instance, by encountering ‘otherness,’ when we become disorientated, that we notice we are orientated in a specific way. It is this traversing of our bodily alignment with the world that Ahmed qualifies as queer. In these moments of disorientation, of
othering wonkiness, Ahmed detects queerness which, when it is not straightened out, holds the potential to gain a different affirmative orientation towards such moments:
[P]henomenology is full of queer moments; as moments of disorientation that Maurice Merleau-Ponty suggests involve not only "the intellectual experience of disorder, but the vital experience of giddiness and nausea, which is the awareness of our contingency, and the horror with which it fills us" (2002: 296). [...] if we stay with such moments then we might achieve a different orientation toward them; such moments may be the source of vitality as well as giddiness. We might even find joy and excitement in the horror.54
Later I will return with more detail to this politics of disorientation. For now, let me pick up the thread of Rachel Hann to enmesh Ahmed’s queer phenomenology with the theatrical situation via Hann’s concept of the stage-scene.
Hann’s use of Ahmed’s queer phenomenology allows her “to consider how
phenomenological experience is conditioned by an ordering of difference.”55 This leads Hann to an “understanding [of] orientation in terms of material proximities and the felt orders of othering - whether in terms of strategies of orientation (spatial arrangement, intimacy, etc.), location (belonging, scale, etc.) or period (historical signifiers, tempo, etc.) [...].”56 One of these strategies of orientation is the stage or stage-scene as Hann calls it. Hann argues that the historical phenomenon of the Greek skēnē functioned as a material orienting staging device. The skēnē was initially a tent placed onto the orchēstra which allowed actors a way
53
Here Ahmed specifically gives a detailed analysis of both Franz Fanon’s and Edward Said’s critiques of Western notions of neutrality and universalism as investigations of normative whiteness and its notions of familiar-unfamiliar.
54
Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 4.
55
Hann, Beyond Scenography, 33.
56
21
to enter from a someplace-else, thus creating a threshold.57
She recounts how this
eventually resulted in the elevated structure of the stage. The notions of stage and scene are therefore historically intertwined and, in that sense, symbiotic concepts that not only
function as a space for symbolic representations but also orientate theatre as a place of encounter.58
The term stage-scene specifically points to this creation of a threshold between different worlds. Moreover, Hann states how the stage-scene can be scenographically used as a potential othering tactic that intervenes in the same manner as counter-sites or
heterotopias as formulated by Foucault. The stage-scene interpreted as counter-site is, therefore, “a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites [...] are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.”59 In this context, she notes how “orientation focuses on the bodily methods through which place, as a material situation of a spatial imaginary, is felt.”60 The othering of the stage-scene as counter-site is felt in a bodily manner via the distinct affective, sensory perception of place. The stage-scene as place orientation is felt as an irritant that exposes normative orders of knowledge that phenomenologically shape and orient place. It is in this notion of irritation that Hann describes that I recognize the
experience of disorientation as described by Ahmed within a theatrical context.
Furthermore, Hann broadens the notion of place when she introduces the processual concept of ‘worlding.’ It describes a particular temporal relational mode of being with the world. Worlding conceptualizes the ongoing “active qualities of ‘the world’” as a continuous process that questions the idea of ‘the world’ as enfolding before a stagnant single
viewpoint.61 Hann, therefore, proposes that scenography crafts ongoing processes of (human-centric) worlding and that it draws attention to these processes by scoring them through material interventional acts of orientation.62 Besides this concept of worlding, Hann argues that the stage-scene acts as a fold of different worlds following Gilles Deleuze’s theorization of the fold.
The fold sustains an innate tension where oppositional worlds are always in a state of negotiation. A stage is arguably an exercise in folding, of irritating the juxtapositions of
57
Hann, Beyond Scenography, 25.
58
Ibid., 25.
59
Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics 16, no 1 (1986): 24.
60
Hann, Beyond Scenography, 37.
61
Ibid., 2.
62
22 worlding that score the porous boundaries of stage and not-stage. Correspondingly, a stage is also a place of transition and transaction; of negotiating place orientation.63
Hann thus proposes the scene-stage as a situational encounter and intervening orientating act which scores (through revealing and affirming) ongoing processes of worlding. The stage-scene is an interventional act which “reveals and affirms how worlds are felt, whether politically speculative or ‘real.’”64
Hann proposes ‘the scenic’ as a specific ideological aesthetic-political positioning of the stage-scene that “sustains the politics of the picturesque.”65 The aesthetic politics of the picturesque dates back to debates on the spatio-temporal difference of poetry and painting in the 17th and 18th century.66 Namely how “pictures capture the totality of a scene, while poetry can show temporal movement,” which in landscape painting creates tension with the notion of the scene as a place of encountering worlding as an ongoing process.67 Through an aesthetic reversal, the orientation of representational painting became imposed on the landscape to appreciate the environment as ‘a scene’ or ‘a view.’68 Scenic politics, in turn, entail a division of our being with the world into the stagnant model of a subject separate yet possessive of its object. This negates the temporal processual dimension of worlding, as described above.69 Hann argues how scenic politics evoke a Cartesian split or dualist binary mode of experience:
This literal positioning of the subject (the spectator) as discrete from the object (the landscape) is fundamental to the politics of the picturesque and, correspondingly, the scenic. Unlike the ontological indeterminacy of affective atmospheres, scenic politics enact a strict binary between subject and object that enable the viewer to possess, to partition, the experience of landscape through a system of value judgment.70
The scenic, therefore, orients place in such a manner that would negate both the processual dimension of worlding as well as returning to 21 pornographies Ingvarsten’s practice of soft choreography. Nevertheless, in the opening scene of 21 pornographies, it is this type of spectator-subject and their scenic relation that is staged in the virtual mansion-labyrinth—
63
Hann, Beyond Scenography, 88, 89.
64 Ibid., 16. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid. 68
Ibid., 26. She for instance gives the example of benches placed at specific sites from which one is to appreciate the view.
69
Ibid., 27.
70
23
only the virtual stage-scene of the mansion-labyrinth others this scenic spectator by folding different processes of worlding.
As I will later argue more in-depth in the episode on poetic imagination and seeing gloom, the opening scene of 21 pornographies creates a “threshold state for seeing” when I am looking into the gloomy atmosphere of both darkness and light. 71 The looking at the gloomy stage is intertwined or folded with my visualisation of the virtual mansion-labyrinth by doubling this act of looking when Ingvartsen utters in a calm voice with minimal inflection the first speculative sentence: “Imagine you are looking at a huge mansion.”72 The relation between the two places is thus mediated via the embodied spectator whose primary sense is seeing, which in the virtual space is tied to imagining. I imaginatively oscillate between seeing myself seeing in this imaged place, seeing the imagined place of the mansion, whilst physically looking at the gloomy atmosphere. From this initial emphasis on seeing in both the virtual place as well as via my physical action of peering at the gloomy stage, Ingvartsen’s voice leads me to engage my body through the virtual mansion imaginatively. A few
moments later, there is another instance of a doubled looking. It is this other form of looking that reminds of the scenic relation as described by Hahn.
Located in a great hall of the virtual mansion-labyrinth, Ingvartsen describes a group of men and women seated on chairs, all looking towards a small stage. “Dressed in lavish gowns and tuxedos,” she informs us, “they are sitting completely still.” 73 Ingvartsen uses the words numb and lifeless to describe their facial expressions: “While they stare at what is being performed in front of their eyes, they seem spellbound on their chairs. There is hardly a blink of an eye.”74 I imagine this lavishly dressed group of spectators and envision them looking in this imagined place. These spectators are spellbound but unmoved, seemingly unaffected by what they see. Partitioned off from the object that they see as Hann describes the scenic subject and object relation. The static scene that the language choreography evokes seems an inverted scenic view; the looking spectators, still in their disembodied continuous stare, become the object of the scene I imagine looking at. Nevertheless, I am also aligned with them in an embodied manner because of my position as a spectator sitting on a chair looking at the stage. My bodily position aligns with the seated spectator position,
71
Martin Welton, ´Dark Visions: Looking at and in Theatrical Darkness.’ Theatre Journal 69 (2017): 497.
72
Transcribed from 21 pornographies. Performed by Mette Ingvartsen. Digital recording, 2018.
73
Ibid.
74
24
yet I feel slightly out of place or ‘slanted’ because of a certain embodied affective excess I experience towards my virtual unaffected double. They are not just affectively flat; they are physically unaffected by their environment, keeping it at a distance like a scenic view. Pornography researcher Susanna Paasonen proposes the term carnal resonance to research the “material and visceral sensations that are caused by encounters with pornography. Resonance is carnal by definition, and the sensations and vibrations that it entails are not necessarily easy to articulate or translate into language.”75
The bodies that I imaginatively encounter in this instance through Ingvartsen’s calm voice seems to be devoid of carnal resonance, which renders my own resonance attentive. From the framework of Ahmeds queer phenomenology, this can be seen as a moment of straightening. In her discussion of Merleau-Ponty, she notes how he describes his perception of the world as queer when it appears ‘slanted’:
Merleau-Ponty considers how subjects "straighten" any queer effects and he asks what this tendency to "see straight" suggests about the relationship between bodies and space. [...] He answers this question [...] as being shaped by the purposefulness of the body; the body does things, and space thus takes shape as a field of action: "What counts for the orientation of my spectacle is not my body as it in fact is, as a thing in objective space, but as a system of possible actions, a virtual body with its phenomenal 'place' defined by its task and situation. My body is wherever there is something to be done" (291). By implication the queer moment, in which objects appear slantwise and the vertical and horizontal axes appear "out of line," must be overcome not because such moments contradict laws that govern objective space, but because they block bodily action: they inhibit the body such that it ceases to extend into phenomenal space.76
In the Western theatre norm, which has shaped my bodily orientation towards theatrical performance, the virtual body of the spectator is defined by its task of looking through which the stage directs its attention. The scenic relation assumed by the imagined spectators in the virtual mansion-labyrinth is at odds with my bodily orientation, momentarily rendering its normative structuring of ocular possession and unaffected bodily separation attentive. The spectators I imagine in the virtual mansion-labyrinth are othered by my embodied
experience as a spectator seeing the gloomy stage-scene. Nevertheless, their othering virtual bodies also affect my own experience of place: as I fail to align because of the gloomy
peering with them, my normative virtual spectator position in the theatre is called into question. The stage-scene of virtual-mansion place is therefore used in 21 pornographies to render questions around pornographic worlding attentive. In this slanted scenic setting the
75
Susanna Paasonen, Carnal Resonance, affect and online pornography (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011): 17.
25
first question of pornography as a visual genre is not what do we see represented?
However,: how do we see, from where do we see, in what manner do we expose ourselves in how we are affected by what we see? In my orientation as a Western ocular theatre spectator, I am enticed to examine and negotiate my own affective relation towards the pornographies that I will experience during the performance. Because this examination happens through experiencing disorientation that is not reoriented towards normative straightness, I am invited to see what is represented as pornography without immediately grasping it in order to judge it from my preconceived notion of what pornography is.
26 Why invoke Porn? Because Porn – or, if you shy at the term, erotic art – both in and in spite of its crudities, stupidities, and bad politics, does not, as Porn, offer itself to a subject as an object for interpretation. This is not to say that Porn cannot be interpreted or criticized, but that it is not to the gaze of a political or epistemological subject that it offers itself. - William Haver77
Episode IV. Pornographic you know ... pleasure
In this episode, I will briefly address pornographic pleasure. As William Haver, comparative literature and queer scholar reminds us, it is important to acknowledge that pornography offers itself to us not to be interpreted but “as sexual pleasure; insofar as it does so, its address is not to a subject’s gaze, but to the body’s capacity for pleasure, its capacity to see more than it looks at, to hear more than it listens to, to think more than it conceives.”78 This bodily address of Porn and offering as sexual pleasure is necessary to take as its explicit first principle, no matter if it succeeds or fails in achieving this. Its address is not just to our gaze, but to our sensuous bodily capacity for pleasure. With his insistence on the experience of pleasure as an elusive just out of grasp sensuous ‘more,’ Haver seems to allude to the difficulty of pleasure, as pointed out by Foucault: “Pleasure—nobody knows what it is!”79 Tim Dean, scholar in philosophy, sex and queer studies, notes how “pleasure malfunctions as a reliable sign of subjective truth.”80 Which would counter the type of pleasure that was a part of what Foucault called the Western scientia sexualis that produces “pleasure in the truth of pleasure, the pleasure of knowing that truth.”81
Even though Foucault, therefore, argues against sex (and specifically desire) as a paradigm for the pleasure his consideration of pleasure is useful. He was interested in pleasure because of its apparent superficiality. Elaborating on Foucault’s notion of pleasure, philosopher Arnold I. Davidson states:
Pleasure is, as it were, exhausted by its surface; it can be intensified, increased, its qualities modified, but it does not have the psychological depth of desire. It is, so to speak, related to itself and not to something else that it expresses [...]. There is no coherent conceptual space for the science of sexuality to attach itself to pleasure, and no primacy of the psychological subject in the experience of pleasure. Structures of desire lead to forms of sexual orientation,
77
William Haver, “Really Bad Infinities: Queer's Honour and the Pornographic Life,” Parallax 5, no. 4 (1999): 12.
78 Ibid. 79
Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,” in Essential Works, of
Michel Foucault, 1954-1984 vol. 1, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997): 269. 80
Tim Dean, “The biopolitics of pleasure,” South Atlantic Quarterly 111, no. 3 (2012): 480.
27 kinds of subjectivity; different pleasures do not imply orientation at all, require no theory of subjectivity or identity formation.82
Pleasure, in that sense, does not imply This surface quality of pleasure as related to itself recalls what Haver deems the pornographic quality of the representational mode of pornography. He states that pornography as a visual representation is not pleasurable because it refers to sex as a surrogate sign or supplantation of sex. It is another distinct form of pleasure. Porn is, in other words, not a representation of sexual pleasure, but
representation as sexual pleasure. A representation that is sexually pleasurable in itself is, therefore, pornographic:
[Porn] offers itself as in itself sexually pleasurable, that in itself and as itself, it produces a pleasure that is no metaphor. [P]orn is what in representation exceeds representation, it is what in the visual image or in the word can be neither transcended nor translated.83
This is also a reason for art critics to deny Porn the status of art as its primary offering is pleasure in its “impossible presence of here, now” and not meaning.84 Haver applies this quality of the pornographic to life to describe a “life insofar as it is attentive to those possibilities [... it] does not give up on the bios apolaustikos that is the surplus of political and epistemological subjectivity.”85 Haver’s notion of pornographic pleasure is, therefore, one that is not linked to a sense of mastery of the subject.
82
Arnold I. Davidson, The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 212.
83
Haver, “Really Bad Infinities”, 12.
84
Ibid., 15.
28 There is a tension between the word and body, speech and gesture [...] There are artists for whom that tension is fodder, not limit. And that includes any dramaturg who is attending to the full range of contemporary performance. - Katherine Profeta86
Episode V. Poetic imagination and seeing gloom
Ingvartsen uses this tension between word and body that dance dramaturge Katherine Profeta describes as ‘fodder’ in a myriad of ways. In this episode, I analyse this fodder via the relation between the speculative usage of language, imagination, and spectatorship. My analysis will focus on Ingvarsten’s use of language choreography as a form of speculative storytelling and the specific form of imagination this evokes. Furthermore, I will focus on how particular forms of imagination are supported in how seeing is phenomenologically constructed in the opening scene through the play with darkness, light, and atmospheric gloom. Furthermore, I will investigate how seeing gloom relates to the notion of scopic control as contemporary power in theatrical spectacle as described by dance scholar André Lepecki and how this relates to pornography as a hypervisual medium. In this episode, I specifically draw upon the theoretical writing of Bojana Cvejić and Lepecki, who are both dramaturges and dance scholars that have reflected upon the work of Ingvarsten, to understand the political working and possible potentiality of poetic imagination and speculation within the field of contemporary experimental dance. In their theoretical writings, they offer an analysis of how artists like Mette Ingvartsen critically expand their notions of choreography to address and rework dance’s conditioning under contemporary forms of power. Furthermore, their writing offers an intimate and intricate understanding of the workings of such a critique as both Lepecki and Cvejić have been working for many years with choreographers as dramaturges or as facilitators of the development of their
choreographic practice.
Bojana Cvejić has, for a long time, collaborated with Mette Ingvartsen in the role of dramaturg and acted as her PhD-supervisor as well. Cvejić's own research is philosophically underpinned, and she draws upon and critically engages with continental metaphysic and aesthetic, philosophical thought from Immanuel Kant to Gilles Deleuze. She approaches choreography as a form of thought in itself and philosophically contextualises different contemporary choreographic attitudes and poetic strategies. I will engage with Cvejić’s
86
Katherine Profeta, Dramaturgy in Motion, at Work on Dance and Movement Performance (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Pres, 2015): 29.
29
analysis of the workings and possibilities of poetic imagination that she proposes in the essay ‘Imagining and Feigning’ and the continuation of this argument in ‘Towards a poetics of imagination.’ André Lepecki’s research interest is more geared towards political theory and postcolonial critique of choreography and art, as well as theorizing it as a potential practice of freedom under neoliberalism. In his book Singularities, he theorizes the political potential of contemporary spectatorship and performing via the affective conditions of live performance. He states that these conditions render art and choreographic representation specifically porous or permeable instead of separate and autonomous.87 He argues that this requires further critical attention because of the conditioning of these affective conditions of art (as well as art criticism) by the current governing neoliberal rationality. Art and
performance are, therefore, both expressions of this rationality, but this also opens this rationality up to critique when performances choreographically interrogate their own conditioning.88 Lepecki follows the definition of neoliberalism by political theorist Wendy Brown, as put forth in her book Undoing the Demos, Neoliberalism’s stealth revolution. Lepecki quotes her analysis of the functioning of neoliberalism’s rationality as “a specific and normative mode of reason, of the production of the subject, 'conduct of conduct,' and scheme of valuation [...] intensely governing subjects it claims to free from government.”89 Because of this rationality that claims freedom, the understanding and practice of freedom become convoluted. This governing of subjects and hijacking of ‘freedom’ is what Lepecki views as a form of contemporary power. He takes up this notion of contemporary power again in the chapter “The Politics of Speculative Imagination in Contemporary
Choreography” included in The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics. His focus in this chapter is specifically on how experimental choreographers critique contemporary power through the operations of imagination, speculation, and storytelling. Following art and performance researcher Patricia Reed he connects a notion of futurity with the imaginary; what is not yet here nevertheless exists as imaginary fiction.90 He views speculative
storytelling as an oral “sharing historical narratives where fact and fiction intermingle.”91 He
87
Lepecki, Singularities, 2.
88
Ibid., 5.
89 Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution (London: Zone books, 2015): 48-49.
quoted in Lepecki, Singularities (New York: Routledge:,2016): 2.
90
This also reminds of Deleuze’s conception of the relation between the virtual and the actual as counterparts that exist in the real world in the sense that the virtual is real but not yet actual.
