Ireland, Memory and Performing the Historical Imagination

Mary P. Caulfield, C. Collins

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137362186
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

This book explores the performance of Irish collective memories and forgotten histories. It proposes an alternative and more comprehensive criterion of Irish theatre practices. These practices can be defined as the 'rejected', contested and undervalued plays and performativities that are integral to Ireland's political and cultural landscapes.

Part I
Legacy and Heritage

1
Walking In and Out of Place: the Pedestrian Performances of Tim Robinson

Daniel Sack

Walking is a passing over time: the body present in each step’s fall into lack, catching itself on the ground, already future-bound, moving forward with the next step while inscribing the past in the last footprint. For 40 years the English expatriate Tim Robinson (born 1935) has walked the rural coastlines of Western Ireland (the Aran Islands, Connemara and the Burren) producing a substantial body of books, essays and hand-drawn maps that detail his own body’s fleeting engagement with the natural and cultural landscape of these desolate regions. Bringing the historical events of a place into present discourse, Robinson’s mediations and meditations on and of the land disrupt an economy of stable coordinated places to propose other ways of knowing and doing. This chapter is an exploration of how we might think of the rural walker as a performer and how his or her practice traverses the outsides of monolithic meaning inherent in the standardized map.

Robinson spent his formative years in the London art scene of the 1960s before turning to walking as a primary medium of inquiry and expression. While he once produced sculpture and installation work, he no longer identifies as an artist, much less a performance artist; yet, by reading the maps and essays that Robinson creates as performance texts, I conceive of them as scripts recalling past actions of walker and author, and positing a further stage for the actions of future walkers and readers.¹ Robinson explains his project as follows: ‘I have come to think that, if this process transmits anything of the terrain itself, it is not my limited, personal and changeable responses to it, but the objective ground of the possibility of that subjectivity.’² Indeed, an encounter with Robinson’s map of the Burren inspired my own first walks in that region of Ireland more than a decade ago. In the pages that follow, I rejoin the walker in attending to those sites that cannot be marked (temporary tidal causeways and bridges), recollecting the lost practices of the past and their accompanying misplaced names, and, finally, recalling the simple rhythmic fall of the moving foot. These limit-cases of cartography’s language produce an unconscious space that surrounds the conscious place found in any map or any monument, a spatial performance promising that, as long as the walker keeps walking, the past will keep living and will never arrive at an end. In this way the remains of past performances remain otherwise; they live on, in and through other bodies.³

The pedestrian performative: speech act theory and walking

Traditional cartography presents the illusion of a flat and evenly negotiable traversal across a knowable landscape, absented of any reference to how bodies on the ground name and use that land. This dissonance between embodied use of the land and its mapped representation is particularly fraught in the Irish context. As Brian Friel’s 1980 play Translations reminds us, the Ordnance Survey (OS) maps that the British recorded in the mid-nineteenth century offer a consummate example of the abstraction and erasure at work in conventional mapping. ‘The Ordnance Survey Office was established in Dublin in 1824 to carry out a survey of the island for land taxation purposes. By 1846, Ireland had been surveyed at a scale of six inches to one mile, making it the first country in the world to be fully mapped in such detail.’⁴ The OS maps, then, were perfect representatives of an authority that sought to manage an empire’s distant oversight through the simulation of an unpeopled view from above. One of its more insidious side effects, memorably represented in Friel’s play, was a thorough Anglicization of the place-names of Gaelic tradition, in transferences that range from rough-hewn translations to complete eradication. So the OS maps, coming to Aran first in the late 1830s and the Burren and Connemara sometime around this same period, both unearthed and rewrote the variegated human practices of the island into an authorized and consistent fixed artefact.⁵

Acknowledging the impositions inherent to all mapping, the fact that ‘by no amount of stretching can the concept of a text be made to cover the basic topography of an area’, Robinson insinuates visual and verbal markings into the gap between the proper and performed.⁶ He distinguishes the cartographic system from the land itself in his express usage of the OS maps of the 1800s as the basis for his own work; Robinson’s maps return these places to the Gaelic tongue, pulling out some of the imbricated histories of lost use and event in the process, to make a lived and remembered site. Rather than commit to his own empiric measurement of line and direction, Robinson appropriated the langue or system of the OS map and concentrated instead on ‘that mysterious and neglected fourth dimension of cartography which extends deep into the self of the cartographer’, the dimension of time and, by extension, the body.⁷ Before considering the graphic techniques that Robinson sutures to the standardized map, let us take a brief detour to consider the conceptual relationship between mapping and performance.

In The Practice of Everyday Life, French theorist Michel de Certeau discusses how an individual’s quotidian embodied actions operate in a ‘tactical’ manner, improvising practices available in the moment in a manner at odds with the official ‘strategic’ possibilities anticipated by authority. Setting up a parallel between the performative speech act and such quotidian uses, his chapter on ‘Walking in the City’ conceives of the urban landscape as a system of langue (the superstructure of language) where every block posits a series of significations from which the user picks and chooses a parole (the situated enactment of speech). In the briefest of summaries, we could say that speech act theory, as proposed by the British analytic philosopher J. L. Austin in his 1955 Harvard lecture series and later published as How to Do Things with Words, argued against the notion that speech was comprised entirely of statements (or constatives) that could be claimed to be either true or false. Austin suggested that speech also includes instances that do not function as truth statements, but instead do what they say. The most famous example of these ‘performative utterances’ was the wedding vow ‘I do’, a linguistic event that has felt consequences outside of language. Beyond such explicit performatives, Austin argues that the image of an isolated truth-statement is illusionary throughout spoken language, that all speech events are situated in a temporal context: every constative statement with a certain meaning is surrounded by an intention with its particular force (the illocution) and a consequence or effect (the perlocution).⁸ While speech act theory originally addressed only spoken events, Austin allows for the possibility of non-linguistic parallels. As such, de Certeau poses the distinction between the constative and performative as the basis for a ‘more general distinction between the forms used in a system and the ways of using the system.’⁹ This provides a theoretical means of approaching non-linguistic performances through the discursive medium of writing while explicitly acknowledging the necessary adaptation from the somatic to the syntactical. In the case of pedestrian performances, the word discursive exhibits its double meaning: as ‘passing from premises to conclusions; proceeding by reasoning or argument; ratiocinative’; and, in its more archaic use, ‘running hither and thither; passing irregularly from one locality to another.’¹⁰ In other words, the performative acknowledges discursivity as both a linguistic and a somatic claim.

De Certeau distinguishes between the stable place, a fixed location of singular and proper meaning, and fluid space, a site where mobile elements intersect in an embodied vector. Or, more directly: ‘[s]pace is practiced place’.¹¹ Place – like the word in the midst of language’s net of meanings, only making sense in the context of its surrounds – presupposes a series of other places in correspondence with one another and existing synchronously on a single plane. Separated from the city with its practices on-the-ground, a readable whole appears as a text of transparent reference from which the body has been evacuated. With its transcendent unseen origin of sight, place and its mode of representation, the map, court an imagined death. This ‘law of a place’, as de Certeau writes, relies on ‘determination through objects that are ultimately reducible to the being-there of something dead’.¹² Even the map that attempts to inscribe a path of previous use flattens out a chronological passage into its synchronic simulation, referring to the absence of what once was. The mark on the map ‘is thus a mark in place of acts, a relic in place of performances: it is only their remainder, the sign of their erasure’.¹³ As such, a map is always a historical vision, a survey of the past from the vantage point of the passed.

De Certeau does not make the comparison, but in the context of the performative speech act, the fixed nature of place corresponds to that of a cartographic constative utterance. Just as the constative purports to bear a truth-value independent of context and situation, so too, place pretends an unattainably set monadic meaning. On the other hand, space ‘occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function’.¹⁴ Following through on this parallel, if we extend the ‘chain’ of the performative, we see that the walking body occurs on both sides of its constative place and overflows its sited/cited meaning: its illocutionary operations or orienting force an entrance into the placement of a foot and its perlocutionary effect, an exit into the next step. In a way, then, place always occurs between the space of the walking act. Tim Robinson, our guide through this topology (etymologically the ‘logic of a place’) of the step, writes: ‘[t]hus we, personally, cumulatively, communally, create and recreate landscapes – a landscape not just being the terrain but also the human perspectives on it, the land plus its overburden of meanings.’¹⁵ The excess of meaning produced by walking through place, the fact that the walk always ‘oversteps’ the placement of one foot by requiring another, is comparable to that of the performative’s excess, an over-determination that produces the unconscious and the pleasurable.

De Certeau follows in the footsteps of Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord and others, who write about the ways in which a walker’s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: the Rest is History
• Part I Legacy and Heritage
• Part II Recollection and Remembrance
• Index