Performing the Body/Performing the Text

Amelia Jones, Andrew Stephenson Nfa, Andrew Stephenson, Amelia Jones, Andrew Stephenson Nfa, Andrew Stephenson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134655939
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Teatro

This book explores the new performativity in art theory and practice, examining ways of rethinking interpretive processes in visual culture. Since the 1960s, visual art practices - from body art to minimalism - have taken contemporary art outside the museum and gallery; by embracing theatricality and performance and exploding the boundaries set by traditional art criticism. The contributors argue that interpretation needs to be recognised as much more dynamic and contingent. Offering its own performance script, and embracing both canonical fine artists such as Manet, De Kooning and Jasper Johns, and performance artists such as Vito Acconci and Gunter Brus, this book offers radical re-readings of art works and points confidently towards new models for understanding art.

1

REASON AND REMAINDERS

Kantian performativity in the history of art

Karen Lang

TO M.L.R.H., IN MEMORIAM

Just as the capacity of representation is the measure of domination, and domination is the most powerful thing that can be represented in most performances, so the capacity of representation is the vehicle of progress and regression at one and the same time.

(Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1947¹)

In a well-known passage Kant equates the moral law within the subject to the starry heavens above him. Arguably the philosopher’s most famous utterance aside from the categorical imperative, ‘the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me’ concludes the second volume of his critical philosophy, the Critique of Practical Reason, of 1788. It is useful to follow Kant at length on this point, for in this conclusion he offers us the essential contours of an idealized Kantian subject:

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not merely conjecture them and seek them as though obscured in darkness or in the transcendent region beyond my horizon: I see them before me, and I associate them directly with the consciousness of my own existence. The former begins at the place I occupy in the external world of sense, and it broadens the connection in which I stand into an unbounded magnitude of worlds beyond worlds and systems of systems and into the limitless times of their periodic motion, their beginning and their continuance. The latter begins at my invisible self, my personality, and exhibits me in a world which has true infinity but which is comprehensible only to the understanding – a world with which I recognize myself as existing in a universal and necessary (and not only, as in the first case, contingent) connection, and thereby also in connection with all those visible worlds. The former view of a countless multitude of worlds annihilates, as it were, my importance as an animal creature, which must give back to the planet (a mere speck in the universe) the matter from which it came, the matter which is for a little time provided with vital force, we know not how. The latter, on the contrary, infinitely raises my worth as that of an intelligence by my personality, in which the moral law reveals a life independent of all animality and even of the whole world of sense – at least so far as it may be inferred from the purposive destination assigned to my existence by this law, a destination which is not restricted to the conditions and limits of this life but reaches into the infinite.²

Whereas the experience of the starry heavens ‘annihilates’ the ‘importance’ of the subject by reminding him of his inevitable mortality, or to use the words of Kant, the fact that he ‘must give back to the planet … the matter from which it came,’ the moral law elevates the subject out of his station as ‘a mere speck in the universe’ and into the possibility of infinity.³ The subject in his infinity is thereby rendered akin to the cosmos in its vastness, while he is also endowed with the capacity to grasp a seemingly infinite totality. It is this idealized subject, and not the subject constituted by a duality of reason and nature, that is championed by Kant.⁴ Guided by the moral law as a regulative principle, the idealized Kantian subject discovers his superiority and his ‘universal and necessary connection’ to the universe in the contemplation of the starry skies.

Kant will follow a similar paradigm in his analytic of the sublime. In the third volume of his critical philosophy, the Critique of Judgment, of 1790, the starry heavens will be replaced by an object whose vastness or might will initially overwhelm the subject; the ‘moral law within’ will be translated into the idea of ‘a higher purposiveness,’ occasioned by the experience of the sublime. Just as ‘the moral law within’ lifts the subject out of his own animal nature, so in the experience of the sublime the subject discovers his superiority over and above nature. In Kant’s second and third Critiques, mortality gives way to morality as nature is traded for reason.

According to Kant, the subject desires to live in accord with reason’s demands, and it is reason’s ‘peculiar fate’ to press itself toward questions and ends it often cannot answer or attain.⁵ What Kant calls this ‘peculiar fate’ is, however, anything but a failing. As Susan Neiman remarks, the ‘autonomy of the principles of reason permits them to function as a standard by which experience can be judged: by providing a vision of intelligibility that the given world does not meet, they urge us to continue our labors until this idea is attained.’⁶ In his three Critiques Kant demonstrates how reason operates as a regulative principle, guiding understanding, moral action, and judgment. Operating on the world rather than constituted through it, reason provides the possibility of organization and so shapes the world according to its own moral image.⁷

Unlike the faculty of the understanding, which enables the subject to feel at home in the world, reason is not of the natural world, nor is it at home in it. The faculty of understanding is directed toward knowledge of the world as it is, whereas the efforts of reason are exerted in the name of the future – toward the world as it should be, or will one day become. Reason and nature are therefore constituted as separate spheres in the Kantian system. For Neiman, this ‘duality of reason and the world’ makes Kant’s philosophy ‘profoundly modern.’⁸ While a duality of reason and nature is certainly constitutive of the Kantian subject, ‘the unity of reason’ is his ascendant principle. As a result, the Kantian subject is not so much implicated in nature as transcendental to it.

Whereas for Rousseau and others of Kant’s contemporaries, freedom is located in nature and in a ‘natural’ state of unalienated wholeness, for Kant freedom lies in the reverse direction – in a prospective moral end which the subject only begins to move toward once reason has released him from the ‘womb of nature.’⁹ In the concluding passage of the Critique of Practical Reason, Kantian freedom is located at a telling point along this trajectory. Progressing from the ‘starry heavens above me’ to ‘the moral law within me,’ Kant charts a path from nature to reason that opens onto vistas of infinite possibility once the ‘animality’ of the subject is left behind. The autonomy of the Kantian subject is predicated on this break from nature, and the illusion of the autonomy of the subject is maintained only in so far as the subject’s relation to nature has been minimized, or covered over. Not permitted to linger in the realm of nature, the Kantian subject stands to reason, in both senses of the phrase.¹⁰

While the idealized Kantian subject transcends nature within, and dominates nature without, nature nevertheless remains. In Bodies that Matter, Judith Butler describes the mechanisms whereby ‘[w]hat is refused or repudiated in the formation of the subject continues to determine that subject. What remains outside the subject, set outside by the act of foreclosure which founds the subject, persists as a kind of defining negativity.’¹¹ As the ‘defining negativity’ of the Kantian subject, nature forms the underside of the idealized subject as well as an unimagined detour from the creation of a fully rational and moral world. Consequently, nature must be warded off. The idealized Kantian subject, or the movement from nature to reason, must be continually performed.

For Kant, the performance of the subject is one of discovery rather than of struggle. What the subject discovers is his moral worth in the shape of his own reason. Highlighting reason over nature, and the domination of nature through reason, Kant describes the movement from nature to reason as one forever in the service of the idealized subject. In this sense, the discovery of the moral law, or of ‘a life independent of all animality,’ might be termed a Kantian historical sign: a sign of progress, indicating that humankind is improving.¹² Yet the idealized Kantian subject actually represents himself to himself in the form of his own domination. Considering the domination of nature by the subject in a favorable light, Kant views the movement from nature to reason as a story of progress. Following Horkheimer and Adorno, on the other hand, one can see in Kantian performativity the traces of regression.

In Dialectic of Enlightenment, published in 1947, Horkheimer and Adorno describe the mythic origins and contemporary effects of Enlightenment progress. The book begins with ‘Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment,’ an excursus by Adorno on Homer’s epic wanderer.¹³ Odysseus, whose sense of self is fragile and who struggles to preserve the newly constructed self against the overpowering forces of nature, served well as an illustration of Adorno’s account of the mythic origins of enlightenment. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the turning points of Western civilization are marked by the emergence of new peoples or classes who have succeeded in ever more strenuously repressing their fear of ‘uncomprehended, threatening nature,’ a fear which is itself the creature of attempts to objectify and materialize nature. Myth is reduced to ‘superstition,’ and the domination of nature is made into the absolute purpose of life. Yet as Adorno demonstrates in his excursus, the domination of nature entails a certain sacrifice on the part of the subject himself: the nature Odysseus slays in the external world – most memorably captured in his episode with the Sirens – is, at the same time, the nature he sacrifices within himself.¹⁴

For Odysseus as well as for the Kantian subject, the journey into rational subjectivity entails an overcoming of internal and external nature. While Odysseus slays nature through the cunning of reason, the Kantian subject confronts nature in the aesthetic experience, only to find himself superior to it. This is most powerfully demonstrated in Kant’s analytic of the sublime. Unlike their philosophical forebear however, Horkheimer and Adorno do not view the overcoming of nature as an unequivocal sign of progress. Instead, they consider the movement from nature to reason dialectically.

As Dialectic of Enlightenment indicates, the production of a self occurs only once instinct – or nature – has been overcome by reason, and this is registered through the exercise of self-consciousness. For the ‘proto-bourgeois’ Odysseus, and so Horkheimer and Adorno argue for all subsequent bourgeois subjects, self-consciousness thus occurs at the expense of the subject’s own nature.¹⁵ Odysseus signals the achievement of self-consciousness by the beating of his breast, thereby making clear that his victory is one over his own nature. Rather than submit to the rule of the instincts and desires, the newly self-conscious Odysseus is able to exercise more thoroughly his faculty of reason and so to win his battle with the forces and manifestations of nature he encounters. Yet as Horkheimer and Adorno make clear in their nightmare vision of an instrumental reason run amok, in time this reason comes to dominate the subject himself. Considered in this way, ‘representation is the vehicle of progress and regression at one and the same time.’¹⁶ As progress, representation indicates the slaying of an internal and external nature that had formerly dominated the subject; in its denial of nature and of the space between things, however, representation is regressive.¹⁷

Homer’s Odyssey and the Kantian philosophical enterprise indicate how the subject of reason is perforce male.¹⁸ Nature, on the other hand, is customarily gendered female.¹⁹ The realm left behind in the triumphant march toward rational subjectivity and Enlightenment progress, nature makes her appearance in the history of art in the guise of personification. Kantian performativity in art history will therefore be a drama played out between male and female, wherein the female will be equated with nature, while the male will serve as artist, philosopher, or ideal spectator. To be sure, the conflation of woman and nature, indeed the personification of nature, is not a natural fact. Rather these constructions, and the artistic conventions to which they have given rise, dramatize the need to secure the idealized Kantian subject from the internal and external nature that continually threatens his undoing. It is to this act of securing that I would now like to turn.

In the history of art we encounter reverberations of the philosophical journey of the Kantian subject, or so it appears when we consider three graphic works by German artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Max Beckmann’s pen and pencil drawing of February, 1946, Walk (The Dream) (Plate 1.1), the artist depicts himself taking a nocturnal stroll along a high bridge.²⁰ Beckmann vividly described a long walk in his diary during the month this drawing was made, noting how ‘the sea was once again the sea and said good day Mr. Beckmann.’²¹ In the chasm separating the darkness on the left-hand side of the drawing from the light on the right, a colossal, supine female form lies across an expanse of water. The night walker, who steps off the end of the bridge, is poised to fall into the lap of a recumbent nature. Like the song of the sirens, the personification of the sea beckons to this latter-day Odysseus, who appears to have no option but to f...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of plates
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Reason and remainders: Kantian performativity in the history of art
• 2 Performing modernity: the art of art history
• 3 Art history/art criticism: performing meaning
• 4 Cross–cultural reiterations: Demetra Vaka Brown and the performanceb of racialized female beauty
• 5 Race, ritual, and responsibility: performativity and the southern lynching
• 6 Shading meaning
• 7 The greatest homosexual? Camp pleasure and the performative body of Larry Rivers
• 8 The politics of feminist spectatorship and the disruptive body:de Kooning’s Woman I reconsidered
• 9 ‘Catholic tastes’: hurting and healing the body in Viennese Actionism in the 1960s
• 10 Contests for meaning in body politics and feminist conceptual art:revisioning the 1970s through the work of Eleanor Antin
• 11 Dismembership: Jasper Johns and the body politic
• 12 Performing clits and other lesbian tricks: speculations on an aesthetics of lack
• 13 Renaming Untitled Flesh: marking the politics of marginality
• 14 Andy Warhol: performances of Death in America
• 15 STUFF: a performance
• 16 Following Acconci/targeting vision
• 17 Performing vision in the theatre of the gaze: the work of Douglas Gordon
• 18 What sense do the senses make? Aspects of corporeality in the works of Miriam Cahn and Maureen Connor
• Author/artist index
• Subject index