Passerelle: Playing with Presentation and Representation

Photo: Andy Julia
Source: http://www.andy-julia-photography.com/home.htm

Passerelle:
Playing with Presentation and Re-presentation : a few notes

“To produce is to materialize forcedly what is of a different order, the order of the secret and of the seduction.
Seduction is everywhere and always that which is in opposition to production. Seduction withdraws something from the order of the visible; production sets up everything in evidence, be it an object, a number or a concept.”

Jean Baudrillard
“De la Séduction”, p. 55

“(…) it is not the object itself that produces desire but our desire that elevates an ordinary object into an impossible one.”

Todd McGowan
“The Impossible David Lynch”, pp. 63-64

The problem of archaeology – and of any historical discipline, in general – is basically this: how can we represent (to present now, to present again, to “rebuild”) something that occurred in the past, i. e., before my appearance in the world?
It is immediately easy to see that the question – axed on a time vector (the past, the present) - is just a sub-question of a more general one, not only based in the dicothomous view of the world that characterizes our way of thinking, but also in our broader quest for knowledge: how shall I proceed in order to enlarge knowledge, from a scientific point of view?
For instance, what is the relationship between “presence”, that which is in front of me, which faces me, which is occurring at this instant, and “absence”, that which escapes my comprehension, but that I know that it exists (or that it has existed) in a way or another, through traces, remains, signals?
Ultimately, what is the relationship between physics and metaphysics, what is the status of the (“weak”) reality that I perceive, and which seems to “be there” for another one, to re-present another one, stronger and fundamental (the reality that I want to embrace, to explain, to reduce to a scheme of more general intelligibility, i. e., to abstraction)?
The problem is pertinent in current archaeology because its practice is illuded by a basic fantasy, sustained by the infantile fetish of the objectual: it is easy to go from the remain of the thing to the thing itself, it is possible to reconstruct the event taking its “documents” as a point of departure, there is a possible, easy connection between the presence (the present) and the absence (the past).
Obviously, only very simplistic, “non-cultivated” people would believe in such a direct, almost “natural”, easy made connection. Being an archaeologist, I was always surprised by the fact that often my colleagues seemed to live in this naïve regime of belief: behaving as if everything was simply denotative of a real, empiric world of evidences, and not, of course, as connotative, i. e., as something that entertains with others a complex set of relationships.
This was particularly strange given the fact that these old philosophic problems of form/content, part/hole, presence/absence, appearance/truth, image/concept, etc, etc., have been approached by a number of thinkers since the beginnings of the XX century. Semiology and semiotics, in particular, have shown how complex, ambiguous and polysemic is the world of signs in which we dwell.
And the modern subject, as it is presented by all significant authors from the beginnings of the XX century – the subject as scientist included, of course – is a fragmented one, i. e., it is no more possible for him to believe in the centralised character of his own consciousness. Psychoanalysis, among a crowd of other approaches, has shown how the modern subject is “smashed into pieces” : what I think and feel spontaneously comes from “another reality”, something that does not contain a definitive answer, but projects the answer into an infinitude of mirrors. The echo of my answers has no god, be it science, to answer to me. The father is definitively dead.
And that “death” has not ceased to increase from then on: the two wars and the magnitude of the crimes practised made us feel like living after a tremendous trauma, a series of traumas indeed, which represent a turn in history. What a surprise seeing many of my colleagues still quietly collecting their bits of information for, like Sisyphus, “piecing together the past”.
In these brief note I will concentrate in just a part of the question, taking as a point of departure:


Three key words: theatre, ritual, performance.

Each one of these concepts may be used, or be applied, to such a variety of situations, that they need a clarification, from my point of view, of course. The very broad semantic spectrum of each one of them (and their possible mutual connections) is obviously significant in itself, implying a metaphoric work of extension that is revealing of many things in many ways.

Theatre, for the French thinker Denis Guenoun (see references), is basically ambiguous, because it operates in the sharp edge of the visible (the action shown on stage) and the invisible (the text, the idea, the “meaning”, something that is hidden behind the action, the drama played). It implies an assembly, an audience, and this audience watches how the actor converts, or transfers, the invisible into the visible.
So, there is a metaphysics in all this (the setting, a reality exposed to the sight of the spectators, and where these ones watch something that is, in a way, well beyond the drama itself, the enigma of life; the visible of the scene is constantly intercepted by that invisible) and, of course, also a politics, too.
Politics in the sense that for theatre to exist the assembly is crucial: the very question at stake on stage is that it is observable, i. e., that it only “functions” or exists before an audience. Without this one, no theatre is possible, properly speaking.
The enigma of the representation (its metaphysics) consists in the fact that it is presented as the very enigma of the presentation itself; and, in a certain way, the drama is in search, in quest, of a sort of non-political foundation of our life: the “pure” appearance of the real.
The exteriorization of “meaning”, of something metaphysical, passing through the bodies of the actors, and shown to an assembly that is aware of the ultimately hidden dimension of “what is going on” is what makes theatre to exist. Therefore theatre is at the critical limit of the political and the non-political, of the “visible body(ies)” and the “invisible body”. It puts into action a multiplicity of mirrors, in the (utopian) hope that in course of action a mirror reflects more than an image: the Image itself, the model. The verb.
I would say, following Baudrillard: theatre operates in the limit between production, presentation, presence, the show (to make visible, here and now) and seduction, suggestive representation of the absent (to keep the secret, to refer implicitly to something elsewhere, something that constantly “escapes capture” and maintains active the subject as a subject of desire – what Lacan called the real, the impossible, “the failure of the symbolic order to explain everything”- McGowan, p. 25).
Following Guenoun, the “dramatic model” is solidary to a metaphysical scheme that indeed is in crisis for centuries. According to that scheme, life has a destiny, a teleological meaning or “raison d’ être”, and that destiny is projected in the life of each one of us. The drama is the place where destiny may be accomplished; but (and Guenoun invokes here W. Benjamin) there is of course a tendency, in these last centuries, for drama to turn into a mere scene.
That is, for “meaning” to be dissolved into a “simple” scene which is something open, and actually presents the very contingency, indeterminacy, aleatory character of existence. Then Guenoun tells us that Shakespeare was the apex of the equilibrium, of the unexpected coalescence of the carnivalesque (the “entertainment side” of the spectacle, the “divertissement”) and the dramatic. After him, very probably the history of theatre is the history of the crisis of drama.
With modernity and the desacralization of Western world, i.e., the separation from the notion of a teleology of life (a destiny for humankind), drama, which implied in a way the absence of the subject from the narration, is indeed no more possible. The formerly hidden author is increasingly aware of his/her total (contingent and fragmented as it may be) presence in the representation. So the crisis of theatre, the crisis of drama lies in the general tendency of modernity to interrogate its foundations, in such a way that theatre itself if the staging of the crisis of the dramatic action, of the dramatic pertinence. Theatre accompanies the disenchantment of modern age, our “loss of innocence”, not as an elite feeling (that existed for a long time) but as a generalized “way of existence”.
I think that all of this is very much connected to broader aspects of the history of modern systems of representation, and in particular to the interest on ritual, on one hand, and to the development of performance (in the strict sense of the word) out of the traditional theatrical frame. Ritual and performance presuppose settings completely different from the stability of theatre, even if we extend this one, of course, to the Greek tragedy or to the Medieval “miracle”.
And Guenoun invokes Brecht when this one says that theatre has its origin in religion (that would be indeed a common place), but in the sense of being the result of a parturition: as when coming out of the mother, the infant is delivered to the world where he/she enters into a process of negation of its own genesis, i. e., in a process of autonomy and maturation.

Ritual is a qualification commonly used for a great variety of actions or events. Rite or ritual are indeed words of daily currency, to the point of semantic exhaustion (in everyday life we talk of ritual about all things and anything). So, “ritual” may be extended to the totality of current human activities (in the sense given by symbolic interactionism of E. Goffman and others) and, in the opposite side of the spectrum, it is connected to a sense of density and secrecy very much tied to religion or at least to some sort of transcendence. This dichotomy comes from the very beginning of sociology, with Durkheim calling attention to the “functionality” of rituals as communitarian ties, and other authors giving it a more substantive meaning, in the sense that the ritual is the mode of contact with some supernatural reality.
But the word “ritual” has many other connections, one of which is that crucial approach made by P. Bourdieu a quarter of century ago (“Ce que Parler Veut Dire”, Paris, Fayard, 1982, esp. chap. II-2 – “Les rites d’ institution”). Also, Danièle Hervieu-Léger (EHESS, Paris), among many others, has treated this subject in a very interesting way.
Let us see the idea of Bourdieu, that goes in the direction of underlining the effect the rituals have in the consecration, or sacralization, of social/status differences, prescribing embodied identities. Through their capacity to inscribe and to naturalize, rituals have an enormous symbolic effectivity, consisting in a sort of “performative magic”: not only they legitimize the arbitrary, but they make subjects defend themselves from taking that arbitrary, that categorical classification, as their own, their deepest conviction. This is the symbolic power of rituals, their capacity of inculcation.
It would be very interesting to explore this idea in connection with the Marxist notion of “alienation” (and “false consciousness”), on one hand, with the above mentioned “symbolic order” of J. Lacan, on the other, and also with the “political economy of signs” as exposed a long ago by Jean Baudrillard.
My aim is ultimately to cross and to combine their contributions to understand the complexity of life; without this sensibility, I am convinced that every research is condemned to vulgarity, trapped in the hole of any specialized field.
All those authors, as every great thinkers of any time, keep being fundamental, in my opinion, to prevent any tendency to reductionism and oversimplification, even when inspired, for instance, by phenomenology, which is of course a fascinating and very complex and diversified field of philosophy (it demands of course decades to be studied, and it can not be seen as a tool box to apply here and there), but which shall not drive us into new “mythical” forms of an-historical, universal notions about “human experience in the world”.
I do not believe in the idea that the so called “primitive societies” were more centred in ritual then us, and, with the “evolution” into “complex” ones, ritual would have the tendency to lose importance and to be replaced by beliefs, eventually organized into great symbolic religious systems. In a way, modern atheism is a form of belief, in, for many people, a sort of religion. A very few escape the dictates of the dogma, whatever it is.
That dichotomy would oppose traditional communities, where the rite was a “total social fact” (i. e., it organized the entire society itself), to modern ones, empty of overwhelming systems of rites, in which religions (in spite of their complexity) would be just a sort of remains of tradition. Danièle Hervien-Léger (see references) finally admits that Bourdieu’s approach is the best.
Rituals unify those who act together, and distinguish them from those “outside” these practices. Therefore, they create a sense of belonging and ultimately they assure the continuity of communitarian life according to certain rules of inclusion and exclusion, tying people to a shared “memory”.
Here the modern idea (not to say obsession or organized industry) of heritage is a very good example. For Hervien-Léger, ritual is a marker of the continuity of a sort of lineage, an “anamnesis in act”, i. e., a way of building “foundational memories”. But the common rite that is pervasive in daily talk, being used in every context, is different – in her view - from the religious one, in the sense that common rituals (ceremonies, individual performances in order to reassure self-confidence, etc., etc.) do not aim to assure the continuity with the past which is the pretension of the religious ones.
Is there a logic of “disritualization” of modern societies (at least in the West)? The author asks. Well, the process of “discharge” and “recharge” of “meanings” is a very complex one in modern contexts.
Suffice to remember the secularization of society (rationalization), the invention of the egotist individual (increased autonomy of individuals, at least as an ideal), the acceleration of time and the compression of time/space (new mobilities, etc.), and the innovative forms that shape the “social contract”, so to speak, in a “democratic society”. In the core of this problem lies the concept of consent, to keep quoting Hervien-Léger. Consent is a crucial notion, well beyond the idea of submission, and in my view it implies alienation (Marx) and fantasy (Lacan). I can not develop all that here.
What does that mean? In so called “democratic societies”, the social ties are renegotiated constantly. So the ritual expresses a consent which is, for that French sociologist, always temporary, subject to “revision” (as in the conjugal relationship, for instance). So the author considers that there is a tension between the precariousness of rituals in modern societies and a sort of “universal need” for continuity that the rituals assure. In these terms, a kind of “bricolage” is always in the making, being different from context to context and escaping our tendency to search for overwhelming explanations and theories. There is an horizon of impossibility, a fundamental lack, which is constitutive of the human being. The elimination of that “lack”, the supreme fantasy, would be, for Lacan, the very subject’s disappearance (see for instance McGowan, p. 66).
Perhaps in some sense the transformations observed in theatre and drama mentioned in the beginning of this text could be useful here again. Many of the crisis of modernity have germinated at a local scale for centuries. The crisis of theatre is the crisis of modern societies. But should we speak of “crisis” or of a constant transformation of the very concept of society? As John Urry has frequently underlined, probably the very concept of society is becoming old, tied to the idea of nation-state.
We are compelled to invent different ways of reasoning, just as others are constantly inventing new ways of business… it is here our condemnation to the “liquid” time and logic of “late capitalism”. A time that is morally troubling, because social differences of access to modern comfort and information accentuate, as long as an increase and generalization of violence and an abyss between “those in” and “those out”, including difficulties of access to employment in middle classes and scholarly prepared young people. So the liquefy of “society” seems to be something frightening.
I sometimes ask myself if I am contributing (modestly, I know, but in any case contributing) in my teaching and writings to this process that entails the domination and destruction of all the ideals of generosity and solidarity that were those of my post-war generation. Only now are we realizing how naïf we were! We enact the “status quo” everyday even – and mainly – when we represent ourselves as “critical think makers”: like cancer, the systems this needs these margins as fresh blood to feed its own cells.

One of these forms of naiveté would be to adhere unconditionally to the fashion of calling “performance” everything human and even non-human (indeed, we live under the “imperium” of the machine).
Again, we need to distinguish the current use of the word “performance” in the sense of behaviour of people, animals, machines, tools, devices of all sorts, etc., and in the more restricted sense of a “new” form of “art”. But that “new”, as many other symptoms, has being at work for centuries. To put it short, theatre (presentation and representation) is in a way a mediator of ritual (presentation) and performance (presentation again, under a renewed mode).
For many, this form of “art” – anyway, talking about art in our times is a little suspicious; so let us speak of expression, for instance – corresponds precisely to the implosion of the traditional theatrical scene, of the humanist centrality and state of equilibrium that replaced the “primitive” centrality of God.
We are no longer mere spectators, passive consumers of pre-pared and finish “works”, as Debord has shown long ago; we are all in a constantly movable setting, longing to see and to be seen. We do not simply watch: we act to be watched, we are all inside the act, we are all on stage, even (and possible mostly) when we try to hide and to be discrete.
Images among other images, simulacra that do not have any submission to text, to the centrality of the author, to the prophetic sacrality of enunciation – that is our discoursive world, the reality as we experience it today. It is a spiral with no center, where we want to produce ourselves in a aesthetics of presentation, of surprise, of glamour, or self-experiment, of zapping.
Trying to recover some form of “primitive feeling of belonging?” Calling attention to what? We do not know anymore; and we know that there is a limit, i. e., that the totality is a fantasy of fulfilment that would imply our death as subjects. Probably, the loss of the sacred and the nostalgia that the proliferation and aggressiveness of images (too clear, brutal and perfect to be true, that is, to be thought as objects submitted to our reasoning) are connected to that feeling. Probably the precautious (not to say defensive) way some people looks at psychoanalysis and feminism, for instance, reflects the destabilisation of something old, an “order of the father”, a communitarian symbolic order where the centrality of reason was possible. Today we know that a film of David Lynch may be as pregnant of ideas and suggestions (taking us inside fantasy itself) as a book of philosophy. Poetry work – we know that for centuries, not to say millennia - may be a way of reasoning more effective than hundreds and hundreds of “argumentative texts”. And a performance, an act played in public where the “subject” (the text) is our own image and body (a text in process, an idea in the making) may have a tremendous force, well beyond the staged drama.
There is nothing behind the strip of masks, nothing beyond the magic of entries and issues, of marvellous worlds opening to other marvellous worlds. Those marvellous worlds are offered to all by entertainment industry. But only some (the elites) access to the competence of make a sort of discoursive frame out of all these productions, thus producing themselves as elites. It is a politics that is always involved in appearance – its production, consumption, and its use as an economics of distinction.
Horror has lost its face, because horror was the other side of beauty or even of the sublime, and we have lost both. We play in an eternal world of magic, of fantasy giving way to other fantasies, like in the films of David Lynch. So “art” is becoming something different, it does not express anything out of itself, it expresses itself. It is an experience of intensity, of emotion, of a different kind of reasoning where all our experience echoes.
We do not have a text to perform, we do not have a stabilised “public” to act to, in an architectural display similar to a church (dichotomy altar/assembly, siege of power and authority and receptive audience); we want all to be actors and spectators at the same time. We want all to be gods, to invent ourselves permanently, to open to an unlimited happening. So mobility is pour paradigm. We travel or we shop with no idea or destination in mind, actually it is an undefined “thing” that appeals us, that aspires us from the stability of place. We want to experience, not to read or to listen about other’s experiences. We do not want second hand products, we want to produce ourselves (be it in a simple web log or in a scientific paper or in a public presentation of any sort). The “passarelle” of fashion’s clothes is the paradigm of our time: the eternal circulation of variations, combinations, of all imaginable modules.
Sentiment, passion, eternal presentation of the banal as sacred, having each individual as a zealous believer.

Some references:

http://semioweb.msh-paris.fr/AAR/668/introduction.asp?id=668

http://www.ehess.fr/centres/ceifr/pages/seminaires-en-ligne.html



- Baudrillard, Jean (1979), “De la Séduction”, Paris Galilée.
- Bourdieu, Pierre (1982), “Ce que Parler Veut Dire. L’ Économie des Échanges Linguistiques”, Paris, Fayard.
- McGowan, Todd (2007), “The Impossible David Lynch”, New York, Columbia University Press.
- Urry, John (2007), “Mobilities”, Cambridge, Polity Press.