In conclusion to Chapter One, I want to link back with feminist performance art and the ways in which psychoanalytic theory can be applied to the act of transgressing and shifting bodily boundaries that can be seen to be performed in much feminist performance art. Skin in performance art is repeatedly the site of action: the surface of the body is variously
lacerated, marked, stretched, bled, written upon and painted. This concentration upon the skin can hardly be separated from the issues of language identity that have been seen to run through psychoanalytic discourse and the problematic 'subject'.
Freedman (1990:56) questions succinctly: "Given the longstanding debt of psychoanalysis to Classical drama and the centrality of the Oedipus to both disciplines, is a feminist anoedipal theatre possible, or possibly a contradiction in terms?".I would argue that 'feminist', 'anoedipal' and 'theatre' are irreconcilable terms insofar as the 'Oedipal' theatre is invested in the recapitulation of the masculine subject as the site of originating will and authority. Willis (1990: 86) states that:
Tensions articulated in the mirror stage [in Lacan], where the subject recognises/misrecognises its image, are the initial mappings of the mechanisms of visual pleasure: voyeuristic and narcissistic. The imaginary plenitude of the mirrored image, over against the felt dispersion of the subject who views it, produces a sense of separation and lack, and an identificatory fascination simultaneously.
The word/image, then, are products of the desire for an integrated self (identity). Thus, the privileging of the symbolic (that is, the phallic organisation of language and the drives) in conventional, logocentric theatre reiterates the world-forming, performative power of the word whilst negating the material base of language (that is, the body). The jouissauce of the undifferentiated body is purged by the recitation of logos in the theatre whereby narrative, plot and psychological motivation interpellate the performer and viewer into a misidentification with the harmonies and resolutions supplied by the text. This structure in effect reproduces the doctrine of individualism privileged in the logos of the discrete speaking subject. This individualistic, logocentric form of cultural production is ubiquitous with modern capitalist culture wherein theatre functions to allay fears of ontological disorder and particularly castration anxiety (in the masculine-identified viewer) and promulgates the discourse of scientific rationalism and instrumental reason. In this (Oedipal) theatre, the voyeuristic and narcissistic viewer is able to identify with the object (the actor) and project "...secret images within ourselves" (Auslander 1997:37). The text
8 See Vergine 2000, Miglietti 2003
of the Oedipal theatre thus reiterates the attempt by the misidentified subject to control meaning (that is, attaining the position of the Other/the phallus) and simultaneously sublimates the impotence of the phallus to fix finally the symbolic.
As Loots (1995:148) claims, whilst much feminist writing has highlighted the theoretical need to reclaim 'the body', minimal attention has been focussed upon the
"...material, physically lived-in body as needful of feminist analysis and intervention".
This is where I think feminist performance art can intervene in dominant forms of representation: the explicit use of the female body as a performance tool offers up the possibility not so much of recuperating a lost, elsewhere, and recuperable feminine symbolic, but of actively producing alterior modes of signification and in turn facilitating the production of feminist analysis. I see this possibility as inherent in feminist performance artist's use of skin in particular as a tool for reworking symbolic structures.
Skin comes to be a signifier of difference or the mobile and interstitial, which is analogous with Irigaray's mucous/double lips, Kristeva's semiotic chora and Butler's lesbian phallus.
The use of skin as a surface of reinscription is not necessarily bound to the reversal of the phallic imperative and the re-fixing of sexual difference in genital markers. Shildrick (2001:161) states: "The skin as the most visible boundary between bodies, is both the limit of the embodied self and the site of potentially transgressive investments". This statement I think holds true in the case of performance art. The theatrical framing of performance exploits the presence of the performer, presence being what Auslander (1997:63) describes as "...the matrix of power" in theatre, whilst simultaneously undermining the authority of that presence to guarantee identity. Thus in feminist performance art, the spectacle of skin that is marked as sexually specific is used in order to deconstruct and work against the dominant imaginary and its social and aesthetic limitations of the signifier 'woman'. The deconstruction of 'the body' in performance art can thus be viewed as an incremental undoing of the reiterative or performative practises that enabled the subject in the first place. Thus, in feminist performance art, identificatory categories such as 'woman' and 'the body' are disinvested of esoteric or prediscursive meanings. Rather, these categories are deployed critically as temporary and discursively produced: 'woman' becomes an exoteric sign that is marked on the body but is always implied to be in inverted commas, so as to remain a contested and shifting sign.
The performing body, unlike the acting body, is a semiotic body that is open and in process. Thus, the notion of a stable or essential interiority or identity is disrupted. The narcissistic projections of the viewer are also disrupted when the image of the acting body is displaced by the performer's live flesh. As Diamond (1997:85) states: "[tjhrough an art constructed from...human bodies, theatre demands a certain distance in order for its illusions to be believed". Performance attempts to destroy the (aesthetic) distance between actor and audience by disrupting the illusion of identity and presence through the very discourse of identity and presence. For feminist performance artists, re-representing the female body in performance resituates the narcissistically invested viewer: the former spectacle (the ubiquitous female body) invests narcissistic energy in reflecting her self in performance whilst closing the gap between her object status and her position as a self- authoring subject. The viewer, then, can no longer invest in the performer's skin as a surface upon which phallic authority is inscribed because the relationship or differentiation between viewing subject and theatrical object is no longer clear. Thus, the use of the explicit body in performance art transgresses the boundaries of the symbolic by re-marking the body literally and thus undermines the symbolic authority of the logocentric structure.
Conclusion
It has been established in Chapter One that to conceive of an exclusive psychic interior and material exterior (that / am located inside myself and excluded from the body of the other) is an obsolete formation, or is at least descriptive of a metaleptic structure whereby the effect or appearance of identity is taken to be its cause. In the dominant imaginary, the affectations of femininity are given a causal link to the biological body whereas
'femininity' can be viewed as discursively constructed and performative. In this sense, the biological and the cultural body are indiscernible, for culture and physiology are imbricated. The view that identity is not innate or essential does not infer that the body is a blank slate or that we cannot resist the discourse that inscribes the body and schematises the psyche. The relationship between the body's surface, the skin, and imaginary structures is important to feminist discourse if the phallomorphic imaginary is to be decentred for the centrality of the phallomorphic imaginary has linked the masculine with subjectivity, authority and culture and the feminine with base maternity, materiality and nature. This has in effect rendered the female body unrepresentable except in terms of variations of the monstrous maternal or the sexualised spectacle.
In Chapter Two, I build upon the theories around identity and subjectivity that have been analysed and critiqued in Chapter One and look at gendered constructions of time and space. The construction of the gendered subject in terms of his/her orientation in time and space will be seen to reiterate the privilege of the phallomorphic imaginary.
Chapter 2
Mapping Silence: disruptions of time, space and place
Introduction
This chapter develops the arguments about subjectivity and subject formation that were covered in Chapter One, as I contend that the subject (/) and symbolic forms are produced within a matrix of gendered time-space relations. I argue that dominant forms of space- time relations have resulted in the privileging of a phallogocentric symbolic and the negation of women-centred knowledge systems and representational economies. This I unpack in sections one to four of Chapter Two, with specific reference to the discursive mapping of the female body as space in classical, Judeo-Christian, psychoanalytic and biomedical discourses. I will also consider how the gendered division of space, coupled with the spatialisation of the female body has been sedimented in terms of domesticity and phenomenological experience. I argue that the gendered division of social spaces and the patterns and pathways that women articulate with their bodies in space are heavily regulated by the discursive construction of dominant time-space relations.
In section five of Chapter Two, I argue that theatrical space since its foremost inception in classical cultures has been invested in representations of gendered space. As the social position of 'woman' has changed, so too has the construction of theatrical space (Scolnicov
1994). I argue that the crisis of reason- a crisis of the logocentric subject- that characterises postmodernity is contingent with the dissolution of theatre into performance, which attempts to transgress the limits of theatrical time-space matrices and hence representation.
Performance art specifically ruptures or problematises the constitutive borderlines between time and space by dissolving or rupturing that borderline quite literally upon the body. I contend that feminist performance artists subvert dominant modes of representing the relationship between time and space by disrupting the telos of a fixed identity.