Crossmappings: On Visual Culture 9781350985971, 9781838608316

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CROSSMAPPINGS

CROSSMAPPINGS On Visual Culture

ELISABETH BRONFEN

Published in 2018 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd London • New York www.ibtauris.com Copyright © 2018 Elisabeth Bronfen Copyright Series Preface and Foreword © 2018 Griselda Pollock An early version of this collection of essays with graphic design by Bruno Margreth appeared in German with Scheidegger & Spiess in 2009. The right of Elisabeth Bronfen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions. References to websites were correct at the time of writing. New Encounters: Arts, Cultures, Concepts ISBN: 978 1 78831 107 6 eISBN: 978 1 78672 376 5 ePDF: 978 1 78673 376 4 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations Series Preface by Griselda Pollock Foreword: Introducing Elisabeth Bronfen Introduction: Crossmappings – Visual Readings as a Critical Intervention in the Cultural Imaginary

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PART I: TRAVELLING IMAGE FORMULAS 1. Facing Defacement: Degas’ Portraits of Women Dialectic of displacement Gendering the scene of portraiture Deconstructing the scene of portraiture

19 22 25 27

2. Naked Touch: Disfiguration, Recognition and the Female Nude What recedes from the gaze Fetish or curiosity To stop and to see

31 31 37 46

3. Leaving an Imprint: Francesca Woodman’s Photographic tableaux vivants The silhouette in the room Poses of self-reification Poses of self-staging Two crossmappings Appearing by disappearing

49 50 53 61 69 84

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4. Pop Cinema: Hollywood’s Critical Engagement with America’s Culture of Consumption Pleasures of the outtake; or the economy of popular culture Cinema as merchandise; or pop stance avant la lettre Celebrity; or pop art revisited

86 86 92 105

5. Hitler Goes Pop: Totalitarianism, Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Hollywood Entertainment

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6. Simulations of the Real: Paul McCarthy’s Performance Disasters

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7. Wagner’s Isolde in Hollywood Feminine sacrifice Liebestod as evidence Isolde’s triumph

146 150 158 164

8. Shakespeare’s Wire It’s all in the game Aristocratic war games, American style All the world’s a stage

171 171 178 188

9. Queen of Chess: On Serial Reading Rules of the game Chess code A black and a white queen A queen, both white and black

196 196 198 206 211

PART II: GENDERING THE UNCANNY, IMAGING DEATH 10. The Horror of the Familiar: Freud’s Thoughts on Femininity and the Uncanny The homely turned strange The maternal body and the uncanny Uncanny femininity The enigma of femininity Surrealism’s game with the feminine uncanny

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11. Gendering Curiosity: The Double Games of Siri Hustvedt, Paul Auster and Sophie Calle Siri Hustvedt’s postmodern Pandora Paul Auster’s conceptualist artist Sophie Calle goes by the book

238 238 245 255

12. The Other Self of the Imagination: Cindy Sherman’s Hysterical Performance

259

13. Eva Hesse’s Spectral Bride and her Uncanny Double

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14. Wounds of Wonder: Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin, Nabuyoshi Araki

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15. The Fragility of the Quotidian: Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s Work with Death

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16. Picasso’s War Women

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17. Contending with the Father: Louise Bourgeois and her Aesthetics of Reparation Resculpting past trauma The daughter’s complaint

347 352 361

Notes Index

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

2.1

2.2

2.3

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Lucas Cranach the Elder, Venus, 1532, mixed media on beech, 37.7 × 24.5 cm, Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt (Main). Copyright: Bildarchiv Foto Marburg. a) Michelangelo Merisi Caravaggio, Testa di Medusa (Head of the Medusa), c.1598, oil on canvas mounted on wood, 60 × 55 cm, Galleria degli Uffizi, Pinacoteca, Florence. Copyright: Bildarchiv Foto Marburg. b) Jean-Léon Gérôme, Phryné devant l’Aréopage (Phryne before the Aeropagus), 1861, oil on canvas, 80 × 128 cm, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg. Copyright: Bildarchiv Foto Marburg. c) Anthonis van Dyck, Susanna and the Elders, c.1621/22, oil on canvas, 194 × 144 cm, Alte Pinakothek, Munich. Copyright: Bildarchiv Foto Marburg. d) Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velazquez, The Toilet of Venus (‘Rockeby-Venus’), 1647–51, oil on canvas, 122.5 × 177 cm, National Gallery, London. Copyright: Bildarchiv Foto Marburg. a) Jean-Antoine Watteau, Le Jugement de Pâris (The Judgment of Paris), c.1719, oil on panel, 47 × 31 cm, Musée National du Louvre, Paris. Copyright: Bildarchiv Foto Marburg. b) Masaccio, L’espulsione di Adamo ed Eva dal Giardino dell’Eden (The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden), c.1428, 208 × 88 cm, fresco, Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence. Copyright: Bildarchiv Foto Marburg. Francesca Woodman, Untitled, New York, 1979–80, gelatin silver print, N.224.1, 11 × 14 in. Reproduced courtesy of George and Betty Woodman.

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

3.2

3.3

3.4

3.5

3.6

3.7

3.8

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Francesca Woodman, A woman: a mirror; a woman is a mirror for a man, Providence, Rhode Island, 1975–8, gelatin silver print, P.044 and P.046, 5 13/16 × 5 3/4 in and 5 3/4 × 5 11/16 in. Reproduced courtesy of George and Betty Woodman. Francesca Woodman, Self-deceit #5–6, Rome, Italy, 1978, gelatin silver print, I.208 and I.209, 3 1/12 × 3 3/8 in and 3 9/16 × 3 9/16 in. Reproduced courtesy of George and Betty Woodman. Francesca Woodman, Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island, 1975–8, gelatin silver print, P.069, 5 3/8 × 5 7/16 in. Reproduced courtesy of George and Betty Woodman. Lady Clementina Hawarden, Clementina Maude, c.1862–3, albumen print, 23.1 × 20.3 cm, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Copyright: Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Lady Clementina Hawarden, Clementina Maude, c. 1862–3, albumen print, 15.2 × 12.7 cm, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Copyright: Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Francesca Woodman, And I had forgotten how to read music, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976, gelatin silver print, P.062, 4 1/4 × 4 1/4 in. Reproduced courtesy of George and Betty Woodman. Francesca Woodman, I could no longer play I could not play by instinct, Providence, Rhode Island, 1977, gelatin silver print, P.060, 5 3/4 × 5 11/16 in. Reproduced courtesy of George and Betty Woodman. Francesca Woodman, Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island, 1975–6, gelatin silver print, P.022, 5 5/8 × 5 9/16 in. Reproduced courtesy of George and Betty Woodman. Francesca Woodman, Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island, 1975–8, gelatin silver print, P.111, 5 × 5 in. Reproduced courtesy of George and Betty Woodman. Sandro Botticelli, Nascita di Venere (The Birth of Venus), 1468, tempera on canvas, 72.5 cm × 278.9 cm, Galleria degli Uffizi, Pinacoteca, Florence. Copyright: Bildarchiv Foto Marburg.

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3.12 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8

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Film stills from The Others (Alejandro Amenábar, 2001). Film stills from Hellzapoppin’ (H.C. Potter, 1941). Film stills from Hellzapoppin’ (H.C. Potter, 1941). Film stills from Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944). Film stills from Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944). Publicity still from Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944). Film stills from A Place in the Sun (George Stevens, 1951). Film stills from A Place in the Sun (George Stevens, 1951). Film stills from Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen/Gene Kelly, 1952). 4.9 Film still from Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk, 1956). 4.10 Film stills from Romeo + Juliet (Baz Luhrman, 1996). 5.1 Film stills from Olympia, Phase 1: Die Ruinen der Akropolis (The Ruins of the Acropolis) (Leni Riefenstahl, 1938). 5.2 Film stills from Olympia, Phase 2: Die Marmorköpfe und -statuen (The Marble Heads and Statues) (Leni Riefenstahl, 1938). 5.3 Film stills from Olympia, Phase 3: Verwandlung der Statue in Sportler (Transformation of the Statues into Athletes) (Leni Riefenstahl, 1938). 5.4 Film stills from Olympia, Phase 4: Die Sportler (The Athletes) (Leni Riefenstahl, 1938). 5.5 Film stills from Olympia, Phase 5: Die “Geburt” des Olympischen Feuers (The “Birth” of the Olympic Flame) (Leni Riefenstahl, 1938). 5.6 Film stills from Olympia, Phase 6: Die “Rückkehr” zu den Ruinen (The “Return” to the Ruins) (Leni Riefenstahl, 1938). 5.7 Film stills from Dames (Ray Enright and Busby Berkeley, 1934). 5.8 Film stills from Dames (Ray Enright and Busby Berkeley, 1934). 5.9 Film stills from Bambi (David Hand, 1942). 5.10 Film stills from Bambi (David Hand, 1942). 7.1 Film still from Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958). 7.2 Film still from Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958). 7.3 Film still from A Farewell to Arms (Frank Borzage, 1932).

83 91 91 94 96 97 100 102 103 104 108 118

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7.4 7.5 7.6 7.7 7.8 7.9 8.1

Film still from Humoresque (Jean Negulesco, 1946). Film stills from Humoresque (Jean Negulesco, 1946). Film stills from Humoresque (Jean Negulesco, 1946). Film still from Murder! (Alfred Hitchcock, 1930). Film still from Blue Gardenia (Fritz Lang, 1930). Film still from Interrupted Melody (Curtis Bernhardt, 1955). Film still from The Wire (David Simon, HBO, 2002–8, season 1, episode 3). 8.2 Film still from The Wire (David Simon, HBO, 2002–8, season 1, episode 3). 9.1 Film still from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Tomas Alfredson, 2011). 9.2 Film still from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Tomas Alfredson, 2011). 9.3 Film still from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Tomas Alfredson, 2011). 9.4 Film still from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Tomas Alfredson, 2011). 9.5 Film still from The Honourable Woman (Hugo Blick, BBC 2, 2014, credit sequence). 9.6 Film still from The Honourable Woman (Hugo Blick, BBC 2, 2014, episode 1). 9.7 Film still from House of Cards (Beau Willimon, Netflix, 2013–, season 1, episode 5). 9.8 Film still from House of Cards (Beau Willimon, Netflix, 2013–, season 1, episode 5). 9.9 Film still from House of Cards (Beau Willimon, Netflix, 2013–, season 1, episode 5). 9.10 Film still from House of Cards (Beau Willimon, Netflix, 2013–, season 1, episode 5). 13.1 Eva Hesse, No title, 1960, oil on canvas, 125.7 × 125.7 × 3.7 cm, Ursula Hauser Collection, Switzerland. Copyright: The Estate of Eva Hesse. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth. 13.2 Gustave Courbet, La Toilette de la Mariée (Preparation of the Dead Girl ), c.1850–5, oil on canvas, 77 × 99 in, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA. Copyright: Bildarchiv Foto Marburg.

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154 155 156 160 163 168 172 173 199 200 202 202 207 209 213 214 215 216

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17.1 Louise Bourgeois, The Destruction of the Father (detail), 1974, Latex, plaster, wood, fabric and red light, 237.8 × 362.3 × 248.6 cm. Collection The Easton Foundation, Photo: Peter Moore. Copyright: The Easton Foundation/VAGA, New York/DACS, London 2017.

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SERIES PREFACE NEW ENCOUNTERS Arts, Cultures, Concepts Griselda Pollock

How do we think about visual art these days? What is happening to art history? Is visual culture taking its place? What is the status of Cultural Studies, in itself or in relation to its possible neighbours art, art history, visual studies? What is going on? What are the new directions? To what should be remain loyal? New Encounters: Arts, Cultures, Concepts proposes some possible ways of thinking through these questions. Firstly, the series introduces and works with the concept of the transdisciplinary initiative. This is not a synonym for the interdisciplinary combination that has become de rigueur. It is related to a second concept:  research as encounter. Conjoined, transdisciplinary and encounter mark the interaction between ways of thinking, doing and making in the arts and humanities. Each of these modes retains the distinctive features associated with its own disciplinary practices and objects: art, history, culture, practice. Yet a new knowledge is produced when these different ways of doing, making and thinking encounter each other across – and this is the third intervention – concepts. Concepts circulate between different intellectual or aesthetic cultures, inflecting them, finding common questions but in distinctively articulated practices. The aim is to place these different practices in productive relation to each other mediated by the circulation of concepts. We stand at several crossroads at the moment in relation to the visual arts and cultures, historical, and contemporary, and to theories and methods of analysis. Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (CATH) is offered as

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one experiment in thinking about how to maintain the momentum of the momentous intellectual, cultural revolution in the arts and humanities that characterized the last quarter of the twentieth century while adjusting to the different field of analysis created by it. In the 1970s to 1990s, the necessity, or the intrusion, according to your position, was Theory:  a mythic concept with a capital T that homogenized vastly different undertakings. Over those decades, research in the arts and humanities was undoubtedly reconfigured by the engagement with structuralist and poststructuralist theories of the sign, the social, the text, the letter, the image, the subject, the postcolonial, and above all, difference. Old disciplines were deeply challenged and new interdisciplines – called studies – emerged to contest the academic field of knowledge production. These changes were wrought through specific engagements with Marxist, feminist, deconstructionist, psychoanalytical and discourse theory. Texts and authors were branded according to their theoretical engagements. Such mapping produced divisions between the proliferating theoretical models (could one be a Marxist, and a feminist, and use psychoanalysis?). A  deeper split, however, emerged between those who, in general, were theoretically oriented, and those who apparently did without theory: a position that the theoretically-minded easily critiqued because being atheoretical is, of course, a theoretical position, just one that did not carry a novel identity associated with the intellectual shifts of the post-1968 university. The impact of ‘the theoretical turn’ has been creative; it has radically reshaped work in the arts and humanities in terms of what is studied (content, topics, groups, questions) and also how it is studied (theories and methods). Yet some scholars currently argue that work done under such overt theoretical rubrics now appears tired; theory constrains the creativity of the new generation of scholars familiar, perhaps too familiar, with the legacies of the preceding intellectual revolution that can too easily be reduced to Theory 101 slogans (the author is dead, the gaze is male, the subject is split, there is nothing but text, etc.). The enormity of the initial struggles – the paradigm shifting – to be able to speak of sexual difference, subjectivity, the image, representation, sexuality, power, the gaze, postcoloniality, textuality, difference, queerness fades before a new phase of normalization in which every student seems to bandy around terms that were once, and in fact, still are, challengingly difficult and provocative. Or worse. It is clear that bandying indicated

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that at least something of this intellectual and theoretical revolution was still – even in an etiolated form – part of public discourse. Recent events have shown how the terms of critical thinking from feminist to postcolonial theory are not part of general discussion. Outrageous acts of sexual harassment and abuse are greeted not with knowing acknowledgement of their structural place in a patriarchal culture of asymmetrical power relations but as the signs of a surprising number of ‘badly behaved’ individual men. Where is the sense that facing revelations of such an order necessitated a political-critical analysis rather than surprise and celebrity ‘outing’? Theory, of course, just means thinking about things, puzzling over what is going on, reflecting on the process of that puzzling and thinking. A reactive turn away from active engagement with theoretical inquiries in the arts and humanities is increasingly evident in our area of academe. It is, however, dangerous and misleading to talk of a post-theory moment, as if we can relax after so much intellectual gymnastics and once again become unthinking couch potatoes. The job of thinking critically is even more urgent as the issues we confront are so complex, and we now have extended means of analysis that make us appreciate even more the complexity of language, subjectivity, symbolic practices, affects and aesthetics. So how to continue the creative and critical enterprise fostered by the theoretical turn of the late twentieth century beyond the initial engagement determined by specific theoretical paradigms? How does it translate into a practice of analysis that can be constantly productive? This series argues that we can go forward, with and beyond, by transdisciplinary encounters with and through travelling concepts. The notion of ‘travelling concepts’ was proposed by Mieke Bal, a leading feminist narratologist and semiotician, who launched an inclusive, interdisciplinary project of cultural analysis in the 1990s with the book The Point of Theory: Practices of Cultural Analysis (University of Amsterdam Press, 1994) and The Practice of Cultural Analysis:  Exposing Interdisciplinary Interpretation (Stanford University Press, 1999). In founding the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA), Bal turned the focus from our accumulating theoretical resources to the work – the practice of interpretation – we do on cultural practices, informed not only by major bodies of theory (that we still need to study and extend), but by the concepts generated within those theories that now travel across disciplines, creating an extended field of contemporary cultural thinking. Cultural analysis is theoretically

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informed, critically situated, ethically oriented to ‘cultural memory in the present’ (Bal, 1999: 1). Cultural analysis thus works with ‘travelling concepts’ to produce new readings of images, texts, objects, buildings, practices, gestures, actions. In her book titled Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide (University of Toronto Press, 2002), Bal argues that concepts, formed within specific theoretical projects have, however, moved out of –  travel from  – their own originating site to become tools for thinking in the larger domain of cultural analysis. Their interplay produces, a domain that seeks to create a space of encounter between the many distinctive and even still disciplinary practices that constitute the arts and humanities: the fields of thought that puzzle over what we are and what it is that we do, think, feel, say, understand and live. In 2001, a Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (CentreCATH) was founded at the University of Leeds, with initial funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, to undertake what it defines as a transdisciplinary initiative to bring together and advance research in and between distinct but interrelating areas of fine art practices, social, feminist, queer and feminist histories of art and cultural studies:  three areas that seem close and yet can be divided from each other through their distinguishing commitments to practice, history and theory respectively. CentreCATH was founded at a moment that emerging visual studies/ visual culture was contesting art history or inventing a new field of studies. It was a moment of intense questioning about what constitutes the historical analysis of art practices as the increasing interest in the contemporary seemed to eclipse historical consciousness. It was a moment of puzzling over the nature of research through art practice, and a moment of reassessing the status of the now institutionalized, once new kid on the block, Cultural Studies. CentreCATH responded to Mieke Bal’s ASCA with its own exploration of the relations between history, practice and theory through the passionate engagement with transdisciplinary cultural analysis that also took its inspiration from the renewed studies of the unfinished project of Kulturwissenschaft proposed by Aby Warburg at the beginning of the twentieth century. Identifying five urgent but expanding themes that are at the same time concepts: hospitality and social alienation, musicality/aurality/textuality, architecture of philosophy/philosophy of architecture, indexicality and virtuality, memory/amnesia/history, CentreCATH initiated a series of encounters (salons, seminars, conferences, events)

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between artists, art historians, musicologists, musicians, architects, writers, performers, psychoanalysts, philosophers, sociologists and cultural theorists. Each encounter was also required to explore a range of differences: feminist, Jewish, postcolonial, ethnic, sexual, politico-geographical, and historical (see http://www.centrecath.leeds.ac.uk). Each took cognizance of different ways of thinking and knowing in creative practice and critical thought. Each book in this new series is the outcome of such a transformative transdisciplinary research laboratory. We are not proposing a new interdisciplinary entity. The transdisciplinary means that each author or artist enters the forum with and from their own specific sets of practices, resources and objectives whose own rigours provide the necessary basis for a specific practice of making or analysis. While each writer attends to a different archive: photography, literature, exhibitions, manuscripts, images, bodies, trauma, and so forth, they share a set of concerns that defy disciplinary definition: concerns with the production of meaning, with the production of subjectivities in relation to meanings, narratives, situations, with the questions of power and resistance. The form of the books in this series is itself a demonstration of such a transdisciplinary intellectual community at work. The reader becomes the locus of the weaving of these linked but distinctive contributions to the analysis of culture(s). The form is also a response to teaching, taken up and processed by younger scholars, a teaching that itself is a creative translation and explication of a massive and challenging body of later twentieth century thought, which, transformed by the encounter, enables new scholars to produce their own innovatory and powerfully engaged readings of contemporary and historical cultural practices and systems of meaning. The model offered here is a creative covenant that utterly rejects the typically Oedipal, destructive relation between old and young, old and new, while equally resisting academic adulation. An ethics of intellectual respect – Spivak’s critical intimacy is one of Bal’s useful concepts – is actively performed in engagement between generations of scholars, all concerned with the challenge of reading the complexities of culture. This volume, Crossmappings, comes to the series from the research laboratory of another major cultural analyst, Elisabeth Bronfen. New Encounters is proud to bring to an English language reading community the work of one of the most original and creative of cultural analysts whose work creatively takes on and transforms a wide range of concepts

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while addressing, with equal depth of analysis, the rich complexity of both formal cultural practices  – literature, visual art and opera – and contemporary popular cultural forms such as TV series from The Wire to Madmen (the subject of her most recent book). Crossmapping is not just a title. It is a concept that gives rise to a method – of comparative reading across media and forms. Crossmapping does not simply show up the fact that texts reference each other (The Wire and Shakespeare’s history plays for instance). It demonstrates the ways in which shared concerns or issues are worked out in each media’s distinctive form. We come then to recognize how big issues such as death, power, desire, anxiety inform a range of cultural practices over time but also resurface in new forms (and media) to re-engage  with, but also to rewrite, them for the urgencies of different times and in social forms that have to negotiate such urgencies in new cultural ways. This combination of persistence of concerns, recurring tropes and transformed cultural inscriptions draws on the concept Aby Warburg invoked in his study of the image: Pathosformeln that can be translated as formulations of/for affect. Warburg was studying not only the affective intensities that were given form in bodily gestures that are then stored and remembered in images, often associated with ritual. He was also identifying their afterlife, Nachleben, their persistence, transmission and transformation over time and cultural geographies. The collected essays that form this book thus share their starting point with the New Encounters/CATH project, notably in a common understanding that Hamburg art historian and cultural analyst Aby Warburg’s eccentric procedure for studying the image as the locus of the transmissions and transformations of an international cultural imaginary offers unexpected resources for our current concerns in the study of cultural forms and meanings, subjectivities and the politics of difference. It also shares a commitment to practices of close reading of cultural forms to expose the complexity of their production of meaning and affect. Finally the extraordinary intellectual range of theoretical insights Bronfen provides are drawn from a breadth of literary, philosophical, psychoanalytical thought that are placed in dialogue with the images and practices that are being analysed. The latter are not inert objects for theoretical recasting; they are shown to be already theoretical and legible as ways of thinking about the issues philosophers and psychoanalysts addressed in their own practices. Whether Bronfen is discussing drama written for television’s

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twenty-first-century enriched use of the multi-series format, Hollywood films, or the varied works of contemporary visual artists, we come to see how they all perform as a mode of cultural thinking. Such thinking by means of cultural formulation is elucidated both through recourse to the concepts theory has derived from the study of how we live and feel and think and to other works of fiction and art that are revealed as an active intertextual presence. While traversing a broad field of topics and practices, these studies exemplify and generate a model for the practice of cultural analysis freed from disciplinary boundaries. They also reveal how both contemporary and historical ideas and forms already travel across cultural forms. When placed in dialogue with each other, and with their often-invisible cultural intertexts, Bronfen’s method of cultural analysis makes each topic ‘thicker’ with both meaning (in its own internal architecture and effects) and significance (in terms of what cultural forms do with and for us as their readers, and in a sense their actual subjects). For a fuller introduction to Elisabeth Bronfen and her project see the following foreword. Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History University of Leeds 2018

FOREWORD Introducing Elisabeth Bronfen Griselda Pollock

To some of us Elisabeth Bronfen needs no introduction. Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Zürich, she is also Global Distinguished Professor at New York University. Not only does she bridge the German- and English-speaking cultural communities, her double vantage point combining European and American positions enables each culture to look back at and see each other differently, from outside as it were. A media presence in the German cultural world as a widely known and challenging public intellectual, Elisabeth Bronfen has had immense impact in film studies, feminist studies and cultural theory. In 2017, to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the German translation of her first book in 1992, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester University Press, 1992), a conference titled Over her Dead Body Redux: Feminism for the 21st Century was held in Zürich at which the keynote speakers were philosopher Judith Butler and film theorist Mandy Merck. Examing feminist thought in the 1990s, these speakers emphasized the place of Elisabeth Bronfen’s work in the transdisciplinary formations of feminist analysis at its most theoretically probing and indeed continuously innovative. In the wake of Donald Trump’s election to the White House in 2016, Elisabeth Bronfen gave a lecture posing the question of Trump in the White House as a new reality show. While looking at the images of power long circulating in American literature, film and television, she mobilized her prolonged study of the tensions between fiction and reality that have shaped American culture and society in ways constantly reworked by its popular media. She also

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mobilized her enduring engagement with Shakespearean representations of sovereignty and power. Abolishing the apparent incongruity of talking the sublime literature and dramaturgy of Shakespeare to the real estate salesman Trump, Bronfen offered insights into the ways the political event is made possible by cultural forms that have shaped the American cultural imaginary with stories of power games and the contesting images of masculinity, femininity and authority. One of her most recent books might be said to bridge the dramas of power with those of death and dreams when, using her method, Bronfen undertakes an analysis of the influential TV series about advertising and television in the 1960s, Mad Men, in her book Mad Men, Death and the American Dream (Chicago University Press, for Diaphanes, 2016) ‘showing how – then as now – we turn to fantasy in the face of conflicts that cannot be resolved in political reality’ (cited from the blurb).  Elisabeth Bronfen is thus a transdisciplinary writer par excellence. The following chapters ‘travel’ between and across the historical (Degas and Picasso) and contemporary visual arts (Diane Arbus, Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sherman, Sophie Calle, Eva Hesse, Francesca Woodman, Paul McCarthy, and Eija-Liisa Ahtila), American TV series such as The Wire and House of Cards, Hollywood movies such as Vertigo, Fascist cinema of Leni Riefenstahl and its unexpected reverberations or anticipations in Hollywood. Chess, the archetypal game of power in its fantasized and yet played out form, functions as a key figure recurring across these diverse studies. Each reading of cultural practices, either focussing on specific images or working across narrative structures, is an enactment of conceptual thinking. Bronfen thus reads aesthetic practices with a range of theoretical resources and vice-versa in a way that becomes a singular and rich methodological intervention. She draws on literary semiotics and psychoanalytical theories of both manifest and latent meaning, of both structures and processes. She thus reveals through such readings how psychic formations shape and reformulate literary, cinematic and artistic tropes while the conventions of visual, cinematic and artistic formulation perform and transform those very psychic dispositions to which psychoanalysis alerted us, often through its own interpretations of Greek tragedy, art and contemporary literature. Thus the transdisciplinary is performatively demonstrated as a practice that in fact reveals to us intrinsic ‘crossmappings’

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already present in areas of culture that academic disciplines artificially separate. Prime amongst the psychoanalytical issues Bronfen tracks and redefines by so doing in their actualization in cultural forms are the uncanny and the spectral (Das Unheimliche in German, Heim meaning home, uncanny meaning unhomeliness, or homeliness turned unfamiliar by repression and return), hysteria, and fetishism. These form perhaps the key concepts for any psychoanalytically informed aesthetics and cultural history. Yet, at the same time, their immediate relevance to cultural analysis now is dictated by the character of the cultural forms that have emerged, notably in those areas of culture committed to narrative such as literature and cinema, and in the areas of image-making that stage the body, sexual difference and desire. Home and its uncanny spectres or what Elisabeth Bronfen calls ‘the haunting gaze’ that is one effect, and indeed a key product, of the cinematic itself crosses films, images, narratives of war and loss as much as of domestic situations that stage relationships of love and desire. By approaching her topics thematically and her fields of study conceptually, Elisabeth Bronfen makes feminist analysis a necessary matrix for cultural analysis in its broadest sense. What might be initially isolated by feminist analysis to insist on its place in cultural analysis – gender – is shown to be an active dimension and constant thematic in literature and modern narrative forms in audio-visual media from film to television. Thus she reveals the ways in which home and masculinity  are articulated in American cinema. She also identifies the structural role of the feminine as a deflection of masculine anxiety in the face of the unbearable knowledge of human mortality. Studying dominant cultural forms through the lens of narrative and fantasy finds issues of gender, power, the body, violence, fear and longing constantly at work in ever-changing cultural formulations. Elisabeth Bronfen is a specialist in nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twentyfirst-century literary and cinema studies, and visual culture, while at the same time being what we might name in English as an Americanist scholar. In disciplinary terms, she crosses boundaries between literature and the visual arts, between the visual arts and popular culture, between popular culture and literature, between opera, cinema and literature and all with theory. In doing so she reveals the obstructiveness of such disciplinary borders

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if our object is to understand inherently transdisciplinary issues such as meaning, form, memory, desire, death, anxiety and the dream. These words also indicate varied fields that cross from a focus on subjectivity and its psychic structuration to semiotics and aesthetic philosophy. She was a student of German and English studies under the rubric of comparative literature when she studied at Harvard University before completing her PhD at the University of Munich on the unjustly neglected work of British author Dorothy Richardson (1873–1957). One of the founders of stream of consciousness as a narrative form, Richardson was the author of Pilgrimage, a 13-volumed sequence of related autobiographical novels. Bronfen’s study was published in English as Dorothy Richardson’s Art of Memory:  Space, Identity, Text (Manchester University Press, 1999)  Her Habilitation thesis (a requirement in European universities in order to be able to teach in a university and direct graduate research) was on the intricate culture entwining of death, femininity and the aesthetic, first published in English as Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester University Press, 1992). Her next major project, The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and its Discontents (Princeton University Press, 1998), took up the challenge of understanding hysteria, which had become a key topic in feminist engagements with psychoanalysis and sexual difference since the 1970s. Bronfen not only took us back to basics with close readings of key texts by Freud, but she reassessed the complex and uncertain terrain of feminist and psychoanalytical engagements with this troubled concept. She then proposed her own distinctive interpretation of hysteria as not so much a question of sexual difference (‘Am I a man or a woman?’) as a confrontation with the trauma of mortality (‘Am I alive or dead?’). As part of this study, she offered a probing reading of Cindy Sherman’s Untitled works. One work, which exists only in its German form, is Elisabeth Bronfen’s remarkable work on the figure of the DIVA, Die Diva. Geschichte einer Bewunderung with Barbara Straumann (Schirmer Mosel, 2002). Subtitled ‘a history of  admiration’ – or enthrallment might better translate the idea – the Divas in question included Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe but also historical figures known to us through representation, such as Elizabeth I of England and Cleopatra. Bronfen explored what in effect constitutes the ‘star body’ in our cultural imaginary, a body which exists in its performance and its imaging, and in what such images project to us and indeed do for us. She argued that the Diva is neither a star in

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generally understood terms nor a celebrity product of publicity. The Diva is a complex cultural fiction performed and balancing precariously between the performer/actor and the public as the combination of extraordinariness and vulnerability. Moving between German and English language publications, Elizabeth Bronfen continued her analysis of writers and trauma, Sylvia Plath for example, and of the uncanny, notably in her book, inspired by the work of philosopher Stanley Cavell, Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of Cinema (Columbia University Press, 2004; see also her chapter on this theme  in Blue Beard’s Legacy:  Death and Secrets from Bartók to Hitchcock, I.B.Tauris, 2009, also in the New Encounters series). The next major topic Elisabeth Bronfen addressed was ‘night’, in her massive study across literature, cinema and opera, appearing in German in 2008 as ‘a cultural history of the night’ and in English as Night Passages: Philosophy, Literature and Criticism (Columbia University Press, 2013). Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton and George Eliot meet Shakespeare’s and Freud’s dream worlds, the movies Taxi Driver, Sunset Boulevard, The Big Heat, and Touch of Evil while inevitably opening with Mozart’s Queen of the Night. Then she undertook an analysis of American cinema’s representation of war, which appeared in English as Specters of War: Hollywood’s Engagement with Military Conflict.  (Rutgers University Press, 2012) and in German under the more revealing title  Hollywoods Kriege. Geschichte einer Heimsuchung (S. Fischer Verlag, 2013; the history of a visitation as in the sense of ghostly returns). Her findings revealed the ways in which wars – the once historical events – become their images and their spectres through cinematic representation. ‘What Hollywood’s obstinate engagement with military conflicts thus attests to is that wars of the past remained unfinished business. As we are called upon continually to reimagine the political violence that has come to shape and define America, we implicitly take part in a cultural haunting’ (p.  5). Thus it is through the after-images created by cinematic fiction, and its diverse forms of rendering war a spectacle and an experience, that we come to be able to read the past through belated representations. ‘My claim is that if all current war films are seen as engaging with previous cinematic formalizations of war, we can only read these earlier films through the lens of the present’ (p.6). Here we can grasp crossmapping as much more than the already known idea of all texts being inherently intertextual. Crossmapping is not just cross-referencing or source hunting. Elisabeth Bronfen affirms

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Mieke Bal’s concept of ‘preposterous history’. We come to understand the historical as an after-effect of visualizations and representations that come later. Thus ‘cross mappings’ not only involve traversing media; they also reverse the positivist view of linear time. As a result we come to appreciate how cultural forms not only shape our subjectivity and even political consciousness in the moment; as an entwining of present and past, past and present, they also extend time in an involuted cultural memory. In giving the titles of her books in different languages, I am drawing attention to cultural difference, for none is a direct translation and each must capture a dimension of the book for its different cultural readership. Elisabeth Bronfen teaches and is read in a German context while also being published and taught in English. While so much of contemporary cultural theory, notably in literature, film and cultural studies, inhabits French and its often unhappy translations into English, Bronfen’s multilingual intellectual imagination introduces a remarkable set of linguistic crossmappings between American thought and culture and German-European thought and culture. Points of theoretical reference that stand out are the psychoanalytical vocabulary of Sigmund Freud, the Kulturwissenschaft/Cultural Analysis of Aby Warburg – notably in his work on the image as bearer of memory and  on the transmission of forms of pathos – and the elegant philosophical analysis of and with literature and cinema performed by American philosopher Stanley Cavell. In her introduction to this volume, Bronfen writes of her engagement with Aby Warburg: The essays on visual culture… take their cue from Warburg’s cartography of the afterlife of resilient pathos gestures in that they, too, offer a comparative reading of the repeated return of cultural intensities at different historical moments and in different aesthetic media… If my own essays not only theorize the process of seizing upon and appropriating past pathos formulas but also emphatically trace their subsequent affective value, my readings do so because I, too,  am concerned with sustaining the tension between being subjectively moved by the formal aesthetization of an emotion and grasping this aspect conceptually. Indeed, I have come to understand pathos gestures, whose intensities continue to reverberate in our contemporary culture, as both an inheritance and a responsibility. Like the artists, whose images and texts I have consistently used to orient my own theoretical discoveries, I, as a cultural semiotician,

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maintain a conversation with the thought and image formulas of the past. Thus the crossmapping of intensities, culturally encoded and transmitted, with aesthetics and media formulation seeks also to work with the affective charge of what we read, watch and make in culture. This raises the possibility of deriving from them knowledge that is in part their actual after-affect. Elisabeth Bronfen’s often acknowledged conversation with Stanley Cavell is built upon a shared understanding that cultural analysis occurs at the crossing of ‘image formulas’ and ‘thought figures’. Since philosophical or theoretical writing depends as much on the thought figures and images it conjures up in pursuit of its forms of understanding, we must also ascribe to cultural forms their formulations of thought. Cavell, however, went further to produce readings, for instance, of Hollywood comedies as formulated and narrative modes of addressing questions such as happiness and relationality that could only become apparent by considering these films through the lens of philosophical questions about the moral and indeed the political subject: action and change, inflected uniquely by the narrative and cultural form’s empassioned utterance of these questions. Cavell and Warburg share with Freud the necessity to confront passion/pathos/intensity in its many processes in relation to the urgency of understanding. Thus Bronfen asserts the need for theoretical conceptualization in constant dialogue with cultural formulation because that crossmapping approximates more closely to both the topics we find recurring in cultural forms and those that drive us again and again to engage with cultural forms as makers, viewers, readers and analysts. Crossmappings was initially a volume of Bronfen’s many writings in German on art, cinema, and TV practices that share image formulas, narrative process and thought figures. Many of those on art were solicited by curators intrigued to invite her as a feminist cultural analyst to address the content of their exhibitions. Bringing together the many texts enabled their author to formulate what became apparent as their shared framework as well as her method and preoccupations. Thus in conjunction with the substantive volumes on Death, the Diva, Hysteria, War, Night and the American Dream, these detailed case studies serve here to introduce both one of the major cultural theorists of our moment and the distinctive methodology and epistemology that she has produced by the passionate practice of cultural analysis across arts, concepts and cultures.

INTRODUCTION CROSSMAPPINGS Visual Readings as a Critical Intervention in the Cultural Imaginary

Punning on the German word for griffin, Vogelgreif, Aby Warburg notes in his Mnemosyne Atlas: ‘Under the darkly whizzing beating of the griffin’s wings, suspended between apprehension (Ergreifung) and profound emotion (Ergriffenheit), we dream the concept of consciousness’.1 At stake, for him, in all artistic work is maintaining a balance between comprehending an intense emotion with the help of one’s imagination and offering a conceptual presentation of it; which is to say oscillating between a magic association with and a formal re-writing of expressions of pathos. Image formulas (Bildformeln) from the past are retrieved from the arsenal of our cultural imaginary and adjusted to the present, so as to give expression to contemporary articulations of intimate emotions. If each artistic act thus attests to the affective effects (Nachwirken) of past image formulas, Aby Warburg’s project for the study of visual culture seeks to map the cultural afterlife (Nachleben) of these pathos gestures (Pathosgesten). To do so, he came to produce sequences of images on black panels, thematically arranged, even while he would constantly change the arrangements of these visual formalizations of emotional intensities. As he explained, his aim was to capture the spirit of past times in the way it came to inform notions of style, and to do so by offering an explicitly subjective comparison of one and the same object at different historical times and in different cultural arenas. Warburg called the cognitive space (Denkraum)

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to be gained by aesthetic formalization the distance (Spanne der Distanz) between an affordable fantasy (erschwingende Phantasie) and inspired reason (aufschwingende Vernunft). Aesthetic formalizations, thus his claim, serve to capture an anxiety or an enthusiasm (Begeisterung) and transfer this intensity into an image, so as to apprehend and thus understand it as an image, and in so doing, to hold the pathos contained in the image at bay. The mappings Warburg unfolds with his image panels, in turn, allow the critic engaged in an analysis of visual culture to grasp the gesture of transference that pathos formulas afford and render them comprehensible, in order to unfold ever-new – and ever-changing – relations between these aesthetic formalizations and the cultural effects they subsequently had. The essays on visual culture I have collected in this volume take their cue from Warburg’s cartography of the afterlife of resilient pathos gestures in that they, too, offer a comparative reading of the repeated return of cultural intensities at different historical moments and in different aesthetic media. My readings also claim to unfold a cognitive site in which aesthetic image formulas stand next to theoretical tropes (or figures of thought), so as to record the cultural after-effects of profound intimate emotions, as well as the correspondences between various modes of formalizing these intensities. If my own essays not only theorize the process of seizing upon and appropriating past pathos formulas but also empathetically trace their subsequent affective value, my readings do so because, I, too, am concerned with sustaining the tension between being subjectively moved by the formal aesthetization of an emotion and grasping this affect conceptually. Indeed, I  have come to understand pathos gestures, whose intensities continue to reverberate in our contemporary culture, as both an inheritance and a responsibility. Like the artists, whose images and texts I have consistently used to orient my own theoretical discoveries, I, as a cultural semiotician, maintain a conversation with the thought and image formulas of the past. These have not only significantly informed my own approach to visual culture, but were, in fact, the point of departure for my own critical engagement with images and their cultural after-effects in the first place. I call the comparative readings these essays present crossmappings so as to underscore my own heuristic concern in offering a cartography of image formulas that are of both an aesthetic and a theoretic nature. I am, however, less interested in uncovering established influences between certain moments in different texts than in finding a similarity in the concerns they revolve around. Crossmapping, thus my claim, produces a cognitive

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site, which, like art, intervenes in the cultural imaginary. Furthermore, I understand my theoretical concepts, taken primarily from the domain of semiotics and psychoanalysis, as critical metaphors, which unfold their own visuality. I thus compare texts of different medialities along the axis of a shared visual language, so as to confront the visuality of both narrative texts as well as critical concepts with the narrative quality of images. At the same time, my comparison is concerned with their common will to formalization (or aesthetic shaping), as this transfers resilient affects into effective signs. If all profound inner emotion engages with inherited pathos formulas on the level of our shared cultural imaginary, my essays on visual culture seek to explore this uncanny interface. For this reason, I understand crossmapping above all as a practice in reading, in which theoretical and aesthetic apprehensions of our cultural imaginary prove to be mutually implicated. While theory seizes upon certain cultural concerns that have already played themselves out in the arena of aesthetic formalization, we need critical metaphors to draw our attention to the resilient afterlife these artistic creations have had, as well as to work out their continual relevance for contemporary culture. My concept of crossmapping, in its attempt to expose unusual or overlooked trajectories of the afterlife of cultural image formulas, supplements Aby Warburg’s cognitive space (Denkraum) with Stephen Greenblatt’s notion of an ‘exchange of cultural energies’.2 Having recourse to the rhetorical concept of energia in his readings of early modern theatre, Greenblatt is also concerned with the manner in which precursory experiences of emotional intensities have historically been handed down such that the prior intensities continue to circulate in contemporary culture. The continual aesthetic power of a Shakespeare play, for example, is not to be thought of in the sense of any direct transference from early modernity into our own times. After all, the play itself, as well as the social circumstances that came to produce it and which it represents, have experienced too significant a reformulation in the past centuries. At the same time, these transformations, which in fact guarantee the cultural survival of an aesthetic work, do not cancel out the historical past. Instead, Greenblatt’s recourse to the rhetorical concept of energia attests to the fact that the resilient power of an aesthetic work can be attributed to the ineluctability of historic processes. The cultural afterlife of a given social energy is the result of structural processes of exchange that were already noticeable at the historic origin

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of the aesthetic work, only to be handed down together with its cultural refigurations. With his notion of a circulation of cultural energies, Greenblatt patently appropriates Nietzsche’s genesis of moral judgment, more precisely his concept of the will to power. A more powerful morality gains dominance, Nietzsche claims, because it is able to overwhelm a prior set of moral values that is already in place. It succeeds in reinterpreting these cultural values by confiscating them and reformulating them, so that they might serve a new purpose. Any empowered reformulation thus entails an act of appropriation, an act overwhelming a prior interpretation of the world. At the same time, such mastery must be thought of as a new interpretation qua adjustment of a previous truth, in the course of which the prior meaning and purpose are obscured or perhaps even obliterated. Precisely because Nietzsche postulates an exchange between interpretory powers, which entails a process of being overwhelmed by the force of a new and more compelling, more urgent formulation, he, in turn, anticipates Aby Warburg’s Denkraum. As Nietzsche explains, at stake in his concept of a will to power is the continual force of a significatory chain of incessantly re-newed interpretations and appropriations, which may well succeed and replace each other accidentally.3 When Greenblatt speaks of the exchange of social energies, he also insists that there need be no direct, unalloyed and reconstructable connection between our contemporary affective experience of a play and the earlier historical conditions that influenced it. The afterlife of an aesthetic work, its resilient energia, can, according to Greenblatt, only be apprehended as a belated effect, to be more precise as the trace that this intensity has left in our cultural memory. Put another way, owing to a cultural negotiation that plays itself out as a network of resilient exchanges and rewritings, the energia of an aesthetic work remains in circulation and can be kept alive over several centuries. In answer to the question what shape the force of social energy can assume  – and therein, I  suggest, resides the conceptual proximity to Warburg’s pathos formulas – Greenblatt answers: ‘Power, charisma, sexual excitement, collective dreams, wonder, desire, anxiety, religious awe, free-floating intensities of experience’; in short, all articulations of emotion and imagination a society has brought forth and represented.4 My own insistence on crossmapping figures of thought and image formulas for which no simple or unequivocal intertextual

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relation can be determined is meant to draw our critical attention to similarities between aesthetic formalizations that have remained overlooked or uncharted. At the same time, the crossmappings my essays unfold involve a complex, often contradictory transformation, entailing both the movement from one historical time into another, as well as the shift from one medium to another. At stake, for me, is not only the question why a particular figure of thought has survived, but also what transfer into a different medium, into a different visual or verbal language it has come to experience in the course of its cultural afterlife. My heuristic interest lies both with what is contemporaneous about a historical text, as well as with what is significant about its belated reformulation. The method of crossmapping is concerned with asking why a given image formula has been confiscated and re-interpreted in a particular way, even while it is equally intrigued by what has proved to be most decisive about the affective cultural after-effects it has had. If, however, I  am concerned with uncovering developmental trajectories in the afterlife of cultural image formulas, which have often remained unnoticed, then not least of all in order to draw our attention to the differences that emerge in the process of any subsequent appropriation. By claiming that it is pertinent to focus our critical attention on differences between figures of thought and image formulas, which, in fact only come to be noticed because one has discovered significant similarities between them, I  follow Stanley Cavell. In his writings on the comedy of remarriage of the 1930s, he treats classic Hollywood films as an example for the way American culture thinks about itself, by virtue of producing a cognitive site where philosophical, political and literary texts – revolving around a common concern – are brought into conversation with each other. Decisive for my own project of crossmapping is a passage in his book Pursuits of Happiness, in which he justifies his interest in reading George Cukor’s The Philadelphia Story (1940) as an example of the cultural afterlife of certain pathos formulas from William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Both texts, thus Cavell’s claim, are based on the idea ‘that the public world of day cannot resolve its conflicts apart from resolutions in the private forces of night’. A therapy for our diurnal anxieties as well as desires can, however, happen at night, ‘by way of remembering something, awakening to something, and by forgetting something, awakening from something’.5

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At the same time, although Cavell discovers significant epistemological correspondences between Shakespeare’s early modern play and Cukor’s film comedy, he is not concerned with providing any solid evidence for the relation of The Philadelphia Story and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As he notes: I might rather describe my interest as one of discovering, given the thought of this relation, what the consequences of it might be. This is a matter not so much of assigning significance to certain events of the drama as it is of isolating, and relating the events for which significance needs to be assigned.6 Along the lines proposed by Cavell, the crossmappings my essays unfold revolve around the question which image formulas and thought figures one might fruitfully bring in conversation with each other. I, too, am interested in asking what conceptual consequences can be gleaned from appropriations and refigurations that attest to the cultural afterlife of a given pathos formula or thought figure. What does the discovery of culturally poignant lines of connection not only render visible but compel us to assign meaning to? How are the figures of thought and image formulas that allow me to discover similarities between different aesthetic formalizations specifically deployed so as to produce their own idiosyncrasies? What does it mean to discover correspondences between diverging formalizations of inner emotion? How does the discovery of such analogies change the possibilities of interpreting a particular image or text? What differences are produced in the course of a refiguration of a particular pathos formula? And why is insisting on these differences perhaps as urgent an issue as the discovery of those similarities, which the crossmapping took as its point of departure in the first place? To trace a line of connection between comparable image formulas that have occurred at different historical times and in different media means taking the inheritance of history seriously. If any contemporary production of images inevitably engages with aesthetic formalizations from the past, it also, by necessity, inscribes itself retroactively into the earlier art work that had originally influenced it. The resilient afterlife of cultural image formulas also brings with it the notion that our perception of past image productions can never be completely severed from the refigurations they have encountered in the course of time. Mieke

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Bal calls an investigation into the recycling that images from the past have undergone in contemporary art only to colour our conception of this past, doing a ‘preposterous’ form of historical reading. While the literal meaning of the word preposterous means ‘contrary to nature, reason or common sense,’ ‘inverted’ and ‘absurd,’ Bal, picking up on the Latinate roots of the word  – ‘pre’ meaning ‘before’, and ‘post’ ‘coming after’ – offers an idiosyncratic semantic spin on the term. To look preposterously at the visual culture of the past, which is to say in relation to the contemporary culture that came after it, thus her claim, allows us to notice what remains hidden when we address more conventional intertextual influences. Indeed, art works from the past will be perceived and interpreted differently if they are seen through the lens of their later recyclings and refigurations. Such re-visions of past works, Bal explains, neither ‘collapse past and present, in an ill-conceived presentism, nor objectify the past and bring it within our grasp, as in a problematic positivist historicism.’ Instead, as she explains, this ‘reversal, which puts what came chronologically first (“pre”) as an aftereffect behind (“post”) its later recycling, is what I would like to call preposterous history.’7 It is a way of doing history, of dealing with the past today. Pathos formulas from the past catch up with us even though they can never fully be subsumed into or consumed by the contemporary moment. We cannot get rid of images that haunt us from the past, even though – precisely because they are the mark of unfinished business  – these images are often hard to grasp, let alone apprehend. While they influence the image formulas that have succeeded them, they are often screened out by what they themselves have engendered. Mieke Bal’s concept of preposterous history has, in turn, influenced the essays brought together in this volume in the sense that many of them engage with the intervention of female artists in modern visual culture. How do women artists appropriate traditional conceptualizations of femininity so as to both critically reflect as well as creatively rethink the equation of woman with the image? How do they circumvent the reduction of the feminine body to a screen for the desires and anxieties of the masculine artist and the masculine spectator so prevalent in our Western image repertoire? How do they develop their own voice, their own self-image, their own authenticity in a medium that has traditionally served to screen out feminine subjectivity so as to function primarily as a medium of masculine self-expression? At the same time, these essays are

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equally concerned with casting a different, oblique gaze onto images that allegedly transform the feminine body into an object of the male gaze, so as to ask whether our cultural imaginary might not allow for a less restrictive view of femininity than the one that equates woman either with fetishes or sacrificial objects, and in so doing reduces her to being the stake in a masculine visual economy. Is it not possible to read our cultural image repertoire against the grain, so as to glean from it a more plural and multifarious representation of femininity than was perhaps intended? Recalling Nietzsche, one might claim that if women artists can confiscate traditional image formulas and re-interpret them, so, too, feminist critics also negotiate and re-figure the attitude with which we engage with our inheritance of the visual culture that has informed our thinking about images. Decisive for the gesture of empowerment I am proposing is, however, the following aporia: If Judith Butler introduced the notion of gender trouble so as to draw attention to the political force behind a parodic appropriation of culturally determined identity positions on the part of women artists, these games with gender are subversive precisely because a radical break with the traditional image repertoire is neither possible nor desirable. Image formulas that injure and restrict us in the way we conceive ourselves can, according to Butler, be confiscated, negotiated and refigured. We cannot, however, escape them, as we can also never entirely reject or repudiate them.8 Precisely because they inevitably have an afterlife, these image formulas and thought figures represent our ineluctable cultural heritage; an inheritance which obliges us in one way or another to engage with the images and stories that define us. An intervention in the cultural imaginary thus entails oscillating between a playful re-imagination and a critical deconstruction of pathos gestures of the past. An ironic imitation might, for example, expose these by taking the reification of the feminine body to its utmost extreme. I, in turn, understand my essays on visual culture as a troubling of conventional ways of seeing, which proceeds in a manner analogous to the work of critical artists, because I try to both critically and empathetically describe the manner in which they seize upon and reformulate precursor image formulas and figures of thought. If, in my crossmappings, I insist that at stake is above all a process of reading, I do so because I am concerned with a will to artistic conceptualization and shaping, which not only affords the transference of

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profound inner emotions into an aesthetic formalization, so that these can be grasped and apprehended. Rather, the meaning artistic work creates serves to contain, if not master, the very contingency that threatens to overpower us. As Joan Didion has said about her own work as a cultural critic, we tell ourselves stories in order to live.9 One could, however, add that we need images, stories and critical interpretation so as to endow the disparate and arbitrary experience of our ordinary life with meaning. We need aesthetic formalizations so as to transform the incommensurable and often contradictory complexity of our world into a coherent story that we can make sense of. Images and narratives offer a symbolic substitute for everything that we cannot grasp because it is too unascertainable or unpredictable, even while we also cannot screen out this immeasurable complexity. Instead, we must focus our attention on the transference of contingent material into aesthetic formalization – be it the human body, psychic material, things and objects, or simply the phenomenological givenness of the world surrounding us. At the same time, we must ask what kind of displacements and distortions are produced as a result of such ‘re-form’ (as Kenneth Clark describes the relation between nakedness and nude painting).10 If the complexity of experience must be transformed into story and image formulas so as to become both personally meaningful and collectively fruitful – analogous to what Aby Warburg calls the apprehension of profound inner emotion – this reform always also entails a degree of regulation from which something withdraws. When focusing our attention on the meaning that is gained in the process of an artistic formalization of affects, we must also critically reflect on what is lost in this translation. In order to explain the double system inscribed in the signification of mythic signs, Roland Barthes, in his essay ‘Myth Today’, describes a scene that in fact applies to all readings of visual and narrative texts. As he argues, there is never any contradiction, conflict, or split between the meaning and the form. Rather, one might imagine sitting in a car and looking at the scenery through the window. ‘I can at will focus on the scenery or on the window-pane,’ so as to grasp either the presence of the glass while the landscape is unfocussed and at a distance. Or, on the contrary, I can screen out the transparency of the glass so as to focus my gaze on the depth of the landscape. What according to Barthes I cannot, however, do, is see both glass and landscape at the same time. In this sense, the aesthetic form, into which materiality (be it body, spirit,

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objects or landscape) has been transferred, so as to endow it with meaning, is empty and present to me precisely because I can’t help noticing the mediality of the art work. The materiality, in turn, has been rendered unreal, even though, or rather precisely because formalization has endowed it with meaning; it is both unreal and full.11 Barthes’ concept of the duplicity of the sign, which has persistently informed my own readings of images and narratives, makes the following compelling claim: If our gaze can only focus on one level of the image or the text – the form or the meaning, the manifest or the latent signification – what reveals itself to us displaces something; by becoming present, it screens out its double. Our critical gaze must, therefore, not only be concerned with the transference of contingent materiality into an aesthetic formalization, endowing it with coherent meaning. Rather, we must always also take note of the duplicity inherent in the image as well as in any narrative scene, along with the visual language used to describe it. Apodictically put, we should cultivate the oblique gaze, which the visual culture of the Baroque period came to disseminate in the shape of anamorphotic paintings. An example of this is Hans Holbein the Younger’s 1533 painting The Ambassadors. At first glance, the painting shows the eponymic Tudor ambassadors in front of a shelf containing various scientific instruments. When we tilt our heads, however, a large skull – standing for the baroque motto of memento mori – becomes visible at the bottom of the painting. This and other baroque double visions (and their resilient cultural afterlife in the modern avant-garde) exposed a dimension of meaning normally hidden from the ordinary gaze, which usually revolved around the transience of the world and the fragility of human existence. Looking at something awry, however, proves to be a useful hermeneutic tool in the critical engagement with all images and texts, especially those that do not explicitly elevate the duplicity of signification to their aesthetic project. In the same manner, in which profound emotion can only be apprehended by virtue of the distance gained, according to Aby Warburg, though the Denkraum of formalization, something always also recedes from our grasp. While this fleeting quality inhabits all visual and textual signs, it can never be apprehended directly. At stake in interrogating the will to artistic conceptualization subtending all pathos formulas is thus not only the question of what energy or intensity seeks to express itself. Rather, one must equally ask what resists this drive, either because it cannot be apprehended as an

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image formula or because it exceeds any formal articulation. As many of the artists with which my essays engage insist, something always escapes the transference of contingent materiality into a coherent story or a meaningful image. Aesthetic formalization produces a blind spot, creates a secret that stands to contradict the desire for unequivocal meaning and closure art seeks to satisfy. The title of one of Sam Taylor-Wood’s video works, Sustaining the Antagonism, offers a useful critical metaphor for the duplicity the critical eye must entertain in relation to the contradiction images thrive on. They show too little and too much, and what is revealed in and by them not only elicits both a direct and an oblique gaze. Rather, any straight gaze may, in fact, obstruct an appreciation of precisely the resilient energia that forbids any unequivocal expression. At the same time, the antagonism that must be sustained also pertains to the duplicity inherent to the will to artistic formalization itself. On the one hand we need stories and images, which allow us to apprehend a pathos that affects us precisely because it can never fully be grasped. If our experience and explanation of the world can only be transmitted and handed down with the help of reproductions, Aby Warburg calls the cognitive site (or Denkraum) these mediations produce an interval in which we can emotionally come in touch with a panoply of expressions of alterity that to a degree recede from rational apprehension as well as transparent signification: Be it the strangeness of the past, the ungraspability of anxiety, happiness or ecstasy, or – and above all – the separateness of another person in her or his bodiliness, her or his subjectivity; an individuality I can never fully capture. This third space of aesthetic formalization, which sustains the antagonism between my personal experience of another person and her or his singularity, represents one of our most culturally vibrant sites where we can transgress the very boundary that turning another person into an image always also draws. Cornelius Castoriadis has coined the term capacité imaginaire in order to point to the fact that our imagination allows us to make something present to ourselves that we neither personally experienced nor could have experienced. Fantasy is neither made up only of images, standing for something else, nor does it exclusively consist in the ability to see something different in an object, or to see the object differently from what it is. Rather, the resilient power of the imaginary, according to Castoriadis, relates back to an originary ability to render present an object or a relation, which were never actually present in our perceptions, so that there

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is no actual ground or source to the imagination.12 Based on such a fundamental ability to call forth images – and therein lies the aporia – an imaginative capacity to intuit and thus emotionally penetrate an alterity, which is not actually accessibly to reason, is rendered possible. On the other hand, the interval (or intermediary space) an aesthetic formalization produces – regardless whether we are dealing with painting, photography, film or literature  – always also misappropriates the very materiality it seeks to grasp; it misses its grip. According to Georges Didi-Huberman, the body (soma), which is to be translated in to figurability (sema) so that contingent materiality or pure affect can be transmitted as signs, only reappears on the canvas (and one might add on paper or on screen) as an approximation. The impression that it has again become flesh is a hallucination, and a diminished one to boot. We always remain aware of the fact that what is missing from the image is precisely the corporeality of what it represents; its flesh and blood.13 We are not only dealing with bodies that can only be apprehended in an image and as an image. Rather, we are also confronted with the translation of bodiliness into a figurability, which self-consciously always points to its own mediality. Along the lines of Roland Barthes’ ‘window scene’, our gaze inevitably oscillates between our capacité imaginaire (rendering present a relation, which strictly speaking we are not part of) and the sobering recognition that our ability to call forth an image in which we can affectively participate is nothing other than the result of lines and colours on a canvas, a play of shadow and light on a screen, or letters written on a white page of paper. Figuration always also entails a degree of disfiguration, a defacement and distortion, obscuring as much as it discloses. It dissolves the body it puts on display in the very image used to portray it, thus partially obliterating it from our view. Each performance of a body in an image uncovers something, but also adds something. The image is always more and less than the body, similar but never the same. The represented body is visible and invisible, present and absent at the same time. The image formula misses what it seeks to articulate; it is inhabited by a radical duplicity. In my essays I privilege that strand of modernity which takes a fascination for totalizing artistic expression in so far seriously as it points to the stain of human existence and the fragility of life, indeed insisting on the fugacity and implenitude of all will to artistic formalization. I do so because I fundamentally think the imaginary in relation to mortality. As

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the Marxist cultural theorist Fredric Jameson has argued in his work on the political unconscious, history in the sense of actual events occurring in a specific time and place is diametrically opposed to any imaginary apprehension of it. History, he explains, is ‘the experience of Necessity’; it is ‘what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis’. History, he continues, can only be apprehended through its effects, it can never be directly grasped as some reified force. Decisive for Jameson is not only the fact that history resists all attempts at transforming the real into image formulas, so as to diffuse the narcissistic wound it inflicts on desire. Rather, he understands history as the ground and as the boundary beyond which our capacité imaginaire cannot move, precisely because – and in this his critical metaphors are close to those of Warburg, Greenblatt and Freud – he takes the real of history to be the force that haunts us and drives us toward conceptualization and aesthetic formalization. As he soberly concludes, ‘History as ground and untranscendable horizon needs no particular theoretical justification: we may be sure that its alienating necessities will not forget us, however much we might prefer to ignore them.’14 The aporia we must learn to sustain and maintain might be formulated as follows: Images are inscribed by a radical duplicity, harking towards the real, which both our private fantasies and our cultural imaginary seek to screen out. For this reason, images elicit much discontent as they produce meaning. If the real of history can only be apprehended through its effects, then the site where these traces can most poignantly be discerned might well be precisely the Denkraum of aesthetic formalization, which repeatedly and incessantly unfolds an equally overwhelming energia, doing so belatedly by tracing the effects of their cultural survival. My own interest in conceiving of the cultural imaginary as a domain in which the real of history can be read through the inscription of its effects, along the line of what Mieke Bal calls preposterous history, is predicated on the fact that no other critical metaphors have influenced my own engagement with images and narrative imagery as those of psychoanalysis. My claim for a will to conceptualization or aesthetic formalization is based on the theoretical assumption that repressed psychic material (be it affects or thought representations), which has been stored in the unconscious, inexorably strives toward articulation. The afterlife of image formulas and thought figures not only allows us to discover an individual desire for self-expression and self-performance. Rather, it also

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allows us to decipher symptoms of cultural discontent, which function as visual ciphers for anxieties and desires haunting our culture at large. Fantasies occupy the murky interface between a personal need to organize our idiosyncratic desires and the pathos gestures, scenes and stories that our cultural image repertoire holds in store for us. While nothing seems to be as intimate as our day-dreams, in our fantasy work we inevitably have recourse to collective image formulas and thought figures. Nevertheless, equally decisive for the satisfaction that fantasy work affords is the duplicity of signification I have already described for the rhetoric of images. Unconscious psychic material can always only take shape by virtue of distortions and defacements, regardless whether we are dealing with private wish dreams or public enactments. The work of fantasy, like all other psychic symptoms, implicitly uses the rhetoric of denial. Freud explains: The content of a repressed image or idea can make its way into consciousness, on the condition that it is negated. Negation is a way of taking cognizance of what is repressed; indeed it is already a lifting of the repression, though not, of course, an acceptance of what is repressed.15 Put another way, fantasies articulate forbidden and threatening knowledge, even while they use the detour of representation – which never fully corresponds with what it represents  – so as to ward off this dangerous knowledge. For this reason, Freud calls fantasies protective fictions, or rather Schutzdichtungen, with the German word Dichtung referring both to a fiction and to a sealing device.16 Fantasy work uses the transference of threatening psychic material into the images or stories so as to protect the subject against the effects of the very recognition, which the translation of affects into fiction also affords. In so doing, the work of fantasy to a degree successfully seals off the knowledge that it seeks to articulate obliquely. According to Freud, the language of dream work is regulated by four mechanisms: displacement, condensation, consideration of representationability and secondary processes. After all, both nocturnal dreams and daydreams serve to transfer intimate unconscious psychic material into a conscious, externalizing formalization. The conceptualization that the work of fantasy affords thus not only represents a refiguration.

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Rather, it also gives shape to a form of rewriting, which mitigates any direct confrontation with the undesirable knowledge we seek to protect ourselves from. We recognize something about which we can claim that it is not quite the way it appears to us to be. Fantasies always represent a psychic compromise. Nevertheless we can distinguish between fantasy work foregrounding the gesture of screening out knowledge and fantasy work that obliquely draws attention to a disturbing piece of knowledge we allow ourselves to apprehend only in a distorted manner. Freud uses the fetishist as an example for an aversion of the gaze. Confronted with a naked woman, his neurosis consists in supplementing in fantasy the lack he believes to recognize in her allegedly castrated genitals. His erotic interest is now exclusively invested in the fetish object that takes the place of this lack. Freud, however, emphasizes the duplicity of this ersatz satisfaction. ‘But this interest suffers an extraordinary increase as well, because the horror of castration has set up a memorial to itself in the creation of this substitute.’17 The threatening knowledge of castration, which fantasy is meant to seal off, literally comes to be condensed in and at the supplementary object, which has come to take its place. The fetishist – and in this countless artists, authors and critics follow his neurosis – knows that no protective fiction will allow him to successfully screen out a recognition of human implenitude. Nevertheless, he prefers to believe in the magic of this protective refiguration. He sees what he wishes to be blind to, and at the same time is able to convince himself that he has been shielded from this disturbing sight. In her feminist re-reading of Freud, the film critic Laura Mulvey pits feminine curiosity against the wilful blindness of the fetishist. Using Pandora as her case in point, she argues that ‘while curiosity is a compulsive desire to see and to know, to investigate something secret, fetishism is born out of a refusal to see, a refusal to accept the difference the female body represents to the male.’ So as to distinguish these two versions of fantasy work, she continues, these complex series of turnings away, of covering over, not of the eyes but of understanding, of fixating on a substitute object to hold the gaze, leave the female body as an enigma and a threat, condemned to return as a symbol of anxiety while simultaneously being transformed into its own screen in representation.18

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Whether, while confronted with an image, a photograph or a film sequence, we do not avert our gaze; whether, facing a painting, we look for what has come to be defaced in the process of its drawing; whether our attention is drawn instead toward the self-reflexivity inscribed in a given set of images; or whether we prefer to give ourselves up to the satisfying protection that the condensation and distortion of aesthetic formalization offers us: The decision is entirely ours. What is, in turn, decisive, is that we are dealing with an enactment of personal intensities, of intimate images on a public stage, which, because they appeal to our capacité imaginaire, our capacity to call forth images, is fundamentally uncanny. An uncanny effect is often produced, according to Freud, when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, ‘when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality, or when a symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolizes.’19 Indeed, the critical formula he offers for this experience of psychic disconcertion is as follows: ‘Heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way or other a subspecies of heimlich.’20

PART I TRAVELLING IMAGE FORMULAS

1 FACING DEFACEMENT Degas’ Portraits of Women

In his memoirs of the artist, the painter Georges Jeanniot quotes Edgar Degas as saying: It is all very well to copy what you see, but it is much better to draw only what you still see in your memory. This is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory. Then you only reproduce what has struck you, that is to say the essential, and so your memories and your fantasy are freed from the tyranny which nature holds over them.1 Even though this gesture of privileging the belated recreation over the actual event is not specific to Degas’ portraiture of women, the transformation at stake contains a particular resonance when the tyranny of nature to be outwitted refers to the face of another human being. For the portrait, intended first and foremost to represent a particular woman in her specific context, comes in the process to depict its very opposite as well – the effacement of the model as she is turned into a figure, signifying something other than herself. This ambivalence is, of course, written into the very definition of portraiture. In its simplest terms, a portrait is a painting of an individual

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meant to intensify an aspect of something seen by the artist. It is the result of a sympathetic visual response to another human being. But given that the artist must always make choices in respect to gesture, pose and setting, the question that any viewing of a portrait immediately raises is whether it is merely the imitation of a particular model or whether it does not also signify the painter himself. Indeed, the Latin etymology – protrahere – suggests that the act of picturing is not just one of drawing or painting a figure upon a surface so as to represent a human face by mirroring reality. Rather, the act of copying from life is one that reveals by drawing forth, by bringing to light, by extending something seen in the sitter’s appearance, by prolonging a physiognomic detail, a gesture, a pose. The act of producing a simulacrum of any given human face with a body – whether this be an exact or an idealized likeness – entails a rendition of the visible and a reproduction of the invisible. Thus Hegel can argue in his Aesthetics that ‘a portrait must be an expression of individual and spiritual character. This nobler element in a man, which the artist introduces into the portrait, is not ordinarily obvious in a man’s features.’2 As the portrait painter draws out something from the appearance of the sitter, he also introduces something by virtue of his vision that is not seen by the ordinary eye. The portrayer is not a mere copier but rather part of the transformational process. The individual psychology of the portrayed can emerge only because the painter has brought it out in his impression of the uniqueness of this personality. In his portrait of Elena Primicile Carafa di Montejasi Cicerale (1875), for example, Edgar Degas captures a moment of intimacy, as his cousin, comfortably seated in a flowered armchair, looks up from her reading. Rather than maintaining a distance from the sitter, he stages a scene of proximity and familiarity. The particular impression he chooses to draw forth is above all one of a marked discrepancy between the relaxed and self-assuredly poised body on the one hand and an enigmatic facial tension on the other. The pouting mouth, the rigid tilting of the head, the sharply questioning, weary and annoyed gaze all indicate her irritation. Yet her expression remains equivocal. Is hers an irritation at having been interrupted in her reading, a general discomfort with her bourgeois life or a statement about being portrayed? Privileging what he considered to be an essential expressive quality in the physiognomy of his cousin over any verisimilitude, Degas allows a haughty, withholding and at the same time challenging feminine figure to emerge on his canvas, who can be

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read either as a particular woman, or as a representative of a given class, or indeed as an example for the situation of the model in general. One could say that Edgar Degas characterizes her as a woman well aware of her privileged position in a socially powerful family. At the same time, the portrait could also be read as depicting the artist’s anxiety about his model’s resistance to his portraying her. The X-ray of this painting corroborates the more oblique interpretation that, in addition to a personality or status study, the woman’s image comes to signify the artist as well. It shows that initially her face was turned to the left, away from Degas, with her eyes looking at some unidentified object outside the pictorial frame.3 The decision to have his cousin look directly at him was apparently a belated choice. If, as Degas concentrated on what he could still see after the actual portrait-session, memory mixed with imagination induced him to turn her head to confront both his and the spectator’s gaze, then that may explain the startling quality of her facial expression. The disempowering look she casts upon him – and implicitly us – is in fact also a sign of his empowerment. For this glance that seemingly challenges our visual appropriation of her appearance is precisely a look he invented in elaboration of his impression of her, over and against the tyranny nature posed to his remembrance and his fancy. At the same time, Degas breaks the convention that the viewer be, in Griselda Pollock’s words, ‘both absent from and indeed independent of the scene while being its mastering eye/I’.4 Countering the conventional mastery of the artist’s gaze over his passive object  – the model  – he stages an interchange of a parity of gazes. The act of portraying, then, conjoins disparate gestures. A  portrait is the pictorial copy of a particular human face and body within a specific historical and geographical context, with similitude linking the model and the image. In a transitive sense, however, to portray also means to adorn a surface with a picture or a figure, so that the emphasis is on the artistic medium rather than on the reality of the rendered person. Finally, in the figurative sense, a portrait also entails the act of forming a mental image of something that represents or typifies something else by virtue of resemblance to the depicted figure. Thus, while the portrait implies a binding relation to a particular referent, it also implies its very opposite, namely the artist’s freedom from any naturally given context. To return to Edgar Degas’ desire to liberate himself from the tyranny nature has over memory and fancy,

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to portray someone also means to picture to oneself, to conceive or fashion. Ultimately, to portray means to invent in reference to, but also surpassing, a given empirical body. Furthermore, once portraiture has become as explicitly subjective and impressionistic as Degas’ representations of women have, it inadvertently enmeshes three aspects that need to be explored in greater detail – the model’s desire to have herself portrayed as a sign of social status, the traditional fear of having one’s image taken as a sign of disempowerment, and the prominence with which the artist’s signature came to be endowed by the late nineteenth century, as portraiture turned into self-portraiture. Dialectic of displacement Traditionally, portraits were always meant as visual embodiments of power, commissioned and financed by patrons so as to assert inherited or achieved positions of authority. The social status of the model was usually as important – if not more so – than any personal appearance, and the sitters were often cast in roles, while a formal distance was maintained to the staged scene. Given that most conventional portraits represented someone who in turn was representative of a particular privileged class and its interests, the face and body depicted readily transformed into a figure for the social values he or she stood for, be this wealth, culture or, as in the case of some women, beauty, and social graces. As Gordon and Forge argue, ‘a portrait was both a likeness and a social statement. The particular and the general supported and authenticated each other’,5 the individual always also representative of a type, the likeness always also signifying a social station. Although Edgar Degas painted comparatively few commissioned portraits, choosing primarily to render himself or his family, his relatives and his friends, the depersonalizing shift from face to figure can, nevertheless, be found in his portraits insofar as his sitters often disappear behind their role as model. It is significant that many of the names of the female models have not been recorded. With labels such as Portrait of a Woman, Young Woman, Woman in Black, their portraits merely attest their anonymity. Obliterating to a degree the precise historical reference, Degas transforms his models into types, reproducing not only the physiognomy of a particular character, but also placing the portrayed within the milieu for which each is typical – be this a particular métier, a specific geographical area or a prominent social group.6 The refigured women

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function as representatives of the contemporary mode, placed within spaces at times intimate and domestic, at times public, yet always defined by the urban bourgeois culture surrounding them. Like his contemporaries, Edgar Degas no longer took for granted that outward appearances mirror the inner truth of a person, believing that an objective rendition of another human being was in fact not possible. Rather, he explicitly chose to disturb any easy correspondence between physiognomy and essential being by using imprecise lines as well as a mixture of clarity and obscurity to signify his subjective vision imposed on the portrayed. One part of the body or the face will often be imperfectly drawn, smudged over or even entirely obliterated while another part will appear in exquisite, minutely descriptive detail. Nevertheless, Degas believed that a person’s appearance does signify, albeit as an equivocal expression of contemporaneity. In one of his studio notebooks, he dictated to himself, ‘make the expressive heads [academic style] a study of modern feeling – it is Lavater, but a more relativistic Lavater, so to speak, with symbols of today rather than the past’.7 The contradiction at stake is, then, that while many of his portrayed women seem to pose as typical figures for what is specific about the late nineteenth-century individual, they are in fact removed from their concrete historical context and relocated as actresses in a multifarious spectacle of urban modernity, with Degas as director. The woman standing behind a bench in what could be a private garden or a public park, a reddish-brown oval hat squarely placed on her head, a blue-green shawl lightly draped beneath her shoulders to offer some warmth, sturdy bootlets on her feet, possibly meant to indicate a robust walking nature, her gaze alertly fixing some unseen object, remains unidentified except as a representative of English culture enjoying the freedom of mobility that the modern city offers her (L’Anglaise, c.1880). The woman in a rustcoloured dress with white collar, a bit of a hand visible as she clasps herself across her chest while bending over one side of her sofa, listlessly staring into the space before her as though in a trance or in agony, is simply a figure for melancholia (La mélancolie (Melancholy), c.1867–70), representative of the fatigue, weariness, dislocation and isolation that, too, is characteristic of the modern city. Even when the models are known, such as his aunt, the Duchess of Montejasi Cicerale, the specific details of their individual character come together in such a manner that they could also be perceived as a composite type. Regally posed on her

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red-cushioned sofa, her arms tightly crossed over her black gown to indicate poise but also containment, her face expressing dignity, authority, resignation and benevolence all in one, with the oil lamp placed almost ironically behind and partially above her head like a source of crowning light, Degas’ aunt comes to signify a stately figure representative of the privileges, leisure and constraints of an entire age and class (Duchessa di Montejasi Cicerale, 1868). The dialectic of displacement at work in such transformations, however, cuts both ways. For even as family members or friends are drawn into typified scenes, with their faces, the comportment of their bodies, their characteristic gestures turned into tropes for contemporaneity, these stagings nevertheless also illuminate their individual characters. Degas is thus one of the first to explore the belief so prevalent in modernity that a subject emerges precisely as the result of the multiple roles she or he performs. For he turns to portraiture as an epistemological tool because it allows him to straddle fiction and realistic rendition, as though to illustrate that we need to turn a familiar person into a figure in a narrative in order to discover her essential being. In that sense, Charles Baudelaire’s distinction between a historical and a novelistic understanding of portraiture is apt. While members of the former school of thought, as archivists of what they see, render the model as truthfully, severely and minutely as possible by focusing on her most characteristic physiognomic attitude and spiritual or psychic comportment, the followers of the latter understanding, as storyteller, add an allegorical dimension by turning the portrait into a tableau, a poem filled with fanciful accessories, the product of imagination rather than reproduction. Baudelaire’s conclusion  – that ‘a good portrait always appears like a dramatic biography, or rather like the natural drama inherent to every man’8 – actually only confirms that the portrait invariably calls forth an oscillation between verisimilitude and imagination. However, allowing the reference to a specific historical woman to be obliterated by the role or type she is meant to play in one of many scenes dramatizing both modern life in general and the artist’s subjective vision in particular not only points up the uneasy alliance between the appearance of a woman and her essential being. Further, it articulates the fact that power resides with the one who can negotiate the boundary between model and image, between reference and figure, between visibility and obscurity.

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Gendering the scene of portraiture European folklore has always believed the portrait to be a double of the portrayed, with the body or part of it translated into the picture that represents it. The portrait has thus always served as a pictorial site where the boundary between a vital representation and the vital presence of the portrayed becomes blurred. To picture the human face was, therefore, not only seen as a sign of social authority. Functioning rather as the diametrical opposite of the traditional representational portrait, the likeness of the human face came also to be seen as an embodiment of demonic or magic powers that disempower the model.9 Thus, an anxiety about having one’s picture taken often came to underlie any sense of control and power that the self-representation initially seemed to confer upon the portrayed. While the image potentially captures and contains the soul of the model, so that having one’s portrait taken was also often thought of as a harbinger of death, the maker or owner of a portrait in turn was thought to gain possession, power and control over the portrayed  – at times even the ability to exercize a fatal influence over the model.10 Given this fluid boundary between vital presence and vital representation, portraiture serves to empower the maker and owner in yet another sense, by endowing him with the ability to manipulate visible presence and absence. Since to be visible is a sign of presence while absence is marked by being invisible, the function of the portrait, John Berger argues, is ‘to fill an absence with the simulacrum of a presence’, while the ‘main task of painting has been to contradict a law which governs the visible: to make what is not present “seen” ’.11 The irony is, of course, that by the same token, a further function of the painted likeness is that it makes what is seen absent. Edgar Degas’ Rose Caron (Femme assise tirant son gant) (Portrait of Rose Caron, c.1892) in one sense makes visible and thus present the absent soprano Rose Caron – not only after she has left the portrait session, but indeed after her demise. At the same time, however, Caron is present not as a private person but as a woman acting the part of an actress, playing an unidentified fictional character to boot. Perfectly aware that she is the object of a gaze, the elegance with which she pulls her glove while firmly holding a closed fan in her left hand is clearly meant to manipulate her implied spectator even though she does not directly confront him. The eroticism of the moment is further brought forward by virtue of the fact

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that while she seems barely clothed, her dress matching the colour of her flesh, her back is just slightly raised above a chair laden with multicoloured – though imperfectly visible – dresses. Indeed, her appearance is so powerful because of the contrast between the calculated bodily poise and the gesture of self-absorption. While the scene she is part of remains obscure – is she on stage, is she in her dressing room, is she at a public event? – she acts the part of one withdrawn from any audience, as though lost in thought. Degas thus uses this portrait to illustrate the nexus between presence and absence, visibility and invisibility. Though highly staged as a spectacle, Rose Caron also recedes from the field of vision, not only because neither she nor the context within which she is placed are directly named, but also because what she performs is the act of withdrawing. This elusive quality is further enhanced by Degas’ technique of blurring most of the painted figure. The lower part of her seated body is smudged, the face, especially the eyes, though discernible, are obscured through shadows. The woman as object of the representation seems caught in the process of absenting herself; she marks the vanishing point of the image. She not only performs the act of removing herself though in plain sight, but is also occluded by the artist in the very act of being portrayed. The transformation at stake here seems to be less the move from face to figure than an effacement of the particularity of a face. Indeed, what Degas presents us with is the configuration of absence. As Griselda Pollock argues, the specificity of gender is written into the scene of portraiture by virtue of the fact that, in dominant patriarchal ideologies of art, the role ascribed to the feminine position is either as model or as muse in such a manner that ‘the construction of the masculine artist is made in opposition and in precedence to absent femininity’,12 with the woman functioning as a sign, a fiction, a confection of meanings and fantasies ‘not of woman, but of that fantastic Other in whose mirror masculinity must define itself ’.13 The hierarchy of power invoked is such that the implicitly masculine spectator as the owner and consumer of the image actively looks at and is able to utterly and timelessly possess the feminine object, who in turn is seemingly reduced to the passive function of being ‘looked-at, the surveyed which is reconstructed in his image’.14 Man is the ‘eye, a powerful metaphor in the west for knowledge, liberated from the body by means of his enjoyment of a mastering gaze’, whereby enjoyment colloquially means pleasure but also

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contains the legal meaning of possession, as in the enjoyment of rights of property.15 The exchange thus invoked by the portraiture of the feminine figure through a masculine artist is, however, never simple, constant or secure, for even as the feminine body refigured in the interest of the implicitly masculine artist and spectator is meant to satisfy a desire to possess what is fugitive or absent precisely because it is Other, so her rendition cannot help but signify the opposite as well. Not only that; the portrait stands in for and eternalizes an absent and thus at least figurally dead woman. As it recasts the woman in the artist’s image, something is invariably disturbed in his own mastery. It is precisely this aporia which comes to the fore in so many of Degas’ portraits of women. Though he designs them as figures and configurations meant to outwit the tyranny of nature, he also uses the space of the portrait obliquely to illustrate precisely that quality that eludes the grasp of the artist’s mastering gaze and hand, which recedes from his power, that thwarts his imagination and fancy by remaining enigmatic and yet persistently present  – the irreducible, equivocal subjectivity of the Other. Deconstructing the scene of portraiture In classical rhetoric, prosopopoeia is the name for a figure of speech that serves as an apostrophe to an absent person, to the act of giving a face to the faceless, thereby conjured into a semblance of existence. But, as Paul de Man reminds us, it is a double-edged tool, for it calls forth an interminable interplay of figuration where the symmetrical structure of the trope implies, by the same token, an act of disfiguration. It uses fancy and memory to outwit the tyranny of nature’s constraints – like absence, mutability, invisibility – even as it acknowledges them, for owing to its gesture ‘the dead are made to have a face and a voice which tells the allegory of their demise and allows us to apostrophize them in our turn’.16 Owing to this duplicity, where giving face or drawing forth a face is also an act of defacement, prosopopoeia is the rhetorical correlate most apt to describe the visual gesture repeatedly undertaken by Degas in his portraiture of women. In the painting Femme à la fenêtre (Woman at a Window, 1871), the model’s invocation is also the precondition and result of her obliteration. While she sits calmly next to an open window, her face is completely obscured, her body amorphously painted, imprecise except for the careful delineation of the hands that seem almost to belong to

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a different painting. Outside, traces of buildings can be discerned as they are reflected in water. But inside, in the shadows of a rust-coloured room, she is the embodiment of an enigma. She sits in stark contrast to the bright whiteness of the opened window, a nexus between vagueness and brilliance. Any details of her face have been washed out. It will never become any clearer, even though this unnamed woman is forever resurrected from the dead. She gives figure to the failure of representational verisimilitude, to the breakdown of shape, to a celebration of disintegration. As Robert Harbison argues, ‘Degas seems to say that there are things a painting can’t legitimately tell you’.17 She could be anyone, old or young, respectable or demi-mondaine, quietly anticipating someone to appear, pensively lost in thought, withdrawn from the world or speaking to the artist. Neither her physiognomy, the status she is meant to represent, nor the precise conditions of the sitting can be made out with any certainty. Yet precisely the performance of her imperfect visibility, with its contingent instability in meaning, makes her such a perturbing spectacle. What sticks out from the frame, disturbing any stabilizing visual enjoyment, is the disjunction between the smoothly textured hands, the stark white blank of the window and the dematerialization of the body. Completely equivocal, she elicits an endless series of questions and plural interpretive projections. Given that any portrait is on some level also a self-portrait, it ultimately always negotiates the uneasy alliance between the artist’s signature – as representative first and foremost of his gaze – with the alterity of his model. For the scene of portraiture entails a journey encompassing several stages. The first, the primal sitting, is a situation or session where the artist interlocks in an exchange or dialogue with his model, collecting the impressions that her appearance in all its complexity makes on him. Then, owing to his power of memory and creativity, a material image emerges. Belatedly, the artist has taken the woman’s face, drawn out essential qualities to make the unseen visible, translating the face onto the space of his canvas. As this second face emerges, however, it is also inscribed with distortions, for the portrayed face comes to represent various things indeterminately – the model as a specific historical person, with her physiognomy mirroring a particular psychic make-up; her social status, local and/or class origins; but also values such as power, authority or beauty attributed to her; and finally the artist’s vision. She thus obliquely comes to signify absence; either because, representing a type,

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she has lost her contextual specificity, or because she has become the cipher for the ideas the painter wants to transport by virtue of her figure, which may include his subjective reading of her and their interaction, but which may also pertain to a statement about his artistic medium. This is the case in Edgar Degas’ more radical paintings where, in privileging the paintedness of the image over the woman’s face or parts of her body, both are often partially obscured. The portrait turns the event of a session into a scene, in the process of which the emergence of the image also entails dislocation – a transformation I have discussed as the move from face to figure, from face to a configuration of effacement, and finally as the performance of defacement itself. While the various strategies of disfiguration make any reference elusive and transform the depicted face into an equivocal figure, once the portrait faces the spectator, it invites a stabilizing interpretive narrative. Yet, as Carol Armstrong points out, although Degas’ images ask to be turned into telling, their readability places them on the edge of illegibility. His conspicuously messy technique of rubbing out, covering over and thereby negating levels of depiction produces the specifically modern hybridity of constitutive and obliterative portraits. As he endlessly explores the boundary between physiognomic expression and effacement, the visual space of his portraits elicits what Carol Armstrong calls a ‘free play of decipherment and detective work, of gestures and physiognomies which can be underread, or overread, in any way you like’.18 With the model caught in a process of dissolution and erasure, Degas’ portraits disturbingly negotiate the reconstitution and negation of corporeal representation. In the portrait of the woman by the window, Edgar Degas deconstructs the very scene of portraiture, for what he draws out is precisely the act of defacement that underwrites all attempts at making an image of another’s face. The scene he recreates is one wherein the act of figuration, the feminine figure – far from being absent – visibly disintegrates, but so, too, does the artist’s facture. As though to perform the mutual implication at the heart of the portrait scene, Degas illustrates that to enjoy the feminine model, to take possession of her and to obliterate her in the process of pictorial figuration only imperfectly hides what is lost in the exchange, namely the irreducible subjectivity of the Other. By self-consciously illustrating his inability to capture a woman’s face, Degas performs what eludes his sight and his brush. Figuration defaces

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the model by empowering the artist, but portraiture can also serve to celebrate the artist’s own disempowerment. What is ultimately portrayed, or rather drawn forth, in this vortex is the clear-sighted, albeit disturbing insight into the fugitive inter-subjectivity inherent in any exchange between feminine model and masculine artist, fraught as it is with fragility and mutability.

2 NAKED TOUCH Disfiguration, Recognition and the Female Nude

What recedes from the gaze At first sight, the painting of a disrobed feminine body may give the impression of a genuine display of nakedness. However, once we gaze at a female nude for an extended period of time, one soon recognizes the gesture of veiling that appears inevitably inscribed in this allegedly undisguised display of a bare body. In female nude painting, the woman depicted seems to expose her physical vulnerability, given that she offers herself to the gaze of an implied spectator. At the same time, however, she explicitly challenges the spectator with her unconditionally honest exhibition of an unencumbered view of her body, and in so doing troubles any simple exchange of gazes. While her painted nakedness promises the spectator an insight into her sexuality along with the sight of her unclothed body, the intimacy invoked recedes from the field of vision. Even though the painted naked body seems to signify truthfulness – as well as the power of a spectator to penetrate a strange body with his gaze – the feminine nude necessarily always also emerges as the site of concealment. The proximity implied by virtue of the undressing of a body produces its own distance. Because nude painting visually foregrounds an aesthetic representation of flesh, skin colour, folds, limbs and muscles, our gaze inevitably shifts between noting the singularity of the

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individual woman being portrayed and the disrobed feminine body functioning as a cipher for beauty and feminine sexuality in general. Indeed, one might surmise that feminine nude painting is more concerned with transforming a female model into an art figure than with representing the subjectivity of the model. Max Amdahl aptly distinguishes between a consciously assumed pose on the one hand, that – owing to its cultural encoding  – serves to articulate an externally imposed expression and, on the other hand, a spontaneous gesture that allows one to communicate something about oneself, or, indeed to genuinely express oneself.1 Precisely because the feminine nude inevitably intertwines any natural body gesture with a culturally encoded pose, it is up to us to decide how to engage the visual contradiction that presents itself between selfexpression and figuration. In his painting of Venus, Lucas Cranach almost paradigmatically stages this interaction between an act of revealing and an act of reveiling (2.1). Although the naked body of his graceful love goddess is self-consciously on display, her genitals are entirely covered by a transparent piece of cloth. We can distinctly see her sex through this gossamer even as we also take note of the pose of modesty she has assumed so as to divert our gaze from this intimate body part. The transparent cloth represents a protection, not, however, because it shields from our gaze, but because it focuses our attention on the body detail that visually emphasizes the nudity of Venus. At the same time, this thin tissue points to the fact that we are dealing with representation. We have no unmediated view of her sex, can only see it through the transparent veil she holds in front of her genitals. Thus, although this piece of cloth is completely see-through, it nevertheless obstructs our view. Furthermore, it gives the impression of being a piece of canvas onto which this significant detail of the feminine body has been painted. The sex of Venus thus appears to be on display only as a representation, held in front of the real body, as though to shield it from our sight. This transparent tissue not only separates the upper body from the lower body, but it also separates the painting into two distinct domains. On a mimetic level, we see the bare body of a model, posing as Venus; on a self-reflexive level, however, our attention is drawn to the medium of painting itself, and with it to the translation of a concrete feminine body into an aesthetic figure. The transparent tissue thus also enmeshes the pose of the love goddess of antiquity, offering herself seductively to our gaze, with the gesture of a

2.1

Lucas Cranach the Elder, Venus, 1532, mixed media on beech, 37.7 × 24.5 cm, Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt (Main). Copyright: Bildarchiv Foto Marburg.

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particular, individual woman, exposing her sexuality to the artist and his implicit audience. Nevertheless, we can hardly read the nudity of this Venus as a sign of passivity. Cranach not only presents her beauty as an embodied object of sight that the implied spectators can posses with their gazes, regardless whether they recognize the seductive pose of a love goddess or the natural gesture of a naked woman in the painting. Rather, Cranach’s Venus is shown to possess her own beauty, given the confidence with which she displays her nudity. The flirtatious manner in which she holds the veil in front of her sex indicates a certain degree of control, given that she is the one who directs the way in which we look at her undressed body. As Mieke Bal notes, the separation between object and subject forms the basis of how art is exhibited in museum spaces. However, because this separation is often a murky one, it troubles any unequivocal viewing of art. Painting, Bal argues, is as much narrative as it is visual. An image tells a story and renders a condition.2 One might, then, surmise that in the female nude, the naked woman we see on canvas inhabits a double position. The disrobing of her body unfolds both a story about her subjective intimacy and her transformation into an allegorical art figure, performing a stylized and culturally encoded pose of nudity. If, in our reading of Cranach’s painting, we follow along with such a double exposure of the naked feminine body, then the see-through veil could also be read as the index of a two-fold disturbance of any transparent representation of feminine beauty. On the one hand, because it renders the female genitals ‘differently’ from the rest of the exposed body, namely as a veiled body detail, the tissue visually highlights a break in the mimetic rendition of the body on display in this painting, and in so doing foregrounds its artificiality and aesthetic formalization. On the other hand, as the detail in a story about a woman who is self-confident about displaying her naked body, the transparent tissue indicates that she herself determines the status and ownership of her beauty. The subjective agency to which this visual detail draws our attention undermines any attempt to reduce her self-display to an object of consumption. The see-through veil undermines the very voyeurism it calls forth, because the desire for feminine nakedness, represented by this painting of a disrobed woman, remains equivocal and ambiguous. The following contradiction emerges:  All female nude painting bespeaks the erotic pleasure that the possession of a beautiful woman

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promises. At the same time, every nude painting self-reflexively refers to its own medium, radically insisting on the fact that the image is not a literal, but rather a figural representation, a play of visual signs. The body we see depicted and exposed in a painting is always also to be taken as a visual form, an abstract visual refiguration. For each feminine nude, we must thus ask ourselves whether we are dealing with a mimetic representation of the subjective experience of a particular body or whether the image functions as the phantasmatic embodiment of erotic wishes or anxieties regarding feminine sexuality. We must also ask ourselves whether the body on display does not primarily signify an aesthetic formalization. Is it the case that all referentiality beyond the image vanishes and we find ourselves instead confronted with the depiction of a feminine body that is not a painting of any particular woman, but rather the representation of a pure pose? The young woman in Balthus’ painting Alice (1933) is also wearing a piece of cloth on her body. It, too, reveals as much as it veils, given that the white bodice draws our attention to the large breast bursting from its folds. At the same time, we can see an imprint of her navel through the cloth as well as her exposed genitals at the bottom edge of the bodice. Because of the inclusion of this piece of cloth – together with the pose of erotic temptation the young woman has donned – we are called upon to ask ourselves whether her body is disrobed or disguised. In conjunction with the manner in which Alice is seductively resting her foot on a chair even while playing with her hair, the disclosed breast and sex function less as visual signs of any natural nakedness. Instead, Balthus deploys these body details primarily to enact the appropriation of a feminine body in more general terms. The model appears reduced to the erotic projections to be negotiated over her exposed body, a pure figure of fantasy, unequivocally at the disposal of his gaze. As Georges Didi-Huberman notes, what we find lacking in all painting is the gift of flesh. Therein lies both the claim of all pictorial representation as well as its limit. The visual detail of unveiled breasts or exposed genitals fascinates precisely because it seems to promise the viewers that they might be able to actually approach the body on display. Indeed, to be able to touch the depicted body would be the logical intention of any viewing of feminine nudity. As Didi-Huberman explains, the surface of the painted canvas offers the condition for the ‘pictorial possibility of a hallucination, which transfers the soma of the body into the sema of its

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figurability’. This process, however, can only offer the approximation of a hallucination. ‘The piece of canvas,’ he continues, must always stop short of completing the metamorphosis it promises, because even at its most verisimilar, ‘painting inevitably stays painting’3. At stake in female nude painting, however, is not only the fact that the affective power of the painting resides precisely in an insurmountable gap between figurative trace (the sema) and body existence (the soma); i.e. in the visual discrepancy between the promise of being able to approach the intimacy the woman we see in the image and her irrevocable aesthetic transformation into an imaged body, a visual figuration, an aesthetic formalization. Rather, equally at stake is the question whether the singular materiality of the body, lacking in all painting, has nevertheless come to be expressed – what kind of touch becomes possible precisely because of the exchange of gazes the painting and its transformation of soma into sema, inspires? The performance of the naked feminine body we find in nude painting is sustained by a duplicitous rhetorical gesture. The represented body emerges as the appearance of something that does not in fact disclose itself but rather explicitly shows itself to be a disguise. As our gaze oscillates between the nakedness implied and the nudity we see, we are called upon to recognize that the approximation at stake obliquely renders visible what is always lacking from painting: The visceral flesh that is never in the frame and as such represents a marked absence. Female nudes in which the depicted naked feminine body promises intimacy despite receding from any touch have as their theme the contradictory rhetorical gesture inscribed in this genre of painting. In Gustave Caillebotte’s Nude on a Couch (c.1880), we find such a double exposure of the feminine body, given that this painting explicitly foregrounds the fact that something about the naked woman in the frame has remained hidden both from the gaze as well as the brush of the artist. The woman’s gaze is drawn inward, her face in part covered by her bent arm, with her entire posture signifying self-absorption, and yet we never doubt for one moment that her naked body is explicitly on display. The clothes she has discarded have been carefully draped over the cushion as if to crown her head. Her outstretched left leg reaches exactly to the end of the sofa and thus forms a harmonious line that, starting with her discarded clothes, stretches along the entire length of her resting place. The mise-en-scène evokes a narrative scene in which something is shown not to reveal itself, namely the visceral flesh as well as the singular subjectivity of the model,

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precisely by virtue of something that is explicitly on display, namely a duplicitous pose. Apodictically put, in one and the same gesture, the feminine body recedes from and offers itself up to the implied gaze of the spectator. The bodily existence (soma) is never fully subsumed by the figural trace (sema), even while it troubles any attempt to read the image as a pure play of signs. Owing to the nakedness of the model, the bodiliness is always implicitly invoked, even if it is also what is explicitly lacking in the painting. The fact that something falls out of the frame, however, is also the reason why one can entertain a contradictory attitude toward the female nude. It allows one to focus on the discrepancy between the singular body of a woman, only gestured toward by the painting, and her translation into an aesthetic visual form. The marked absence of flesh allows one to remain focused on the surface of the canvas, where, according to George Didi-Huberman, one can enjoy the reduction of the feminine body to its charm, ‘existing only in the extreme uncertainty of its lustre’.4 Indeed, one can equate this scintillating charm with the fragility of human flesh. In all cases, however, our attention is drawn to the fact that in female nude painting the figural trace (sema) of the body on the surface of the canvas invariably represents a disfiguration. Always at stake is the transformation of flesh into painted image – regardless of whether it serves to tell the story of an individual woman’s natural gesture or a culturally encoded pose. The spectator must decide whether to look beyond this visual dissemblance or more closely at the double exposure unfolding in the frame because of it. The spectator can decide to notice the charm of the naked body, signifying an absence, and thus functioning as a supplement, as a fetish. Or the spectator can try to approach the enigmatic presence on the surface of the canvas, which reveals itself obliquely, namely though something that presents itself to our gaze and our touch only in the form of a dissemblance. Fetish or curiosity In the image repertoire of classic painting, female nudity has come to embody a plethora of pathos formulae: In Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Phryne before the Aeropagus, the unveiling of the female body stands for a moment of truth (2.2b). In Anthonis van Dyck’s Susanna and the Elders, feminine nakedness represents the object of a forbidden gaze (2.2c). Sometimes nudity serves to expose female vanity, as in Diego Velázquez’s The Toilet

2.2

a) Michelangelo Merisi Caravaggio, Testa di Medusa (Head of the Medusa), c.1598, oil on canvas mounted on wood, 60 × 55 cm, Galleria degli Uffizi, Pinacoteca, Florence. Copyright: Bildarchiv Foto Marburg.

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of Venus (‘Rockeby-Venus’) (2.2d), then again it can serve to articulate a lack, inspiring awe and terror, as in Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio’s Head of the Medusa (2.2a). Or, as in Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Working in Marble (1895), feminine bareness can serve to commemorate the genius of the painter and his ability to create art out of nature. In each case, the female nude functions as the image body over which a discourse pertaining to gender difference can be invoked and disseminated. Because traditionally the feminine body, with its lack of a penis, has been conceived as antithesis to and thus also mirror-inversion of the masculine sex, a woman reduced to her naked appearance can both fascinate and terrify. In a conventional reading of the female nude painting at least, female bareness nevertheless always confirms the power of the male spectator. The narcissistic enjoyment on the part of the spectator, connected to an anticipation of an unhindered access to the feminine body visually at his disposal, is one of the reasons why the female body has so readily come to serve as an object of the gaze of others. In Jean-Antoine Watteau’s Judgment of Paris (2.3a), to view the disrobed body of women is clearly a sign of visual power. Indeed, as John Berger polemically argues, the female nude is not naked in a conventional sense. Instead, her bareness is predicated on the fact that a masculine spectator sees her unclothed and thus disclosed body. Her bareness, Berger argues, does not pertain to her own sensations and emotions, but rather presents a sign of her subjugation. In nude painting, the woman on display is not expressing herself or her sexuality. Instead, she mirrors the expectations brought to bear on her sight; she appeals to the erotic desire of the spectator. According to Berger, ‘to be

2.2

(cont.) b) Jean-Léon Gérôme, Phryné devant l’Aréopage (Phryne before the Aeropagus), 1861, oil on canvas, 80 × 128 cm, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg. Copyright: Bildarchiv Foto Marburg. c) Anthonis van Dyck, Susanna and the Elders, c.1621/22, oil on canvas, 194 × 144 cm, Alte Pinakothek, Munich. Copyright: Bildarchiv Foto Marburg. d) Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velazquez, The Toilet of Venus (‘Rockeby-Venus’), 1647–51, oil on canvas, 122.5 × 177 cm, National Gallery, London. Copyright: Bildarchiv Foto Marburg.

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a) Jean-Antoine Watteau, Le Jugement de Pâris (The Judgment of Paris), c.1719, oil on panel, 47 × 31 cm, Musée National du Louvre, Paris. Copyright: Bildarchiv Foto Marburg. b) Masaccio, L’espulsione di Adamo ed Eva dal Giardino dell’Eden (The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden), c.1428, 208 × 88 cm, fresco, Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence. Copyright: Bildarchiv Foto Marburg.

naked is to be oneself,’ while ‘nudity is a form of dress’. The naked body can become a nude only in the process of being turned into the object of someone else’s gaze. For a woman to appear to be nude in a painting means that she is seen naked by others and yet not recognized for herself. Transformed into an object of someone else’s visual pleasure, the woman has come to assume the status of a fetish.5 In his argument, Berger has recourse the distinction between the nude and the naked body proposed by Kenneth Clark. Nakedness, Clark argues, implies a condition in which the body has been deprived of its clothes, usually accompanied by a sense of embarrassment and shame, as in Masaccio’s

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Adam and Eve (2.3b). Nudity, in turn, refers to the artistic formalization of an idealized body. For Kenneth Clark, the transformation of natural nakedness into an art form, regulated by formal rules, conventions and poses, marks a cultural achievement. In contrast to John Berger, the painted nude holds no pejorative associations for Clark, because it visually transcodes a ‘huddled and defenceless body’ into a ‘balanced, prosperous, and confident body: the body re-formed’.6 The nude consolidates and celebrates a visual regulation of unformed, bodily matter with the help of adapting it to aesthetic categories such as order, symmetry, and determination. Soma comes to be dressed as sema, re-formed in culturally codified signs, so that the body can be perceived as a formal entity, consistent with itself, but also contained and restrained. John Berger retains this distinction, but reverses its signs. He calls the regulation qua refiguration of the feminine body in traditional nude painting a political act, serving the cultural purpose of containing feminine self-expression, and in so doing deforming it. Adapting feminine sexuality to masculine concepts of beauty, subjecting them to this visual code, is tantamount to cultural mastery. Berger’s positive re-evaluation of the concept of nakedness, in turn, serves to draw attention to a perception of the feminine body, which does not privilege its refiguration into an aesthetic form, but rather the concrete bodiliness of the woman visually at stake. Concomitant with this attitude is the appeal to recognize the individuality of the represented woman, which cannot and should not be reduced to serving as mirror and object of possession of those looking at her. To pay attention to the nakedness of the woman depicted in a nude painting does not mean screening out the aesthetic formalization that visually transforms the feminine body into a play of signs. It means, instead, to consciously take notice of the transformation of soma into sema required by the medium of painting, so as not to overlook traces of what resists such formalization. For this reason, Lynda Nead insists that in painting, nakedness never stands in opposition to nudity because any body depicted inside a frame is always already culturally codified; it is an imaged body and thus aesthetically formalized and visually re-formed. In the domain of painting, there can be no formless, immediate rendition of the body, barring the intervention of pictorial mediality. For Nead, a feminist appraisal of the female nude entails instead that we shift our attention to the process of containment and regulation inscribed in this genre

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of representation. It implies a critical interrogation of what is at stake in the idealization of aesthetic forms propagated by Kenneth Clark. Nead’s point is that Clark’s claim for sublimation implicitly reveals a deeply rooted cultural anxiety and disgust relating to the feminine body, given that since biblical Eve, woman represents the threat of undisciplined, unregulated flesh. If art is conceived as the transformation of materiality into aesthetic form, the triumph attained is doubled when the object is a naked feminine body. In one fell swoop, femininity and physical materiality come to be tamed. According to Lynda Nead, the female nude in painting thus not only represents one pictorial theme and artistic form among many. Rather, it is the subject of aesthetic formalization par excellence.7 The re-formed feminine body on display in nude painting not only stands for the process of transformation characteristic of all art – visually re-encoding the raw material of the soma into a culturally significant sema. Rather, the aesthetically refigured (and thus always also disfigured feminine body) signifies artistic creativity as such. The female nude, Lynda Nead concludes, ultimately represents the gaze, the will to formalization as well as the signature of the artist responsible for this process of transformation, regardless whether this is a male or a female artist. Assuming a critical attitude towards conventional modes of reading the female nude entails not only focusing on the way in which feminine nakedness has been viewed and re-formed by an implicitly masculine gaze, but also how it has been deformed. It means asking whether the interaction between the body on display and a gaze allegedly dominating and subjugating this body might not be more complex – and indeed more ambivalent – than both Kenneth Clark (in his privileging of the idealized nude) as well as John Berger (in his valorization of nakedness as a disturbance of the regulation of the material body in art) admit. I claim that we need to reconsider whether, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it continues to be valid to argue that the implicit surveyor of the female nude is necessarily and exclusively masculine. To trouble what was without question a poignant and pertinent feminist intervention, we should further ask whether the female nude really only serves to flatter an implicit spectator. Could it not also be that the woman on display contests the narcissistic desire of the surveyor, turning it back onto him (or her), or for that matter onto herself as well? Don’t at least certain nude paintings allow for a reading that foregrounds undecidability as to who is taking possession of whom?

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Could one not make the claim for Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s A Nymph by a Stream (1869/70) that, far from being the passive object of a dominating gaze, she is expressing a two-fold pleasure  – the enjoyment she derives from her own lush body and the pride she derives from having someone else enjoy the sight of it? Renoir visually highlights her proximity to nature by having the contours of her body blend into the bed of grass she has chosen as her resting place. However, her harmonious fusion with nature’s flowers can also be read as an expression of her own eroticism. Refocusing our sight, we notice how sensually her naked skin touches the earth. Because she confidently meets the gaze of the artist (and us, the implied spectator of his painting), she seems to be undermining all voyeurism by virtue of the honesty with which she looks back. Indeed, she seems to return the gaze with which we seek to contain her, turning it back on us, embarrassing us by insisting that she is more than any expectations we have brought to bare on her picture. Her disrobed body may be a representation of nakedness, and thus neither natural nor unmediated. But her poised demeanour and above all the self-composed gaze she exhibits allow us to infer her singular and particular presence from the representation. We are called upon to enjoy her not because she has vanished into a skilfully composed configuration of lines, forms and colours, but rather because she appears to be so bodily present. Her corporeality is precisely what is not being withheld, even if, in any literally sense, it continues to be what is lacking in the painting. Yet by blurring the contours of her body, introducing a cheerful formlessness into his depiction, Renoir recuperates bodiliness as a visual effect. The authority of his unveiled nymph resides precisely in the tension between figuration – the whiteness of her skin, which invariably attracts our gaze, the classic pose of the prostrate feminine body – and the dissolution of aesthetic formalization. To neatly distinguish between natural nakedness, individual gesture and culturally encoded pose will always pose a problem for the reading of images. Decisive, instead, is the critical attitude of the viewer, and with it the critical project at stake in any one reading. One can follow Kenneth Clark and interpret the female nude as an act of sublimation. One can side with John Berger and Lynda Nead and instead interpret the female nude as an example for the cultural domination and surveillance of feminine sexuality. The decision one makes depends on what cultural studies have come to call a reading effect. Because the represented body is never unequivocal in its meaning, an image allows for more than one

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reading, indeed often contradictory ones, and different identifications. Above all, paintings frequently not only depict the translation of soma into sema but rather perform this transformation, at least once disfiguration emerges as one of the thematic concerns. A second viewing of the female nude in painting might entail focusing on the oscillation between nude and naked, between pose and gesture. We might, therefore, want to ask ourselves what we overlook when we insist on treating an unveiled body only as a fetish, even if such a reduction exposes both the implicit misogyny inscribed in traditional art criticism as well as the erotic reification of the feminine body, which without doubt has been a staple in the classic iconography of the female nude. In this vein, we could read certain nudes by Felix Vallotton as predecessors of the pin-up. By depicting anagrammatic bodies, functioning as signs for erotic submission and availability, these images address their own artificiality. The model in Nu a l’echarpe verte (Reclining Nude with Green Silk Scarf, 1914) bends her head and her upper body backwards, and her genitals and her hips are covered by the same green veil that she is holding over her right shoulder. The green tissue functions like a frame, visually severing the model from the brown blanket she is lying on. At the same time, this green tissue seems to cut her body into two parts, drawing our attention to her exposed breasts as well as her navel, the two body parts the lighting also visually foregrounds. Yet the pose the model of Vallotton’s nude assumes also suggests vulnerability. She not only bares her upper body, but also underscores her unguarded self-display by virtue of the way she holds her arms towards the back. Her closed eyes further indicate that she relinquishes all self-assertion and instead unconditionally offers up her body to our gaze. Fully in line with the visual logic of the pin-up, both her pose as well as the green veil, underlining the framing of her naked body, distract our gaze, shielding from us an unmediated sight of her genitals, which might represent a sexual threat. Like any pin-up, the function of Felix Vallotton’s nude seems to consist in satisfying a desire for visual consumption. Nothing seems to disturb her body’s enjoyment and possession except for two details. The pubic hair, veiled by the green tissue, re-appears at a different site, namely the pit of her outstretched right arm. At the same time, the dark triangle, emerging from behind the green tissue that is draped over her genitals and the two legs, one lying on top of the other, allows us to imagine her real sex. Ex negativo, this nude gestures towards precisely the opening of

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an intimate zone that can be touched but not represented. Regardless of whether it evokes anxiety or fascination, her sexual privacy must remain a visual secret, albeit gestured towards what is lacking in the painting. Both the pubic hair, relocated under the armpits, as well as the marked omission, the dark spot under the green veil, signify the visually ungraspable aspect of female sexuality that Vallotton’s nude comes to represent obliquely, namely by virtue of a marked disfiguration – a secret pertaining both to woman’s lack of the male sexual member as well as the radical alterity inscribed in any sexual relation between two people. Implicitly, Felix Vallotton follows the contradictory rhetorical logic Sigmund Freud ascribes to the fetish. The male viewer, confronted with the sight of the naked female genitals, finding that there is nothing to see, is so overwhelmed with terror that he needs to find a compromise. Therefore, in fantasy, he adds an ersatz body part, meant to cover over what he perceives as woman’s lack of an external sexual member. However, Freud notes: ‘But this interest suffers an extraordinary increase as well, because the horror of castration has set up a memorial to itself in the creation of this substitute.’8 Even though the fetish sustains the fantasy that the naked feminine body does not lack a masculine member, it constantly reminds the fetishist of this lack in one and the same gesture. Because the fetish explicitly functions as a supplement, standing in for a lack, it invariably draws attention to the fact that something is missing, regardless of whether the lack concretely refers to a female penis or whether the lacking body part serves as a cipher for the condition of bodily implenitude in a more general sense. Applying Freud’s figure of thought to Vallotton’s nude, we arrive at a different reading from one that foregrounds the feminine body as an object of the gaze that can be enjoyed with impunity. We now note instead that the extremely formalized depiction of the naked body functions explicitly as fetish because it draws our attention to precisely the body part that we cannot see. Put another way, the contradiction on which this erotic performance of feminine sexual appeal is predicated is that what we want to see – namely her sex – is precisely what we cannot see because there is nothing to see when it comes to sexual intimacy. The pin-up pose, in turn, functions as a supplement, promising visual pleasure and mastery even while withholding any direct sight of sexuality. A memorial has been set up not so much to the horror of castration as to that alterity which can only tarry in the painted image as a trace of what has been relinquished – be it the

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concrete flesh of the model, the ephemerality of the body, the fragility of all intimacy, or the individuality of the model. It is, of course, up to the viewer to decide, whether he (or she) simply wants to abandon himself (or herself) to the fetishism Felix Vallotton’s nude performs, or whether he (or she) prefers to read it as a gesture meant to self-consciously expose the visual pleasure of fetishism. In the latter case, Vallotton’s female nude could be taken as an invitation to asking oneself whether there might not be a way of looking at the naked feminine body that pits something against the reification fetishism affords, namely curiosity. As Laura Mulvey suggests, the obsessive compulsion to look implies that knowledge can be acquired by virtue of seeing, particularly by exploring something hidden, while fetishism is predicated on a refusal to actually look, which ultimately results in a disavowal of the alterity the feminine body necessarily represents for her masculine spectator, a refusal to acknowledge her separateness.9 One might further surmise that at stake in such an averting of the eyes, such a looking away, or overlooking, is the singularity of a specific feminine body, the uniqueness it represents for any spectator, be it a male or a female surveyor. Re-thinking Pandora, who has come to stand for the fatality of a feminine desire for knowledge, we might say that to privilege curiosity would allow us to trace a complex narrative of disclosures emerging from female nude painting. On the one hand, we could read the nakedness of the model as a cipher for her own desire to discover herself – her body, her sexuality, her sensual experiences, her charm. On the other hand, this nakedness could also be interpreted as an invitation to the viewer, to engage with the radical separateness of the woman in the picture, and in so doing actually discover her intimacy. To stop and to see Stanley Cavell claims that we tend not to notice the singularity of the other, be it a real person or a fictional character. For Cavell, this is tantamount to disavowing one’s own separateness from all projections subtending our relation with others. To acknowledge another person depends on letting ourselves be seen by the other. The wilful blindness that, in turn, prevents one from really seeing someone else (so that one also remains invisible to the other) is what Cavell calls tragic. When we narcissistically treats the other as our mirror, as the projection screen for our desires or as the fetish memorial of our own implenitude rather than

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as an independent, separate person, what we avoid is putting a stop to our fantasies so as to actually see the world at hand.10 I have, up to now, been exploring the female nude as a cipher for the murky interface between soma and sema, as well as for an ambivalent erotic desire. I want to return once more to the question of intimacy. If we look at Felix Vallotton’s La Lecture abandonnée (‘Finished Reading’ (Reclining nude with book), 1924) with Stanley Cavell’s notion of acknowledgement in mind, we could interpret this female nude as an invitation to stop and to see. At stake would be the pictorial possibility of a hallucination, not, however, along the lines Georges Didi-Huberman suggests, namely that painting, because it necessarily offers only an approximation of bodily presence, requires a leap of faith, allowing us to divine what we cannot actually see. Rather, at stake is the possibility of touching the woman on display in her naked separateness precisely because we have been touched ourselves by her visually re-formed presence in the painting. In Vallotton’s nude, she is herself already in a state of arrested action. She has discarded the red book she was reading. This book, in turn, serves as a visual point of conjunction between, on the one hand, her bare breasts and her navel, along with the invitation to enjoy her naked body as an object of a voyeuristic gaze. On the other hand, the discarded red book draws our attention to the woman’s own gaze, indicating that she is lost in thought. Her facial expression insists on her separateness not least of all because it decidedly pits the fact that she is clearly engaged in fantasy work of her own against any effort on our part to appropriate her into our fantasies. On second viewing, having looked at the model in the picture, we are invited to look with her. This second sight could entail the approximation of a hallucination because it would mean doing something impossible – assuming her position – and looking at something the painting cannot represent, something at the vanishing point of the image. Her self-absorption could be taken as the appearance of something, namely her psychic condition of reverie that cannot explicitly reveal itself. If we accept the invitation to look with her, our position as spectator would move to the other side of the canvas, abolishing the boundary it delineates. At the impossible site, which the image also enacts as its pictorial possibility, in the position where spectator and model can look out at the world together, a mutual recognition could take place, comparable to what Stanley Cavell calls an abdication from all tragic blindness and self-delusion.

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To stop and to see is also a request we find enacted in nudes in which women, painted on canvas, look us directly in the eye. The spectator comes to share the very condition characteristic of the nude, namely being the object of someone else’s gaze. The model depicted in the painting and her spectator gazing at her depiction look at each other. This enacts an exchange of gazes that evokes the idea of a mutual touch. In the pictorial hallucination rendered possible, the distinction between object and subject, so fundamental for any painting to work, appears to have been – almost – abolished. This enactment of mutual gazes represents a scene in which the separateness of both players involved in the exchange comes to be acknowledged, at least if we are willing to entertain the possibility that we can be looked at by someone present to us only as a painted image. The young woman in Gwen John’s Nude Girl (1909/10) vigorously calls on us to draw nearer. Broncia Koller Pinell’s Sitzende (Marietta) (Sitter, 1907) in turn calmly offers us to share the space next to her on her white bed. In both cases, the disfiguration so crucial for any transformation of the body into the figurality of painting has been surmounted. Not in the sense that the flesh, always lacking from any painting, has returned to the image, but rather in the sense that the singular presence of the model has arrived at a pictorial possibility in the image. Because these women gaze directly at us, and in so doing draw us towards and into the position occupied by them, they share their presence with us, at least if, instead of avoiding the sight of the naked body, looking out at us from a canvas, we are willing to acknowledge it, to expose ourselves to it, to allow ourselves to be touched by it. Stopping and seeing opens up a third space in which the touch between two separate people becomes possible. In this approximation of a hallucination, we are asked to take note of the disfiguration of the body undertaken by the image and to look beyond it; to recognize the unveiled body as a nude and as naked, as a pose and a gesture, as an aesthetic figuration and as an authentic self-expression. This third space of a hallucinated touch can emerge by virtue of the detour aesthetic formalization affords; in the virtual space of art, where model and spectator can encounter each other both literally and figuratively. In the act of viewing, they come together, but their meeting is also one of a reciprocal touch, of being moved by each other, affectively unsettled. That, after all, was always the magic contained in the touch of Venus.

3 LEAVING AN IMPRINT Francesca Woodman’s Photographic tableaux vivants

Amid the convulsions of the First World War, Sigmund Freud, in his essay ‘On Transience’, praises the charm of the fugacity of life. In response to a melancholy young poet who cannot take pleasure in the beauty of nature because it is doomed to wither and die, Freud claims that the inevitable decay of the beautiful, far from devaluing it, raises its value: ‘Transience value is scarcity value in time. Limitation in the possibility of an enjoyment raises the value of the enjoyment.’ The beauty of nature, destroyed each winter, returns the following year. Although, in our own lives, we see the beauty of the human body and face irreversibly wane, ‘their evanescence only lends them a fresh charm.’ The value of what is perfect – be it in nature, in the human form, or in art – does not need to last because its beauty is determined only by the significance it has to our psychic life. In his thoughts on transience, Freud includes the notion of mourning the loss of something as an anticipation of the ineluctability of death. Yet the essential quality of our modern life consists for him in our acknowledgment of the fragility of the world in which we exist and to which we react. According to Freud, our subjective experience is the decisive criterion.1 The fragility of human existence serves as my point of departure for illuminating the chatoyant play of passionate self-staging in Francesca Woodman’s photographic tableaux vivants. By traditionally claiming to

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produce immortal forms, art has always functioned as an apotropaic gesture against transience. As the site where bodies come to be translated into visual form, it pits a sense of permanence against the certainty that all bodily life must succumb to the process of mortal disintegration. The painted as well as the photographic images outlive the fragility of human existence. They overcome the very corporeality where this implenitude is most viscerally noticeable and that, in Woodman’s work – owing to her persistent performances of her self – emerges most forcefully into our field of vision. With the help of aesthetic fashioning, any body can be delivered from its transience, but the price to be paid for the permanence achieved is a peculiar reification. The translation into aesthetic shapes suspends, but also perpetuates, death. The body relieved of its mortal aspect has been rendered immortal in the image and as an image, but only as a lasting imprint. It survives as the trace of an appearance that tarries in the image as a thing of the past. The silhouette in the room In a work on video, Francesca Woodman, dressed in a fur coat and tall boots, walks to an empty white chair in front of a window at her studio in Providence, Rhode Island.2 The bottom right panel of the window, through which sunlight falls into the room, is masked with white paper. Torn into strips along the right edge, it has started to warp and so gained a distinctive tactile quality. After turning around and gazing unabashedly into the camera as though, for a brief moment, she were striking a pose, Woodman takes off the fur coat and reveals her naked body. She then casually drapes the coat over the chair and sits down to take off the boots and stockings as well. For a few instants, the white of her bare skin and the chair’s legs contrast with the dark pieces of apparel, which form a framing backdrop to this act of hasty undressing. Having risen from the chair, Francesca resolutely kicks the boots and stockings behind it, takes the sponge lying next to a bucket by the left chair leg and starts covering the front of her body with white paint. The careful application of the paint recalls a ritual ablution while also drawing our gaze to the various parts of her body, which slowly take on the colour of the wall. We are reminded of a biblical scene with a long tradition in art history, Susanna at her bath, as we intently observe the grace of the speechless movements with which the artist fashions her body into the material canvas of a self-portrait.

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More than once, Francesca Woodman regards the camera as though seeking to assure herself of the attention of her spectators. She then lies down leisurely, resting her unpainted back on the floor and making sure her feet are in the correct position before remaining motionless for several seconds in the posture of a living statue. In this tableau vivant, the white bucket of paint on the left acts as a double of the performer’s face, while the fur coat draped over the chair appears in this pictorial composition as a dark outline enthroned above the recumbent figure. An editing cut, accompanied on the soundtrack by a clicking noise, seamlessly leads to the performance’s second act. The coat, boots, and bucket have disappeared, and the reclining body and floor have been dusted with flour. Woodman continues to hold her motionless pose for a few seconds before gingerly rising and looking at the silhouette of her body with an air of curiosity. As she nimbly walks past the camera and out of the frame, she announces excitedly: ‘Oh, it’s such a wonderful shape.’ The camera, meanwhile, remains focused on the dark imprint of the body, it alone clearly discernible on the white floor. Speaking from off-screen, the performer adds in a theatrical whisper: ‘Oh, I’m really pleased.’ Then she seamlessly slips into the role of photographer. A  fleeting shadow appears near the far left edge of the picture, and, again off-screen, we hear the sober remark: ‘I guess I should take a photo.’ This is followed once more by the sound of a camera shutter before the video picture fades to black.3 The two photographs that record the third act of this performance were made subsequently and thus mark Woodman’s transition from video work to photography. Once more Francesca sits naked on the white chair, only now she is wearing dark Mary Janes. In one photograph, we see only the lower part of her body; her arms, stretched out between the slightly spread legs, touch her calves, while the balls and toes of her angled feet rest on the floor just above the silhouette’s head. The latter is covered with flour, matching the seated figure, whose face is likewise outside the frame chosen for this picture. Only a fragment is visible of the performer who has returned to the scene as well as to the imprint she had left in the earlier video performance. At the same time, the image creates the impression that the seated figure is an extension of the recumbent one, attached to its shadowy doppelgänger like in a gothic tale. In a second photograph, Francesca sits upright on a chair. She has turned her naked body slightly away from the dark silhouette

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to confront the camera directly, even as her gaze seems lost in reverie. In this image, her legs are again slightly spread, but the hands now rest demurely on the insides of her thighs, covering her sex; the silhouette’s head, in turn, is clearly visible. The visual doubling produces two distinct figures – as though the model had returned to compete with the trace she has left. The colour contrast between the silhouette and the artist’s bare skin affords a visual play between absence and presence even while signifying that both appear only on the surface of the photograph. Taken together, the photographs and the video performance encapsulate the artistic engagement with fragility that I want to claim as being one of the seminal aesthetic concerns in Francesca Woodman’s art. The studio becomes the stage for a subjective drama as well as for the transformation of her body into a canvas on which she can leave signs of herself. In these self-performances, her naked body is both the subject as well as the instrument with which she renders herself visible. At the same time, in the two subsequent photographs, a peculiar correspondence is at stake between the materiality of this self-presentation (body, paint, flour) and the mediality of its performance (floor, paper, videotape, photograph). The artist not only produces a bodily imprint of her figure, but also represents herself a second time, positioned in relation to this silhouette. The fugacity of the first form of depiction – the materialized photogram on the floor that turns the dusted floor into photographic paper – counterbalances the permanence of her shape in the photograph taken afterwards. What the video performance could only capture as a sequence of individual moments, the frozen movement of the photograph endows with an arrested poise. If the engendering of the first representation requires that the artist put an end to the tableau vivant she is staging (the reclining statue) by leaving the scene, her disappearance from our view allows the persona ‘Francesca Woodman’ to appear in a double sense:  as a representation of herself which she has left behind and as an artist who has returned to her work, though once again as a figure in a double self-portrait. The figure seated on the chair functions as a materialized signature of the artist, who endorses her work with her own body. Francesca Woodman’s tragic suicide in New York on 19 January 1981 has compelled critics to look for traits in her photographs that might explain her premature demise. Peggy Phelan suggests that the young artist used her photographic works to explore her mysterious relation to

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the development and disappearance of her own image. The frequently blurred rendition of her figure as well as the repetitive aspect of her work produce, for Phelan, a compelling interrelation between the animating power of her creative activity and the manifest determinacy of the end point of her life. Woodman’s artistic practice can, Phelan concludes, be ‘understood as a way to rehearse her own death.’4 One could, however, also read Woodman’s obsessive engagement with her own disappearance in our field of vision in more productive terms. By resolutely dedicating herself to the fragility of her own appearance as a photographic rendition, Woodman highlights the very inexorable inconstancy that ties the vitality of artistic work to the fugacity of life. If Francesca Woodman’s photographic works explore the relationship between the staged female body and the likeness that immobilizes it, both the blurring of the figure in the individual photographs and their thematic seriality draw attention to the constant transformation of the body in the image and as an image. By resolutely walking out of the picture frame at the end of the video performance so as to leave only her imprint, Francesca Woodman thematizes the very mortification entailed in the translation of a material body into aesthetic forms. At the same time, in the photographs that come to subsequently capture this silhouette, she appears once again as an embodied image, as a double of her self-image. As such her reappearance also signifies the shift from one performative state to another; it functions as a cypher for the transference of the body into an aesthetic sign. At issue, once more, is what Freud claims to be the rhetorical effect of transience. The fugacity of her appearance as an embodied image heightens its preciousness, counterbalancing the disappearance of the physical body on which all aesthetic transformation is based. Poses of self-reification The tableaux vivants Francesca Woodman repeatedly puts on display in her artistic practice thus need not only be read as anticipating and rehearsing death. They can also be seen to celebrate a precarious recovery of aesthetic presence by capturing a scene in which the body is staged simultaneously as an image and as the producer of that image. The interface she insistently charts between disappearance and appearance in the image and as an image uses fugacity as the precondition for the creation of new figurations. Her artistic oeuvre thus puts on display

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her idiosyncratic blend of a theatrical performance of subjective moods with an exploration of visual formalization.5 Woodman deploys her own body as material medium and as the object in the photograph so as to in intervene in the traditional image repertoire of art history. But she also goes beyond any mere re-enactment of these conventional images of femininity and instead produces visual narratives in which tragic selfinvolvement is perhaps less crucial than the playful engagement with the inconstant, transient self-image. In these self-performances, we get an idiosyncratic mix between nude, still life and passionate attitude. Since the Renaissance, the self-portrait has been considered a privileged genre in the arena of painting precisely because it allows artists to capture their individuality even while also determining the way their audience will think of them. In the course of the nineteenth century, in turn, the new medium of photography led to a fundamental expansion of the genre of self-portraiture. Now, artists were not only able to repeatedly redefine the images of themselves they made claim to. They could also ceaselessly transform themselves into multifaceted and dazzling arrays of self-designed attitudes. Asked by her friend Sloan Rankin why she so often undressed and made herself the subject of her own photographs, Francesca Woodman laconically replied: ‘It’s a matter of convenience, I’m always available.’6 This comment, however, raises the question: What does it mean when she says of herself that she is always at her own disposal, always accessible and tangible? After all, what we see in Woodman’s self-portraits is rarely the photographer at work. Instead, she is usually striking a pose for the camera. She becomes visible to us only as the image she has composed of and for herself. The props Francesca Woodman chose for these self-portraits sometimes dominate the picture, as though she were merely an addition inserted into the interior of a room. One photograph shows her sitting, nude, on an old-fashioned chair, her hands covering her pudendum, a dried bouquet on the wall above her head. In the composition, the flowers function as an emblematic attribute of the demure posture the upright body has adopted. Woodman looks at us coquettishly, as though to involve us in her ironic play with the traditional equation between the flower and the female sex. In another photograph, she sits lasciviously on a low stool. With her closed eyes, she has turned to face a lily by her side, touching the blossom with her nose. Once again, her hands conceal her pudendum, which is visually doubled by the slender upright plant.

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In this image, autoerotic pleasure takes centre stage. The pale stockings visually foreground the legs opening up before the spectator, while the crouched posture makes her body appear ampler. Other photographs focus on Francesca Woodman’s facial expression. Self portrait talking to vince (Providence, Rhode Island, 1977/1999) shows the artist, the back of her head up against a wall, with a spiral in her mouth replacing the words of a conversation that seems to make her gag. At the same time, there is something aggressive about this mise-enscène of her speechlessness. After all, the menacing dark orifice of the mouth represents a pent-up rage that can be articulated only as a facial movement. In another photograph, in which Woodman is standing in front of a mirror wearing a fur collar around her neck and a white ribbon in her hair, we find her gazing insolently at us (3.1). Her bent arms imitate the rounded shape of the mirror even while masking her own reflection. The birth record on the wall above her right arm offers a factual counterweight to this self-portrait, which decidedly rejects its own mirror image. In yet another photograph, her facial expression is sombre. The claim that she preferred herself as a model because she was always available

3.1

Francesca Woodman, Untitled, New York, 1979–80, gelatin silver print, N.224.1, 11 × 14 in. Reproduced courtesy of George and Betty Woodman.

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finds a visual correspondence in the elongated fingers, set off to heightened effect by the dark dress. Our attention is drawn to this instrument with which, in her work as an artist, she relentlessly manipulates herself. Francesca Woodman’s face is clearly recognizable in each of these self-portraits, and yet she never looks the same. The expression changes with every pose, while the photographer hides behind the attitudes she adopts. These self-portraits, too, thrive in their effect on the fact that Francesca Woodman becomes the medium of her art in a double sense. The photograph (as an image medium) and Woodman’s figure (as a bodily medium) complement one another. In another self-portrait, Woodman self-consciously fashions her appearance as an image within the image. This photograph shows her opening the upper panel of a Dutch door with her right hand; the lower half of her body remains hidden from view. Only a bit of her skirt peeks out from the dark crack between the lower door panels. Her left hand, though projecting in front of the door, simultaneously seems cut off from the standing figure. Surrounded by white light, Francesca Woodman’s self-portrait looks as though montaged into the upper half of the doorframe. Visually isolated from the room she seems about to enter, she appears as a self-sufficient image, body unconnected to its surroundings. At the same time, the photograph once more renders visible how she controls her figure in the self-portrait. The woman represented in the image may not even want to enter the room. Instead, she could just as well be in the process of pulling shut the upper door panel so as to escape from our gaze. The calm pose of the figure, bathed in light – which this portrait renders visible – could, thus, also be read as signalling an act of translation into another realm; transforming Woodman into a fleeting apparition on the threshold between visibility and invisibility. As John Berger already pointed out in the 1970s, the decisive feature of any female artist’s intervention in the genre of the self-portrait is the double gaze inherent in the way Western culture consistently compels women to think of themselves as objects of sight. Berger’s visual essay Ways of Seeing came out the same year that Francesca Woodman took the Self portrait at thirteen (Boulder, Colorado, 1972/2001), in which she resolutely turns her face away from the camera. A woman, Berger notes polemically, is born into a confined space allotted to her by the male gaze. There she can develop, but only at the price of being split in two. She is accompanied by her own image of herself, having been

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taught and persuaded from childhood onwards to survey herself continually. To gage the effect her looks have, she must constantly watch herself. Berger’s point is that while men act, women appear. Men look at women, while women watch themselves being looked at by others, usually (but not always) men. Decisive for a female artist who works with her self-image is that this exchange of looks not only defines most relationships between men and women but also, and more importantly, woman’s relationship with herself:  ‘The surveyor of woman in herself is male:  the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object  – and most particularly an object of vision:  a sight.’7 Any female artist must engage with this double gaze of her3.2 Francesca Woodman, A self, always aware of the effect woman: a mirror; a woman is a she has for an implied viewer. mirror for a man, Providence, At the same time, her selfRhode Island, 1975–8, gelatin determination consists in manipsilver print, P.044 and P.046, ulating the way she is surveyed. 5 13/16 × 5 3/4 in and 5 3/ She need not fully identify with 4 × 5 11/16 in. Reproduced a male encoded gaze; indeed, courtesy of George and Betty she may also ironically trouble Woodman. it. In the photographic series A woman: a mirror; a woman is a mirror for a man (3.2), Francesca Woodman carries to an extreme art history’s conventional reduction of the female body to a sight meant to give pleasure to an outside viewer. Turning her back to the mirror, she holds a sheet of glass in front of her naked body

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as though, trying to squeeze herself into the frame, she were viscerally turning herself into an image. Yet her fingers, feet, and head stick out, so that no unified sight emerges. Instead, our attention is explicitly drawn to the visual tension between the part of the body pressed flat by the glass and those body parts that fall outside the frame. In other photographs from the series, Woodman’s movements and the play of light on the glass blur the contours of her body so that it appears only as a distortion. The image in the cheval mirror moreover includes its exterior frame so that in the photograph that shows Francesca calmly contemplating her own self-image like a female Narcissus, the blurry body in front of the mirror is reflected by a surface, which, on the upper edge, offers a double frame. Each of these pictures troubles an economy of the gaze that puts the female body on display so as to offer visual pleasure to a male observer. The photographs move beyond splitting of the portrayed female self into a male surveyor and a female object of the gaze by not only simultaneously staging the reflection in the mirror and the body there reflected, but by also adding a third element to the reflected image:  the imprint behind the glass and the play of shadows on the skin of the artist. Both the figure in front of the mirror and her rendition in the mirror are blurred, distorted, fragmented: a fleeting appearance that refuses to remain fixed. The seriality of this set of photographs, moreover, suggests that to capture the female appearance in an image means splitting it into different embodied images. What emerges in the photograph is not a unified image of female charm but rather the destructive aspect of any desire to arrest a woman’s appearance in a pleasurable sight. Woodman appears only as a fragmented body, troubling the viewer’s wish to assure himself of his own wholeness and plenitude by virtue of this sight. At the same time, this visual self-dismemberment also serves a ludic intervention in precisely the image repertoire of classic nude painting with which, and against which, Francesca Woodman fashions herself. Although the woman in these photographs has appropriated the male gaze, she uses it to explore a plethora of possibilities by which, with the help of perpetual movement and transformation, she might elude being subsumed into one single, static image. This self-conscious, ludic engagement with the aesthetic processes that reduce her to a visual object is not the only strategy Francesca Woodman makes use of in her incessant engendering of her own

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self-image. The series Self-deceit (Rome, Italy, 1978/1979) has recourse to the traditional feminine vanitas motif, but does so in order to perform ways by which the self might literally fade into an image. These photographs do not show a woman gazing into the mirror so that the sight of her as yet untarnished body might allow her to pretend to herself that she can keep death at bay. Only in one photograph does the large mirror reflect the figure of Woodman as she crawls on the floor (Self-deceit #1). In the other pictures (3.3), she uses this mirror to conceal her face, sits on it, or  – due to the long exposure time – appears next to it like a phantom. In each instance, a visual correspondence between the naked body and the empty mirror image is played through even as these 3.3 Francesca Woodman, Selfphotographs self-consciously deceit #5–6, Rome, Italy, 1978, deny the viewer the sight of a gelatin silver print, I.208 and feminine beauty intact. We are I.209, 3 1/12 × 3 3/8 in and 3 called upon to ask at whose 9/16 × 3 9/16 in. Reproduced self-deception these poses are courtesy of George and Betty aimed. What is thwarted is not Woodman. just woman’s vanity because by not looking into the mirror, she is denied the enjoyment of her self-image. However, the conspicuous absence of this reflected likeness also anticipates the transience that the vanitas motif comes to articulate by virtue of splicing together feminine beauty with bodily decomposition. Yet we also begin to suspect that the self-deception is being staged for us. The empty mirror beside or behind

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which Francesca hides is turned to face us. More is withheld from us than merely the image of female beauty onto which we might project our wish for plenitude. The reflection itself veers towards an empty space. It reflects absence. Francesca Woodman’s play with the fading of her own self-image appears most uncanny in those works in which she literally stages herself as a lifeless object on display. In one photograph, she reclines on a shelf in a wall closet, with packaged grocery products behind her bent knee. Her head has disappeared behind the wall. Her right foot sticks out from the shelf but is obscured by the tabletop edge around the sink in front of the window. Only her exposed pudendum offers itself up directly to our gaze. This sexualized body part finds a visual correspondence in the flower pattern on the paper lining the shelves as well as the numerous little bouquets neatly arranged on the wall shelf next to the closet. The fragmented body presents itself as a consumer object while also rendering an ordinary scene uncanny. The wallpaper peeling off the wall and the carelessness with which the lining paper has been laid out on the shelves evoke a sense of neglect. In another photograph, the symbolic equation between lifeless objects and the artist staging herself is even more sinister. This photograph shows Woodman’s head, but she lies in a glass case next to mounted animals baring their sharp teeth at her, as though she herself were both a hunting trophy and a prey still in danger. Moreover, the open door cuts her figure into two halves so that we see the face and body only through the glass pane. Her hair flows from the display case and thus gains a peculiar tangible quality. The body may be immobilized, frozen into an object on display, but the visual fragmentation once again renders it intangible. It fades into the reflection of the room in the glass pane through which alone it comes into view. In a third photograph bearing the ominous title my house (Providence, Rhode Island, 1976/2008), a seemingly lifeless Francesca stands in a corner next to a shelf. A plastic sheet covers her like a discarded mannequin, thoughtlessly left behind like the shreds of fabric on the shelf and the mirror at her feet. Her figure is barely discernible through the folds of the cover draped over her. Only one detail strikes the eye – the dark glove she wears on her right hand. This picture is Woodman’s most radical response to the visual tradition that defines the female body as a consumer object available for the viewer’s visual pleasure. If in her

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self-portraits she plays with attributes that serve to characterize the pose she has struck and if in her nude photographs she frequently plays a game of hide-and-seek with her own body, in this photograph, the artist’s body emerges as a pure thing in our field of vision. The self-chosen transformation into an image object offered up to the viewer for his voyeuristic pleasure plays with the multiple meaning of the word exposure. As a figure exposed by the light of photography, Francesca Woodman exposes herself, bares herself before a strange, external gaze, and turns herself into an exhibited object. And yet the photograph records no more than the imprint that has been left behind. The immobilized woman appears only through the plastic cover. The artist resolutely eludes the photograph she has fashioned by and of herself. Poses of self-staging As infinite as Francesca Woodman’s refigurations of the self-portrait, the female nude, and the still life may be, these interventions in traditional art-historical genres have one thing in common. She is the photographer who took these photographs, which incessantly explore her relation to the engendering and disappearance of her own image. She has designed the compositions of the pictures down to the smallest detail. Fugacity of appearance may be the central theme of her photographic work, and yet the placement of her body, along with the objects surrounding it, is as minutely calculated as the framing of the scene, the lighting and the movement captured. Arthur C.  Danto astutely notes that while the person Francesca Woodman performs in these photographs is never herself, she is always the same: ‘the character of a young woman in various mise-en-scènes.’ That is why, he adds, it is important to distinguish between Woodman the artist and ‘Woodman’ the performer in these self-stagings.8 Her chatoyant play with her own selfimage, should, thus, be taken as a set of scenes from a visual diary. The photograph it must be time for lunch now (New York, 1979/1999), for example, consisting of a montage in which her face appears next to several silver forks and spoons, recalls the verbal and visual puns of the surrealists.9 Another connection may, however, be drawn to the melodramatic tableaux vivants of late-nineteenth-century photography. After all, as Ann Gabhart recalls, Francesca Woodman was convinced that she had been born in the wrong period and would have been more at home in the Victorian age.10

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Francesca Woodman, Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island, 1975–8, gelatin silver print, P.069, 5 3/8 × 5 7/16 in. Reproduced courtesy of George and Betty Woodman.

Some photographs, indeed, show Francesca Woodman crouching, terrified, in front of a crumbling wall (polka dots, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976/2000), helplessly huddled in a corner of a squalid room (3.4), or leaning against a wall in an elegiac posture, her face covered by an embroidered scarf. The staged drama of these poses recalls the passionate attitudes photographed by Lady Hawarden.11 For her compositions, this Victorian master of the tableau vivant frequently chose young women absorbed in their own thoughts. Quietly reading at the window, standing in front of a mirror, or desperately leaning against a wall, these day-dreamers are caught in an inner theatre whose subject remains invisible, only hinted at by the poses they put on display (3.5 and 3.6). Francesca Woodman’s work sometimes adds an idiosyncratic touch to this melodramatic heritage, notably when she not only assumes theatrical attitudes but also complements this with thought fragments jotted down on the photographs themselves. Like captions accompanying stills from

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Lady Clementina Hawarden, Clementina Maude, c.1862–3, albumen print, 23.1 × 20.3 cm, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Copyright: Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

a silent movie, these notes allude to the meaning of the pose assumed in each photograph, pitting the body deployed as a graphic sign against the written word inscribed on the surface of the image. At the same time, the cryptic notation invokes the musical component of melodrama, but as a disruption of its excessive pathos. In And I had forgotten how to read music (3.7), Francesca Woodman holds a strip of paper with writing on it in her outstretched palm; her face is turned way from it. The exaggerated gesture stands in for the music that has been interrupted. In I could no longer play I could not play by instinct (3.8), not only does the knife Francesca Woodman holds in her right hand suggest melodramatic pathos while the upper edge of the picture cuts off her face, but the bare right breast is also framed by a strip of photographic

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Lady Clementina Hawarden, Clementina Maude, c. 1862–3, albumen print, 15.2 × 12.7 cm, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Copyright: Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

paper on which we can discern contact prints of several self-portraits. These stand in for the cropped face. At the same time, the subtitle draws us into an ominous mood. The streaks running down the pictures of the contact print suggest bloodstains. The inability to play invoked by the subtitle allows us to anticipate the violent termination of theatrical playing as such. The photograph captioned ‘then at one point I did not need to translate the notes; they went directly to my hands’ (Providence, Rhode Island, 1976/2010) shows Francesca cowering in front of a wall. Her back and posterior are almost entirely covered by shreds of wallpaper; imprints on the wall above her fingers vaguely suggest the keyboard of a piano. In this melodramatic pose, the negation contained in the subtitle obliterates all mediation. The expression of pathos no longer requires any notes.

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Francesca Woodman, And I had forgotten how to read music, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976, gelatin silver print, P.062, 4 1/4 × 4 1/4 in. Reproduced courtesy of George and Betty Woodman.

Instead, it flows directly into the hands that all three photographs employ as instruments of the conversion of the self into writing. If the hands of Francesca Woodman the artist inscribed the photographs, the hands of Woodman the performer present the materials producing notation: the strip of paper bearing an inscription, the blurry knife, the imprint on the wall. While in the other two photographs, the framing of the image cut off her head, in this third image, the head moves forward into the spatial gap between the wall and the wallpaper on the artist’s back. Francesca Woodman appropriates the enraptured gaze of the young women in Lady Hawarden’s melodramatic tableaux even while she literally performs this as a gaze severed from the body. At the same time, the photographer’s gaze crosses the performer’s, given that in all three scenes she adopts a passionate attitude so as to draw our attention to the fact that she is about to refashion herself into a photographic embodiment. Writing is inscribed in these photographs

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Francesca Woodman, I could no longer play I could not play by instinct, Providence, Rhode Island, 1977, gelatin silver print, P.060, 5 3/4 × 5 11/16 in. Reproduced courtesy of George and Betty Woodman.

not only in the form of explanatory subtitles. In combination with each other, the text and the embodied pose call upon us to reconstruct these photographs as a visual narrative. Even if these gesture towards the fallibility of self-expression, the costume, the gesture, and the framing of the scene underscore the degree to which rigorous formalization intensifies this staging. The pathos of negation engendered by means of the body of Francesca the performer is shown to be the creative product of Francesca the photographer. The photographs, which the artist took in an empty abandoned house in Rhode Island, present an especially poignant enactment of the

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Francesca Woodman, Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island, 1975–6, gelatin silver print, P.022, 5 5/8 × 5 9/16 in. Reproduced courtesy of George and Betty Woodman.

oscillation between the fading of self in the image and the engendering of the self as an image. Abigail Solomon-Godeau interprets these photographs as a dramatic refiguration of the domesticity attributed to a Victorian woman, as this threatens to literally devour her. Swallowed up by the fireplace, obscured by the wallpaper, effaced and erased, the female figure in these photographs, Solomon-Godeau argues, appears as a living victim of the home (house #4, Providence, Rhode Island, 1975– 8/2005).12 Yet, once again, these images raise the question of double vision. Francesca the photographer uses the dilapidated house as the stage for a creation of her self in which the tension is sustained between the vanishing of her body in the space of this home and its photographic eternalization. One photograph (3.9) shows Francesca Woodman standing in the middle of an empty room; the half-open door guides our eyes towards the darkness that looms beyond. The shadow her figure casts on the

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floor might also signify that this darkness is leaking into the illuminated room. As in so many other pictures, the wallpaper has come off the wall in several places. The performer herself embodies an attitude of fugacity:  the picture captures her in motion, rendering the tail end of her underskirt so transparent that the wall shows through. The strange look with which she confronts us seems to compel us to follow her into the mysterious darkness beyond the door. Most beguiling, however, are her hands that, like those of a magician, seem to summon an invisible figure. Furthermore, the right arm, which is a bit blurred, looks as though it has been severed from the body and begun to lead a life of its own. Like a phantom body part, it seems to be moving towards us on the surface of the image. The gaze, unabashedly focused on us, in turn suggests that something might cross the threshold from the back of the house and enter the room, even if this is only the boundless void that lies behind the door. Decisive for the uncanny effect this image has on the viewer is the ambivalence suggested by the pose Woodman has struck. We must ask ourselves: does the house threaten to devour her, or does she conjure up this room beset by tokens of transience, as the scene of a self-discovery whose vanishing point lies in the darkness beyond this particular scene as well as beyond the picture as such? Several photographs from the series house actually perform her vanishing act, showing her physically entering into the walls of this space. In one, she visually blends into the wall beneath the window. The left part of her face has fused with the frame. A piece of wallpaper – its image in the picture is blurred – covers her body and virtually draws it into the wall; only the leg and the dark Mary Jane project into the room (house #3, Providence, Rhode Island, 1975–6/2001). Although her face, superimposed on the wall and thus rendered transparent, has taken on its pattern, ambivalence remains inscribed in the photograph. The dilapidated room seems to be receiving Francesca into itself even while the wall itself appears not to be a solid structure. Lumps of plaster and shreds of wallpaper torn off the wall attest its own fragility. This eerie tableau vivant also thrives on a paradoxical double movement. The room serves as the stage for a performance of the self in which Francesca positions her elusive figure on the threshold between appearance and disappearance. Her body corresponds to the wall because both are the materials for the imprint she leaves in and with this photograph. Her spectral presence furthermore bears witness to the conceptual affinity between exhibiting something and

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conjuring something into being. What is captured in this photographic tableau vivant is primarily a precarious moment of transition. In her work, Francesca Woodman relentlessly and systematically explores the equation between wallpaper, skin and photographic paper. In one picture from the series space2 (Providence, Rhode Island, 1975–8/ 2000–1), both her face and her naked body are covered by large shreds of a flower-pattern wallpaper as though the latter were a second skin. All we see of her are her left arm and the area around the navel, which is to say the part of the body that, as a knotted scar, testifies both to its birth and to its mortality. And precisely this mutual implication of engendering and passing away finds expression in the arrested movement the picture performs. We must ask ourselves: is Francesca about to blend into the wall completely, or is she on the brink of emerging from the wall? The murky boundary that this photograph celebrates runs not only between the female figure and the wall, but also between destruction and recreation. The debris scattered on the floor may indicate that the wall itself is fragile. In the picture, however, it is also the site where new shapes take form. What is captured by the photograph is not a figure that has become something, but the process of becoming. Two crossmappings The process of becoming is also at the heart of my crossmapping of Francesca Woodman’s photo works from the years 1975–8 with Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s gothic tale ‘The Yellow Wall-paper’ (1890) and Alejandro Amenábar’s film The Others (2001). I want to demonstrate how the duplicity inherent to all signification is inscribed both thematically as well as formally into our ability to call forth images so as to intervene in our cultural imaginary. The relation between these three texts, which has prompted my comparison, consists in the fact that all three have recourse to the critical metaphors of psychoanalysis, confiscating and reformulating them. Gilman transforms a biographical anecdote about her own hysteric illness and the rest cure her doctor prescribed to for her into a gothic tale. The bedroom of her fictional alter ego transforms into a stage where she can enact at her body the writing that has been forbidden her. Woodman, in turn, uses an empty house in Providence, Rhode Island as a stage for the enactment of her disappearance into the photographic image.13 In these photographs, she erects a monument to her uncanny self-fashioning, precisely by obliterating herself in the

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image, even while forbidding us to avert our gaze from this spectacular vanishing act. Finally, Amenábar plays with the correspondence between a country house, haunted by ghosts, and the darkened space of the film theatre, where white light falls on what Lotte Eisner called a demonic screen, so as to call forth a spectral play of light and dark, which acknowledges its own fugacity. Compelling about this crossmapping, however, is not merely a thematic relation, given that all three artists enact a scene of haunting in which something suddenly appears before us in reality that had hitherto been regarded as imaginary. The image formulas that Gilman, Woodman and Amenábar produce are also articulations of the uncanny because they foreground how visuality and narration mutually inhabit each other. While Gilman’s language challenges our ability to call forth images, Woodman’s photographs requires us to turn them into stories so as to make sense of them. Amenábar, in turn, stages his haunted house explicitly as an uncanny arsenal of the imaginary. The fleeting cinematic images, which resurrect the dead and restore them to life at this haunted site, dissolve again into thin air at the end of the film. However, or perhaps precisely because they have vanished, they survive, only to have an even more resilient after-effect on the imagination of those, who took part in their spectral presence on the film screen. Abigail Solomon Godeau, one of the first feminist critics to discuss Francesca Woodman’s vanishing act in the empty house in Rhode Island, has argued that in these photographs, the woman’s body is physically devoured by the house. As in Charlotte Perkins Gilmans ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, the space of woman’s seclusion and worldly exclusion not only imprisons, it also consumes. Swallowed by the fireplace, layered over by the wallpaper, effaced, occulted, Woodman presents herself as the living sacrifice of the domus.14 However, if one looks at these photographic works in relation to the duplicity of their own signification, one also notices that Woodman uses the dissolution of her body in the image so as to transform a home, which has become uncanny, into a scene of self-creation, where the photographic process serves to celebrate fugacity. Let us return to a photo already discussed (3.9), in which Woodman stands in the middle

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of an empty room, the half-opened door of which draws our gaze into an ominous darkness lying behind it. The dark shadow her figure leaves on the floor, could also be seen as a piece of darkness flooding into the lit room from beyond the other side of the threshold. The space appears uncanny not only because, in several places, the paper has begun to peel off the walls, which themselves have begun to disintegrate, leaving pieces of plaster on the floor as well. Rather, the artist herself also embodies fragility. Owing to the movement of her body while the photograph was taken, her petticoat is blurred and appears to be almost transparent in one spot. Furthermore, her strange direct gaze at the camera invites us to follow her into the mysterious darkness at the other side of the door. The longer we look at the photo, the more all familiarity comes to be dissolved before our eyes. Suddenly we notice a visual analogy between the big door knobs and the ring she is wearing on her left index finger, given that both draw our attention to that which lies in the dark behind the door, at the vanishing point of the photograph. In a similar vein, upon closer inspection, her right arm, which is slightly out of focus, appears to be severed from her body, as though it had developed a life of its own and were gliding towards the surface of the image, which is to say towards us. By contrast, the young woman, locked into her solitary fantasy work, is clearly drawn towards the dark room at the left edge of the photograph, which is to say its vanishing point. If this empty home promises to consume her, she is at the same time the source of a desire, which also draws our attention to this uncanny site in the back of the lit room. In so doing, Woodman confiscates the common visual trope of Western iconography, equating the feminine body with the home. A particularly resonant survival of this trope appears in Titian’s painting of a musician (Venus with an Organist and Cupid, 1550) whose gaze penetrates the sex of the women reclining next to him, while behind him a coach approaches a house. Projected onto the scene in Woodman’s photograph, one might say, that the room, emptied out and in the process of dissolution, not only functions as an image formula for the fragile feminine body, which this female photographer seeks to explore with her camera. Vigorously directed at us, her gaze also explicitly foregrounds the dark chamber behind the door. If we read its immeasurable emptiness as a visual trope for feminine genitals, it would frighten a fetishist gaze. Woodman, however, challenges us to share in her curiosity, rather than averting our gaze from the dark spot, which leads to the unlit vanishing

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point of the photographic image, and thus commemorates the transience of all fantasy work. The theme of fragility does not, however, concern only a feminine subjectivity, willing to engage with her own frailty. The fact that we can intuit a space inside this uncanny home without actually seeing it can also be taken as visualizing the limit of what can be seen. The empty room, the feminine body, and the limited field of vision produce three mutually implicated figures of thought in this photograph, which Woodman’s self-performance brings together. The play between light and darkness, visibility and invisibility runs along the opened door. Because the edge of the door is completely black at the top it seems to reduplicate the play of light and dark at stake in the image as a whole. Furthermore, corresponding to the movement of light along the edge of the door, leading from the bottom upwards into complete darkness, one finds a similar movement on the wall, where the colour grows ever darker as one’s eye glides from right to left. What also strikes the eye is the disconcerting incursion of darkness into light, towards which Woodman’s strange hand gesture draws our attention. The dark kernel of this uncanny home, into which our gaze has no access, seems to creep over the threshold and threatens to flood the scene. Or is the movement going in the opposite direction? Has the young woman magically opened a door with her arms, which leads to a secret place, into which the light behind her, falling through the window from outside the house, can now penetrate? Does the darkness from inside this uncanny home perhaps originate from her spectrally blurred figure? In line with Mieke Bal’s notion of preposterous history, a reading of the novella ‘The Yellow Wall-paper’ in conjunction with Woodman’s photographic work is less concerned with any solid proof of influence. Rather, at stake is looking back at the earlier literary text through the lens of visual language, which came afterwards. A thematic relation between this late Victorian text and Woodman’s photographic scenes, in turn, consists in the fact that Gilman’s heroine also triggers the strange events that occur in her bedroom, by tapping into her ability to hallucinate. She also emerges as the author of an experience of the uncanny, which equates her psychic apparatus with the space she inhabits. Decisive, however, is not only the thematic similarity between the novella and Woodman’s photographs. Rather, this correspondence reveals a further connection, which in turn leads from the spectral language of photography to the

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capability of textual metaphors to evoke hallucinations. After the birth of her daughter, Gilman’s young mother suffers from postnatal depressions. Her husband, who also functions as her physician, lodges her in the nursery at the top floor of an old country house they have rented for the summer. His instructions are clear. She is not to receive visitors, she is not to undertake any physical or mental activities and she is – above all else – not to write. The irony of the novella, of course, consists in the fact that the rest cure, which John, the narrator’s husband has prescribed, not only encourages the hysteric fantasies, which come to inundate the bedroom of his depressed wife with spectral visions. Gilman’s alter ego also clandestinely writes down these uncanny events on paper, as though she were keeping a diary. She convinces herself, that the pattern on the yellow wallpaper is a cage in which a strange woman is incarcerated. The paper on the wall can, however, also implicitly be understood as the paper onto which, by taking notes on the development of her hysteric hallucinations, she inscribes letters so as to apprehend (in both senses of that word) her own madness. Shortly before her husband and she are about to leave this summer home again, she will pull the paper off the wall completely so as to liberate the prisoner her fantasy work has placed there. In so doing, she not only gives free reign to her own delusions. Rather – and therein lies a further ironic point of the novella – she creates herself, albeit retrospectively, namely as the author of a story about a hysteric attack, which is to say as the author of the text we hold in our hands. By liberating the feminine figure she believes to discern in the pattern of the wallpaper, along with the letters she writes on her notebook pages, she brings forth a creation that sustains a compelling antagonism:  She writes with her hysteric body, even while moving into the abstraction of pure writing. Decisive for the connection I am proposing between this scene of self-creation and the creative self-vanishing, which the photographer Woodman stages in her uncanny chamber, is the visuality Gilman’s metaphors invoke; the capacité imaginaire her narration requires of us. While the narrator initially compares her summer home, with its hedges, stone walls and iron gate, to the haunted houses she knows from gothic fiction, she soon turns her attention to her own spacious room, which has a window on each side, so that air and sunlight can enter freely. Her interest, however, is soon fixated almost exclusively on the pattern of the yellow wallpaper, which has already been torn off in certain places: ‘[The

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wall-paper] is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study,’ she notes, only to add ‘and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide  – plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradiction.’ The colour of the wallpaper, she goes on to explain, is repellant [sic], almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow; strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. It is a lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others. No wonder the children hated it! I should hate it myself if I had to live in this room long.15 With this description of the uncanny wallpaper, a grotesque visuality breaks into the ordinary language of the narrator. With the help of the letters, which she writes on the paper of her notebook, the lines impregnated on the walls around her room become animated and give shape to figures on the inner theatre of this young mother, to whom writing has been forbidden. The metaphors, with which she tries to apprehend the pattern of the wallpaper (in the sense of both capturing and understanding something, which has evoked a profound inner emotion in her), deal with fugacity, contradiction and transience. Put another way, her intense reaction to the abstract image formulas she sees on the walls surrounding her bed evoke an excessive visual language that reveals both her immense hysteric capacité imaginaire as it also encourages us to follow her in this production of outrageous images. In response to her husband’s forbiddance, she indulges in a more intimate, but also more visceral mode of writing, namely a psychic hallucination, endowing the lines and colours she sees on the wallpaper with meaning. She reads them mimetically, projecting onto the ordinary pattern a double vision, which allows her to see feminine figures in what, to a less oblique gaze (which is to say to the ordinary eye), is simply a pattern. At the same time, she allegorizes this double vision along the lines of baroque culture and interprets the incarcerated women as embodiments of imprisonment. Furthermore, the correspondence between the pattern on the wallpaper (on the diegetic level of the novella) and the letters on the paper (on the extra-diegetic level of the text), transforms this uncanny chamber into a stage where forbidden psychic material

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can be enacted in such a manner as to unfold a purely spiritual space in a two-fold sense: the intimate psychic space of inner spirits and the shared cognitive space (or interval), where these phantoms will have an afterlife, once they have been transcribed into a novella, entitled ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’. In the following weeks, the bored young woman will continually look out of her barred window during the day. Yet the power of her hysteric hallucinations is so strong that she increasingly juxtaposes the idiosyncratic fantasies her capacité imaginaire evokes on the wallpaper onto the ordinary images she finds outside her window. The longer she stares at the pattern, the more she is convinced that it contains a network of eyes, as though the wallpaper were looking back at her from all sides of the room. In search of an explanation, which would allow her to transfer the intensity of her profound emotion into a protective fiction, she finally convinces herself that, under certain light conditions, she can see a formless figure, lurking inside the stupid, obnoxious pattern, which makes her positively angry. Indeed, the wallpaper increasingly becomes a Denkraum, into which she enters through the bars of the pattern, so as to creep around in it, imitating the figures she believes to be caught there. The manner in which she jots down the movement of her hallucinatory vision in her notebook, sets up a poignant analogy to the process of reading, and in so doing calls upon us to follow her in her fantastic apprehension of the uncanny wallpaper: ‘I start, we’ll say, at the bottom, down in the corner over there where it has not been touched, and I determine for the thousandth time that I  will follow that pointless pattern to some sort of a conclusion.’16 On the one hand she believes she can detect ‘isolated columns of fatuity’ in the ‘bloated curves and flourishes’. On the other hand she notices that the sprawling outlines connect diagonally, and seem to ‘run off in great slanting waves of optic horror,’ which she compares with ‘a lot of wallowing seaweeds in full chase’. Because she, however, also believes to detect a horizontal movement, adding ‘wonderfully to the confusion,’ she admits that entering into this world of intersecting lines and morphing shapes leaves her exhausted. With the help of her imagination, she gives life to these deanimated forms, and in so doing undertakes an act of creation, in which Dr Frankenstein’s creation of his monster finds a resilient feminine survival:

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There is one end of the room where it is almost intact, and there, when the crosslights fade and the low sun shines directly upon it, I can almost fancy radiation after all, – the interminable grotesques seem to form around a common centre and rush off in headlong plunges of equal distraction.17 The image formulas she evokes in the course of her mental peregrinations along (or inside) the wall-paper, produce a visual dynamics between vertical columns and horizontal enmeshments, but also between meaningless, confused figures and a navel, holding everything together. From this point, a force radiates outwards, even while animating everything with a central energy, so that one might call it the pivotal point of a birth and a return. As Gilman’s heroine becomes ever more manic in her attempt to read the wallpaper so as to discover a meaningful story she can live by, she convinces herself that she can see a crouching woman, shaking the lines of the pattern, so as to escape through these bars. Her hallucinatory blurring of the boundary between the material walls surrounding her and the patterned paper, serving as a screen onto which she can project her profound inner emotions, offers a further connection to Francesca Woodman’s photographs from the series house. In the photographic image already mentioned above (house #3, Providence, Rhode Island, 1975–6/2001), the artist has merged with the wall beneath a window by covering her body with a piece of the wallpaper, both of which are blurred in the picture. The light on her face has taken on the colouring of the naked walls. Nevertheless, a duplicity is inscribed in this photograph a well. Although the uncanny home seems to be consuming the young woman, the wall itself is no permanent structure. The plaster lying on the floor next to pieces of the wallpaper, which has been torn off, attest to its own fragility. Once one reads the hysterical enactment of writing in Gilman’s novella through the lens of Woodman’s photo works, the following duplicitous interpretation emerges: In the same gesture in which her neurotically afflicted heroine seeks to enter into the patterned paper on the wall, her doppelgänger attempts to detach herself from this paper, only to reappear as a fictional character, imaginatively evoked by virtue of the letters she jots down on paper, so as to record her hysteric hallucinations. One could, however, also say that in the same gesture in which Gilman’s hysteric calls forth the image of a woman, who  – as an image – seeks to escape from a pattern imprisoning her, she herself enters

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into this hallucinatory space. The hallucinated phantom offers her an image formula for her own imprisonment, her enforced rest cure. The analogy between feminine body and wall, enveloping but also imprisoning her, finds a compelling afterlife in a further photograph by Francesca Woodman. In it, the naked legs of the artist are visually equated with a piece of the torn-off wallpaper. We see both the printed side of the wallpaper and its white reverse side, and we see a piece of the patterned skirt, which would normally cover up the white legs of the young woman. The white spot on the wall, in turn, offers an inverted imprint of the space between her two nude legs. In another photograph from the series space2 (Providence, Rhode Island, 1975–8/2000–1), also already mentioned above, Woodman has covered both her face as well as her naked body with a big piece from a flower-patterned wallpaper, as though this were her second skin. This protective screen, which not only equates the feminine body with the wall but also equates the photographer’s genitals with her face, is particularly confusing because it produces a visual uncertainty. Is the feminine figure about to merge completely with the wall, or is she about to emerge from the wall? The boundary this photograph uncannily blurs, thus not only runs between the woman and the walls of her chamber but also between the disappearance and (re)appearance of both, which is to say it demarcates destruction and creation. Out of the waste lying on the floor, attesting to the fugacity and implenitude of all phenomenological appearances, a new figure is brought forth in this photograph. In Gilman’s novella, the psychosomatic enactments of the bed-ridden hysteric’ imaginary capacity culminates in a two-fold competition: The narrator must apprehend (and thus contain) the confusing image formulas on the wallpaper by finding a coherent story for the intense emotions they invoke in her; a story, furthermore, which will allow her to live with her predicament. At the same time, however, she must assert her own will to create stories against her husband’s forbiddance. Having reached the acme of her psychic delusion, she is convinced that the feminine figure is trying to liberate herself from the bars of the pattern. On paper she notes, ‘She is all the time trying to climb through,’ but feels compelled to add, but nobody could climb through that pattern  – it strangles so; I  think that is why it has so many heads. They get through, and

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then the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white!18 Her delusion indeed allows a meaningful story to come forth because – and that is the decisive point  – the hallucinatory cognitive site it produces, which is also the site of her writing (and thus the creation of the novella), is coherent, even if riddled with terrifying images. At the same time we find here the survival of one of the seminal image formula of gothic fiction: The terrible and endangering fascination for self-creation. To engender oneself artistically means to expose oneself to death so as to survive as an image. At the same time, Gilman’s ironic re-writing of this romantic notion of creation consists in the fact that her hysteric takes it literally. She removes the oppressive wallpaper, so as to assure the survival of her doppelgänger. The liberated woman, creeping along the

3.10

Francesca Woodman, Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island, 1975–8, gelatin silver print, P.111, 5 × 5 in. Reproduced courtesy of George and Betty Woodman.

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floor inside her chamber, however, also guarantees her own survival as the author of a novella entitled ‘The Yellow Wall-paper’. Returning to another work by Francesca Woodman (3.10), one might speak of a mutually dependant act of engendering. Captured in this image is not only the vanishing of the artist into the wall, but also her emergence from it. At the same time, the image formula of the birth of Venus finds a poignant afterlife (3.11). The decapitated young woman does not rise from the waves of the ocean, but rather from a piece of paper, tacked onto the wall. The shell in her right arm, a reference to the uncanny feminine genitals from which all life comes forth, further signifies an act of self-creation. As in the other photographs we are faced with arrested movement. The paper, through which Woodman’s figure is piercing, also holds her back. Gilman’s ‘Yellow Wall-paper’ ends with a rather more shocking act of emergence. On the day of their planned departure, the doctor breaks the lock on the door of his wife’s uncanny bedchamber and sees her creeping along the wall, amidst the shreds of wall-paper she has torn off. In her subsequent written record of this final encounter, Gilman’s narrator notes,

3.11

Sandro Botticelli, Nascita di Venere (The Birth of Venus), 1468, tempera on canvas, 72.5 cm × 278.9 cm, Galleria degli Uffizi, Pinacoteca, Florence. Copyright: Bildarchiv Foto Marburg.

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I kept on creeping just the same, but I looked at him over my shoulder. ‘I’ve got out at last,’ I said, ‘in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!’19 Not without irony, Gilman adds a final comment to this monstrous scene of birth, attesting to the resilient will of her heroine. In the last sentence of the novella, her hysteric laconically asks herself why her husband should have fainted, and then continues with her description of how, so as not to be interrupted in her path along the wall, she had to cautiously step over him every time. Francesca Woodman also offers a photographic version of a woman, crouching close to a wall. The decisive correspondence my crossmapping seeks to uncover consists, on the one hand, in the way in which the psychosomatic performance of both artists is aimed at transcending the mediation of written transmission. Underneath the photograph, we read the inscription ‘then at one point i did not need to translate the notes; they went directly to my hands’ (Providence, Rhode Island, 1976/2010), comparable to the way Gilman’s narrator relies entirely on her bodily enactment of her fantasies in the culminating scene of the novella. On the other hand, in this photograph we also find a woman turning her shoulder to us, so as to signal that as an artist she is withdrawing from any gaze seeking to constrain her self-expression. At the same time, by self-consciously showing us her bare shoulder, she is also making sure that we will not avert our gaze from her subjectivity. We may have no access to it, but it is also not reified into an enigma or a riddle. This imaged figure also occupies a spatial interval between the paper on her back and the wall in front of her, as she, too, is surrounded by the debris that has resulted from her attempt at self-creation. The transformation she enacts with her body is two-fold: She is a woman, assuming a pose so as to transform herself into an image body in a photograph. A comparative reading, unfolding the relation this photograph entertains with the final scene in ‘The Yellow Wall-paper’, reveals why it is fruitful to draw our critical attention to the way in which visuality inhabits the production of meaningful stories much as a narrative impulse is inscribed in the creation of images. Gilman’s novella appeals to our capacity to produce images. Indeed, she literally challenges us to empathetically re-trace in our minds the images her narrator painstakingly produces in the field of vision, only to record them on paper: the narrative about an imprisoned

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woman that she extracts from the wallpaper, as well as her own hallucinatory self-creation that brings with it a leap into pure, non-mimetic writing. Woodman’s photograph, in turn, reveals that writing is not only inscribed in her photo by way of an explanatory title, supplementing the image. Writing also inhabits the image in the sense that we can only begin reading Woodman’s photographic scene by virtue of retracing it as a story; even if only as the story about the effect her vanishing act has on us. In our response we may well sever the image facing us from any notes the artist might have about this photograph, so as to move into the pure intensity of our affective engagement with her work. A final concluding image will allow me to introduce the third medium, film, into my crossmapping. Alejandro Amenábar has also chosen a country house as the scene for his gothic film The Others (2001), comparable to the one in ‘The Yellow Wall-paper’, since it is also surrounded by hedges and a big iron gate at its entrance. The significant relation to Gilman’s novella, as well as to the photo work by Francesca Woodman, consists in the fact that this uncanny home is also the scene for a painstaking process of self-recognition on the part of the heroine, resulting in a moment of feminine self-creation that self-reflexively comments on the cinematic medium itself. The film begins with a woman screaming as she wakes up from a nightmare. In a vertical close up we see Grace (Nicole Kidman), holding her hand to her mouth, sobbing in terror. As she slowly calms herself, the camera moves into a horizontal position. Only then does the confused woman stir from her petrified terror. Quickly wiping the tears from her face, she looks at the wrist watch lying on the table next to her bed. She briefly presses her lips into the pillow before sitting up on the edge of her bed and, visibly relieved, begins breathing calmly. Everything seems to have been a dream. As will become clear in the course of the film, Grace is no hysteric, but rather a dead woman, who, despairing over the fact that her husband had died in battle, suffocated her children with a pillow and then shot herself with a shotgun. Because she is able to ward off the knowledge of this terrible deed, she believes she is still alive. The strange events that set in on this foggy morning, represent a fantastic work of repression, with the uncanny house supporting her need to screen out something she simply cannot ultimately not know. Grace artificially darkens all the rooms by drawing heavy curtains across the windows, so as to protect her allegedly photosensitive children from any direct sunlight. The act of keeping

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light out of the house, however, also signifies her need to keep the triple murder from coming to light, which is to say, preventing this terrible knowledge from moving from its repression in the unconscious to conscious recognition. The night before, the new tenants (who are still among the living), decided to have a séance, because they had come to realize that their new home was haunted. Because of this, Grace is finally forced to recognize that she belongs to the dead. In the penultimate scene of The Others, we see her sitting on the stairs, holding both her children fondly in her arms, while she is able to describe to them (and confess to herself) how her act of murder came about. The terrible knowledge that had been tormenting her throughout the film can finally be transformed into a meaningful story about how her willingness to kill her children was nothing other than the anamorphotic counter-point to her unconditional maternal love. By transferring her initially ungraspable and unacceptable deed into the pathos gesture of the mother, who kills out of despair, only to juxtapose onto this a second image formula (of the mother, protecting her children), Grace is reborn as the subject of her traumatic story. At the same time, this postmodern film, which self-consciously thrives on the survival of poignant pathos formulas of gothic fiction, does not conclude in the dissolution of all spectral appearances of the dead. Precisely because Grace finally acknowledges that she and her children are dead, they can take possession of their uncanny home forever. As we see sun light streaming through the windows, we hear their collective voices claiming: ‘This house is ours.’ If before Grace had had to lock her photosensitive children into darkened rooms, to protect them from all natural light, they can now dance in the dawn sunlight. Though dead, they remain among the living, precisely as creatures of light, which is to say as cinematic figurations. The uncanny home  – and therein consists its correspondence to the cinema screen – remains an interval: the site where the deceased can have an afterlife and from which they can effect the living. In the final scene we see Grace standing with her two children at the window of the house they have re-possessed. Calmly she watches the members of the other family as they get into the black car that will drive them away for ever. Until the end, however, even as the car is already driving along the gravel path, the little boy continues to intently gaze at the three spectral figures that seem to appear only to him, and of

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3.12

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Film stills from The Others (Alejandro Amenábar, 2001).

course, implicitly to us. At first he could still distinctly see them, then they have vanished. He is now in their possession as well. Even if he is able to repress the uncanny knowledge of their survival from his ordinary consciousness, the image of the three figures at the window will continue to haunt him in his fantasies – as an enigma, a promise, and a hope (3.12). If, in this final scene, Grace and her two children are initially visible, only to ultimately dissolve into the film image, then because we are dealing with a mise en abyme of cinema’s mediality. After all, one of the themes of The Others is how an uncanny play between light and darkness allows spectral figures to appear as a result of our imaginary capacity, even though we know that we do not share any world with them; that they are not present to us. Indeed one might ask, aren’t film figures who flicker across a white screen in a darkened movie theatre, defined by precisely the oscillation between presence and absence within a given frame, which Amenábar presents to us in nuce in the form of window in a forlorn country house? And isn’t the uncanny magic of film characters such that – insofar as they have emotionally moved us – they will continue to haunt us in our memories, in our fantasies, and in our dream? Something remains, even after we have successfully transformed a gripping but ultimately ungraspable affect into image formulas and meaningful stories; after we have apprehended what has profoundly affected us. Something tarries after all the spectral figures projected on the screen

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have once again dissolved into pure light and pure darkness. And as we oscillate between the afterglow of our intense emotion and the success of our intellectual apprehension, we are sustained by the after-effect of this antagonism. Appearing by disappearing Francesca Woodman, however, is not only concerned with staging her disappearance into the walls that demarcate the space in which she can incessantly re-discover herself. As mentioned before, her brilliant adaptation in which she uses her own body to rewrite the traditional image formula of the Birth of Venus serves as a poignant rendition of her emergence from a wall while cradling a seashell in her right arm that both symbolizes the female sex and its life-giving power and attests to the selfcreation taking place. This, too, is a movement arrested. In a work on video from the same time, Francesca Woodman pursues a similar figure of thought. We initially see her silhouette behind a large piece of white paper hung like a curtain in front of the window of her studio. Her right hand soon emerges above the upper edge of the paper and begins to inscribe her given name in black pen on the white surface. The body and especially the left hand, both of which can still be seen only as silhouettes positioned behind the translucent paper, serve as a writing surface. Having finished writing her name, she pulls back her right hand as well. For a few moments, we once more see the silhouette of her entire body through the backlit paper, only now the letters of her name run across the white sheet at the level of her waist. Both hands suddenly appear in front of the paper, grab it, and begin to tear strips from it. The body of the artist hidden behind the paper curtain bearing her name gradually comes into view. Having completely revealed her upper body to the viewer’s gaze, Woodman stands still for several seconds, again striking a pose. This tableau vivant also takes up the image formula of the Birth of Venus. Francesca Woodman’s right arm elegantly falls to her side while she graciously holds the left one, slightly angled, in front of her navel. The remaining paper covers her sex and simultaneously alludes to the foam of the sea from which Venus, her model, rose. The camera soon pulls back, and Woodman the performer, holding her pose, now looks directly at us. Her figure has broken through the name, but that also means that the name preceded her appearance as an embodied pose. In contrast to the classical tableau vivant, in which the curtain falls before the

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performer again begins to move, Francesca suddenly does just that. The seductive pose she had struck for an audience abruptly changes. The artist once more looks confidently into the camera before nimbly walking out of the frame. The illusion of the animated image is broken. Only her face, drawn on a sheet of paper and set on the windowsill on the right-hand side, tarries in the room, surrounded by the leftover shreds of paper suspended motionlessly in the picture. As Mieke Bal notes, this video performance illustrates the fleeting and intangible consistency of the subject. The result is a double self-portrait, combining the self with the proper name while also highlighting the difference between them.20 The woman making her appearance is not identical with the name that stands in for her. In order to appear, she must tear her signature apart and walk through it. At issue are programmatically several stages of emergence. At first, the actual embodiment of a traditional image form (Venus) replaces the name that belongs to (and as such designates) the performer in the scene and the artist creating it. This selfexpression, based on an inherited canonical image of female beauty, not only replaces the signature, but also endows the silhouette, which stands at the beginning of everything, with the facial features of a particular person: Francesca Woodman. Once the paper has been completely torn to shreds, this animated self-image also disappears from view to be replaced, in turn, by a drawn self-portrait. If Woodman’s bodily performance of the birth of Venus lends concrete substance to her proper name, the completion of the entire video work proves once more to be predicated on her disappearance. The game with different self-images begins with an outline and ends with a likeness. It renders up not only a double portrait but also a double birth. Breaking through the paper produces a tableau vivant that appropriates the Venus of art history. The final tearing it to shreds puts an end to all three self-images, using Francesca’s body as the site for this re-imagination of a previous image form. For a brief moment, the destruction of the illusion also brings the artist, as the producer of these diverse selfexpressions, into focus. The embodiment of her self-image displayed in various modes is all the more precious not only because it is temporally limited, but also because it ultimately discloses the very illusion on which the photographic self-performance thrives. Francesca Woodman’s art attains its fragile magic at the threshold between entering and leaving the scene of her own creation.

4 POP CINEMA Hollywood’s Critical Engagement with America’s Culture of Consumption

Pop art is liking things. Andy Warhol Pleasures of the outtake; or the economy of popular culture In a chapter from The Philosophy of Andy Warhol entitled ‘Work’, the master of pop art explains why he liked to pick up on cultural trash and feed it into his projects. In order to explain why he so tremendously enjoyed re-using materials others had rejected, he points to the economy of the out-take; those scenes during the shooting of a film that do not work as planned and must, therefore, be thrown out. ‘I’m not saying that popular taste is bad so that what’s left over from the bad taste is good,’ he explains, in reference to pop art’s enmeshment of mass entertainment and consumer culture: I’m saying that what’s left over is probably bad, but if you can take it and make it good or at least interesting, then you’re not wasting as much as you would otherwise. You’re recycling work and you’re recycling people, and you’re running your business as a by-product of other businesses. Or other directly competitive businesses, as a matter of fact. So that’s a very economical operating procedure. It’s

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also the funniest operating procedure because, as I said, leftovers are inherently funny.1 Although pop artists have been faulted for the fact that they did not always sufficiently transform the objects, which they appropriated from mass culture, into independent aesthetic artefacts, the decisive point in Warhol’s description of the process of recycling consists in the following:  Even if the rejected material is not necessarily transformed into good art in the process of being recycled by a pop artist like himself, it is, in any case, no longer trash. In the economic model Warhol proposes, trash transmutes into the material force that ensures and sustains successful cultural consumption. Having recourse to something that was initially taken out (because it did not conform with a given aesthetic norm) proves to be a reduction in waste. In fact, if one thinks of his Brillo Boxes or his serial images of Hollywood stars, Warhol’s celebration of the out-take contains a core definition of his understanding of pop art. When recycled, signs, objects and images belonging to everyday culture, receive a surplus value. Thereby, they are transformed in both an aesthetic as well as an economic sense. This embrace of the economy of the out-take elevates what was traditionally considered to be cultural trash to an art form. Rejected waste emerges as the source for an improvisation of conventional cultural codes, while the recycling of this trash affords commercial gain. At the same time that those New  York artists who became know as pop artists in the early 1960s lovingly turned to commercial art and the subjects of popular culture in order to liberate themselves from the rarefied atmosphere of abstract expressionism, the literary critic C.L.R. James developed a theory of culture, privileging the market-oriented entertainment of America’s industrial, capitalist society. In his history of American civilization, he had concentrated on Melville, Poe and Emerson for the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, however, he found that the critical engagement with American culture these writers had demonstrated resurfaced not in modern literature but rather in Hollywood cinema, in jazz, and in the art of the comic strip. With the emergence of a radical commercialization of art in the twentieth century, and concomitantly with it a dramatic popularization of art, James argues, a decisive expansion of aesthetic premises took place, which came to include the artistic artefacts produced by business people for a mass

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audience. Producers and sellers of modern mass culture, who explicitly do not consider themselves to be artists, must – as Andy Warhol cynically notes in his thoughts on outtakes – heed the constraints of the very financial markets upon which their business depends. At the same time they are as dependent on their audience as Euripides and Sophocles were in ancient Greek culture. For this reason, C.L.R. James claims that the most significant contemporary aesthetic and social phenomena are to be found in the development, production and dissemination of popular films and popular music.2 Taking my cue from C. L. R. James, I will use this essay to explore both the concerns as well as the modus operandi of pop art in Hollywood cinema. At issue, however, are neither the films these artists themselves made nor a discussion of 1950s cinema as an intertextual point of reference for pop art. Nor will I be addressing the way in which, with the onset of postmodernity, the audience of popular culture came to appropriate the ironic sensibility of pop art, transforming genres such as the horror film or the romantic comedy into pop phenomena.3 Instead, following Nancy Marmer’s notion of ‘pop stance’ or ‘pop temper’, I will discuss a critical attitude to be found in Hollywood cinema since the 1930s.4 At stake, then, is less our attitude towards certain films than an attitude exhibited by certain films towards their own cinematic process as a modus operandi explicitly engaged with the language of popular, everyday culture. So as to foreground the uncanny inhabitation of cultural critique within commercially successful Hollywood film, I  will concentrate on the musical, the melodrama and film noir, even though the phenomena I am concerned with is not limited to these three genres. If pop art is concerned with an ironic appropriation of the language of advertisement, as these are to be found primarily in the domain of popular culture, films that demonstrate a ‘pop stance’ or ‘pop temper’ also highlight the fact that, even while mainstream cinema necessarily celebrates popular modes of expression, it also critically engages with commercially produced and disseminated representations. To attribute a pop sensibility to Hollywood films, which themselves served as a source of inspiration for pop artists in the 1960s, means concentrating on those aspects of Hollywood’s cinematic language that share, or rather anticipate, pop art’s playful yet critical stance towards the representational quality of all American culture. The aesthetic gesture at stake entails foregrounding one’s medium as a site of the reproduction

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and recycling of already existing signs, so as to render visible their function as commercially successful goods, even while illuminating their effects on mass culture; which is to say on the very dreams, wishes and anxieties they either call forth or satisfy. In other words, the analogy between pop art and Hollywood mainstream cinema for which I will be making a claim in this essay takes as its point of departure films, or film sequences, that are as self-reflexive about their own medium of representation as pop art is. Apodictically put, these films not only foreground the lack of any referentiality beyond the cinematic sign. Rather, they also draw our attention to the very fact that they are the product and the effect of an interplay of culturally codified and popularly disseminated signs. The films I will be discussing anticipate the stance of pop art in that they ironically deploy similar subjects – advertisement, billboards, packaging, comics, photography from high gloss magazines and newspapers, icons of the entertainment business as well as film stills – so as to create a popular, commercially successful product, whose visual as well as thematic charm consists precisely in the defamiliarization gained by virtue of assuming a self-reflexive distance to its own cinematic medium. H.C. Potter’s musical Hellzapoppin’ (1941) is a useful place to begin my tour through examples of pop in Hollywood Cinema because the frame narrative explicitly addresses the idea that film, because it is a mass market product, must be readily and widely consumable. At the same time, the dramaturgic and visual modus operandi of this musical consists in introducing disturbances into the very entertainment machine it invokes, by celebrating the out-take as its privileged mode of expression. The film sets in with a heated discussion between a Hollywood producer and his two stars, the comedians Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson. The producer wants to turn their Broadway musical Hellzapoppin’ into a film and has engaged a screenplay writer to come up with a sentimental love story, which is to serve as a frame for the performance of this show. While the two comedians vehemently argue against any changes in their version of the show, they suddenly see themselves doubled on a screen, hanging on the wall in front of them. In the film that begins to unroll before their astonished gaze, they find themselves at the beginning of the romance the screenplay writer has come up with, which is to say at the beginning of the commercially viable film plot that the producer wants to impose on their show. This anti-musical, however, is not only a film about turning a Broadway show into a film. Rather, it consistently

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includes self-reflexive moments pertaining to the medium of film itself, primarily by including jokes that repeatedly render visible that what we are seeing on screen is nothing more than the reproduction of signs, referring to themselves; a film projection, not a mimetically transparent representation of a world beyond the screen. Early on in the film, Hellzapoppin’ introduces the projectionist Louis, who will continually disturb the smooth projection of the film. In this carnivalesque universe, Ole and Chic can address him directly and ask him to reverse the action of a film sequence they are part of, so that we see them in reverse motion. At one point in the story Louis will accidentally jar the film projector, with the result that we suddenly see the halves of two separate takes juxtaposed simultaneously in one frame (4.1). The two comedians, now split between two images, must fight against the bar that threatens to suffocate them. At another point the projectionist disturbs the unravelling of the romance plot just before the lovers sing their duet by splicing a message into the scene that has nothing to do with the diegetic story, and instead takes us outside this fictional world, into the movie theatre itself. The words superimposed on the two lovers are a message for Stinky Miller, a young boy in the audience (4.2). He is to go home, because his mother has his dinner ready and is waiting for him. Because Stinky initially refuses to obey, the projection of the film stops completely and only begins again after we have seen his silhouette depart from the auditorium. I have, however, also chosen Hellzapoppin’ as my initial example because it unfolds a parody of the classic Busby Berkeley musical, along the lines of Andy Warhol’s claim, ‘the things that I have apparently parodied I actually admire’.5 Because they want to prevent the love story from overshadowing the cinematic adaptation of their show, Ole and Chic decide to intervene in the film they find themselves ingrained in against their will. They transform the song and dance routines, conceived by the screenplay writer as conventional musical numbers along the lines of the chaotic scene from the Broadway show Hellzapoppin’, with which the film began; a staging that elevated the rhetoric of the out-take to its privileged aesthetic modus operandi. The point of their carnivalesque take on the musical genre, serving self-consciously as a mise en abyme of the film as a whole, consists in celebrating with intense gusto all those accidents and mistakes that could happen during the shooting of a scene, which Andy Warhol found so funny. In one of the culminating show

4.1

Film stills from Hellzapoppin’ (H.C. Potter, 1941).

4.2

Film stills from Hellzapoppin’ (H.C. Potter, 1941).

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numbers of the film, Betty (Martha Raye), finds herself singing against all the hindrances her two comedian friends have devised for her. The showgirls, along with the other dancers as well as the musicians, keep falling for the tricks of Ole and Chic, and thus keep getting in her way. At one point, a wind machine blows her skirt so high up that it covers her face. She resiliently continues singing, even when she suddenly finds herself holding a firecracker, which one of the two comedians clandestinely slipped into her hand. As it explodes, her dress begins to burn, while she is blown into the sky. In a classical Hollywood musical, these scenes would have been treated as out-takes and discarded at the editing table, while the singer, herself a leftover, would probably have been fired. In Hellzapoppin, however, these moments of burlesque contribute to the enormous success the show has with potential sponsors, who have been invited to the elegant country home to be present at the preview. In the last scene of the film, the commercial aspect of popular entertainment is addressed one last time. The producer, furious at the screenplay writer for clandestinely re-including the celebration of chaotic trash, for which the Broadway-Show Hellzapoppin’ had become famous, shoots him with his revolver. The writer, however, knows how to successfully prevent himself from literally becoming a leftover. Without batting an eye, he explains to the producer that he never comes to a movie set without wearing his bulletproof vest. Cinema as merchandise; or pop stance avant la lettre Entirely in the spirit of pop art’s troubling all clear distinctions between the truthful originality of expressionism and the calculating imitation of constructivism, the films I will now turn to, as examples for what I claim to be Hollywood’s pop stance, foreground an engagement with reality as visually reproduced. The objects to be found in the filmic world they unfold on screen contain no essence outside or beyond the social code they manifest. At the same time, these films, which predate the actual emergence of pop art in the 1960s, bring social criticism as well as an effective seriousness to bear on their critical presentation of a commercialized popular culture by rendering visible the phantasmatic constructedness of psychic and emotional realities. The cinematic pop stance I am concerned with thus not only draws our attention to a playful recycling of the visual language of commercial culture but rather also understands itself as a critical engagement with what has always been the most

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tangible expression of the imaginary negotiation and regulation of real living conditions in American culture; namely the American Dream with its notions of celebrity, success and a right to a pursuit of happiness. If from the mid-1950s onwards, pop artists recognized that in consumer culture what counts are not objects themselves but trademarks, along with the cultural insignia they are enmeshed with, the genre films of this period treat emotions as trademarks: In musicals, lovers regularly fall into song whenever the intensity of their romantic passion can only be expressed in platitudes. In melodrama, heroines inadvertently break into tears because only this grand pathos gesture can adequately articulate their despair. In film noir, the femme fatale and her lover ultimately point their guns at each other because this is the only way that they can convince each other of the hopelessness of their situation. Entirely in the spirit of pop art, the inclusion of insignia, whose function it is to pitch the sale of merchandise – whether packaging or advertisement – allows these films to critically reflect upon the commercial aspect of the cinematic medium itself. At the same time, the use of these insignia also supports critical reflections about a culture in which emotions are treated as merchandise; as goods that can be exchanged and whose price can be negotiated. The films to be discussed critically engage with their own status as objects of consumption by staging other mass market objects not as props, but rather as part of a mise en abyme; miniature portraits of the film as a whole. The deconstruction of the American Dream they unfold reveals it to be a consumer object, which promises consumption without restraint to those who are willing to trust in this collective fantasy, even while transforming them into the merchandise of the ideological system subtending American capitalism. By self-consciously staging the imaginary world they unfold on screen as a reproduction, which reflects the economic conditions of popular culture, these genre films not only render visible that because the emotions of the protagonists are negotiated with the help of commercial insignia, they are themselves consumer goods. Rather, the affects exhibited by the films’ stars are exposed as being the merchandise that Hollywood cinema as a commercial medium seeks to pitch to its audience. Lucy Lippard has suggested that the broad appeal of pop art in America had in part to do with the fact that the popular imagery it came to appropriate consisted in experiences all Americans had in common: ‘For the sophisticated,’ she explains, ‘even the new has a nostalgic

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attraction, recalling those balmy days when bicycles, baseball games, driveins, Hotdogs, ice-cream sodas, and comics were the low-brow facts of life, uncomplicated by intellectual responsibility’.6 If we, however, turn back to precisely the classic films from the Hollywood Studio era that pop artists revived by having recourse to the visual language of mass entertainment, the nostalgia Lippard evokes proves to be far less homogenous, indeed riddled with poignant fissures. As Martin Scorsese points out in his Personal Journey through American Movies, a film like Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), renders visible that towards the end of the Second World War, neither the suburbs nor the supermarkets that would become the trademarks of American prosperity after the war could be assumed to be a given of American consumer society. A particularly poignant case in point in this film noir is Jerry’s Supermarket, the place where the femme fatale (Barbara Stanwyck as Phyllis Dietrichson) and the noir hero (Fred MacMurray as Walter Neff) choose to meet. Surrounded by a plethora of cans and packaged food, they first plan the death of her husband and then, once the law threatens to catch up with them, their mutual destruction (4.3).

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Film stills from Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944).

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Billy Wilder’s pop stance, thus my claim, consists in the fact that he uses the scenes in Jerry’s Market to critically reflect on a materialist society, which, saturated by images of its own wealth, brings into focus the vanishing point of the right to a pursuit of happiness proclaimed by the American Constitution, namely death. Put another way, Billy Wilder anticipates the gesture of pop art when he, too, uses the packaging of mass market consumer objects – the containers, decorated with images and brand names, so sumptuously arranged on the shelves of Jerry’s Market – not only as a backdrop for the sinister conversation between the femme fatale and her deluded lover, but rather also as the cultural insignia the audience has in common. At stake, however, is the fact that this common ground actually gestures towards a fissure in the American Dream. To promote one’s own interests at all costs not only leads to the destruction of anyone who threatens to hinder the fulfilment of one’s desire. It may well also result in one’s own self-expenditure. Put another way, to buy into the dream of unrestrained self-determination and with it into an equally uninhibited pursuit of prosperity and happiness, which by the mid 1940s was pitched by popular culture as consumer freedom, could leave one consumed by this ideology itself. During the second meeting in Jerry’s Market, Phyllis finds herself tracking her lover up and down the aisles, as though both were locked in a cage. While we see the rich display of food articles on the shelves she passes by, we hear her explaining to him why he must not abandon her, now that the insurance company is after her. They went into the murder of her husband together, she forcefully explains, so they will either get out together or both be destroyed in the process. Billy Wilder directs the scene in such a way that the noir lovers, who were initially standing next to each other, are forced to separate, because one of the supermarket employees brings more merchandise to put away in the shelves. Phyllis thus speaks her decisive final lines over a mountain of perfectly stacked canned foods, shielding her torso from our view (4.4). One has the impression that she is hardly tall enough to look over the piles of food products standing before her. After taking off her sunglasses to signal that she has irrevocably left the imaginary world into which she had drawn herself and her lover with her dream of forbidden love and stolen money, she declares to him, ‘It’s straight down the line for both of us, do you remember?’ However, one can also read the removal of her sun-glasses as a sign that she no longer has eyes for the consumer goods

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Film stills from Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944).

surrounding her, as she no longer wishes to take notice of the promise of money and freedom that the murder of her husband had held for her. Instead, her gaze is focused on what the American Dream, together with the mass-market goods it advertises, conceals, even while it was always its implicit vanishing point; the death of all purchasing power and all American dreaming. There is, furthermore, a film still that explicitly renders visible the cultural status of Jerry’s Market by bringing the historical context of the filming of this film noir into focus (4.5). In this photography we see security guards, yet they are not protecting the stars Stanwyck and MacMurray from their fans. Rather, they are on location to make sure that greedy shoppers do not disturb the sumptuous piles of food, a rarity in 1944. A decade later, Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes will simulate the fetishization of supermarket items, even while removing them from all reference to the actual product the brand name was meant to sell. In the case of Jerry’s Market, in turn, the gesture of dislocation consists in the fact that the consumer goods that fill the shelves do not correspond to any actual everyday reality. Instead, they refer to the dream of prosperity the American public hoped for as a result of the end of the war. At the same time, the artificially sumptuous display of food goods also articulates the dark kernel inhabiting this promise of wealth. It is the potentially fatal consequences of precisely this economy that Warhol will reference in his disaster paintings, some two decades later.

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Publicity still from Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944).

Jerry’s Market thus emerges as an uncanny site par excellence: For all those watching the film, it is implicitly a place they have in common. At the same time it is a virtual site, representing a dreamed reality, not a mimetic representation of actual living conditions in America at the end of the Second World War. Finally, Jerry’s Market proves to be an uncanny place, because it allows Billy Wilder to visually foreground how objects of mass culture, namely food goods that promise a world of prosperity, converge with cinema, another product of mass culture, which in turn promises a protective screen against the harshness of real social living conditions. The food products so lavishly exhibited in the shelves of Jerry’s Market can be read as icons of precisely the obsession with a blind consumerism, which will prove to be fateful for the noir couple. Pop art will appropriate Billy Wilder’s gesture of estrangement, meant as a critique of the image repertoire of the American Dream, by also rendering strange familiar images of everyday culture. Like Duchamps between the two World Wars, Warhol and his friends will rediscover the ready-made, relocating soup cans and detergent boxes in exhibition spaces, while images from comic books, small enough to be held on one’s lap while reading, will reappear as over-sized paintings on the walls of museums, along with billboards that one normally encounters along the side of a highway.

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Genre cinema, especially film noir, melodrama, and musicals, can be thought of as cinematographic billboards in their own right, given the clearly codified plot conventions and character schemata that regulate their generic narration. Pop artists like Claes Oldenburg and Roy Lichtenstein always claimed that they appropriated the subject matter from billboards, along with that specific painting technique, not only in order to parody stereotypical scenes of emotional excess. Rather, it was in the image repertoire of billboards that they discovered correspondences to the world of their imagination, to their own private fantasies. Pathos gestures disseminated by billboards, as well as by romance comics, proved to be rich in potential not only for a seamless imitation of the sentimentality they put on display and the affects they sought to evoke. Rather, this image repertoire was also fruitful for a passionless, sober, and unabashedly ironic exhibition of exaggerated emotions. If I choose to speak of genre cinema as a cinematographic billboard, I do so because, with the notion of a pop stance in mind, one readily finds traces of an ironic distancing from grand passions in Hollywood melodramas or musicals. Put another way, we find pop art’s irony anticipated in precisely those genres in which exaggerated emotionality was raised to an aesthetic principal, culminating either in an outburst of tears or an effusion of music. While masters of the genre, such as Stanley Donen and Douglas Sirk expect of us to be affected by the pathos celebrated on screen, they also call upon us to recognize that what we are confronted with are reproductions of intense states of emotions. We cry over imitations of life, as Sirk came to call his last Hollywood melodrama, not the real thing. At the same time, the resilient affective force of both melodramas and musicals derives from the fact that precisely the films belonging to these genres often explore the murky interface between private fantasies and cultural stereotypes. The heroines and heroes in these films perform for us how we all have recourse to culturally prevalent images of desirable love objects, promises of happiness, as well as commercial and social success. In other words, we all orient ourselves on the imaginary billboards we find lining the highway that leads us through each of our individual lives, because these signs, bigger than life, help us fashion private day-dreams into viable stories, which we can live by. At the same time, the heroines and heroes of genre cinema – regardless whether they succeed or fail in realizing their dreams – show us that, even while one

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has recourse to the commercially disseminated pathos formulae one finds on billboards, one is, in turn, invariably also manipulated by them, namely in the intimate space of one’s private day-dreams. If pop art represents reality as a comic strip or billboard so as to visually foreground the lack of resemblance between the fantasies by which we live and the real living conditions, which they come to refigure and organize, so too does genre cinema. Both visually and dramaturgically, both melodrama and musical highlight the discrepancy between ordinary living conditions and the pathos formulas of emotional intensity we use to organize our day-dreams, even though they may pertain to stories about tragic failure. Like pop art’s critique of American commercialization of culture, the stereotypic pathos formula, which the protagonists of Hollywood melodramas and musicals have recourse to, are severed from their actual lives not least of all because these images and stories, bigger than life, serve a commercial interest. If the classic billboard deploys emotionally charged poses and body gestures so as to pitch a product which promises to afford a particular life style to the person who buys it, the two film sequences I have chosen as my next examples use billboards to sell the American Dream, with its promise of success and happiness, to the American movie audience. Only their pitch explicitly involves a stereotypical image, a commercial imitation of the real living conditions, of those for whom it has been reproduced. The first scene from George Stevens’ melodrama A Place in the Sun (1951) marks the beginning of a tragedy, the second, the closing shot from Stanley Donen’s Singin’ in the Rain (1952), signals the end of a song-anddance comedy. In the first film, the picture of a woman in a bathing suit, promising leisure beyond all realistic means, becomes the catalyst for real failure, in the second, two singers, who have been able to realize their dreams, are transformed into figures, bigger than life. In both cases, at stake is precisely the affective contradiction pop art was also concerned with. Like Lichtenstein’s comics or the billboards by Wesselmann and Rosenquist, both film scenes cultivate a style of detachment, even while eliciting an emotional and sensual reaction from the viewer. They touch the affects of their audience, move their spectators, precisely because of the stylization of the cinematic language. In the opening scene of A Place in the Sun, we see George Eastman (Montgomery Clift), with his back to the camera, standing on the side of a highway, hoping to hitch a ride. Only once he shifts his gaze away from

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Film stills from A Place in the Sun (George Stevens, 1951).

the street, as though he had given up all hope in getting a car to stop for him, does he turn to the camera and thus to us. He suddenly notices the billboard, which, standing behind him, screens out the Californian landscape: An advertisement poster for the clothing company his uncle, Charles Eastman, owns (4.6). First we see a close-up of his face, lit up with happy expectation. Then the reverse shot reveals the image which has enthralled him, as though it were a representation of his intimate fantasy. He seems to have forgotten why he is standing on the side of the highway, absorbed instead by a picture of a dark-haired woman, leisurely lying on a beach, advertising a bathing suit. The stereotypical pose of the happy bather she is putting on display, transforming a suggestive piece of women’s apparel into a sign for prosperity and leisure, triggers his own private fantasy. The writing above the reclining woman proclaims, ‘It’s an Eastman,’ and he, too, is an Eastman, albeit from the poor branch of the family. He had accidentally met his uncle in Chicago a few days ago and decided to take him up on the offer to work in his factory. On the lower left edge of the billboard we find a second piece of writing, which, since we know we are dealing with a cinematic adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, serves to introduce the notion of a cultural inflection of the fate about to unfold, once the young man embarks on fulfilling his dream of belonging to the leisured class he finds depicted on a billboard. The merchandise, as well as the painted reproduction of the model, we discover from this second piece of writing, is ‘Made in the heart of America for all of America.’ Our hero, only too willing to embark on these fantasy scenarios, is, thus, implicitly equated with a consumer product himself, made in the heart of America. Indeed, the story,

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which begins with him noticing this billboard and acknowledging the promise of success and prosperity it pitches to him as his personal fantasy, will depict him as the product of the potentially fatal consequences of the American Dream. Seduced by this dream to kill his wife so as to pursue happiness with another woman, he will ultimately be sentenced to death. At the same time, we find in this opening scene precisely the ironic distance characteristic for pop art, because the framed canvas of the billboard appears like a mise en abyme of the framed screen on which George Stevens’ film is beginning to unfold. This inbuilt self-reflexivity is further underscored by virtue of the fact that George Eastwood turns away from the advertisement poster as though he were in a trance. One has the impression that he had mentally entered the virtual space of the billboard, a world of reproductions and merchandise, separate from the real conditions of the highway. At this moment, a dark-haired woman drives by him in a white cabriolet, and George Stevens wants us to believe her to be the materialization of the woman on the billboard. This rich high-school student, played by Elizabeth Taylor, will in fact come to embody for George the promise of upward mobility, which was inspired by the advertisement poster, even while his love for her will also bring about his tragic death. If A Place in the Sun begins with a young man, gazing at a billboard only to play through his phantasmatic realization of the dream it has elicited, the film ends with an equally significant superimposition. We see a close-up of George’s face as he is walking towards the death chamber. He is once more re-playing before his inner eye the passionate kiss he gave the woman for whom he committed murder. Briefly, this image, emerging on his internal screen  – but also on the movie screen – freezes the pathos gesture of utmost romantic joy, sustaining it in our imagination forever (4.7). George Stevens’ radical critique of American consumer culture, embodied by the fatal outcome of the dream of this young man, made in the heart of America, moves in two directions. On the one had, we recognize that the happiness mass culture promises can be enjoyed only as a reproduction – as a billboard or a dream image. On the other hand, we are moved by the resilience, with which Stevens’ protagonist insists on pitting his commercially informed fantasies against his unglamorous everyday reality. At the end of Singin’ in the Rain, we find ourselves at the onset of the sound film era. The young singer Kathy Seldon (Debbie Reynolds),

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Film stills from A Place in the Sun (George Stevens, 1951).

who, up to now, has been kept out of sight behind the screen, giving her voice to the arrogant and self-willed silent movie star Lina, is suddenly dragged into the spotlight by her lover Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly), the male star of the film being premiered. A moment before, Lina was still standing alone in front of the lush red curtain, miming with her lips the words of the title song, while her double, standing behind the curtain, was actually singing the song in her stead. Then Don and his friends, seeking to trick the troublesome prima donna, began raising the curtain to reveal this game of doubles. Horrified, Kathy had initially tried to flee by running into the auditorium, but her lover was able to stop her, singing at her from the stage. He wants the audience to acknowledge the real woman behind the beautiful voice they had heard on screen, even while he also wants to give birth both to a new star, Kathy Seldon. At the same time, at stake is the transformation of their private love story into a public icon of romance. ‘You are my lucky star,’ they assure each other, while the violins in the orchestra underscore the successful fulfilment of both their dream of love and their dream of public success. Stanley Donen’s conception of the American Dream may appear to be more optimistic than George Stevens’, yet he also insists on exposing it as a reproduction. The close-up of Gene Kelley’s ecstatic face seamlessly turns into a billboard representation (4.8), serving as advertisement for both the musical that he and his friends had been composing in the course of the story, as well as for Stanley Donen’s own film Singin’ in the Rain. The camera once more approaches the two lovers, who, for a brief moment, we see doubled; as the actors Gene Kelley and Debbie Reynolds and as two figures on a painted billboard. The camera captures their kiss,

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4.8 Film stills from Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen/Gene Kelly, 1952). the visual insignia for the successful transformation of a love story into the frozen pathos gesture of romance, as well as the transformation of the female character into a star body. They, too, have been consumed by the very signs of romance and stardom they used to orient themselves in their pursuit of happiness. The film ends with a celebration of the murky interface between stereotype and private fantasy, not, however, as in A Place in the Sun, owing to an implicit juxtaposition between a reclining billboard woman, coming alive, and the memory image of a kiss. Rather, at the end of Donen’s musical, we find the couple, reproduced on the billboard, juxtaposed in the same frame with the stars Gene Kelly und Debbie Reynolds. Unequivocally we recognize the representationality of both depictions. Any actual reality remains screened out by the celluloid materiality of a pathos formula of love, pitched to us as a commercial product, always ready for our consumption. My last example from the classic age of Hollywood genre films brings yet another sign of popular culture into play, namely sale signs, urging consumers to buy products that have been reduced in price. Douglas Sirk’s melodrama Written on the Wind (1956) also tells a tale of histrionic passions, explicitly staged as reproductions of true emotions, as he is also concerned with exposing the promise of happiness the American Dream propagates. Typical for Sirk’s ironic distance towards the emotional intensities around which all his melodramas revolve, however, is the fact that the psychic alienation of his protagonist, the alcoholic playboy

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Kyle (Robert Stack), is visually contradicted by the hermetic perfection of his cinematic style, given that it introduces aesthetic defamiliarization into the field of vision. So as to underscore the emotional hopelessness of one of his protagonists, Douglas Sirk will usually include mirrors or window frames, serving as a visual correspondence of the pathos of the story, even while the perfect formalization of the mise-en-scène stands in opposition to the emotions it contains. One scene in particular illustrates the pop stance on display in Written on the Wind. During a moment of anagnoresis, Sirk’s protagonist is surrounded by signs, advertising an immediate mass consumption. Kyle meets his doctor in a drug store, only to discover that he cannot have children at this point in his life. Although, as his old friend assures him, he is not sterile, his physical shortcomings can only be corrected with time, and no guarantee of success can be given. After Kyle rises from his seat, as though in a trance, we see his upper body surrounded by numerous signs, informing us that certain drugs are on sale at the moment (4.9). Douglas Sirk thus uses commercial insignia to visually underscore the emotions of his protagonist, who at this moment is sure his masculinity is also ‘on sale’, having been diminished in value. Because Kyle is forced to recognize the potential failure of his dream of fathering children, the wealth he has inherited from his father, indeed his whole existence as the owner of an oil company, appears to him to be cheap merchandise. After all, the most important product – his own ability to procreate – has proven to be utterly fallibly. At the same time, his marriage

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Film still from Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk, 1956).

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with Lucy (Lauren Bacall), whom he had imagined would save him from his boring life of luxury, has been exposed as being nothing but a cheap drug as well. Anticipating Andy Warhol’s pop-art project, Sirk’s deployment of an abundance of signs reading ‘drugs here’ and ‘sale’, not only explicitly refers to the state of intoxication that goes in tandem with the enjoyment of consumer products. Rather, the abundance of signs also serves as a cruel stylistic comment on the anaesthetic repetitiveness of American culture in the 1950s, given its notorious replacement of real happiness with surrogate, drug-induced excitement. In Douglas Sirk’s world there is no way out, only the immersion in the world of drugstore temptations. A few scenes later, Kyle will return home drunk and lose his life in a last tussle with his rival in love. The claim Roland Barthes made for pop art, thus proves to apply equally well to the use genre films of the classic period made of the insignia and the products of commercialism. The social and cultural critique of both resides in the way they stage a banal agreement between the image and the object it reproduces, even while preserving a cold distance between these two domains.7 Celebrity; or pop art revisited By way of closure, I want to return once more to a core premise of pop art, namely its understanding of realism as a second-hand experience the audience shares, owing to the popular image repertoire they have in common. At stake now, however, is no longer the uncanny enmeshment between products of mass consumption and death, but rather its optimistic counter-part; namely the love for cultural icons. Pop art not only developed strategies that help us read popular culture critically. Pop art also undertook its own cultural critique, primarily in relation to a logic of consumerism, which can be understood as a manipulation of signs. As Baz Luhrmann’s cinematic appropriation of a pop stance suggests, pop art’s engagement with America’s culture of capitalism always also offered a theoretical discussion of how representation works, especially when reality is negotiated as a sign, and realism as reproduction. What Baz Luhrmann’s pop stance has in common with pop art is the enmeshment of his individual aesthetic claims and the language of mass culture. Speaking about his reanimation of old genres, he insists, ‘Stories never change. The way we tell them must change, so that we can re-enliven the ears and the eyes of the audience.’8 For this reason, he sees his work as an attempt ‘to vibe the zeitgeist and work out a way of releasing the

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power of the story’. His cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, which he retells in the language of the MTV video clip, not only foregrounds precisely the commercial value of art that C.L.R. James privileges in his history of American culture in the twentieth century. It also enacts a self-conscious engagement with the ubiquity of media images taken from pop art by staging a distance to these images, rendering them strange. By focusing on the opening sequence from Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996), I am not directly returning to Warhol’s out-takes. Instead, I return to the way love was always one of his favourite themes, albeit its commercialization and vulgarization. At the same time, at stake, once again, is my claim that a pop stance entails playing with expectations of measure and size, which is to say with visual inflation.9 Baz Luhrmann enacts his engagement with the popular language of postmodern industrial culture by literally refiguring the language of Shakespeare’s text, aesthetically refiguring the actual letters from the prologue of his tragedy, illustrating them, fragmenting them, and having them flicker on the screen, visually expanded to enormous size, even while reduced to the pure materiality of the signifier. In interviews, the Australian director has always insisted that Shakespeare could so easily be appropriated for a translation of classic literature into the language of commercial popular culture because as a writer, belonging to the court of the English Queen, he was as much influenced by commercial realities and the popular taste of his time as he was by his individual aesthetic aspirations: ‘He knew he had to come from a personal place but then decode it, in a way in which the child, the adult, the Queen of England could read it.’10 In his cinematic adaptation of the star-crossed lovers of Verona’s story, Baz Luhrmann has recourse to Shakespeare’s dramatic convention of treating the world as a stage, even while translating this trope into the media language of the late twentieth century. The world is no longer nothing but a stage, it is nothing other than a television broadcast. The first image we see at the beginning of Romeo + Juliet is a television screen. Although it is turned on, an image has yet to appear. First we see the name of Luhrmann’s production company on the surface of the screen within the screen, before an anchor-woman, announcing the film we are about to see, replaces these letters. A news label reading ‘starcrossed lovers’ has been spliced into the frame above her head, to signify the theme of the show; a quote that Baz Luhrmann has isolated from

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Shakespeare’s prologue in the spirit of pop art to elevate it to a visual insigne. The camera then moves forward until the television screen fits completely into the film screen. At this moment, the presenter speaks another word segment from the prologue, ‘in fair Verona,’ so as to indicate that the following image sequence is meant as an establishing shot, designating the scene of the action. It is impossible to overlook the complexity of the editing with which Luhrmann accompanies his camera’s lurch into the television screen. Three times he repeats a fast zoom through the streets of Verona Beach, only to return each time to the title ‘in fair Verona’. What follows are more visual fragments pertaining to, yet also defamiliarizing, the classic establishing shot of Hollywood’s continuity editing, offering instead a pop-art demontage. His camera zooms towards and then again away from an enormous statue of Jesus Christ, which will serve as a visual point of orientation throughout the film, as though it were the monument under whose auspices this story of two ‘star-crossed lovers’ unfolds. Other scenic fragments include police helicopters approaching and cops standing next to wounded bodies. With these images, Luhrmann establishes a second frame of reference for his transfer of an old story into a new, popular situation. His adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet takes as its scene the gang wars in Los Angeles (4.10). In one sense, Luhrmann’s refiguration of a classic tragedy within the medium of popular mainstream cinema is a conventional transposition. The television announcer replaces the speaker of the prologue, endowing the narrative voice, commenting on the images we see in the television programme, a similar ability to judge events as classic tragedy does to the voice of the chorus. At the same time, the manner in which Baz Luhrmann both cites and undermines the convention of the establishing shot also indicates an ironic, postmodern game played with conventions. Furthermore, he renders Shakespeare’s play-text popular by visually doubling the violence that the television presenter announces verbally, namely with the help of violent camera zooms and editing, appropriated from the visual language of MTV video clips. Finally, Luhrmann’s interest in a popular revision of this old story consists in foregrounding the mediality of his own staging by including yet another medium, namely the newspaper coverage of outbursts of violence. The feminine voice of the television presenter is replaced by a masculine voice-over, repeating further textual segments from the prologue. In

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Film stills from Romeo + Juliet (Baz Luhrman, 1996).

contrast to the anchor-woman, we do not see this second narrator, who keeps reiterating the first six lines of the prologue and thus also keeps veering towards the tragic outcome we are to expect: ‘the pair of starcrossed lovers take their life.’ While we hear these textual fragments as voice-over, we are shown a visual rendition of the plot of Shakespeare’s tragedy in the guise of a news report. We see the pages of a newspaper, reproducing the strife between the two noble houses in the form of photographs of the two star-crossed lovers’ parents, played by the actors Luhrmann has chosen for his cinematic adaptation. Luhrmann continues to isolate fragments from Shakespeare’s text and use them as headings for the various newspaper reports, intermingling them with

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further visual fragments that illustrate the violence of gang war and police intervention. After the second, masculine narrator has spoken the seminal sentence from the prologue, referring to the unavoidable death of the two lovers named in the title of the play, we move to a different medium one last time, namely that of dramatic stage performance. At this point, Baz Luhrmann introduces the dramatis personae as though to signal that we have seamlessly moved from a television documentary, into which news coverage has been embedded, to a cinematic adaptation of a well-known tragedy. Immediately visible, however, is a poignant exclusion. Neither Romeo nor Juliet are introduced as dramatic characters. Briefly, we see a close-up of DiCaprio’s face, before the first six lines of the prologue are invoked a third time, now literally as word fragments, cut and respliced together into a rapid sequence of text, emerging on the screen, only to dissolve in a further image. If Carl Orff’s music score rhythmically corresponds to the editing of these textual fragments, we must speak of a further gesture of transformation. His Carmina Burana is embedded in the visual style of MTV video clips and thus comes to be presented to us as though it were pop music. At the same time, Luhrmann draws our attention to the specific grammar, emerging from the rapid succession of images, revolving around the violence engendered by a strife between two noble houses. This cinematically rendered star-crossed violence  – perfectly aligning theme with style – proves to be a text from which there can be no escape. This sequence of images, thus my claim, can be taken as a visual recycling of Shakespeare’s words, treating canonical Shakespeare as cultural trash, not only because Luhrmann behaves like a cultural scavenger, feeding on the original text, and in so doing consuming it. Rather, we can speak of a recycling of trash, because his cinematic adaptation insists that the text of the prologue must necessarily veer towards clichés. This establishing sequence does not end, as we would expect, with an image of the two ‘star-crossed lovers’, played by the stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes. Rather, it ends with a rendition of their fictional names, ‘Romeo’ and ‘Juliet’. The interpretation Baz Luhrmann thus offers of the cultural afterlife of Shakespeare’s tragedy insists that the two star-crossed lovers have come to be elevated to the status of a cultural myth precisely because their names have been severed from the names of their parents, Montague and Capulet, whose actual strife, in

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fact, dictates the tragic outcome of their love. As a flash-forward, we proleptically see the self-destruction of these two tragic characters. They disappear into the images that Luhrmann’s film is about to unfold, which is to say their tragic outcome consists not only in their premature death, but also in the fact that they merge into images that, from the start, commemorate the inevitability of their tragic love. Apodictically put, we see the fatal outcome of a love, always already star-crossed, as the words of the prologue insist, before either of the two lovers appears on the screen. With pop-art sensibility in mind, we may well think of Warhol’s vanishing Marilyn Monroe, the postmodern American icon of tragic love par excellence. Baz Luhrmann’s mise-en-scène, however, also refigures pop art’s love for defamiliarization, and along with it its ironic distance from the image repertoire of popular culture. After all, what Luhrmann establishes with his idiosyncratic appropriation of the classic Hollywood establishing shot is the self-reflexivity of his own cinematic enactment. From the beginning, Luhrmann draws our attention to the fact that, precisely because Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet has already been endlessly interpreted, each new staging runs the risk of (re-)producing clichés; of enacting pure recycling. At the same time, his cultural frame of reference  – televised urban street-gang violence  – renders visible another murky interface between actual living conditions and their reproduction in the medium of mass communication, which both evokes and effaces real violence beyond representation. The television show appropriates the sombre tone of tragedy, even while it refigures it in contemporary visual language. These images, in turn, transform into an MTV music video, advertising a product, namely a movie by Baz Luhrmann’s production company. Baz Luhrmann thus appropriates pop art’s treatment of cultural reality as a series of impenetrable visual reproductions even while he also gestures towards precisely the cinematic language that formed the point of departure for this art movement. My claim, after all, is that it is precisely in genre films from the classic studio period of Hollywood that we find scenes, in which the relation between the cinematic reproduction of the world and the real living conditions it refers to is consciously troubled. Hollywood’s masters of the musical, the melodrama, and film noir know how to draw our attention to the fact that all cinematic imitations of life fade before the visual grid

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used to produce them. In the end, all we see are images on the screen. Equally, the American Dream, negotiated and disseminated by pop cinema, also tragically threatens to dissolve into the thin air of the imaginary. The pop stance I am making a claim for thus consists of an aesthetic attitude that insists that the world can only be perceived and transmitted through its reproductions. The distortions, disfigurations, and dislocations thus produced make these images a personal statement and a shared cultural site. They are the images we have in common, precisely because they are so fugitive.

5 HITLER GOES POP Totalitarianism, Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Hollywood Entertainment

In her Essay ‘Fascinating Fascism,’ Susan Sontag describes how, in 1939, Leni Riefenstahl, after returning from a visit to Hollywood, where she had been the guest of Walt Disney, accompanied the invading German Wehrmacht into Poland as a uniformed war correspondent with her own camera team. The photographs she took to document these atrocities seem not to have survived the war, although an image of her shocked face while witnessing one of the public executions has survived. Her filming of the National Socialist Party Convention in Nuremburg 1934 as well as of the Olympic Games in Berlin 1936, in turn have influenced a cinematic language Susan Sontag calls fascist aesthetics. At stake in this art form, she explains, is the extravagant staging of ‘the massing of groups of people; the turning of people into things; the multiplication or replication of things; and the grouping of people/things around an all-powerful, hypnotic leader-figure or force’. Fascist dramaturgy, Sontag goes on to argue, revolves around an orgiastic transaction between powerful forces and those who enact them. It alternatives ‘between ceaseless motion and a congealed, static, ‘virile’ posing. Fascist art glorifies surrender, it exalts mindlessness, it glamorizes death’.1 At the same time, Sontag insists that her concept of fascist aesthetics is not confined to art labelled fascist or produced under an explicitly totalitarian regime. Rather, certain formal structures and themes of fascist art can be found

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in films such as Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940), Busby Berkeley’s The Gang’s All Here (1943), or Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The concept can, however, also be applied to the allegedly documentary films made by Leni Riefenstahl who throughout her life vehemently protested against the charge that she had made propaganda films for the Nazi Party. The fact that one can detect a similarity in cinematic language for such diverse directors as Riefenstahl, Berkeley and Disney as well as a common narrative about the dissolution of the individual into the technological sign belatedly sheds light on the way in which German fascism always also understood itself as a cultural movement. Not only political goals were to be perpetrated, but also a particular concept of what it meant to be a German person was to be disseminated, and – connected to this – the idea that the individual was to become part of a mass body, unequivocally subjected to the will of the political sovereign. Bringing both art and mass entertainment in line with the ideological goals of the Nazi Party was decisive not only for the way in which the new German people were to change the world, but also for the different interpretation of political culture this political party sought to install along with their belligerent actions. At stake, however, was not only the ideology of a people-body (Volkskörper) united under a charismatic leader, but also the manner in which this collective body, cleansed of all racial and class differences, came to be visualized as a political entity so as to sustain narratives about the strength and greatness of the new German nation that were brought into cultural circulation from the early 1930s onwards. At the same time, the formal as well as thematic similarities between Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary films, financed by the Nazi government, and the animated films as well as the musicals that were produced by Disney Studios and Warner Brothers in Hollywood at the same time draw our attention to a somewhat more vexed connection, which joins European and American modernism together with the cultural praxis of totalitarian movements such as the Nazi Party. In his preface to Hitler’s Speeches on Art and Cultural Politics, Robert Eikmeyer suggests that this relation is too complex for us either to declare that the classic avant-garde ended in 1933 (so as to allow it to resurface untainted by all political events in 1945), or to assume that the avant-garde was seamlessly subsumed into the totalitarian movements of the 1930s.2 Is it a question of intention, of style, or of the transported ideologies that makes this connection noteworthy? Should we address

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the manner in which culturally pressing issues come to be visualized and aesthetically resolved, and in so doing inscribe themselves into the political imaginary, as Susan Buck-Morss has shown in her comparison of American and Soviet mass utopias in the 1930s?3 Or should we rather focus on the political consequences that follow from artistic works, so that their material usage as propaganda is at stake? I want to offer a crossmapping of the three film directors Susan Sontag mentions as examples for what she calls fascist aesthetics so as to explore the uncanny interface between aesthetic innovation, pop culture and totalitarian art projects at the acme of modernism. All three filmmakers transpose the spirit of the totalitarian movement into the domain of cinematic mass culture in the period leading up to and moving into the Second World War. My comparison of the documentary film Olympia (Leni Riefenstahl, 1938), the musical Dames (directed by Ray Enright, with dance numbers created by Busby Berkeley, 1934) as well as the animated film Bambi (Walt Disney, 1942) focuses on the manner in which the cinematic language of all three directors re-articulates some of Hitler’s seminal political concerns within the visual tropes of pop culture: the celebration of the immaculate, triumphant body, able to perform supreme physical feats; the production of a new human as emblem for an intact social body (Volkskörper), immune against decay; the construction of an artificial world that promises to ward off all dissolution of time and space. However, drawing attention to the analogy in both the visual form and the narratives of these three films necessarily also means foregrounding their seminal differences. Not only do these three directors differ in their intentions. Rather, both Busby Berkeley and Walt Disney consciously undermine the very fascination for a totalitarian aesthetic that they also celebrate in their joyous enactment of mass body formations. I claim that it is not only fruitful but critically necessary to bring to bear a film language that in the case of Leni Riefenstahl explicitly served the purposes of a totalitarian political system on the films Hollywood produced at the same time, even if American visual culture emerged from a social order that was precisely not totalitarian but rather aggressively democratic. At the same time, to insist on a connection that leads from Busby Berkeley and Walt Disney to Leni Riefenstahl not only means sharpening our sensitivity for totalitarian analogies, as these came to inscribe themselves in very different political imaginaries. Rather, it also means taking note of the manner in which art and cultural visions triumph along the lines of what Nietzsche called the emergence of moral

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judgment. A set of values, he argues, gains dominance by re-interpreting the cultural values already in existence, by confiscating and reformulating them so that they might serve a new purpose, and – by virtue of this appropriating – redirecting them.4 If such diverse directors as Berkeley and Riefenstahl similarly stage the technical mechanization of the human body, we must also ask how far one can take any analogy in the way in which they re-interpret and re-formulate the relation between the modern subject and her or his reification. At what point must one insist on a decisive difference between these cinematic projects? As Bazon Brock argues, at the heart of totalitarianism lies the claim that it consists in a force that insists on realizing its ideas by transforming them into political reality.5 Following this definition, I suggest that the difference between diverse artistic expressions fascinated with totalitarianism might well reside in the way we evaluate the reality they produce on screen, which is to say the reality they transform into a world of visual signs: Is it aimed at politic consequences, at commercial success, or does it unfold as a self-reflexive play of signifiers? If we turn to the ideas to which Hitler, in his speeches on art and cultural politics, ascribes the force of producing reality, the following schema emerges:  Ways of seeing the world (Weltanschauungen) shape cultural life insofar as poets can sing of precursor poets only if heroic times allowed these to emerge. Unheroic times, in turn, force heroes to descend into the lowly ordinary of everyday existence. For this reason, a permanence of the heroic (in the sense of a transhistorical energy) must be pitted against the possibility of the decay of any particular cultural moment’s concrete worldview. With this claim for the survival of the spirit of the heroic, Hitler has recourse to a belief in the eternal value of the ideals of antiquity, prevalent in the writings of cultural critics at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. In his essay ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’, Matthew Arnold already foregrounded the notion of disinterestedness in relation to ‘all questions of practical consequences and applications’ as the quintessential trait of the good critic. According to him, the work of both the poet and the critic should instead consist in knowing ‘the best that is known and thought in the world, and by in its turn making this known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas.’ In short: ‘to produce fruit for the future’.6

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What is, however, idiosyncratic in Hitler’s schema of the resilient afterlife of cultural ideals of perfection is the fact that he locates the permanence of the heroic in the immutability of racial inheritance, using the cultural survival of classic ideals of beauty as his example. The material appearance of paintings and sculpture from ancient Greece testify to the immortality of these past ideals, but do so, however, only – and that is the decisive point  – as long as people with a similar hereditary predisposition (because they share a similar racial descent) continue to exist. As future spectators, they will recognize the sublimity of this art from the past and attest to its eternal value. Hitler’s rhetorical trick consists in the claim that the preservation of the ability to appreciate artistic expressions of the heroic is tantamount to its production in relation to both the past and the future. On the one hand, a contemporary artistic practice based on esteeming heroic values must bridge the gap to the equally heroic times of the past. On the other hand, Hitler’s notion of culture is aimed less at art works themselves. Rather, his concern is for the production of a future audience that will subsequently recognize the heroic times represented by the Nazi period. The wager of contemporary art and cultural practice is that in retrospect, future spectators will attribute an ideal perfection to the art works of the past even while, in so doing, they actually come to produce this heroic quality as an aftereffect of belated artistic appreciation. The rhetorical gesture celebrates the future perfect: These art works will have been perfect. In his critical comments on Hitler’s writings on art, Boris Groys notes that the totalitarian art work seeks above all to produce a corporate body of spectators who as future art consumers will guarantee the survival of a heroic hereditary predisposition adopted from antiquity. This future audience that contemporary art is to bring forth is defined as a group based on the affective responses it shares with the immortal achievements of antiquity. It identifies with their past ideals, which have, however, survived primarily owing to their externally recognizable and material appearance. The translation of this cultural energy into tangible paintings and sculptures allows the spirit of the past to affect an audience long after the culture that produced these artefacts has ceased to exist. Race, taken to be the innermost, constant kernel of cultural transmission, thus emerges as the cipher for a successful transhistorical transfer of cultural values and cultural knowledge. According to Hitler, hereditary predisposition allows cultural taste to survive genetically and thus

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serves as a safeguard that a future body of spectators will retrospectively be able to recognize the cultural achievements that a past people was able to produce.7 In his speeches on art, Hitler is not concerned with the present and its particular economic and cultural demands. In the sense of Matthew Arnold’s disinterestedness he, instead, develops a mythical notion of culture that explicitly seeks to disengage itself from the inconstancy of real historical times. Contemporary art is to appropriate the immortal spirit, to confiscate and re-interpret it. In the present, it is to create for the future an artistic materialization of the immortality of ideal perfection postulated by art critics. It is, thus, only logical that Hitler emphatically rejected all notions of style, declaring all new fashions to be an untenable threat to the healthy development of humanity as he saw it. In contrast to Ezra Pound, enthusiastic supporter of Italian fascism, who appealed to his fellow artists to ‘make it new’, Hitler’s art politics was not concerned with what was novel, innovative and indeed, up to that historic moment unheard of. Unwittingly walking in the footsteps of the Victorian poet Matthew Arnold, he sought instead to draw attention to the best that a past culture had always already thought and created. Caught up in a rhetorical short circuit, Hitler’s totalitarian logic claims that the heroic proves to be a cultural value that has always already been in existence and will always continue to exist, precisely because one and the same racial kernel bridges the past, the present and the future. At the same time, one will only be able to determine belatedly whether a particular historical moment was able to produce immortal heroic achievements, namely when, owing to the persistence of such a racial kernel (which will allow future audiences to recognize past aesthetic ideals) the best that can be thought and created will have been preserved from decay, demise and oblivion. In his speech at a conference on culture during the party Nazi Party Convention in Nuremburg on 1 September 1933, Hitler explained: ‘Even if a nation is extinguished and its people fall silent, the stones will speak as long as there are other people who have a similar understanding of culture.’8 In the temporal loop, in which the present produces the conditions that will allow the past to have a cultural survival and thus affect the future, the spiritual energia of art meets its pure materialization. Everything depends on the survival of a material artefact, conceived as the bearer of a given set of cultural values, as well as the survival of an aesthetic taste, which will guarantee that this perfection will always be

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recognized by those who share it. A particular understanding of culture is eternal because it has survived a catastrophe and is able to resurrect itself out of its ashes. But one could also say that only the catastrophe, which must be outlived, actually allows one to recognize what was beautiful and perfect in the past. The demise of a particular culture emerges as the precondition for determining that its ideals have, nevertheless, survived. The resilience of a particular cultural effect is predicated on this loss. In his speech on 5 September 1934, also given at a conference on culture in Nuremburg, Hitler proclaimed that the dimensions of a cultural will to power can only be understood belatedly, namely as force ‘that had been great because it undertook to create the greatest things possible.’9 Boris Groys poignantly notes that the eternity Hitler addresses is ‘the eternity of the ruins’ that remain after a given civilization has been destroyed.10 Let me come back to the three directors whose fascist tendencies I  want to analyse. Leni Riefenstahl begins her opening sequence of Olympia (1938) with a cinematic rendition of the time after the demise of one of the West’s most significant cultures  – ancient Greece (5.1). Her images of a temple in Olympia can be understood as an illustration of Hitler’s theories of art. With the help of her signature montage technique, Riefenstahl enacts the survival of the spirit of antiquity by focusing on the way it has lived on in its material monuments. Her camera

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Film stills from Olympia, Phase 1: Die Ruinen der Akropolis (The Ruins of the Acropolis) (Leni Riefenstahl, 1938).

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captures the spirit of past ideals of perfection and reanimates what has remained of the great Greek architecture and sculptures even while documenting the fact that these ruins are eternal. She uses superimposition to lead over from a close-up of the fresco painting of two athletes to the clouds moving across the sky above the temple, and then pans along the stony relics of this ancient cult site. So as to foreground the eternity of these ruins, Riefenstahl juxtaposes different visual perspectives of this sacred building. Her montage enmeshes various external views of the walls and columns, overgrown with grass and bushes, with views of the temple’s interior while the panning movement of the camera visually underscores the transhistorical continuity of the space. At times, her camera glides along a façade, then it again traverses the interior, circling around a column, only to then move outside and depict the external structure of the temple in a long shot. The first longer camera pan ends as Riefenstahl moves into an extreme close-up of one of the columns, thus dissolving this antique cult site of worship into its pure materiality, into the stone that has outlasted all historical changes. After all, her aim is to use her filmic language to make these stones speak. A second superimposition draws our attention to the sculptured bust of a man standing in one of the rooms of the temple as though it had been extracted from the stone surrounding it (5.2). Initially,

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Film stills from Olympia, Phase 2: Die Marmorköpfe und -statuen (The Marble Heads and Statues) (Leni Riefenstahl, 1938).

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Riefenstahl’s camera cautiously approaches this stone head seemingly standing alone in the open interior. Then the director changes her miseen-scène and, panning along several columns inside the temple, once more glides her view upwards into the sky, heralding the beginning of a new sequence of images:  the superimposition of several close-up shots of statues, meant to illustrate the eternal value of antique ideals of beauty. Once more, her camera pans along these externalized embodiments of the spirit of antiquity while her montage juxtaposes the individual marble bodies into one visual unity. One has the impression that they all flow together into one image body, produced by virtue of Riefenstahl’s editing technique. Faded into the background, we see clouds moving across the sky, signalling that the nebulous spirit that eternally envelopes this ruined cult site has been incorporated into Riefenstahl’s cinematic re-animation of antique stones. As in the first sequence, which captures the external walls and interiors of the temple, the camera once again pans towards the stony materiality of the deceased Hellenic culture so as to move around the individual statues. Only – in contrast to the establishing sequence – the space is no longer filled with sunlight. Instead, the individual statues that, owing to the superimpositions used to depict them, seem to be dissolving into each other appear as though exhibited on a dark stage, beyond any real location in time and space. In this artificial exhibition space, where Riefenstahl comes to enact her gothic reanimation of the past, the statues – enveloped by a cloudy fog  – appear to have come alive again (5.3). They speak to us with a ghostly presence. What the montage calls forth are not individual figures but an embodied corporation as form, which is to say a group of

5.3

Film stills from Olympia, Phase 3: Verwandlung der Statue in Sportler (Transformation of the Statues into Athletes) (Leni Riefenstahl, 1938).

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figures combined into one cinematically produced image body. At the same time, the effect of the montage is to add spiritual re-animation to the illusion that an arsenal of cultural artefacts has been spared from the inevitable force of transience and decay. The gliding movement of the camera produces the impression that the statues, which its spirit seems to have reanimated, are now themselves moving on the screen. Riefenstahl visually underscores her appropriation of the immortal spirit of the past by virtue of the spatial design of this sequence, namely the dark background, the chiaroscuro lighting as well as the fact that she continues to superimpose foggy clouds onto the individual statues. Indeed, her reanimation is tantamount to an embodiment of a particular cultural value’s eternity, namely that of ideal beauty and perfection. The internal racial kernel Hitler praises in his speeches on art – meant to guarantee a hereditary predisposition to recognize and create the best and greatest in the future – thus finds its materialization in the sublime statues that, having outlived the downfall of antiquity, are recognized and commemorated by this modern German(ic) director. Once her camera has reached the sculpture of a discus thrower, Riefenstahl shifts to a corporeal embodiment of the spirit of antiquity (5.4). Seamlessly, stone turns into bodies made of flesh and blood as though the two materialities were interchangeable. After all, decisive is

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Film stills from Olympia, Phase 4: Die Sportler (The Athletes) (Leni Riefenstahl, 1938).

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Film stills from Olympia, Phase 5: Die “Geburt” des Olympischen Feuers (The “Birth” of the Olympic Flame) (Leni Riefenstahl, 1938).

merely the transmission of a hereditary predisposition. Statues draw on the energy of the past to produce the perfect body of the contemporary German athlete, and he, in turn, generates a cascade of images. In the same manner in which, in the previous sequence, one individual statue brought forth the next one, so too, in this sequence, one sport gesture engenders the next: The discus thrower transforms into a javelin thrower, who in turn becomes a runner, until these muscular men are replaced by female gymnasts, performing their morning exercises. Out of the rhythmic body movements of these naked woman, who in turn come together to form one monumental formal corporation (or totalized body unit), the Olympic fire is finally brought forth (5.5), and with it the mass entertainment spectacle of the torch race that Joseph Goebbels thought up for the Olympic Games of 1936 in Berlin. The bodies of the German athletes, reduced to their hard corporeal materiality, serve to bridge the lighting of the Olympic fire and the immortal spirit of the past whose belated recognition makes for any contemporary recognition of the heroic in the present (5.6). In Riefenstahl’s popularizing cinematic language, eternity comes to be enacted as the visual transformation of stone into flesh and then fire, which, with the help of montage and superimposition, welds everything into one totalizing image body. What emerges is precisely the synthesis between

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Film stills from Olympia, Phase 6: Die “Rückkehr” zu den Ruinen (The “Return” to the Ruins) (Leni Riefenstahl, 1938).

appropriateness and beauty that Hitler praised in his speech at the Nazi Party Convention in Nuremburg in 1934: We are happy enough to know that between the Greek alphabet and the runic characters of our forefathers a visual correspondence exists in their great sense of style. Once more we look in admiration upon the great people of antiquity, upon their achievements in the domain of human culture and particularly in art. As a people, they are far removed from us, as members of the Indo-Germanic racial community, however, we see them as forever close.11 Riefenstahl’s montage offers a perfect illustration of the compromise Hitler demanded of art between a sober assessment of pertinence and the intimation of perfection. As Boris Groys notes, for Hitler the artwork was primarily ‘a form in the world of forms’. He conceived art ‘not as a message, but rather as a body, engendered by another body, namely the body of the artist’, only to be appreciated and consumed by yet another body, namely the implied spectator of the future.12 One issue Hitler’s claim for a persistent cultural valorization of perfection raises is the fact that the artificial engendering of bodies is often negotiated over the notion of an eternal feminine beauty. This brings me to my second example, the musical Dames (1934), directed by Ray Enright. The young, ambitious songwriter Jimmy Higgins (Dick Powell) wants to put on his first Broadway show, with his beloved Barbara

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Hemingway (Ruby Keeler) playing the lead part. Her uncle, a millionaire who is to fund this enterprise, is initially against it. Jimmy, however, uses the visually spectacular optical illusion of the final show number ‘I Only Have Eyes for You’ to beguile him. The ruse works, the millionaire provides the necessary money, the songwriter gets his break on Broadway and can marry his beloved. The show number, decisive in bringing about this happy ending, directed by Busby Berkeley, begins with Barbara picking Jimmy up from work. They walk to the subway together while his song, explicitly calling his love for her ‘an optical illusion’, charms the world around them and transforms it into a transhistorical site, divorced of all material transience. It is a virtual space of desire, comparable to the dark exhibition site in the inaugural sequence of Riefenstahl’s Olympia. The singer only has eyes for the woman he loves even while he is self-consciously aware of the visual enchantment into which he draws his beloved by virtue of his enthusiastic song. After the two lovers have sat down in the subway, all the other passengers disappear. A  fantasy scene of uncanny intimacy is about to begin. The two lovers share a world of enchantment, whose charm consists in the fact that it explicitly screens out reality. Barbara, the object of the singer’s loving gaze, soon falls asleep. Jimmy, who continues to sing, moves his charmed eye away from her and, in so doing, transfers the beautiful body of his beloved to the advertisement for a cosmetic article hanging in front of him on the other side of the subway car. As his eye moves from one poster to the next, he repeatedly reproduces her images even while he uses this illusion to besing the eternal value of his own poetic creativity. Suddenly all the other advertisement posters, which he looks at through his love bedazzled gaze, reveal the only face he has eyes for. From all around him the woman, sleeping at his side, is smiling back at him as a consumer commodity. We must, however, ask ourselves who actually is dreaming the following show number – Barbara, who has indeed fallen asleep, or Jimmy, staring around himself in utter enthusiasm, as though her spirit had taken over his imagination. What is about to unfold before our eyes is, of course, the birth of the glamour star Ruby Keeler, namely as the commercial fabrication of a thoroughly cosmetic – not natural – beauty ideal. The boundary between the young woman and the reproduction the poet’s love for her inspires has become fluid. We encounter a cinematic enactment of the world of visual forms in which bodies incessantly engender new bodies as though

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they were on a conveyor belt in Hollywood’s image factory. Decisive, however, is the direction that the power of the singer’s idea, seeking to realize itself, takes in Busby Berkeley’s staging of the eternal value of feminine beauty. This musical enactment of an endless reproduction of the feminine body explicitly claims for itself that it is aimed only at a world of aesthetic forms, and at an optical illusion to boot. The advertisement image transforms into a multiple reproduction of Barbara’s face (5.7). The enchantment, which unfolds before our eyes as a visual infatuation, goes in tandem with a fragmentation of her body as well as a screening out of the real models, whose faces were initially on the advertisement posters. Instead, one face, recalling Ruby Keeler’s, turns into many super-sized faces that suddenly appear in front of a black background, and – in line with the gothic tone – begin to spectrally move on their own. Only after a while do we recognize that a multitude of show girls, whom we do not initially see, are holding these masks of Ruby Keeler’s face, and are thus the actual motor behind this visual spectacle. Slowly, one layer of mask faces, which screens out the actual bodies of the show girls, is peeled away to reveal a second layer, until in one grand movement, all masks are tilted forwards, producing a multitude of tulle skirts (5.8). Only now do we actually come to see the corporation of showgirls, all resembling Ruby Keeler. Each one is now holding a detail of the total glamour image, advertising a star, underneath the front part of

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Film stills from Dames (Ray Enright and Busby Berkeley, 1934).

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Film stills from Dames (Ray Enright and Busby Berkeley, 1934).

her skirt, swinging both the cloth and the image it now covers back and forth. Individualization and reification replace and supersede each other because all the showgirls are part of totalizing body geometry; materialized image bodies we can only recognize as external figurations. At the same time, we are dealing with what Sigmund Freud came to call the

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uncanny, given that Busby Berkeley explicitly plays with a fluid boundary between the animated and the deanimated woman, between the image and the body, as well as between individual singularity and a mass or corporate totality, drawing all separate bodies into one unity. In the midst of the anonymous showgirls, we repeatedly see the individual star Ruby Keeler before she once again dissolves into the total body of all the dancers, as well as the totality of the staging. Busby Berkeley’s brilliantly composed optical illusion thus reveals two sides. On the one hand, his show number elevates the individual actress to a glamour star and in so doing guarantees her immortality. On the other hand, this performance reduces the individual woman to a part in his choreographed glamour body machine. The high point of the show number is the moment in which all the showgirls once more raise their skirts, covering their faces with this part of their costume. Busby Berkeley’s camera captures this moment as a top shot, so as to reveal a monumental reproduction of the face of the musical star for whom alone the singer has eyes. The birth of the glamour star is complete even as it emerges as a puzzle image, the amalgamation of many different fragments. In this spectacular transformation, a multitude of anonymous showgirls engenders the glamour image of the female star. Owing to the uncanny oscillation between musical performer and image body we have seen unfold on the screen, the star Ruby Keeler proves to have a double origin. She is the product of the charmed gaze of the love-enthused singer, but she is also the product of the technologically perfect choreography performed by the other showgirls. The birth of the glamour star onto whom everyone’s attention is now drawn – on stage, off stage, and on screen – is revealed to consist in the mechanic transformation of many women, each carrying one detail of the total image in front of their faces, into a super-sized image body. These show girls, coming together into a unified body image, collectively engender this glamour image, even though they have also been subsumed by it. They are no longer in the picture, even though their bodies are literally holding the picture. However, not only the individual bodies of the show girls are dissolved into the totalizing gesture Busby Berkeley deploys to celebrate the birth of his glamour star. The star image itself is immediately transformed. Once more revealed to be nothing other than a fabricated picture, it engenders a new cycle of showgirls resembling it. Busby Berkeley

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not only turns the screw of his optical illusion one notch further by self-consciously pointing to his game with commercial media images. After his camera has paned forward into an extreme close-up of the pupil of the puzzle image of his glamour star, a new chain of reanimations sets in. Phallically, Ruby Keeler emerges from her own super-sized eye, painted on cardboard, only to be immediately transformed again into an image – a mirror reflection, to be precise. After we see the back side of the mirror she is holding in her hand, we are suddenly back in the subway with the sleeping beauty whose face inspired the entire optical illusion. First, we see the two lovers from the front, then from behind, with shadows on the screen, and thus as a cipher for the game of light and shadows that is the magic of cinema itself. The stylistic similarity to Riefenstahl’s film can hardly be overlooked. A chain of feminine bodies, engendering themselves, formally opens up on the screen and, as a corporation (qua embodied unity), takes on the status of an immortal, explicitly cosmetically produced ideal of feminine beauty. Many bodies come together to form one perfected body, which, because it is declared to be special, rises above them, even while it is incessantly reappropriated by the group. At the same time, the oscillation between totalization and fragmentation seems to have been taken to the extreme. The poet, his artwork (the show number), and his audience have also come to be united into an affectively charged, incorporated body that shares its enthusiasm for this optical illusion. The cultural value of the eternal has been confiscated in the sense that, with this show number, the songwriter is propagating his art form even while he anticipates his commercial success on Broadway. However, the refiguration that Busby Berkeley celebrates unfolds an interminable loop, welding together self-advertising and artistic creation. His art, rather than giving voice to a past ideal of beauty, speaks of the transferal of the beautiful feminine body into a glamour image that ultimately inundates the entire stage. As such, it serves as propaganda for itself; for the show number promoting the film Dames, as well as for this particular musical film promoting the musical genre together with mass entertainment in the 1930s in general. And it is propaganda for a transhistoric process, resisting the laws of fugacity and transience. In his sonnet 18, Shakespeare claims that his poetry has the power to immortalize his beloved: ‘So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee’.13 It is this trust in the eternal value of the

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art form that Busby Berkeley attributes to the musical genre. As long as there is a cinema audience willing to enjoy his idiosyncratic formalization of feminine beauty, this scene of a glamour star’s birth will be attributed to his choreographic genius and as such will survive the ephemeral world that brought it forth. In retrospect, one will recognize the greatness of his idiosyncratic staging of showgirls in the fact that the body images he came to design and choreograph have continued to affect our cultural imaginary. If, on the level of style, a visual analogy to fascist art theory unfolds, one must nevertheless insist on the following difference: Hitler’s actual politics stood in contradiction to his ideas about art when it comes to precisely the point of I have sought to trace in my discussion of Busby Berkeley’s choreography. Stéfani de Loppinot correctly points to the fact that Berkeley’s career with the US military (six years in a military college close to New York City, three years as second lieutenant and trainer in the First World War) greatly influenced the way in which he came to direct his female troops on Broadway and in Hollywood after the war. At the same time, she emphasizes that ‘the bodies of the show girls, lined up like tin soldiers, embody a situation of passage, a united body which keeps changing, and which suddenly swerves off in unexpected curves.’14 In short, what Busby Berkeley reveals to us is a gigantic optical illusion in which an embodiment of the idea of eternal feminine beauty and its mechanical transformation into cinematic image bodies mutually implicate and replace each other. The totalized body that subsumes individual showgirls into a united corporation remains in constant movement. The only message Berkeley’s grandiose choreography transmits is one concerned with an untiring pleasure in partaking in the oscillation of seductive feminine bodies and their visual formalization. Fascist politics, by contrast, were acutely concerned with a message whose consequences were horrifically real. What followed upon the reification of the individual and his dissolution into the united body of the willing subject – which Riefenstahl filmed at the Nazi Party Conventions and transformed into montaged sequences at her editing table – was an irrevocably and unquestionably real dehumanization and extinction of human beings on the battlefield and in concentration camps. How these two sites relate to each other remains an open question. To show that the formalization of unified body figurations (where individual bodies become part of one embodied corporation) was one of

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the seminal concerns of modernism is the heuristic gain of the crossmapping I am proposing. At the same time, by confronting Riefenstahl’s fascist aesthetics with Berkeley’s choreographies, I am equally concerned with drawing our critic attention to the fact that in the arena of politics, the gesture of totalization must be judged to be fundamentally differently than in the arena of art. The transferal of bodies into the pure materiality of the artistic sign cannot be seamlessly equated with the dissolution of the human body into an ideological message as it was performed in sites of mass extinction. Modernism was concerned not only with endowing art forms with materiality, but also with both the dissolution of the body into an aesthetic sign as well as the extinction of the artistic sign in pure abstraction (such as Malevich’s black paintings) as the logical consequence of an aesthetic project of artistic auto-poesis. For this reason, the vexed interface between avant-garde innovation, popular culture and modernism leads ever more deeply into a self-reflexive mediality – even if there can be no doubt that these virtual sign systems had cultural effects and ideological implications. Hitler, by contrast, held his last speech on art on 16 July 1939, at the opening of the ‘Great Exhibition of German Art’ (Die Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung) in Munich. After this, he sought to enforce a different, extra-aesthetic reality by transposing his notion of the totalized artwork (Gesamtkunstwerk) into his politics of destruction and cultural demise. Perhaps this explains why he had nothing more to say about art after 1939. Let us, however, return to Walt Disney, whom Riefenstahl left that year in order to work as a war correspondent in Poland. On 8 December 1941, Disney’s studios were taken over by the American war department. During the next four years, he supported the war effort with countless training, educational and propaganda films for the armed forces, made to help raise money for the war and at the same time boost the moral of the American people.15 Indeed, during the war years, he depicted Snow White’s seven dwarves selling war bonds (1941) and Donald Duck’s nightmare visit to Hitler’s Reich in The Führer’s Face (1943), with the distorted language of dreams offering a caricature of fascist politics. My interest in exploring the murky interface between entertainment culture, avant-garde film language and totalitarian politics will, however, be played through with a different film, whose morally uplifting sentimentality can likewise be ascribed to the war effort of the Disney Studios. In Bambi (1942), made one year after the attack on Pearl Harbor,

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another analogy between Hollywood’s image production in the 1930s and Hitler’s speeches on art can be found, precisely because the film also makes the claim that a hereditary predisposition serves as a guarantee for the successful transmission of eternal cultural values. The scene, in which Bambi meets his father for the first time, revolves around the idea that a taste – inherent to a racially more perfect creature – will serve as the binding and trustworthy bridge between the generations. As young Bambi and his female playmate watch the more mature deer practicing their athletic jumps in the meadow below, they intuitively recognize the beauty and strength of this display of physical prowess. Without quite knowing why, indeed as though he had instinctively recognized gender difference, Bambi suddenly sends away his female playmate. Propelled by a genetically inherited ability to imitate what is great in others, he in turn tries, albeit timidly, to copy the noble leaps of the older deer. Decisive about this scene  – conceived as a rite de passage  – is, however, the fact that owing to the affective predisposition that Bambi has inherited from his father, he is also able to instinctively recognize the greatness of the Great Prince of the Forest even before he discovers his actual blood relation to this leader of his community. Initially, Bambi sought protection from the wild leaping of the other deer, hiding inside a hollow trunk of a tree. When, however, they suddenly stopped in their gleeful exercizing, he followed them onto the meadow. There we see a rather frail Bambi, standing next to a small bush, close to but not part of the unity that the older deer have come to form. All gazes are aimed at the approach of the figure of paternal authority, although – in contrast to the others – Bambi is astonished. Significant about the scene is, once again, the choreography. While the older deer were exercizing, Disney showed them jumping and running in various individual groups. Once their leader descends from the forest and approaches them, however, they come together to form a closed embodied corporation, recalling the phalanx of a fighting unit. Now, only their heads move in perfect unison, their united gaze tracking the movement of the Great Prince of the Forrest as he silently passes by them. He approaches his son, looks at him intently, as though in recognition, and, without uttering a word, returns to the forest (5.9). The movement of the deer – cipher par excellence for the medium of animation film – has come to be arrested into a tableau in which two figures, who are not part of the group formation, foreground the closed

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Film stills from Bambi (David Hand, 1942).

unity of the embodied corporation precisely by virtue of being outside it. Disney thus offers a visual enactment of one of the core themes of the story of Bambi. A taste or affective predisposition that can instinctively recognize what is beautiful and noble  – be it the celebration of athletic prowess or the sovereignty of a figure of authority – testifies to the successful transmission of a racial kernel. When Bambi was born, all the other animals of the forest immediately recognized in him their future leader. In a meeting between Bambi and the Prince of the Forest later on in the film, the preservation of a political embodied corporation is, in turn, once more portrayed as the transferal of power from one generation to the next. This political inheritance requires – thus Disney’s claim – a discursive formation of leadership predicated on an embodied group unity of subjects who accept the authority of their sovereign. Put another way:  On the level of biology, the community of deer assure their survival by virtue of a procreation of their race; on the symbolic level, however, by virtue of the difference between phalanx and leader. It is along this line of demarcation that the heroic can be passed on from father to son in a two-fold manner. In the meadow scene, Walt Disney conceives of both father and son as figures that are separate from precisely the group that gains both its visual and narrative meaning only from its relation to them. The leader, for whom alone all those surrounding him have eyes, as though he were the glamour star of this scene, anticipates the position that Bambi will assume at the end of the

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film. Owing to the monumental stillness of the other deer preceding the approach of the Great Prince of the Forest, Bambi, in turn, immediately recognizes his symbolic mandate, even if at this point in his story he cannot yet articulate that he is destined to be the next leader. After the Great Prince of the Forest has once again departed, he can merely tell his mother in awe: ‘He stopped and looked at me.’ Within the first year of American military involvement in the Second World War, Walt Disney in Bambi creates an encounter between a leader and his athletic troops (as well as between the leader and his chosen successor) in which the symbolic body of the sovereign comes to be engendered by the unity of his subjects. Only by virtue of individual bodies coming together to form a single, unified political body can the figure of paternal authority be produced on the screen. Furthermore, Bambi pits a notion of immortality against the particular death with which all the animals of the forest are threatened on the diegetic level. As Bambi discovers from his mother, all the other deer respect the Great Prince of the Forest because his courage and wisdom have helped him survive the dangers of the forest longer than any other animal living there. Indeed, it is he who, in a later scene, will help his son escape from the meadow minutes before the hunters begin their gunfire. At the same time, however, it is the pure materiality of this animated figure – which is to say the fact that it consists only of lines and colours applied to paper and brought into motion by virtue of the film projector – that preserves the cartoon figure Bambi against precisely the inescapable transience of the world his story unfolds and whose affective kernel is the death of his mother. Apodictically put, the drawn lines and colours that appear on screen outlast the fictional world that the art of animation raises so fleetingly before our astonished eyes; much as the cartoon figure Bambi is able to sever itself from his film story so as to become one of the most resilient cultural icons of America. In Walt Disney’s work, the gesture of totalization that turns individual figures into objects only to subsume them into a formal unity at whose centre we find an icon of paternal authority thus undergoes a significant refiguration. The survival of this community of deer on the diegetic level as well as the survival of the cartoon figure Bambi as a star who will continue to have an audience in the future is not limited to the transmission of a racially inflected hereditary predisposition. It also involves the transfer of a symbolic mandate of leadership from one

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Film stills from Bambi (David Hand, 1942).

generation to the next, which explicitly celebrates a democratization of political power. In the final scene of the film, we see the wise old deer sharing his position of power with his son. Together they look down on the meadow before the father quietly leaves the scene (5.10). On the extradiegetic level of the film, however, the eternal cultural resonance of both the Great Prince of the Forest and his son Bambi is assured by virtue of the animated drawings. It is, of course, only logical that all of the animated figures should ultimately dissolve into the totalizing formal language that can only rely on the external, material appearance of the characters it creates and brings to the screen. However, these animated figures are also preserved for any future audience watching this film – precisely because of the animated lines and colours that gave and continue to give body to them. What does it mean that 1930s popular culture chose to appropriate totalitarian art concepts so seamlessly, so creatively, but also so idiosyncratically? And what does it meant that fascist concepts of art could be confiscated and re-figured so unproblematically? The Marxist literary critic C.L.R. James suggests that the neuralgic issues in twentieth-century American culture are not to be found in (post-)modern literature, but rather in Hollywood films, jazz and comic strips. According to James, the murky interface between the aesthetic concerns of avant-garde art and modern entertainment culture results from the fact that with the emergence of the commercialization (and thus also the radical popularization)

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of mass entertainment, a decisive enlargement of aesthetic premises took place. These had to include artistic products that were explicitly produced for a mass audience as well as for business people.16 In Dames, Busby Berkeley explicitly addresses the way in which financial backing influences the Broadway musical shows that can be put on. At the same time, the star body to which he gives birth – even while the show uses it to promote itself and make a profit – is radically different from the athletic bodies Leni Riefenstahl celebrates in Olympia. While Riefenstahl focuses our attention on the transmission of cultural values by superimposing stone, bodies and fire, Berkeley actually produces a new image body by fusing individual show girls into one unified – albeit uncanny – body sign that incessantly oscillates between an animated advertisement of a beautiful girl and a dissolution of her multiple reproduction into pure visual form. Put another way, Riefenstahl enacts the notion of eternal cultural values Hitler postulates in his speeches on art as a pathos gesture, which can be passed down from antique sculptures to the modern German athlete. The survival of this spirit of ideal beauty is, however, predicated on the actual demise of the culture that produced these artistic artefacts. Berkeley’s choreography, by contrast, opens up a completely ahistorical art site, along with the self-consciously fugacious visual magic he unfolds in this scene. The star body, rendering the spirit of feminine beauty immortal, is not a fixed entity, but rather as much an optical illusion as the love the songwriter feels for his beloved. Ruby Keeler’s appearance as a glamour star arises from an advertisement poster, and it turns into a silhouette at the end of the show number, signifying unequivocally that everything was but a play of light and shadow. In Walt Disney’s world of animation, an ironic appropriation of Hitler’s claim for a hereditary predisposition for taste – which makes for an intuitive recognition not only of what is great and beautiful, but more importantly of the sovereign leader as well – attributes these eternal values to a cartoon figure; a creature of even less substance than the advertisement poster of a young musical star, because there is no actual reference to this figuration. What in Riefenstahl’s cinematic illustration of Hitler’s notions regarding the cultural survival of classic ideals reveals itself in the Germanic athlete’s body is reduced in Disney’s imaginary world to drawn lines that only the film projector sets into motion.

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Thrown back to the surface of the film image, we find ourselves affected by mere image effects of the monumental. What moves us are image traces that flicker on the screen before they disappear again into pure light. Fugacity is inscribed into the medium of film as much as the spectral haunting, which allows us to trust in the survival of cultural values and to speak about the eternal value of ideal image forms. In the arena of the art of cinema, all totalizing unities irrevocably dissolve again before our eyes. To turn our critical attention once more to the murky interface between totalitarian art forms and the avant-garde concerns of modernity means to insist on the decisive differences that are contained in a fascination that, in the 1930s, American popular culture had for the transfer of bodies into monumental formal designs. Perhaps it also means reminding ourselves what we should once more – and time and again – pay attention to.

6 SIMULATIONS OF THE REAL Paul McCarthy’s Performance Disasters

Gore Vidal calls movies the lingua franca of the twentieth century and wryly notes: ‘today, where literature was movies are.’1 By implicitly referencing Sigmund Freud’s dictum that where the id was, the ego shall be, Vidal not only points to the cultural shift that has assigned to film the position literature once had, but he also foregrounds the fact that this is a question of assuming a place, of designating a site. Movies, after all, make up a virtual stage, even though they are the result of a complex apparatus linking conception, design, production, and reception; much as the mature ego is conceived by psychoanalysis as the result of an interplay between conscious and unconscious forces, played out on the field of the psychic apparatus. Both owe their power to the fact that they rework reality. Movies produce alternative realities by turning the complexities and incoherencies of real social and political situations into coherent protective fictions where cultural antagonisms can seemingly be resolved. The psychic apparatus, in turn, sustains itself by producing fantasies that resolve the conflict between effectively laden drives and individual desires on the one hand, and social laws and restrictions on the other. At the same time, the cultural imaginary – commodified and brought into circulation by Hollywood – and the personal fantasies of individual consumers of these icons and stories are mutually inflected. While the projections and identifications that mainstream cinema offers

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us give structure to our private dreams, the stories, images, and characters commercially generated by Hollywood or Walt Disney feed on and transform the anxieties and desires of its intended audience. Individual fantasies respond to and rewrite our cultural imaginary, while Hollywood turns history and political realities into universally meaningful stories that can be sold at great profit. Movies thus emerge not only as our lingua franca, but also as one of our culture’s most vibrant symptoms. Contemporary issues are picked up by Hollywood and transformed into mythic narratives that either sustain or criticize the politics at stake. At the same time, the collective dreams that Hollywood produces function analogously to individual dream work because both emerge as the site where repressed material can come to be articulated. If dreams are, according to Freud, always to be thought along the lines of wish-fulfilments, the satisfaction they afford relates to forbidden desires and affects. With the help of a rhetoric of distortion, dreams can speak what the conscious subject has been forbidden to acknowledge directly because their representations deploy strategies of condensation and displacement. In a similar vein, Hollywood films use stereotypes and clichés to give voice to issues that bother American culture at a particular time. The distortions produced when oversized bodies  – and body parts cut into close-ups  – are projected on screen remind us of the way our dreams emphasize and reshape aspects of the everyday into grotesque nocturnal narratives. Both give voice to unease, but do so by foregrounding that they are simulations; by having recourse to a mode of representation that is different from – and in excess of – common reality. Yet while the happy ending prescribed by Hollywood ultimately sublimates all transgressive film thoughts into a sanitized public narrative, dream work veers toward desublimation. If, upon waking up, we remember the thoughts we had in our dreams, we are often more puzzled than comforted. Paul McCarthy, who has come to be known for appropriating images and narratives from the culture industry, looks to Hollywood not simply for entertainment. His interest instead lies with the way cinema structures reality. In the most banal sense, this pertains to the simple battle between good heroes and evil villains and the triumph of reputability over perversity that genre films like westerns and pirate movies put on display. In a more abstract sense, McCarthy’s interest involves invoking the gesture of pretence Hollywood studios stand for – the way scenes

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are story-boarded, props and sets built, cameras and lighting installed, actors cast according to type – in order to produce an alternative reality recognizable as such. It is Hollywood’s sophisticated play and the suspension of disbelief this affords that hold his interest. In this he takes his cue from Wendy’s memorable line in Walt Disney’s Peter Pan (1953), asking us to clap our hands to signal that we simply believe in the magic transformation her wand conjures up. Indeed, the performances Paul McCarthy has been filming for his Pirate and Western project explicitly recall the way children pretend to be Cowboys and Indians even as genre cinema turns this game into a mythic narrative with universal meaning. Yet although McCarthy re-uses old film sets and even employs people from Hollywood to construct his props, his ultimate aim is to make all neat ordering of the world collapse. While his sets, sculptures, and filmed scenarios feed off Hollywood’s play as performance and pretence, structure turns into chaos once his camera begins to roll. In Pirate Party (2005), for example, we see a leg being cut off and know it is not a real leg, because we are also shown what any Hollywood director would edit out, namely that it is a prosthesis. Paul McCarthy asks us to believe that a leg is being cut off anyway. At the same time we are meant to recognize that the performance is exaggerated; we are called upon to suspend not only our disbelief but also any connection between the play of destruction unfolding before our eyes and mimetic reality. In his discussion with Mark Sanders, Paul McCarthy explains: I knew I wanted to appropriate Disneyland in some way, the park, sculpture, and the rides. I was interested in the fake structures and landscapes. The fake Matterhorn, it was so American, an all-white, sterile environment and promotion of colonial purity.2 Yet the point of his simulations is to dismantle the sanitized alternative realities our culture industry offers us. His carnivalesque and explicitly ridiculous performances privilege a transformation of the pure into the impure. Masks and prostheses reshape the ideal bodies we know from advertisements – as well as from Disneyworld and from Hollywood films  – into grotesque composite figures. These come to be covered with fluids such as ketchup, mayonnaise, HP sauce, or chocolate to recall blood and shit, even while their surface appearance is slowly dismantled. Paul McCarthy follows the visual

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rhetoric of dream language by placing centre stage what Hollywood’s dream factory rejects. His deconstruction is such that while stars normally don the mask of glamour to cover up all physical imperfections and conceal any discrepancies between the stereotypical image they embody and their actual selves, McCarthy’s performances script and enact what does not fit the purified image. He appropriates the masks, body gestures, sets and scenarios of Hollywood so as to uncover what lies beneath its masquerade; namely drives and affects that  – while utterly playful – are always also destructive. Yet, even while McCarthy’s intention is to collapse boundaries between the pure and the impure, between stable identities and their dissolution, he does so by working within parameters of Hollywood’s gesture of pretence. Given that the materials he works with  – the masks of Hollywood idols or consumer goods like ketchup and HP sauce  – are themselves cultural materials, at stake is not a dismantling of culture per se, but rather its icons and the cultural values they represent. These notably pertain to an obsession with cleanliness and perfect order that can exist only because it shuts out anything that would contradict it; notably sexual violence masked as heroic prowess or the aggressive creativity that goes under the name of progress. In his effort to turn clean surfaces inside out and expose their visceral contents, McCarthy takes leftovers from Hollywood abandoned pieces from sets, but also image scraps from movies and advertisements, and recomposes them into collaged representations meant to bring back the ugly messiness that commodity culture tries to repress. As he frames Hollywood for the crime of constructing clean hyperrealities whose entertainment distracts us from the complexity of real situations, he does so, however, by virtue of a set-up. His sets – and the performances that we find screened there – pit dirty excess degenerating into chaos against slick aesthetic formalizations. Yet they are as over-sized and fake as Disneyland, only explicitly excessive, selfconsciously stereotypical, wilfully artificial. As a result of the exaggeration they display, they represent a gesture of desublimation within the parameters of a culturally codified stage. Apodictically put, Paul McCarthy fuses the language of dreams fabricated by Hollywood with that described by Freud to produce his own dreamscape because he senses that it is on the set of the cultural imaginary that we discover and negotiate our desires and our fears.

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While one might be tempted to understand this merely as a personal obsession with the toxic underbelly of the sublime idealization aesthetic formalizations afford, there is something specifically American about Paul McCarthy’s play turning into disaster. The discovery of America, as well as the conquering of the West, were, after all, always conceived as a performance. When the pilgrims first set foot on American soil, it was like walking onto a stage. They had come to think of themselves as chosen by God to cross the ocean on an errand to found a New Israel. The land they embarked upon was, thus, never simply a geographic site. Conceived as a land promised to them, it was the site where they were to fulfil the right to ascent and salvation found in the texts of their prophets. America, one might say, always had a mythic and a performative beginning. As Stanley Cavell notes, ‘before there was France and England, there was France and England; but before there was America there was no America.’ This America, he adds, ‘was discovered, and what was discovered was not a place, one among others, but a setting, the backdrop of a destiny. It began as theatre.’3 We must, therefore, think of America not only as a project where individual struggle is conceived as the fulfilment of destiny. We must also remember that as audacious as the thought of realizing a divine mission by settling a continent may have been, this project was from the start fraught with a sense of fragility. If America was the result of the early Puritans having imagined a destiny for themselves, it had to continually be fought for and realized over and over again. The dilemma of America as a project of self-fulfilment thus consists of the fact that any current state must constantly be tested by the fantastic promise of its origin. The optimism required to sustain a constant struggle for reconfirmation was and continues to be held in check by the fear of failing the initial promise; by the terrifying sense that this dream is on the verge of being lost or has actually been lost already. But the optimistic belief in transforming a geographical site into a stage on which a divine destiny of self-fulfilment could be played out has also been  – and continues to be  – held in check by a second factor. Serving as the seminal metaphor for continual struggle, the frontier  – both as a reality and as the imaginary landscape into which the Western genre transformed it – points to the way any performance of the American Dream always also required the deployment of violence. Like the initial settling of New England by the Pilgrims, life on the frontier was always conceived as the secular realization of a divine mission;

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imposed upon but also accepted by those who chose to go out west. This brought with it a restless and creative ambition to seek out what was new, to discover and civilize uncharted areas, to test the limit of what was possible. But the performance of a Manifest Destiny, which claimed the expansion into western territories was both beneficial and inevitable, was always also determined by an arrogant belief that what one found there could be appropriated for this divinely ordained errand. Indeed, moving west came to be tantamount to a willingness to risk everything – one’s own life and the lives of others – if this was the price one had to pay for the American Dream to come to be fulfilled. One might thus speak not only about the promise but also the tyranny of this mission. If the settlers placed their hopes for ascent and prosperity out west on the assumption that it was their right to pursue personal happiness, they were also constrained by the sense that they had to fulfil this mission. Furthermore, while the freedom the uncharted territories in the West represented served as the source for a fantastic trust in prospective prosperity, this belief often required a blindness to the world at hand. Its result was at best the blind force necessary to overcome all odds; at worst a refusal to adjust to the reality of a situation if this contradicted the dream. Indeed, the tragic irony of many legends about the frontier resides in the fact that even though conquering the west was an expression of the American belief in a pursuit of personal happiness, it required a ruthlessness towards oneself and others that often culminated in sacrificing individuals to the larger vision. Indeed, if nothing  – not even personal survival  – is a price too high for the performance of a Manifest Destiny one must accept as one’s fate, then the world of the frontier can be nothing other than a battlefield. As the backdrop of a destiny, the frontier corresponds to a world in which one can either win or lose when measured up against the expectations one’s destiny dictates. On this set, one can triumph or be overcome by stronger forces. But in all cases, the creative energies released by the unlimited freedom uncharted land allegedly promises are inevitably welded to aggression, strife, and destruction. For the settlers, appropriating the land as they moved ever further west not only meant killing (or subjugating) those who had prior claims to it. Rather, the blind force required to settle in the west at all costs transformed the fragility of the American project into a concrete experience of failure. At stake was not merely the fear that one might not live

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up to the promise of the divinely ordained mission. Rather the settlers were continually faced with concrete setbacks that put the viability of the symbolic definition of America as a stage for performing this divine errand quite literally – and horrifically – into questions. Writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the actual frontier had already disappeared, Frederick Jackson Turner nostalgically recognizes a perfect example for American vibrancy and resilience in the spirit of those who sought to conquer it: That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom – these are traits of the frontier.4 Using the same historical material, Paul McCarthy in turn chooses an incident like the Donner Party to find in the frontier as a metaphor for America a more horrific message. George Donner, a prosperous farmer from Illinois, led his family and a train of other settlers along the Oregon trail in 1846, made every mistake possible  – overloading the wagons, starting out too late in the year, taking a foolish shortcut that brought the party into the desert – and ended up trapped by snowfall. What began as a grand possibility ended in disaster. For lack of food, those who survived resorted to cannibalism and only forty-seven people ultimately came to be rescued. But if America was always conceived as a stage for the realization of a divine destiny, once its frontier was no longer a geographical reality, a new frontier was born. On the edge of California, Hollywood set up studios simulating the makeshift towns and fortresses of the West so as to transform a history that was mythic to begin with into genre movies. From the very beginning, the Hollywood studio system not only produced stories with sentimental and romantic happy endings to assuage on the level of celluloid myths the antagonisms of class, race, and gender which could never be resolved fully in social reality. Rather they also from the start created mythic characters willing to destroy everything in order to gain celebrity, prosperity and recognition. Western plots design

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outlaws who rob and kill for fortune, who hold entire towns at ransom in order to fulfil their personal manifest destiny. These films ceaselessly depict battles between the US army and the indigenous population, whose demise is as inevitable as the success of the project of expansion itself. But they also commemorate rogue heroes who fight against corrupt settlers, savage Native Americans and the forces of the wilderness all in one, in order to bring civilization to the west. These lone cowboys will take the law into their own hands if this is necessary to get the job of lighting out the territories done. They sacrifice themselves willingly for the vision of a civilized west even though they themselves can never be part of this transformed, domesticated world. The new cinematic frontier thus emerged in the course of the twentieth century as backdrop for an ideological narrative about how new worlds with new customs can only be created if old ones are destroyed. Innovation, so vehemently valorized by America’s belief in a divinely ordained destiny  – and the Hollywood films created to support this myth – required ceaseless struggles with the past as well as with old codes and laws when these no longer seem adequate in a world that has been changed with the times. While Hollywood westerns focus on the violence inherent in the creative energy of the western hero, they turn real situations of disaster into protective fictions with happy endings that reinstall hope. Paul McCarthy appropriates precisely this gesture of turning the frontier – conceived as a set for playing out the settling of the west – into a film set that replays this moment of American history on celluloid. With his emphasis on architectural design, literally taking ready-mades from prior Hollywood sets for his own installations, or reconstructing sites like the fort, the saloon, or the wagon trail, McCarthy produces a third frontier; simulating Hollywood’s simulation of a frontier that was from the start itself theatre. Fully imbued with the frontier dialectic of creativity and violence, he brings disaster back onto the stage. As he re-enacts Hollywood’s appropriation of the frontier, he offers a playful destruction of its fixed icons. In contrast to films by John Ford, Robert Altman or Sam Peckinpah, which came to nostalgically dismantle the myth of the West in order to point out the horrific price in human loss this megalomaniac vision demanded, there is no pathos in McCarthy’s performances; only black humour and puerile fun. As chaos comes into its own again, he targets American masculinity in crisis; notably the rogue kernel of US culture, where sexual

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repression and violence prove to be two sides of the same coin. But even though McCarthy dismantles the infantile and phallic obsessions of Hollywood’s second frontier, he remains within the parameters of the frontier logic, with its deployment of violence in the performance of its dream. As he focuses on excessive expressions of sexuality and creative destruction repressed by Hollywood’s refiguration of the frontier, he also appropriates its martial gesture. Adrian Searle, writing for The Guardian, astutely calls him ‘some out-of-control general, intent on destruction’5. Yet precisely by focussing our attention on structures that no longer function, Paul McCarthy also reveals his debt to the Founding Fathers of America. Foregrounding the fragility of their dream, he calls upon us to recognize that the megalomania and excess of their fantasies were always a protection against the sense of impotence that was engendered by the pressure of having to live up to the fantastic promise and possibility of the American project in the first place. McCarthy asks us to recognize that, since the American project was always theatrically conceived, and since one of its key metaphors – the frontier – has been culturally transmitted through movies and advertisements, any critical engagement can take place only by invoking the gesture of pretence. It is in the arena of the imaginary that cultural battles are fought. Here Paul McCarthy is the pirate, stealing images from culture industry, and he is also the cowboy who does not fit in, violent in his violation of the iconic figures that America produces to sustain its order. Yet even while he stages excessive assaults upon his set and those performing in it, he remains within the representational confines of what he attacks. If the project we call America was always theatrical, only appropriating, recycling, and refiguring the image repertoire that determines its parameters can manage it. Any artist working within this domain can only imagine a constant struggle at cultural redefinition and a ceaseless encircling of the traumas that haunt its history and its imaginary. Artists cannot conceive of any revolutionary departure from this theatrical terrain. Interrogating the limits of the clichés and stereotypes this mythic project has produced, Paul McCarthy is bent on recognizing the limits he is set – and bent on making us see them as well. One can only push beyond the limits of our commodified cultural imaginary by opening up another artificial frontier. One can only stay within the logic of pretence. Therein lies the promise, but also the fragility of all dreams and nightmares of America.

7 WAGNER’S ISOLDE IN HOLLYWOOD

Richard Wagner’s score for Isolde’s Liebestod aria has had an astonishing if unexpected cultural survival in classic Hollywood cinema, where, adapted by several film genres, the pathos of the libretto has, in the course of its refiguration, been subjected to significant reconceptualizations. In Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), the passion of his Nachtgeweihte, Tristan and Isolde, in what is probably the best known appropriation of this motive, undergoes a deconstruction that discloses the sadistic aspect of a romantic intimacy that radically repudiates the symbolic laws of the ordinary everyday.1 If the fatal repetition-compulsion – inherent to Wagner’s notion of Liebestod (as this requires the death of at least one of the lovers) – proves to be a compelling necessity in Hitchcock’s psychothriller, at issue is a debunking of the necrophilic hero, Scottie Fergusson (James Stewart). The death of Judy Barton (Kim Novak) emerges as the logical consequence of an insistence on eliminating, at all cost, the everyday constraints of desire that, by virtue of their symbolic restriction, inspire Scottie’s fantasy that she impersonate a dead woman in the first place. I have chosen Hitchcock’s recourse to Isolde’s Liebestod in Vertigo to determine the historical time frame for the following discussion because this musical theme already appeared in Hitchcock’s 1930 film Murder! In this early sound film, however, the aria functions as a contingent event, due to which an unjust court decision can be corrected and a murder

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case properly solved. Between these two films, Wagner’s Liebestod score also had a cinematic revival in the melodrama, not least of all because this genre’s happy ending (comparable to the resolution of the psychothriller) also requires some form of sacrifice. In classic Hollywood, the transcendence of death that Isolde celebrates in her final aria usually, however, concludes in a surmounting of death and a return to the ordinary. In yet two further genres – film noir as well as the biopic – a victory of the diurnal laws is pitted against the fatal ecstasy that makes up the grandiose apotheosis in Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde (1865). I have chosen Vertigo – the historically latest example – as my point of departure for my tracing of Isolde’s cultural afterlife in Hollywood not only because, in this psycho-thriller, Wagner’s Liebestod appears merely as a musical allusion, but also because this reference renders visible the sustainable genre memory that has come to be attached to this musical theme. At issue in my proposed crossmapping, however, is no direct citation of the Wagnerian score on the part of the different soundtracks but an intertextual reference, a tonal signifier that banks on a recognition of the Liebestod music, which includes the prelude as well as the love duet in the second act. As such, the passages from Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde that have found their way into the soundtracks to be discussed include Isolde’s final aria along with these other passages from the opera. Key for my argument, in turn, is the following wager: By making use of a brief allusion to the Liebestod theme in his score for Vertigo, the composer Bernhard Herrmann (like all those preceding him) can rely on the fact that the audience will recognize Wagner’s musical language. At the same time, all the previous cinematic deployments of this theme implicitly resonate in Hitchcock’s narrative composition too. In Vertigo, Scottie, having re-discovered in Judy a woman who uncannily resembles Madeleine Elster (also played by Kim Novak) – his former beloved whom he believes he was unable to prevent from jumping off a church tower – forces upon her a lethal make-over. Unaware that he has been abused by his friend Gavin Elster in a scheme to kill his wife – and thus oblivious to the fact that both women are, in fact, the same person – Scottie makes Judy over to resemble the dead woman, forcing her once more to wear her elegant grey costume, dye her hair blond and put it up into a bun. Judy initially resists changing back completely into the Madeleine Elster she had previously impersonated, insisting on a margin of difference. When she returns to her lover, waiting for her in her hotel

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room, her hair is still open. Scottie, however, can only be satisfied with a perfect replica, obliterating all difference between model and copy. He sends her to the bathroom to fix the last imperfection – her open hair. So as to musically underscore the narrative transfiguration of Scottie, caught up in a state of erotically charged expectation, Hitchcock ascribes a psycho-diegetic function to the intonation of the Liebestod theme on the soundtrack. The interaction between music and image is such that they reveal a dialogue between the melody and the emotional condition of the hero such that the music seems to spur on the realization of his fantasy. Wagner’s Liebestod cadence sets in while Scottie is impatiently waiting for Judy to reappear, finding its first musical acme as she passes over the threshold, and, cast in green light, slowly walks toward him in the guise of a dead woman returned from the grave (7.1). Along the lines invoked by Isolde in her final aria, Scotty and Judy/Madeleine transcend death in the long embrace that follows. The commonplace hotel room, scene of this magical transformation, disappears and as a rear projection we see once more the stable in front of the Spanish mission, where Scottie held Madeleine in his arms just before she ran from him: allegedly to commit suicide when, in fact, Elster throws his murdered wife off the tower instead. Bernhard Herrmann’s score re-iterates the rising cadence of the Liebestod theme, using it as a psycho-diegetic indicator not only of Scottie’s erotic enjoyment, but also as Hitchcock’s refiguration of the libretto, as this has recourse to a significant gender cross-over. Not the

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Film still from Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958).

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transformed woman but Scottie himself is in the position of Wagner’s heroine, flooded with waves of desire. Like Isolde, asking ‘Hör ich nur diese Weise, die so wundervoll und leise […] in mich dringet’, he, indeed seems to be the only one hearing Herrmann’s citation of the Wagnerian melody, while Judy is fully engrossed in their kiss.2 Scottie is also the only one to notice the phantasmagorical change in scenery as the camera, panning around the couple in a 360-degree angle, cinematically re-enacts the swelling waves of musical bliss in which Isolde imagines herself to be drowning:  ‘ertrinken, versinken  – unbewußt  – höchste Lust’.3 (7.2) While the libretto leaves open whether, in sinking gently onto Tristan’s body, Isolde seeks to fuse with him in death or whether, by virtue of extreme identification, she is merely simulating his demise, Hitchcock’s mise-en-scène deconstructs the opposition between actuality and psychical reality on which this uncertainty is based. While the camera revolves around the couple – engulfed in their lethal embrace – Judy (recalling Tristan’s corpse) is presented as an inanimate body, energetically propped up by Scottie’s arms. They are, like Wagner’s Nachtgeweihte, in a world beyond the ordinary (Welt-entronnen), yet our astonishment pertains to the necrophilia on which this fantasy is predicated. The ‘höchste Lust’ (highest desire) Scottie sinks into with his kiss, is one explicitly shown to draw life from Judy. What he desires is to take possession of death by virtue of an embodiment of a woman resurrected from the dead.

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Film still from Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958).

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Feminine sacrifice Significant about this mise-en-scène is, however, not only the fact that Alfred Hitchcock, as will be shown in more detail, is citing one of his own early sound films revolving around a hero who is in love with a doomed woman. Rather, he is also invoking the diverse manner in which this melody has been deployed in Hollywood since the beginning of the 1930s, and thus inserts himself into the story of the recycling of a musical citation that would have been familiar to an educated audience in the 1950s. Two years after Hitchcock’s Murder!, Frank Borzage uses Wagner’s Liebestod in the final scene of his cinematic adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s novel A Farewell to Arms (1932) so as to underscore the pathos of the thwarted happiness of his romantic couple. The nurse Catherine Barkley (Helen Hays) has fled to neutral Switzerland so as to give birth to her child, doing so without telling the father, Lt. Frederic Henry (Gary Cooper), whom she had married in an Italian field hospital. Desperately in search his vanished wife, he finally manages to discover the hospital to which she has been brought. On a stormy night, he manages to cross over the Lago Maggiore into Switzerland and, after daybreak, appears at her bedside. In A Farewell to Arms, Wagner’s Liebestod functions as the musical accompaniment for the farewell between two people whose love was meant to offer a promising counterpoint to the mass death of the First World War. The music sets in the minute the doctor, standing next to Helen Fergusons’s sickbed, shakes his head in resignation after one of the nurses told him that the husband of the dying woman is impatiently waiting outside. The camera moves into a close-up of an enraptured Catherine, assuring those who have gathered around her deathbed that she had always known Frederic would find his way to her. Accompanied by Wagner’s mournful music, the doctor tells her that she has very little time left to live and allows her to receive him. In this case, it too makes sense to speak of a gender cross-over. The heroine is in the position of the wounded Tristan, while Frederic, comparable to Isolde, has travelled across water so as to be present at his wife’s death. Before he enters, Catherine applies make-up to her face in order conceal from him her true state of health. Subsequently, she initially assures the man, who is gently bending over her, that she is doing well. After she has asked him to sit close to her bed, a last intimate conversation between the two sets

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in, as, in a close-up, the camera captures the two faces that are almost touching. Initially, Catherine recalls images of the happy future that they had hoped to enjoy together in America once the war was over. Soon, however, she confesses that she is on the brink of dying and asks Frederic to once more hold her closely in his arms. During this change in mood, a dialogue emerges between the voices of the two lovers and an instrumental version of Wagner’s Liebestod music, which affectively underscores what it is that they are saying to each other. At the same time, the soundtrack – given that it operates with a doubling of spoken dialogue and extradiegetic music – also marks the shift from silent to sound cinema. The camera remains close to the two faces, but captures both the hand gestures and facial expressions that accompany their conversation. As in silent cinema, the melodramatic effect of the scene works even when one does not fully understand what they are saying to each other. What is important is simply that the script has adapted Wagner’s Liebestod to the affective formulas of a bourgeois marriage tragedy. As the music increases in pathos, the couple, recognizing the inescapability of death, moves from false hope to despair and fear, until, in a final speech act, they bond over a declaration of their love’s immortality. With her last breath, Catherine assures her husband – once the music has reached its ecstatic climax – ‘in life and death, we’ll never be parted’. Radiant light floods the scene from the right edge of the image and, for a brief moment, shows us her beatific gaze before she finally closes her eyes. With the next shot, the camera moves away from the deathbed, thus drawing attention to Frederic’s reaction. In despair, he takes the corpse of his wife into his arms and embraces her one last time. In contrast to Wagner’s libretto, Liebestod is understood literally here as the act of dying for love. Catherine not only dies because she cannot give birth to the child that was conceived during the war, but also so that her corpse can serve as an embodiment of the sacrifice on which the onset of peace is predicated. Briefly, Milestone interrupts the emotional intensity of this private deathbed scene, and inserts a short montage sequence celebrating the end of war. We hear and see church bells ringing as well as the cheering of a jubilant crowd, behind whose shadow for a brief moment a poster with the inscription ‘Armistice Declared’ can be seen. Like snowflakes, leaflets float down from the sky into which – superimposed over the ringing church bells – two white doves fly. After this short interruption, Milestone

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returns to the dramaturgic climax of the deathbed scene; which is to say both to the finale of the orchestra version of Wagner’s Liebestod and to a performance of love transcending death, to which, with her dying words, Catherine had given authority. Frederic, turning away from the camera, takes the corpse of his wife into his arms again and moves towards the big window through which the rise of dawn can be seen. With his back to us, he twice mournfully calls out the word ‘peace’, thus offering a far less cheerful interpretation of the end of the First World War than the one depicted in the montage sequence (7.3). Unlike Isolde, Frederic does not, however, sink in rapture onto the corpse of his beloved, but instead holds her in his arms as corporeal evidence of the sacrifice that he, too, has been compelled to make. His vocal articulation of the newly won peace is not marked by ecstasy but by deep sorrow. If the sounds of peace had initially interrupted the Liebestod music, these are once more superimposed over the Wagnerian theme on the soundtrack. The deathbed scene bleeds into an image of a cloudy sky, into which a flock of white doves fly. At first we simultaneously hear the church bells and the last accords of the Liebestod theme, then only the sound of the orchestra, while the filmed image of the sky is replaced by a painting depicting the break of dawn. The words ‘The End’ appear superimposed over this painting.

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Film still from A Farewell to Arms (Frank Borzage, 1932).

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Two points about the refiguration of Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde in Frank Borzage’s A Farewell to Arms are striking. Firstly, the music not only accompanies the final conversation between the two protagonists, but also leads from the film narrative’s representation of the heroine’s death to the superimposition that declares the extradiegetic termination of the cinematic spectacle. At the same time, the montage is such that a notion of private, mournful love – conceived as transcending death – comes to be fused with a historic commentary on the end of war. The death, the surmounting of which is celebrated with the last image of the film – the painting of a sunrise – imagines the world of peace as one that is irrevocably marked by traces of the sacrifice in human lives it is predicated on. In Jean Negulesco’s Humoresque (1946), Richard Wagner’s Liebestod music also accompanies a narrative in which an ecstatic embrace of death gives voice to the desire on the part of the heroine to transcend the ordinary everyday. And as in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the citation of this composition is deployed psycho-diegetically so as to mirror the emotional state of the heroine and embellish her transition from life to death musically. In the final scene, Helen Wright (Joan Crawford) commits suicide to the strains of this melody by walking into the ocean below her beach house on Long Island. Because this alcoholic hysteric from a rich family has come to realize that her tempestuous relationship with the violinist Paul Boray (John Garfield) is hurting his career, she is ready to make the sacrifice of which Wagner’s libretto repeatedly speaks. For this reason, she has not gone to New York City to attend Boray’s concert in Symphony Hall, as she said she would, and instead calls him on the telephone just before he is about to go on stage. She has already turned on the radio station, broadcasting his performance. In response to Paul’s angry reproach that, by staying away, she has caused him to worry about her and, in so doing, is consciously undermining his performance, she appeals to him in desperation: ‘Listen to me!’ Still holding the telephone in her hand, she turns toward the window and describes for him the solitary calm enveloping her as she looks out at the nocturnal seascape. Along the lines of a melodramatic refiguration of the abandonment of the world – the dream of Wagner’s Nachtgeweite – Helen describes the boat she sees far out on the ocean and confesses to Paul: ‘I wish we were on that boat, so far out that we couldn’t see anything but sky and water. Nothing more.’ Yet she is compelled to recognize that she cannot share

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this fantasy of a mutual escape; a detail that can be read as a refiguration of the passage in the libretto when, in the final act, Isolde asks those who have assembled around her and Tristan’s corpse, ‘Fühlt und seht ihr’s nicht? Höre ich nur diese Weise?’4 Distressed at the fact that, in his anger, Paul has not been listening to her, Helen quietly reproaches him: ‘You didn’t hear.’ Although he immediately promises her that he will come to her as soon as the concert is over, he hangs up before she, in turn, can assure him of her love. Sobbing, Helen puts down the telephone receiver and goes to the adjacent room, pours herself a drink and toasts herself, while the radio host announces Paul Boray’s entrance, explaining to his listeners that the violinist will perform his own transcription ‘of the love music from Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde’. With a lap dissolve, during which, for a brief moment, the conductor’s baton is superimposed over the pensive face of the heroine, the film narrative moves into the concert hall, beginning with a shot in which we first see only Boray’s left hand, holding the instrument that will bring forth his transcription of Isolde’s voice (7.4). The mise-en-scène in Jean Negulesco’s Humoresque thus works with an implicit connection between the heroine’s thoughts as she tarries alone in her beach house and the transcription and interpretation of the Liebestod (beginning with the prelude) that her lover has begun to perform in the concert hall. At the same time, the actual Helen, to whom

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Film still from Humoresque (Jean Negulesco, 1946).

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Film stills from Humoresque (Jean Negulesco, 1946).

Boray was not willing to listen (and who – because he did not wait to hear her confession of love – has fallen silent as his lover), is being replaced by the musical instrument, the voice of which Paul literally holds in his own hand. Soon the camera leaves the concert hall behind, returning once more to Helen. While visibly struggling with her thoughts, she continues drinking whiskey, refilling her glass several times before she finally decides to walk out onto the veranda, from where she gazes at the moonlit seascape. The camera then returns to the concert, making use of a lap dissolve that superimposes a close-up of Helen, battling with herself, with a medium shot of Paul, who, for a few bars, has paused in his performance (7.5). Once he begins to play again, a second lap dissolve places the violin, shot from below, into the lower right side of the screen, casting a long shadow on the face of the musician, while, in the upper left part of the screen, the face of the heroine rises up, signalling her decision. In contrast to Borzage’s final sequence in A Farewell to Arms, the music/image interaction does not complement a dialogue between two characters, but instead functions as a psycho-diegetic commentary on the imaginary conversation the heroine is having with herself, even while – and in this the script follows the libretto – in her thoughts, she is completely fused with her lover.5 Inspired by the music on the radio, Helen, in passing, picks up the flyer announcing Paul’s concert with her left hand as she leaves her living room, then moves down the stairs to the beach and walks across it until she has reached the shore. Owing to the distance to her home, she can, at this point, only imagine the sound of the violin’s voice, and yet, accompanied by this internalized music (which the audience hears

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extradiegetically), she walks along the water, still caught in an internal struggle. At times, the camera captures her in a long shot from the top, at times from the side, with the waves surging in the background. Then, at the musical climax of the Liebestod theme, in perfect visual correspondence, the editing offers a triple shot/reverse-shot sequence. First, the camera moves into a close-up of Helen’s face, then, moving in the opposite direction, it approaches the waves, only to return once more to the heroine, moving into an extreme close-up. Then, as though it now were her eyes, the camera returns to another image of the surging waves. One last time, the camera moves even closer to Helen’s face, now out of focus as the shot concentrates on her eyes. The visual correspondence Humoresque finds for Isolde’s last words (‘In dem wogenden Schwall, in dem tönenden Schall, in des Welt-Atems wehendem All – ertrinken, versinken – unbewusst – höchste Lust’) is such that we first see only Helen’s figure as she, walking into the water, allows the concert flyer to fall from her hand.6 In the reverse shot, a wave breaks over the camera, which, as though representing the heroine’s dying gaze, sinks down into the water, all the way to the bottom of the ocean, while air bubbles rise around it (7.6). The deployment of the Wagnerian music underscores the transition into death which the cinematic image can only represent as the moment before and the moment afterwards – a woman walking into the ocean and her disappearance. At the same time, the camera visually completes what the sound of the violin only indicates: the selfdissipation of the heroine in an ecstatic embrace of death, which, for a brief moment, leads the mise-en-scène itself (and thus our

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Film stills from Humoresque (Jean Negulesco, 1946).

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spectatorial gaze) to the vanishing point of cinematic spectacle, namely a completely black screen. Then the camera returns to the flyer, abandoned on the beach, drawing our attention to the waves washing over it, before moving into a medium-long shot of the seascape and finally a lap dissolve juxtaposing an image of the waves that have absorbed Helen with a close-up of Paul’s face. Completely immersed in his music, he is playing the last moments of the Liebestod on his violin. While we hear the audience enthusiastically applauding his performance, the camera remains with his face, which has assumed a sinister expression owing to the fact that a dark shadow is cast over his eyes. One last time Negulesco deploys a lap dissolve, leading from the face of the violinist to a view of the waves, breaking on the shore, where Paul – several hours later – stands, a dark silhouette, gazing out over the ocean. As in Frank Borzage’s A Farewell to Arms, the death of the heroine emerges as a necessary sacrifice. The successful career of the violinist Paul Boray is negotiated over Helen Wright’s corpse. The final image, which moves seamlessly from the musician, standing on stage at the end of his concert, to the death scene of his beloved, is, by contrast, far more ominous than the desperate survival of Borzage’s war veteran. In yet another sense, however, Wagner’s Liebestod functions as the line of connection between Paul’s successful performance in Symphony Hall and Helen’s lethal performance in the ocean behind her beach house. After all, it was his violin, heard on the radio, that inspired her to commit suicide. At the same time, in Humoresque, the question to whom the psycho-diegetic soundtrack might be ascribed is not as unequivocal as in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. To whose thoughts does the Liebestod-music correspond? Only to Helen’s or perhaps the thoughts of both of the lovers? Is the music, which Helen continues to hear through the end, an articulation of the fantasy of escaping from the world she had conveyed to Paul during their last telephone conversation? Or is this music an expression of his desire that she disappear so that he might dedicate himself to his art unimpeded by her demands on him? Or do these two fantasies emerge as two sides of the same coin? Given that the lap dissolves repeatedly draw attention to a visual correspondence between Helen’s face and Paul’s violin, the pose the musician assumes when, having finished his performance, he remains immobile on stage, can be read as a sign of triumph. The woman, whose

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voice came to be replaced by the instrument he continues to hold in his hand, even while it was the sounds he produced on this violin that spurred her on in her decision to embrace death by this proxy – this woman has forever disappeared into the waves. Even if, in contrast to Isolde sinking in rapture onto Tristan’s corpse, Paul is shown in the last sequence of the film to be standing alone on the beach, his silhouette – as he stares out at the ocean as if frozen into this pose – imitates the demise of his beloved. At the same time, his ominous gaze at the end of his performance in Symphony Hall, splicing together hopeful premonition with sad recognition, allows us to speculate that perhaps, while playing his transcription of the Liebestod, he had been thinking of his beloved after all, so that in the course of this performance he had empathetically experienced her death by proxy. Even if only obliquely, Negulesco’s Humoresque thus references another aspect of the Liebestod:  the lust for revenge that is explicitly addressed by Wagner’s libretto in the first act and that Hitchcock unambiguously ascribes to his sadistic necrophilic Scottie. What, in turn, becomes clear in all three cases is the decisive turn Wagner’s cultural survival in Hollywood takes. Precisely because – as a last consequence of their lethal romance – the heroines are ready to fulfil their lovers’ death fantasies, the heroes are assured a sad, sober survival. Liebestod as evidence With Alfred Hitchcock’s early sound film, Murder!, a second musical deployment of the Liebestod theme sets in – one which takes from Wagner’s libretto not the idea of self-sacrifice chosen out of love, but rather a desire for death born out of jealousy. As such, the heroine in this second set of films is much closer to the position of Isolde in the first act. At the same time, what also becomes evident regarding the idiosyncratic role which this musical theme plays in the solving of a murder case is the conversation between Hitchcock and Fritz Lang, who also emigrated to Hollywood in the 1930s. Lang’s film noir Blue Gardenia (1953) in fact implements genre memory not only by recalling the opera Tristan and Isolde, but also – owing to the explicit citation of Hitchcock’s earlier crime film – by recalling what is at stake in a media-specific transposition of opera into mainstream cinema. The narrative connection between the two films consists in the fact that in both, an orchestra version of the Liebestod functions as a warning to the hero involved in the investigation

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of a murder. In both cases, additionally, a woman is sentenced to death for a murder she did not commit. As in Jean Negulesco’s Humoresque, so too in Alfred Hitchcock’s Murder!, the Liebestod melody – which Isolde calls ‘wundervoll und leise, Wonne klagend, alles sagende’ – triggers an internal conversation in the hero so that for him, also, the music he initially hears as a radio broadcast leads to a sudden insight into the true state of affairs, bringing with it the dramaturgic peripeteia of the film narrative.7 At the beginning of the scene in Hitchcock’s early crime film, Sir John Menier (Herbert Marschall), who has been acting as one of the jurors in the murder trial against Diana Baring (Norah Baring), is standing in front of his bathroom mirror, shaving. His butler has brought him the radio so that he once more hears about the outcome of the trial. After reporting that the accused woman has been sentenced to death, the newscaster, asserting ‘Now that is all the news’, segues into an SOS announcement from the police regarding a road accident. We cannot hear the exact content of this message because, at this moment, the butler, entering the bathroom with a brandy cocktail, exchanges a few words with Sir John. After the butler once more leaves, the newscaster becomes clearly audible again with his appeal that any witnesses of the accident should get in touch with the police. Sir John, now standing alone in front of the mirror, begins once more to shave. We continue to see him from the back. Once the newscaster has announced that the broadcast of this evening’s concert will begin with the overture from Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, the camera, however, moves into a medium shot so that we can now see Sir John’s face – reflected in the mirror – far more clearly, doubled by a view of the back of his head on the outer left frame of the screen. Given this shift in perspective, we are also able to witness the change in his facial expression, accompanying the conversation he has with himself, which sets in along with Wagner’s music (7.7). At first, Sir John laconically notes the coincidence that the SOS announcement followed immediately upon the news of the judge’s death sentence. Then the first sounds made by the cello and the woodwind section (the Tristan accord in the ‘Prelude’) prompt not a fantasy of sacrifice but rather the desire to ‘save her’, followed by his reminiscence of the debate among the jurors. As in Negulesco’s Humoresque, the music thus also serves to accentuate the different moments in an act of selfreckoning, in this case, however, not one undertaken by a woman about

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Film still from Murder! (Alfred Hitchcock, 1930).

to commit suicide, but rather by a man plagued by his conscience. The rise and fall of the violin allows Sir John to reflect why he had not succeeded in convincing the other jurors of the innocence of the accused woman. Coordinated with his reaching for the brandy glass that the butler had brought him, we hear the first dynamic surge towards the sforzato of the ‘Prelude’. The music on the radio thus underscores the incursion of an unexpected piece of evidence. Sir John, whose face we continue to see only as a reflection in the mirror, suddenly realizes that in the trial against Diana, a glass of brandy was also the decisive piece of evidence that everyone had overlooked. The accused woman had been found lying unconscious in the back room of a theatre, next to the corpse of one of the other members of the theatre company she was part of. After having woken up, Diana could remember nothing of what had happened the previous night. The one thing she was, however, absolutely certain of was that she had not finished off the glass of brandy that was still standing on the table at which she had been sitting, now empty. Inspired by the music on the radio, Sir John realizes that someone else must also have been present in the room that night and from this he deduces who the actual murderer is. Presented as being in conversation with the thoughts of the hero, Richard Wagner’s music thus mirrors Sir John’s retrospective reconstruction of the trial, allowing him to recognize

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clearly what had been wrong in the line of argument presented by the prosecutor. After the butler, announcing the arrival of Sir John’s secretary, again interrupts him, the juror leaves the bathroom. As in Humoresque, the music from the Tristan prelude continues extradiegetically even though Sir John, who has gone into his living room to receive his secretary, can no longer hear the radio, which he left in the bathroom. Thus, when he conveys his change of heart to his secretary, the musical accompaniment is no longer located diegetically and instead serves to mirror the mental decision he has made. If, initially, Wagner’s music had underscored John’s inner voice, allowing him to recognize the true facts and circumstances of this murder case, it now serves as an incentive to act. In contrast to the newscaster, who had proclaimed that with the judge’s sentencing the trial was over, the case is not yet closed for Sir John, given that he now knows where to look for the actual killer. In Murder!, Wagner’s libretto thus undergoes a decisive refiguration. The Liebestod theme is used to accomplish a transcendence of death only in the sense that Diane Baring is saved from an enforcement of the death penalty. Precisely this re-encoding of self-sacrifice into a fantasy of salvation is what Fritz Lang revisits in Blue Gardenia. By recycling Alfred Hitchcock’s plot, he ups the ante on his predecessor’s deployment of the Liebestod theme as operative evidence. In this film, the telephone operator Norah Larkin (Anne Baxter) is also falsely accused of having murdered the painter Harry Prebble (Raymond Buss) because, having fainted during a nocturnal meeting in his living room, she could not remember later on what had actually happened between them. In contrast to Hitchcock, however, Lang divides the process of realization, inspired by the sound of the Liebestod, into two separate scenes. In the first, the columnist Casey Mayo (Richard Conte) visits the crime scene and learns from the investigating police detective that, when the cleaning woman found the corpse, the record player was still on. So as to demonstrate for the journalist what he is talking about, the detective once more turns on the recording of Tristan and Isolde that had been lying on the turntable. Thus, while we hear a brief diegetic excerpt from the Liebestod, the detective continues to list for Casey all the evidence he has so far found at the crime scene: a handkerchief covered in blood, a suede pair of women’s shoes, and a blue gardenia. However, only when this piece of music is played a second time does it actually allow the detective to solve the case. Earlier on, Mayo used

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his newspaper column to set a trap for the murderess by focussing on a different detail, namely the blue gardenia. Norah, who  – like Alfred Hitchcock’s heroine in Murder! – knows that she spent part of the night with the murdered man even though she cannot remember having killed him, has fallen prey to his ruse and is now in detention, awaiting trial. And like Hitchcock’s hero Sir John, Casey, who has fallen in love with Norah, is now plagued with remorse. While he is sitting in the lounge of an airport in New York City together with his friend Al, a photographer, he hears the newsboy calling out the headline that announces the media coup Casey is responsible for. At the thought of the role he has played in the arrest of the ‘Blue Gardenia Murderess’, he mournfully confesses to his companion that he is convinced they made a mistake. At this very moment, Casey suddenly hears the Liebestod theme over the loudspeaker. In response to his question what this sound means, Al laconically answers, pointing to the loudspeaker that we see in a reverse shot:  ‘Music, canned; they can can everything these days’. Because he suddenly realizes that this melody is the clue he has been waiting for, Casey is suddenly wide awake, and his anagnorisis recalls the inspiration the Liebestod theme had afforded Hitchcock’s hero Sir John who, to the sound of this very same melody, reached for his brandy glass. In Fritz Lang’s film noir, however, the music itself becomes material evidence once the case is reopened. Casey remembers that a recording of Tristan and Isolde had been found on the turntable of the record player at the crime scene. During her investigation by the police, Norah, however, said she had heard a different piece of music in Prebble’s apartment before she fainted. Thus, in Blue Gardenia, the Liebestod theme too serves as evidence of the involvement of a third person. Yet if, in the first scene, the melody sets the tone for the fatal outcome of a lovers’ quarrel about which the detective speaks to the journalist, it brings a completely new body of evidence into play in the second scene. As such, the playing of a recording of the Liebestod theme adds a decisive technical component to the solving of the case. It offers proof of Norah’s innocence in that, at the peripeteia of the film narrative, it moves seamlessly from diegetic sound to a psycho-diegetic accompaniment of the actual murderess’s confession. Blue Gardenia uses a lap dissolve to connect Casey Mayo – his investigative instinct reawakened – with the record player on which, having returned to the crime scene together with the detective, he is once more

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Film still from Blue Gardenia (Fritz Lang, 1930).

playing the recording of Tristan and Isolde (7.8). The journalist then succeeds in convincing the sceptical policeman to go to the record store with him where Prebble bought this recording and where Rose Miller, who is pregnant with the victim’s child, works. She had gone to Prebble’s apartment that fatal night, hoping to coerce him into marrying her. The moment she hears that a detective from the homicide department wants to speak to her, the music that, together with the lines of classic continuity editing, connects the crime scene with the record store, becomes the psycho-diegetic soundtrack, now accompanying Rose’s attempted suicide in the bathroom. The music still represent cinematic continuity once the film narration, having jumped forward in time, moves to the desperate woman, lying on her deathbed in the prison hospital. Recalling the final sequence of A Farewell to Arms, Rose is surrounded by the detective, a doctor, a nurse as well as Casey and Norah (now exonerated), all waiting for her to confess. Still accompanied by the Liebestod theme, Rose’s voice-over serves as a commentary on the flashback that allows the lovers’ quarrel between herself and Prebble to reignite on screen. We see how his dismissive attitude forced her to recognize that he will abandon her and their unborn child. Once he has turned away from her so as to put on a different record, she reaches for the fire poker. Prebble deliberately chose Tristan and Isolde because this was the record he had bought

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at the store the afternoon he met Rose and invited her to his apartment. Inspired by the mounting Liebestod theme (which we continue to hear extradiegetically along with Rose’s narrating voice), she is shown to strike her faithless lover with the poker before fleeing the apartment. At this moment, the diegetic music of the record player (in the flashback) and the psycho-diegetic music that accompanies Rose’s confession (in the prison hospital) coincide. With the opera libretto in mind, we might surmise: Rose Miller fulfils the desire for murder that Richard Wagner’s Isolde seeks to execute in the first act, before Brangane replaces the death potion with a love potion. At the same time, like Alfred Hitchcock with his necrophilic hero in Vertigo, Fritz Lang deconstructs the lethal aggression that the notion of a self-dissipating love transcending death only seemingly screens out in Wagner’s libretto. Above all, the deployment of Liebestod in Blue Gardenia oscillates between the actual material record of the opera and an imagined, immaterial sound. Bringing the past back into the present, the music serves as the turning point between recognition and revelation. The fact that Prebble should have chosen this piece of music to mark both the beginning and the end of his clandestine affair with Rose Miller also testifies to the transformation of Wagner’s Liebestod into the crime of passion so typical for the film-noir genre. In its function as the musical frame for this ominous affair, the recording stops – in the middle of the ascending score – the minute that Rose has finished her confession. The reconciliation between Casey and Norah is instead accompanied by Raoul Kraushaar’s far more sentimental film score that comes to replace Wagner’s opera. The final sequence ends with a shot of the court of law’s motto – ‘Justizia semper triumphat’ – so that, on the visual level as well, the dangerous passion connected with Wagner’s Liebestod is shown to have been overcome. Isolde’s triumph While melodrama and film noir foreground the question of death  – whether self-sacrifice or crime of passion – in their recycling of Richard Wagner’s Liebestod, in Curtis Bernhardt’s biopic Interrupted Melody (1955), the notion of transcending death emerges as a triumph over the selfdestructive desire of the Australian opera singer, Marjorie Lawrence (Eleanor Parker), to whom the part of Isolde is ascribed. Bernhardt’s highly sentimental narrative culminates in Marjorie’s brilliant comeback after having contracted polio. In the film’s final sequence, she proves to

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herself and her audience that, despite her paralysis, she is able to sing this part during a production of the Metropolitan Opera. While, in Alfred Hitchcock and Fritz Lang’s crime films, the Liebestod theme functions as a commentary on murder committed out of jealousy, it is completely separate from any concrete performance on stage in both films. At the same time, deployed as evidence in a murder case, at issue in the recycling of this musical theme is the unequivocal distinction between guilt and innocence before the law. Curtis Bernhardt, in turn, makes use of Wagner’s opera so as to draw our attention to both the vocal achievement of the portrayed singer and the fact that, by deciding to sing this part again, Lawrence overcomes the suicidal fantasies brought about by her illness. Genre memory is at work in Curtis’s biopic as well – in this case, however, because the heroine’s willingness to renew her career after her breakdown recalls the celebration of the break of dawn at the end of Frank Borzage’s war melodrama. Interrupted Melody is structured along the lines of the psychic development Stanley Cavell discusses in relation to classic Hollywood melodrama as a movement from mourning to a psychic morning.8 After her first success in the international world of opera, Marjorie Lawrence must undergo a psychic self-scrutiny that includes confronting a desire for death before she can, once more, take up her singing. Precisely because her return to the opera stage involves traversing self-doubt, the voice she regains is far more solidly grounded that it initially was. Three times Bernhardt makes use of Isolde’s final aria so as to dramaturgically structure his heroine’s psychic transformation, beginning with a narcissistic self-reliance, moving into deep despair, and ending in regained hope. The first narrative turning point revolves around the tension between Marjorie’s pursuit of personal happiness and the challenging requirements of an opera career. She has fallen in love with the doctor Thomas King (Glen Ford) and, overwhelmed by her feelings for him, is willing to give precedence to this romantic relationship. She is shown in her penthouse in New York City with her voice coach, practicing the last bars of the duet between Tristan and Isolde in the second act of the opera. Clearly distracted because her thoughts are with her lover, she is unable to reach the high notes and interrupts her singing before reaching the decisive final words: ‘ewig, endlos, heiße erglühter Brust höchste Liebeslust!’9 Although she asks her coach, who is sitting at the piano, to begin once more, the ringing of the telephone puts an end to her practice. Before

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Marjorie rushes out of the room, she gestures towards the mounting conflict she experiences between love and work by explaining that, for the time being, she cannot schedule a new appointment. The fact that Marjorie wilfully interrupts her practice at this exact moment in the score of Tristan and Isolde indicates that her ordinary love for an unremarkable doctor is meant to replace her public performance of the self-dissipating love of Richard Wagner’s noble Nachtgeweihte. Or, put another way, the interrupted melody in this first scene implicitly represents her general avoidance of the ecstatic pathos of a life on the opera stage. In the course of the film narrative, however, it will become clear that Marjorie cannot allow herself to be confined to the domestic happiness of marriage, given that her drive to evolve as a singer is an equally vital feature of her sense of self. The sustained argument with her husband who is not willing to give up his own work as a doctor for the sake of her career results in her accepting an engagement in South America. There, she is meant to sing the part of Isolde in preparation for her appearance at the Metropolitan Opera. Even before the rehearsal of the last act begins, she complains about having a headache. Then, at the point in the score when Isolde ecstatically describes Tristan’s corpse – ‘wie er leuchtet, sternumstrahlet hoch sich hebt’ – Marjorie falls to the ground.10 In contrast to the libretto, those surrounding her are not moved by affection and rapture but rather by amazement and shock. Curtis Bernhardt had already underscored the enmeshment between personal and theatrical drama at the beginning of the scene by having included stage hands in the background, moving about incognizant of what was happening during the rehearsal. The fatigue of the heroine, whose private life is about to take on the traits of a tragic opera libretto, was initially meant only for our eyes. The moment Marjorie’s voice falls silent, however, everyone rushes towards her so as to participate in a different spectacle, namely one which promises to give a new twist to the strained relation between her stage role and her private life. The self-sacrifice Marjorie must now take upon herself is a physical one. If, while practicing in her penthouse, she had interrupted Isolde’s melody in the hope that she would be able to reconcile her opera career with her marriage, she does not wilfully cause the interruption in this second scene. Instead, her song is violently cut short owing to the outbreak of a bodily ailment that had been latently present for some time. The dramaturgy of the film narrative interprets

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this second interrupted melody not only as her personal fate but also as a cultural symptom of the social contradiction inhabiting America during the Eisenhower years. If, during the mobilization of the home front, American women had been lauded for entering the work force, once the war was over, many were not satisfied with simply returning to their domestic home. How pointedly this double time is written into Bernhardt’s melodramatic biopic (made ten years after the events it depicts) is revealed in the peripeteia of the film narrative. After Thomas has quit his work at the hospital in New  York and relocated with his wife to Florida so he can dedicate himself completely to her recovery, the Liebestod she had interrupted on stage comes to haunt their relationship. In despair over the fact that she seems unable to regain the physical power her singing requires, Marjorie also succumbs to the fantasy of wanting to escape from the world. Although her husband is able to thwart her suicide attempt, he is compelled to recognize that she may never be able to return to the stage and thus takes up private practice in New York so as to earn enough money for both of them. At the same time, because this episode in the actual biography of Marjorie Lawrence falls into the war years, the script can pit nationally sanctioned killing against her private death drive. In 1944, a friend asks her to get involved in troop entertainment for the Australian Army. Along with the optimism of the war effort, the spectacle of an entire battalion of soldiers, sitting courageously in wheelchairs, compels Marjorie to overcome her self-pity and return to the stage. Curtis Bernhardt thus initially deploys the Liebestod theme to musically underscore Marjorie’s decision in favour of a marriage that seems to exclude her career. The second time, the theme allows him to re-encode the loss of her lowerbody movement as a symptom for her guilt and indecision regarding her singing if it is conducted at the expense of her marriage. This interruption is meant to test whether Marjorie really has a calling as an international opera star. If, in turn, the third use of the aria functions as musical evidence of her rehabilitation, it also signifies a surmounting of the logic of sacrifice. In this final re-encoding of the Liebestod, neither marriage nor the career as a singer has to be relinquished. In Interrupted Melody, the possibility of resuming Isolde’s aria so as to finally sing it to the end signals an alternative to the death-riddled despair of all prior heroines. During the premiere of Tristan and Isolde, now actually taking place in the Metropolitan Opera, we first see Tom pushing his wife onto the

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stage in her wheelchair and helping her sit down on the throne, where she will sing the entire first act. At this point, he has to still gingerly place her feet onto the red cushion in front of the throne because she cannot move them on her own. If, while practicing with her coach in her New  York penthouse, Marjorie had been distracted, she is now visibly frightened. The ominous mood set by the overture’s music places everyone behind the stage (as well as us) into a state of anticipation. Then the curtain opens and a performance of the opera sets in. The first two acts are only offered as brief excerpts so that the narrative can move rapidly to Isolde’s final aria. As in the previous scenes, Marjorie performs her part while sitting down. Having reached the climax, as if inspired by the libretto invoking the surging torrent and resounding fury of the Liebestod, she, however, slowly rises, using her arms to push herself up against the rock in whose crevice she has been sitting. As she reaches the highest note, and with it the ecstatic appeal to a ‘world breath’, she is finally standing on both legs. In the reverse shot, we see Tom, astonished by what he sees, jumping up from his chair in the side wing of the stage. Then the camera returns to the singer who, despite the braces on her legs, has begun to move forward resolutely toward Tristan’s corpse. The excessive passion about which she sings as she leans over her dead lover once more serves to blur the boundary between theatre role and personal drama. In the reverse shot, we see the enraptured gaze of Marjorie’s actual husband, toward whom a very different ecstasy is directed (7.9).

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Film still from Interrupted Melody (Curtis Bernhardt, 1955).

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Neither self-sacrifice nor an escape from the world in the midst of a lethal love frenzy is celebrated with this apotheosis. Instead, a marriage bond is being re-avowed, in which the love and the careers of both wife and husband have found a balance that promises to be sustainable in the future. While the audience’s applause continues to resound, the curtain falls, and we are shown a reaffirmation of this couple. Only their gazes can touch because all those on stage not included in their personal happiness are busy with an opera performance that has not quite reached its end. Stage hands move across the stage and, just before the curtain goes up once more, Tom is asked to move back into the side wing so that his wife can dedicate herself completely to the applause for her ecstatic audience. In Interrupted Melody, the sound of the Liebestod thus too reaches beyond the diegetic level of the film. As the camera moves into a long shot so as to capture the celebrated singer, now all alone on stage, taking her bow while standing completely upright, the soundtrack returns – as in the finale of A Farewell to Arms – to the last bars of Richard Wagner’s opera. These introduce not only the conclusion of this sentimental biopic, but also put a different transcendence of death invoked by the libretto on display. The sacrifice that Marjorie Lawrence has made with her interpretation of the Liebestod does not entail relinquishing her own life but rather the lethal melancholia that had almost prevented her from returning to the stage. If her successful return brings with it the rebirth of their marriage, this renewal is also tantamount to a surmounting of tragic pathos. In contrast to A Farewell to Arms, the couple in Curtis Bernhardt’s Interrupted Melody has a spiritual morning – indeed a marital day after – they can share together. In classic Hollywood, Wagner’s Liebestod stands for a fascination with melodramatic fatality. As a tonal signifier that can be deployed in a multifaceted manner, this musical theme dramaturgically structures film narratives in which the enmeshment of love and death can entail both self-abandonment and murderous passion. At the same time, an array of possibilities opens up regarding the way Wagner’s tragic queen has come to be reconceived in Hollywood. She appears in film narratives that take the idea of a lethal romance literally. Significantly, however, both in Vertigo and in A Farewell to Arms, the hero assumes the position of Isolde, while in Murder! and Blue Gardenia, the focus is on the murderous Isolde of the first act, seeking to give death to a lover who has betrayed her. Conceived as rescue narratives, the latter films culminate in the solving

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of a murder case that extricate the heroine from a death-riddled notion of love, and thus also surmount the narrative of a doomed love called forth by the Liebestod themeIf, then, Wagner’s melody invokes self-sacrifice in the classic melodrama while it reveals a clandestine act in film noir, Isolde emerges as the operatic role over which the emotional and bodily cost of succeeding as an international opera star can be negotiated in the biopic Interrupted Melody. While all three genres thus have recourse to the ominous pathos of ill-fated love, they also debunk its fatality in the act of appropriation. In each case, at least one of the Nachtgeweihte survives, able to look back – be this with a sober, a shocked or a relieved gaze – at the fatal romantic abandonment these lovers had enjoyed. At the same time, the vocal signifier serves as the generator of a genre memory that, in each subsequent recycling, calls forth traces of the cinematic refigurations of the Wagnerian theme that has preceded it. Isolde’s Liebestod thus not only produces its idiosyncratic evidence on the diegetic level of the film, but – along with Wagner’s music – also has an extradiegetic component. The cultural survival of Isolde in Hollywood engenders a cinematic network that attests to both the blurring of boundaries among classic film genres and the survival of opera in mainstream cinema.

8 SHAKESPEARE’S WIRE

It’s all in the game Early on in the third episode of The Wire’s first season, a conversation takes place that serves as my point of departure for reading David Simon’s TV series in conjunction with William Shakespeare’s first tetralogy of English history plays, the three parts of Henry IV and Richard III.1 Two of kingpin Avon Barksdale’s foot soldiers, Bodie and Wallace, are sitting in ‘the pit,’ a courtyard in one of the West Baltimore low-rise housing projects where drug trade is flourishing. D’Angelo Barksdale, their ‘sergeant’, approaches them, and, noticing that they are playing checkers with a chess set, explains to them the rules of what he considers to be ‘a better game’. Taking the king piece into his right hand, he kisses it before declaring, ‘this is the kingpin … he the man.’ If you get your opponent’s king, he goes on to explain, ‘you got the game.’ At the same time, he warns his two buddies that they must protect their own kingpin, because the other player is trying to get it. To illustrate for them the moves that are possible on a chessboard, D’Angelo adds that the king can move in any direction he chooses but only one space at a time. This means that he has ‘no hustle’, but because all the other pieces on his team have his back, he does not really have to do much (8.1).

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Film still from The Wire (David Simon, HBO, 2002–8, season 1, episode 3).

Bodie, who has been listening attentively, immediately catches the analogy to the rules of the game governing the drug world of Baltimore’s Westside and compares the kingpin to his boss. D’Angelo then moves on to the next piece, and, having called the queen ‘smart and fierce’, explains that because she moves any way and as far as she wants, she is ‘the go-get-shit-done piece.’ This reminds Wallace, who has been watching silently, of Avon’s right-hand man, Stringer Bell. D’Angelo proceeds by comparing the castle to the stash that they have to move each week, while the knights and bishops stand for Avon’s ‘muscle’, the men that move with their product to protect it against both their competitors and the Baltimore police. Suddenly Bodie notices the ‘little bald-headed bitches,’ prompting D’Angelo to explain sombrely that the pawns are ‘like the soldiers.’ To underscore the dramaturgic turning point in their witty conversation, the camera moves into its first close-up of the chessboard, so that we can follow in detail D’Angelo’s instruction about how it is above all these pieces who are in the field, fighting on the front lines. Because he, too, has begun to sense a connection to his own position in the Baltimore drug game, Wallace wants to know how one gets to be the king, prompting D’Angelo to announce the cardinal rule that also serves as the epigraph of this particular episode: ‘The king stay the king’ [sic]. To underscore the rigid hierarchy at issue, D’Angelo sombrely explains that everyone stays who he is except the pawns. If one of them, in turn, actually makes it all the way to the side of the other player he ‘gets to be queen’. Bodie, projecting his own self-image onto the rules being

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Film still from The Wire (David Simon, HBO, 2002–8, season 1, episode 3).

described to him, cockily asks whether that would mean that he would be ‘top dog’. This brings D’Angelo, who has begun to harbour secret doubts about the validity of what they are doing in his uncle’s criminal forces, to embellish his description of the rules of chess one last time. Precisely because he wants his two buddies to understand the fragility of their own position as Avon Barksdale’s soldiers, he ends by warning them that the pawns ‘get capped quick … they be out the game early.’ While Wallace looks on bemused, Bodie, who recognizes his own potential fate in what D’Angelo predicts, nevertheless boldly retorts: ‘Unless they’re some smart-ass pawns’ (8.2). D’Angelo can only smile in response to the grin with which his buddy puts an end to a repartee that calls upon us to recognize in the rules of chess a description of the feudal system of the drug world The Wire seeks to make visible. Yet if chess serves as a template for the codes regulating the network of power, to which this TV show wants to draw our attention, at issue is also the status of the allegory on which this correspondence is predicated.2 As Michel de Certeau notes, ‘games give rise to spaces where moves are proportional to situations.’ As such, they not only formulate and formalize rules that organize all possible moves but also constitute a memory of schemes we might act out in particular circumstances.3 In other words, both in chess and in the drug game, each figure has a clearly-defined place and role within a strictly hierarchical order in which power is incessantly renegotiated by virtue of political acts. The moves individual players can make are highly codified and

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ritually predetermined, based on a shared memory of what schemes are possible. At the same time, if  – in accordance with equating the drug business with chess  – ‘it’s all in the game,’ as the rogue player Omar proclaims at the end of the first season, there is also nothing outside the game. All the players are restricted to the delimited field in which both the drug traffic and the law enforcement seeking to prohibit it are carried out. Not to play is not an option. By anticipating the succession of a new kingpin in Baltimore’s criminal underworld, D’Angelo’s scene of instruction, however, also underscores the one hope that those who start out as pawns can harbour. With a combination of luck and audacity, or perhaps because the ‘top dog’ has become too weak to stop an attack it is precisely the pawn who can bypass all the other ranks and immediately become royalty. While the pawn thus emerges as the most endangered position (usually ‘capped early’ in the game), it is also these ‘little bald-headed bitches’ that render most visible the fragility of royal legitimacy. As such, they open up a poignant line of connection between David Simon’s TV series and William Shakespeare’s first historical tetralogy. In chess, the pawn is the piece that stands in for that particular circumstance within the rules of the game which allows for a self-declared right to absolute power. Having arrived at the other end of the chessboard, this figure can proclaim itself royalty. It is precisely this audacious self-legitimation that The Wire fuses with its own debunking of the American Dream when, in the course of Season 5, the Barksdale rule has ceased and the newcomer Marlo Stanfield has successfully taken over Avon and Stringer’s empire. In Shakespeare’s history plays such claims, of course, remain the prerogative of members of the ruling class:  The Yorkist lords who repeatedly challenge Henry VI to abdicate and give up the throne to their leader, and finally Richard III, who usurps the throne, killing brethren and foes alike, only to himself be vanquished by the Earl of Richmond in the Battle at Bosworth Field, thus clearing the throne for the first Tudor King, Henry VII. It is worth recalling that chess was initially an aristocratic form of the ‘art of war’ introduced by the Arabs into medieval Europe, which is to say the historical period during which – in the wake of the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453)  – the English Wars of Roses (1455–85) was fought. Indeed, at issue in crossmapping these two sets of texts is the way both imaginatively refigure a civil war along the lines of a game in which the situation individual players find themselves in determines the

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moves open to them. Yet decisive about the proposed analogy between the pawn’s role in chess and the fragility of the king’s position in situations of domestic strife – be it medieval England or early twenty-firstcentury Baltimore – is that while the rules of the game governing power relations remain the same, individual players can bring about a significant change as to who will occupy the key position precisely by remembering the possibility of schemes open to them, given certain circumstances. At the same time, another aspect of cultural memory is at issue when one revisits The Wire through the lens of Shakespeare’s history plays. Such a crossmapping is, after all, predicated on a further claim, namely that on the level of dramaturgy, the American TV show recalls, albeit implicitly, similar dramatic schemes that are acted out for political power in a series of early-modern history plays. It is also worth recalling that William Shakespeare’s first tetralogy reimagines the thirty-year battle between two branches of the royal House of Plantagenet as a visceral aristocratic war game in which lords and citizens alike find themselves lined up either on the side of the white rose of York or the red rose of Lancaster, while geographically England turns into the territory on which this battle is fought. David Simon in turn calls The Wire a ‘deliberate argument against the American drug prohibition – A Thirty Years’ War that is among the most singular and comprehensive failures to be found in the nation’s domestic history,’ with Baltimore, the particular playing field, standing in for the more global condition of urban centres in early twenty-first-century capitalism.4 Both the television series and Shakespeare’s series of history plays thus reconceive actual historical domestic strife (the English Wars of Roses, the American War on Drugs) as a theatricalized game in which shifts in political power are embodied by individual actors playing through the schemes open to them. The Wire’s connection to Shakespeare’s history plays is explicitly made by police Detective Lester Freamon who, when watching Stringer Bell on a surveillance tape after a drug war has broken out once again on the Westside, he alludes to King Henry IV’s lament that he alone of all the men in England cannot sleep because ‘uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.’5 Many fans and critics of The Wire, have, of course, noticed a Shakespearean connection, albeit often in a cursory manner.6 Thus Marshall and Potter speak of the way this TV show juggles ‘a Shakespearian cast of dozens of individuals, some of whom have names

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for us, some of whom are recognized or perhaps only partly recognized by their faces.’7 Other critics pick up on David Simon’s claim that The Wire is a postmodern refiguration of Greek tragedy, which replaces the Olympian gods and Fate with late-capitalist institutions.8 If this essay, in turn, foregrounds Shakespeare’s history plays as its point of reference, it does so in part because the particular rules of the game of the drug trade, which regulate moves in relation to situations, recall the feudal loyalties constitutive of the battle among the supporters of the houses of Lancaster and York.9 At the same time, what The Wire also takes from Shakespeare’s history plays is the way these draw us in by virtue of their inclusion of compelling portraits of individuals struggling within and against the system of rules that defines their fate. By casting them as pawns, D’Angelo asks Wallace and Bodie to acknowledge their personal risk in a game they cannot not play. And yet, by moving into a close-up of their faces during the scene of instruction, the camera’s dramaturgy draws our attention to each as an individual whose fate is singular. Indeed, all three will die in what one might call a tragic Shakespearean fashion. Like Romeo, the day-dreamer Wallace returns to the pit, even though he has cooperated with the police, explaining that this is the only world he knows. He will be executed by Bodie, who, as a loyal soldier in the Barksdale command, can do nothing but follow the orders of his commanders. D’Angelo, who like the melancholic Hamlet wavers about staying in a game he has discovered to be corrupt, finds himself forced by his mother Briana not to take a plea bargain and, instead, goes to prison where he, too, is executed on Stringer Bell’s orders. Bodie, in turn, recalls all those who, in the history plays, are compelled out of loyalty to fight to the end and finds his death defending his corner against Marlo, the smart-ass pawn, who, in Bodie’s stead, achieves the royalty both had aspired to. Thus at issue in my proposed crossmapping is yet a further analogy, given that, in their re-imagination of a civil war, both sets of texts make use of the affective power of a dramatic re-conception of political disorder as a game so as to offer a systemic analysis of the violence subtending and sustaining all power relations.10 Writing in the context of Elizabethan England, Shakespeare’s history plays transform the chronicles of the Wars of the Roses into dramatic texts to be performed on stage as a series (premiered from 1591–3), while David Simon taps into news reportage and his own documentaries (The Corner and Homicide) to

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produce a quality TV show (running from 2002–8). Over the span of four plays, Shakespeare’s lords and their supporters – encouraged by the power vacuum which Henry VI’s ascension to the throne calls forth – repeatedly declare themselves to the rightful rulers of England only to either be overwhelmed in battle by the king’s forces or counter his challenge. In a similar manner, as will be discussed in more detail, the rivalling kingpins in David Simon’s drug world repeatedly declare sovereignty over a given territory only to find it incessantly reclaimed by an opponent from the other side. Thus, in both sets of texts, regardless of who is in the key position, ‘the game’ – as well as the repetitive cycles of violence inherent to it – continues. Equally decisive about the rhetorical force of both Shakespeare’s history plays and Simon’s Wire, however, is that each pits against this systemic repetition of martial power relations a set of individual portraits of failure, sacrifice and redemption, infused by tragic sensibility, so as to appeal to our awe and pity. As Marsha Kinder notes, we ‘experience a conflict between this systemic analysis of Baltimore and our emotional engagement with the characters with whom we choose to identify’.11 As will be shown in more detail below, at the heart of the aesthetic reimagination in both cases is, thus, the way a particular domestic strife is theatricalized so as to reflect on cultural anxieties, bringing about a national self-study. Graham Holderness argues that the first tetralogy’s exploration of the succession of the first Tudor monarch in the context of a political culture in which the ‘killing of kings, by secret murder or open battle, was virtually a national sport’, is above all a reflection on the dominant ideology of Shakespeare’s own time and the cultural anxieties surrounding the reign of Elizabethan I.12 Yet if what Shakespeare foregrounds is the way power is seen ‘to depend not on legitimacy but on legitimation, on the capacity of the contender to seize and appropriate the signs of authority’,13 this is precisely the overall scheme David Simon’s Wire remembers when it uses a particular instance of urban domestic warfare to speak to the destructive aspects of both late capitalism and the war on drugs after 9/11.14 To offer a crossmapping of The Wire and Shakespeare thus not only tracks analogous games of power succession, predicated on where the players are situated within the system, but also draws attention to the way both use a self-conscious theatricalization of this game to reflect on the worlds of their audiences. By reimagining a particular political strife (be it early-modern or recent American history)

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as a game in which individual players vie for the position of king(-pin), they produce not only a form of national self-study, but also forge an imaginary community of which the spectators partake by taking the one or the other side, and sometimes even both. Aristocratic war games, American style In Shakespeare’s first tetralogy, the civil strife sets in after a military campaign against France has been won. The politically inept Henry VI  – more interested in religious contemplation than court intrigue – marries the impoverished French aristocrat Margaret de Reignier and cedes valuable territory as part of the dowry arrangements. In the course of the four plays, Queen Margaret will take charge as a ruthless warrior, and in this Shakespeare’s queen is as fierce as D’Angelo suggests in his description of the rules of chess. She will forcibly remove those advisors to her husband who refuse to acknowledge her power. She will, furthermore, not only favour those who promise to help her assert her own political interests (and those of her son) but also fatally enter into alliances with those who side with her only as long as they have an enemy in common. Her forces ultimately vanquish the primary challenger to her husband’s throne, the Duke of York, and yet, in the final battle staged in 3 Henry VI, Queen Margaret’s son not only finds his own death but the surrender she – as commander of her vanquished troops – must accept, also forces Henry VI to abdicate and give the crown to the victor, who then becomes King Edward IV. And yet, once the throne is his, this king, too, will be forcibly challenged; in his case by his own brother Richard of York. While clandestinely stabbing to death the deposed King Henry, this villainous contender declares his own power as being based not on legitimacy but self-proclaimed legitimation: ‘I have no brother, I am like no brother […] I am myself alone’.15 In Shakespeare’s historical re-imagination, the deposed Queen Margaret, in turn, remains in England long enough for her woe-tinged accusations against the murderer of her husband to spill over to Edward’s wife, Queen Elizabeth, as well as his mother, the Duchess of Gloucester, both of whom  – once Richard has successfully usurped the throne  – chime in with her cursing of a tyrant she calls ‘hell’s black intelligencer’.16 Queen Margaret will ultimately leave the royal game, having been sent into exile by this shrewd political strategist, only to assure the other royal women before departing: ‘these English woes shall make me smile

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in France’.17 Left behind in the playing field, the other two women, in turn, will have the satisfaction of partaking in the demise of their mutual enemy and witness the resolution of the ‘dire division’18 between York and Lancaster. In the closing lines of Richard III, the marriage between Elizabeth and Richmond, the ‘true succeeders of each royal House,’ is proclaimed as the promise that ‘civil wounds are stopp’d; peace lives again/ That she may long live here, God say Amen.’19 While The Wire, in turn, renders visible various hierarchically structured domestic battle zones  – including the Baltimore police and City Hall – this essay will focus primarily on the civil war erupting within the drug world itself, not least of all because it is this strife which is most clearly modelled on the rules of a strictly regulated feudal system. As Reed notes:  ‘From the beginning, Avon is presented as a “soldier,” as someone whose control of the drug trade is less about turning a profit than it is about controlling territory and respect.’20 If, in Henry VI, the power vacuum opens up in England after an external enemy has been contained, in The Wire, domestic battling – inside the drug world as well as the police force and City Hall – is fostered when, after 9/11, investigative energy and federal money shifts to Homeland Security’s War on Terror. As Terrance Fitzhugh, an FBI agent clandestinely cooperating with Detective Jimmy McNulty’s wiretap explains, his battle with the Barksdale clan is the wrong war. With the dramaturgic development of Shakespeare’s history plays in mind, it is worth noting, however, that while Avon and his muscle consistently think of themselves and their business in terms of war, the competition between Barksdale’s Westside and ‘Proposition’ Joe Stewart’s Eastside is initially contained, surfacing primarily in the passionate investment each side has in the outcome of the annual basketball game. In contrast to the Baltimore police, which – in its relation to the Court as well as City Hall – is characterized by insubordination, mistrust, betrayal and an overall lack of loyalty, Barksdale’s muscle, furthermore, work as a disciplined team. While in Shakespeare’s Henry VI the internal battle begins because the Duke of York feels that his king has deprived him of valuable territories in France with which he had hoped to be rewarded for his victory in battle, the stage is set in the first season of The Wire for an eruption of civil war once Avon and Stringer begin thinking about opening up fresh territory by taking over corners from their opponents. As Prop Joe explains to Omar Little, who is willing to join forces with him

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owing to a purely personal revenge crusade, he wants Avon gone because before he arrived the projects were an open market. Recalling the shifting allegiances in the history plays, Prop Joe will seek to broker a peace once Omar’s assassination attempt fails, and – true to his name – he will continue to make propositions to various players aimed at maximizing his own profit. After Kima Greggs, member of the special unit under Lt. Cedric Daniels that is investigating the Barksdale clan, is wounded in an undercover operation, police raids break the fragile balance of power within Baltimore’s drug world. The kingpin Avon and his ‘queen’ Stringer find themselves compelled to take stock of their weaknesses and look for the key mistake that got the police to notice them in the first place. With the ruthlessness of any Shakespearean lords, they are willing to sacrifice all players who made them visible as well as those who might testify against them in court. While royalty like Prop Jo and Stringer shift their alliances whenever the positions in the game require them to do so, the muscle on both sides abide by strict rules of loyalty, accepting the moves assigned to them, even if this means taking a prison sentence to protect their team. Yet mapping The Wire onto Shakespeare’s history plays also renders visible that while Avon is presented as a warrior kingpin who thinks in terms of a war to be fought out viscerally on the streets of Baltimore he, like Henry VI, is weak as a political strategist. He, too, fails to grasp that a shift in the particular circumstances at hand require a renegotiation not of the game’s rules per se, but of the schemes that are open to its key players. After Avon has been sentenced to a light prison sentence, the fragile line of demarcation between East and West Baltimore no longer holds and – like Queen Margaret, who is forced to shift her alliances in accordance with alterations in the network of power relations – Stringer is forced to cede territory in order to procure the good product he needs to keep his business running from Prop Joe. Also like Shakespeare’s queen, Stringer is far shrewder than Avon in assessing the changed circumstances of the game, notably the new scheme he must embrace in order to ward off further attention from the police. By founding the New Day Co-Op with his former opponents, Stringer is able to unite all the key players in a mutual business enterprise, the ruse of which consists in suspending all battling on the street and, instead, sharing the profits of the drug trade collectively. While, during the first meeting of this fragile cooperation, Prop Joe lauds the others for showing themselves able

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to put aside petty grievances, Stinger forcefully spells out the new rules of the game. Commanding the others to explain the benefits of this new arrangement to their soldiers, he insists: ‘No beefing, no drama, just business. Anybody got problems with anybody else here, we bring it to the group. We ain’t gotta take it to the streets.’21 Convinced that war is bad for business, Stringer Bell’s new scheme is predicated on the wager that if the game is no longer about territory but only about product and competition, the bodies on the street will disappear, and so will, as a consequence, police surveillance, interception, and incarceration. Once Avon is released on parole, Stringer tries to persuade him that there is no longer any need to fight for individual corners, because Stringer’s investment in real-estate development on the Waterfront has procured for them a new and utterly legitimate arena for business. To stop Avon from going to war with the young challenger Marlo Stanfield who has begun to take over some of their corners, Stringer insists that they have moved beyond thinking in terms of legitimation predicated on seizing and holding turf. Instead, the New Day Co-Op has made it possible for them to base their power on legitimacy. With enough clean money to their name, Stringer assures Avon, they can do much more than run corners. Recalling the legacy of a gangster ‘back in the day’, who made a fortune on number money, he is convinced they could even run the city if they played their hand right. Yet Avon, invested in his feudal world view, can think of himself only as a gangster and, in turn, commands:  ‘I want my corners.’22 Faced with his partner’s stubborn insistence on a self-legitimation based first and foremost not on the accumulation of wealth but on his reputation on the street, Stringer finds his own American Dream of upward mobility into legitimacy radically threatened. The civil war that explodes in the third season once Avon hits back so as to make sure that others do not think ‘the boy’ Marlo is punking him not only pits the Eastside against the Westside but also the kingpin against his ‘queen’. Indeed, it is precisely the unsolvable difference between Avon’s conception of it as a war to be fought out on the streets over and over again and Stringer’s vision of drug trafficking as pure business that actually encourages Marlo’s own dream of power based on seizing and appropriating signs of authority. Although – in contrast to Shakespeare’s warrior queen  – Stringer is the one to argue against rather than for war, his position is analogous to Margaret in that, like the

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French aristocrat, he finds himself fatally caught between two camps. Away from her home country France and not fully belonging to the Lancaster camp, Shakespeare’s queen is repeatedly shown to forge alliances with English lords who will never fully accept her authority. Once Henry VI accepts the terms Edward, Duke of Marsh and later Edward IV, proposes a ceasefire and that the crown will remain Henry’s only as long as he lives, battle seems to be the only scheme open to Margaret if she is to successfully hold onto the throne for her own son. To Stringer, in turn, war is precisely what will prevent him from sustaining his lineage, yet like Shakespeare’s queen, he, too, finds himself tragically betwixt and between; torn between Avon’s feudal lust for war and his own vision of legitimacy without further battling. He is unwilling to join the furor of the other soldiers, yet cannot prevent the war he knows will bring down their waterfront development, B + B Enterprises. Happily re-installed in his war room, Avon astutely notes:  ‘I see a man without a country. Not hard enough for this, right here, and maybe, just maybe not smart enough for them out there.’23 If, during their tearful conversation on the night of Avon’s homecoming, the two had assured each other that they would always be brothers, they are now forced to acknowledge that – because their conception of the game has become incompatible – they are no longer fighting on the same side. To prove that he is, after all, ‘hard enough,’ Stringer finally confesses to the assassination of D’Angelo, and yet – after he and Avon have had their tussle – the camera leaves them panting in silence, once their angry energy is spent. Their shared conversation is over. Even though Shakespeare’s Henry VI is willing to capitulate to his opponent, the Duke of Marsh, so as to remain on the throne whereas Avon embraces war as a way to retain his reputation and reclaim his territory, what they share is their attitude towards power. Both are concerned first and foremost with the legacy they embody in the present. Along the same lines, while their position on the civil wars into which they are unwittingly drawn is reversed, both Queen Margaret and Stringer Bell are similarly invested in the future sustainability of their vision; be it the succession of their own kin to the throne or the preservation of a legitimate business enterprise. Forced to make what can only be seen as false choices, both find themselves compelled to fall back on a scheme that will ultimately destroy their rule. Queen Margaret can only persist in leading her troops into a battle that, once Edward has captured her king,

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will have the obliteration of all her dreams as its outcome. She will be forced to accept not only King Henry’s abdication but also his assassination in the Tower of London. Along similar lines, Stringer finds himself compelled to make a choice that is false in that it is no real choice. Fully aware that Prop Joe will force them to leave the Co-Op if they do not end a war that is bringing the police down on them, he – in a move far more radical than that of Shakespeare’s Queen Margaret – sacrifices his own king, hoping, in so doing, to protect their business. Attacked on three fronts – by Marlo on the corners, by the police raiding the stash houses, and by Avon who refuses to accept a change in the rules of the game, Stringer makes his fateful phone call to Major Howard ‘Bunny’ Colvin at the Western District police, whose Hamsterdam experiment of giving the drug dealers free reign in designated areas as long as they conduct their trade peacefully has come to impress him. The mise-en-scène presents this false choice – which will ultimately destroy the very business that to preserve Stringer has taken recourse to betrayal in the first place – as the solitary gesture of tragedy. The surveillance cameras can only catch Stringer pacing in front of his copy shop before he decides to place the call, prompting, as noted before, Lester Freamon’s cynical quote: ‘Heavy is the head that wears the crown.’ We then see Stringer return to his office in the back of the shop, careful to shut the door behind him. Initially, through the window of the door, we only see him hesitate which phone to use, then, as the camera moves into the room, we hear him dial the Western District Police. Ironically, he tells the operator that it is not an emergency. The editing cuts away from him before his call is put through to the man whose help he is desperate to solicit.24 The nocturnal meeting between these two unlikely allies at a graveyard picks up the Shakespearean tone invoked by Lester’s citation. Walking amongst the dead, Stringer Bell confesses to Bunny Colvin that it was his alternative to the kind of policing that enhances rather than contains drug related crime that made him turn to him in the first place: ‘Look like you and me both trying to make sense of this game’. He then hands him the address where, since the war started, Avon and his soldiers are camping out, armed with ‘heavy artillery’. While Colvin reads this betrayal amongst brothers as a form of revenge, quietly noting: ‘He must have done something to you,’ the tragic pathos of the scene is augmented by Stringer’s laconic reply: ‘No, it’s just business.’25 The fact that Avon’s own act of betrayal will bring about the death of his ‘queen’ while the

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police raid that acts on Stringer’s information will merely bring Avon a heavy prison sentence does more than confirm what Stringer ominously declared during their own last nocturnal meeting: ‘We ain’t got a dream no more, man.’26 David Simon’s dramatic resolution to this war amongst brothers also brings forward the bleak political point already made by William Shakespeare’s early history plays: Even if an overt civil war can periodically be contained – notably by a prodigious marriage such as that between Richmond and Elizabeth  – systemic violence underwrites all politics. After Stringer’s death, Avon has his own moment of doubt, explaining to one of his last trusted muscle that perhaps their war with Marlo over a couple of corners is, indeed, pointless. Slim Charles, in turn, offers an assessment bespeaking to the necessity of war as politics with other means: Fact is, we went to war, and now there ain’t no going back … it’s what war is, you know … once you in it, you in it! If it’s a lie, then we fight on that lie. But we gotta fight.27 In other words, what, in David Simon’s bleak re-imagination of America’s war on drugs, succeeds is neither Bunny Colvin’s experiment with concentrating drug traffic to select areas in the city nor Stringer’s vision of achieving power based on legitimacy nor Prop Joe’s scheme of selling drugs without open bloodshed on the streets. Instead, The Wire follows Shakespeare’s first tetralogy in its nostalgia for periods of political crisis, because the war these call forth are the necessary precondition for peace, precarious as it may be, to be installed. If, at the end of Richard III, the Wars of the Roses can finally be contained in the symbolic authority with which the marriage between Elizabeth and Richmond is endowed, this peace requires the brilliant, if deadly, machinations of the ‘black intelligencer’ Richard III to come about.28 Only by deposing the self-proclaimed king whose rule in Shakespeare’s reimagination of early modern history is shown to be most radically predicated on a ruthless appropriation of power can the Tudor monarchy establish its royal legitimacy. In a similar manner, the dramatic logic of The Wire needs Marlo Stanfield, an equally self-obsessed opponent to the kingpins already in place in Baltimore’s drug game, so that, in the end, the New World

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Co-Op, under the leadership of Slim Charles and his team, will once again win the day. Their collective succession is predicated on the sudden rise and equally swift fall of David Simon’s most audacious pawn.29 Like the future Richard III (who in 3 Henry VI is still Duke of Gloucester), Marlo thinks of the world exclusively in terms of a private war of ambition. Indeed, Richard’s confession could be his: Why then I do but dream on sovereignty; Like one that stands upon a promontory And spies a far-off shore where he would tread, Wishing his foot were equal with his eye; … So do I wish the crown, being so far off.30 In contrast to Avon (who actually admires his young challenger for his single-minded ferocity), seizing territory is not an end in itself for Marlo, but rather a means to gain the one thing he dreams of – the insignia of royal authority. If, initially, Prop Joe had hoped to contain Marlo by offering him a place in the Co-Op and grooming him to be his successor, it soon becomes clear that Stanfield is vying to become the absolute sovereign, much along the terms Richard III formulates: ‘I am myself alone.’31 Yet decisive for the affective dramaturgic force of Marlo’s play within this TV show as a whole is the way his individual portrait of radical personal ambition feeds on the systemic violence governing the drug game even while it endows his dream with the tragic pathos of hubris. Indeed, while Prop Joe and Stringer Bell are businessmen concerned with prosperity, and Avon is a warrior concerned with his feudal domain, Marlo’s emotional investment is purely in the royal position as such. After he has made his first hit against Barksdale, an older player in the game warns him that Avon will retaliate. Rather than showing concern, Marlo is thrilled at the prospect. In response to his advisor’s bleak recollection of the ‘prison and graveyards full of boys who wore the crown’, Marlo sharply responds:  ‘Point is, they wore it. It’s my turn to wear it now.’ Indeed, while the Barksdale clan he is challenging see themselves living the legacy of an extended family that has always been in the crime game, Stanfield’s is a dark version of the self-entitlement proclaimed by the American Dream. By the last season of The Wire, Marlo, like Richard III, will have used a combination of astute intrigues and ruthless executions

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to position himself in a way that allows him to declare to have all the power to himself, alone. Indeed, what Marlo also shares with Shakespeare’s ‘black intelligencer’ is political savvy. Well aware that the police are surveilling them, he only holds court outside, surrounded by his most trusted muscle, even as he makes sure that the people they kill for him drop out of sight. At the same time, he, like Richard, plans his territorial takeover of the Eastside shrewdly, meeting up with Avon in prison first, so as to get ‘the connect’ to the Greek, the invisible hand at the head of the drug supply. The dramatic peripeteia equally worthy of Richard III, in turn, occurs during the Co-Op meeting when Marlo, sure of his allies, takes the final steps necessary for his claim to absolute sovereignty. Recognizing that Melvin ‘Cheese’ Wagstaff can be bribed to betray his uncle Prop Joe because he had publically castigated him for making unlawful incursions into territory marked for another member of the charter, Marlo’s silent gaze forges a fateful bond. Oblivious to this shift in circumstances, Prop Joe – still hoping to civilize the boy he sees as his son – suggests to Marlo after the meeting that he should focus a bit on what can be gained by working with people. Yet The Wire’s black intelligencer already has the key player in position to carry out his fatal incursion by working not with Joe, but against him. On the night Prop Joe prepares to leave the house his grandfather had bought, hoping to bypass the drug war that is once more about to erupt, Marlo enters his living room eearing a black t-shirt with white letters spelling ‘Royal Addiction’. Stanfield is finally able to checkmate his mentor because Cheese, waiting outside, will no longer protect this kingpin he, as his nephew-pawn, should be loyal to. Making his last proposition, Joe insists, ‘I treated you like a son’, only to be sombrely informed: ‘I wasn’t made to play the son.’ Marlo cannot spare Prop Joe because his  – like Richard III’s – self-declared legitimation is predicated on proclaiming the death of his opponents in public. Instead, with the cool severity appropriate to an absolute sovereign, he softly cajoles the older man, telling him to close his eyes and breathe deeply while his assassin pulls the trigger. When, after Joe’s death, Marlo becomes the sole owner of ‘the connect’ and indeed, the only one the Greek’s contact will deal with, he can finally be certain that he has procured the signs of authority. Walking away from the meeting, he joyfully proclaims to his trusted muscle Chris that he is now wearing a crown on his head. Though invisible, this royal insigne

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empowers him to perform his final coup d’état. With the chair at the head of the table empty, after Joe’s sudden demise, Marlo takes control of the next Co-Op meeting, first redistributing the territory that belonged to the murdered man, only to finish by dispensing with all further meetings. As the sole owner of ‘the connect’, Marlo Stanfield can now not only dictate the price of their product, but, having disbanded the Co-Op, he can also declare that all future issues concerning their business will no longer to be discussed collectively. Instead, he proclaims himself the sole arbitrator of any differences that might arise amongst the various factions of the drug business. Yet the absolute power Marlo has seized needs to be acknowledged by those he controls, and his downfall, like that of Shakespeare’s Richard III, hinges on his inability to retain his reputation on the street. When his muscle finally confess to him that the rogue player Omar, once more involved in a personal vendetta, is putting it out on the street that Marlo is not man enough to battle with him, he, for a brief moment, breaks his austere pose. Outraged that his name has been used in the street, he shouts, ‘my name is my name.’32 Indeed, precisely because his name is the only thing he has to base his legitimation on, losing it is tantamount to losing the crown for which he has striven with such single-minded passion. Thus, while in contrast to Richard III he does not find death on the battlefield, the end of the drug war is predicated on Marlo’s symbolic death. The deal his lawyer is able to broker with the District Attorney’s office is that all charges against him will be dropped on the condition that he retires from the drug business altogether. Though not fatal, this sentence is tragic because, without his name on the street, Marlo, whose self-definition was based entirely on his self-declared usurpation of sovereignty, no longer exists in the game. His also is a false choice, because while giving up his crown may mean freedom from incarceration, it is the end of the only world he knows. He is compelled to make the very move that Stringer Bell had dreamed for himself and Avon Barksdale, though Marlo is transformed from gangster to businessman against his wishes. In the penultimate scene of The Wire, we see the price at which this move comes. Having abruptly left an elegant evening event with his new peers, Stanfield finds himself on a dimly-lit street. At one corner, two ‘young punks’ are deep in conversation. Hearing them discuss one of Omar’s mythic exploits, Marlo approaches them, only to discover that they no longer know who he is. After a brief tussle, he stands alone in the night, a knife wound to his

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right arm, bemused at the turn his luck has taken. The future open to him is one of complete invisibility; the end of his existence on the stage that was his world. All the world’s a stage With Shakespeare’s historical reimagination of the succession of royal power from Henry VI to Henry VII in mind, we could summarize the narrative trajectory of The Wire as follows. Initially, battling over territory in Baltimore’s East- and Westside brings legitimation to the Barksdale clan, yet the bodies on the street get Avon and some of his most trusted muscle into prison, thus opening up a breach in the power structure of the drug game out of which two opposing schemes can emerge – the New World Co-Op and Marlo Stanfield’s challenge for the crown. In the course of the civil war that follows, Marlo – like Richard III – either eradicates his opponents or turns them into allies so successfully that he can declare himself absolute sovereign of the drug game. Yet in the final battle with the police, Stanfield’s troops are caught and the price for his defeat is the total abdication from the game, which brings with it – and therein lies the poignant correspondence to the closure Richard III has to offer – a second-generation Co-Op. At the end of The Wire, we have business as usual – not necessarily the peace which Shakespeare’s royal wedding promises, but at least a containment of excessive bloodshed on the streets of Baltimore. Among those sacrificed are players who had alternative visions:  Stringer Bell with his dream of ‘going legit,’ Prop Joe and his privileging of business over battling, as well as Major Bunny Colvin with his Hamsterdam experiment. Ironically, of course, the king does ultimately stay the king. Re-installed as kingpin within the prison world, Avon – along with his most trusted muscle – Wee-Bey Brice, continues to influence Baltimore’s drug traffic from inside. On a more positive note, Wee-Bey’s son Namond has evaded the succession his father had in store for him, living instead with the Colvins and pursuing an academic career against the odds of the game that instead fall heavily onto Namon’s friend Duquan ‘Dukie’ Weems, who ends up living with a drug addict and scrounging money off Roland ‘Prez’ Pryzbylewski, the incompetent detective-turned-teacher who cuts a highly ambiguous figure at the end of The Wire. However, I began my discussion with a reading of the chess game scene in part because it also speaks to the very theatricality of power that

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connects William Shakespeare’s world to that of The Wire. As the melancholic Jaques explains in As You Like It: All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances And one man in his time plays many parts.33 The point of chess is, after all, that it foregrounds the issue of staging power not only because all the positions and moves are determined in relation to a clearly delimited playing field. Rather, as already discussed, it draws attention to the performative nature of legitimation, given that it includes the possibility of declaring oneself to be ruler by appropriating the signs of authority, namely the crown. This also means, however, that the position key players assume in the drug game is predicated on accruing recognition from the other players as well as from those on the periphery, looking on. Or, put another way, for power based on legitimation to have any effect, it must have an audience. If preserving their name on the street is the only guarantee players like Avon, Marlo or Omar have to maintaining their power, it involves not only a constant war to maintain this self-declared legitimation but also a perpetual public display of it, be it in person or as a narrative installed in collective memory. The significance of a theatrical display of power contestation finds a particularly effective articulation in a late scene in season 5. With Marlo willing to sell ‘the connect,’ the other Co-Op members meet in an open lot at night to discuss how much each can contribute to buying him out. Cockily, the traitor Cheese claims he can put up more than his share because he trusts in the future. When one of the other men points out that they were doing fine as long as his uncle had ‘the connect’, implicitly accusing him of having forced them to put up with Marlo in the first place, Cheese, putting his gun to his interlocutor’s face, counters by giving his reading of the past civil war: ‘Joe had his time and Omar put an end to that. Then Marlo had his time, short as it was, and the police put an end to that. And now motherfucker it’s our time, mines and yours.’ A circle has formed around the two combatants, watching a performance in which the proper narrative interpretation of their legacy is as much at stake as the money they need to reinstall the Co-Op. Cheese derides the other man, shouting at him: ‘There ain’t no back in the day,

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nigger. Ain’t no nostalgia to this shit here. There’s just the street and the game and what happen here today.’ Cheese’s is the unsentimental attitude of a pure opportunist, lacking all sense of loyalty, of respect for past royalty, but also all responsibility for his own actions: ‘When it was my uncle, I was with my uncle,’ he concludes: ‘When it was Marlo, I was with him’. At the precise moment Cheese is about to finish his diatribe by saying what is now, Slim Charles, who had so presciently assured Avon that they could do nothing other than fight a war once they had started it, shoots him in the head. Asked by the bemused onlookers why he had done this, he knowingly explains: ‘That was for Joe.’ Sentimental as the move may be, it illustrates the degree to which a collectively performed nostalgia is necessary for the game to hold. The name of the man who, if only for a brief moment, had brought them prosperity with his vision of how business could be done peacefully, needs to be preserved over and against all challengers interested only in the chances the present holds. The miseen-scène, in turn, draws attention to yet another Shakespearean legacy. As in the history plays, violence in The Wire is necessarily theatrical. If one’s name is the only guarantor for legitimation, this requires an audience for whose benefit it can be fought through. Someone needs to witness and to report the struggle incessantly played out on the streets, even when the contests take place in nocturnal alleys or abandoned lots. If, then, the Baltimore drug world is a stage on which everyone must play his or her part, this theatricality plays to various audiences. First and foremost, the visceral power play between opponent kingpins is pointedly staged for the players themselves as well as for members of the community at large, often just innocent bystanders accidentally drawn into their war. When, in the first season, D’Angelo and his friends hold council on an orange sofa placed in the middle of the pit, they embody the centre of a panopticon-like visual regime. Their control over this small part of the drug game is predicated on a theatrical display of themselves as privileged observers. Those they watch – their ‘hoppers’, their customers, as well as the police – are meant to take note of the four soldiers, looking out at them from this exposed stage. Marlo will also hold council outside, in a stony yard that even more explicitly recalls a theatre, although the audiences for whom he stages himself are far less public, while the Co-Op meetings recall early-modern aristocratic mores with the most powerful figure standing in front of the others, as though addressing his courtiers. Yet what The Wire inherits from Shakespeare’s histories is not

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only the manner in which the kingpins stage their own authority, but also the way they perform their triumph over selected opponents. If, on the Shakespearean stage, the heads of vanquished enemies often come to be prominently displayed, so, too, in The Wire, corpses function as encoded messages sent out to the community. It is useful to recall that the entire series begins with a corpse and the discussion it prompts between Detective Jimmy McNulty and one of his informers as to why the dead man was called Snotboogie. They are looking at a crime scene that has been blocked off with yellow tape: a stage in nuce, with the police as actors, moving around a dead body they are trying to read, passing information about its identity and the probable cause of death to each other, while the onlookers stand around them in a semi-circle. In the many public crime scenes to come, these corpses may merely signify the continuation of the drug war and function as a symptom of urban malaise, evoking outrage or disinterest. To those who share the code, in turn, they often have a further, more specific meaning, functioning as admonition, and also – in the case of the cruelly disfigured corpse of Omar Little’s boyfriend Brandon Wright, as a prompt for revenge. Or, as with the informer William Gant’s body, while to most of the ‘soldiers’ on the ground it serves as a warning not to testify in court against a member of the Barksdale clan, for D’Angelo it gives body to his rising mistrust of his uncle’s modus operandi. To knowledgeable viewers of the series, furthermore, it also anticipates D’Angelo’s own fate once he, like Gant, shows himself willing to cooperate with the police. The world of crime, however, is street theatre in the further sense that the routine which regulates the drugs trafficking itself already involves a public display. The buying and selling, as well as the communication between those on the corners and their superiors, is presented in David Simon’s reimagination of the drug world as a ritualized performance, played out in the open, with the inhabitants of the projects – be they involved or disaffected – as audience. Once the wire for which McNulty has fought so furiously is up, this routine turns into a performance that – explicitly or unwittingly – has the police as its privileged spectators as well, albeit once removed. The scene in which Reginald ‘Bubbles’ Cousins, for example, uses hats to signal to the surveillance team who the key players in Barksdale’s team are while to these men themselves he is performing an act of buffoonery worthy of any Shakespearean fool, is a particularly salient example of this doubled spectatorship. Indeed,

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once the police wire begins to track the corpses, left on the street as evidence of the ongoing drug war, this second-degree theatricalization of power fully comes into play. What was initially clandestine theatre, put on for those living in the Baltimore projects, becomes a performance for the police as well. Cracking the pager code in the first season allows Lt. Daniels’s special unit to capture dialogues between individual players and begin to map the dramatis personae of the game according to the side they are fighting on. By rendering the clandestine drug trafficking visible, the wire produces theatre within theatre (or indeed television). The computer screens transform the police into the audience of schemes and movements they can only partially understand. Recorded by hidden microphones as well as photo and video cameras, individual scenes of the game are rendered visible as snippets of coded dialogue, as freeze-frames or silent film footage. On their pinboards, Daniels’s special unit repeatedly draws out connections between labelled photographs, trying to reconstruct the position of each player in the overall hierarchy, thus enacting what any theatre audience (or reader of a play) does. Daniels’ men and women are looking for points of orientation in the dramatic action so as to make sense of the dialogues they have overheard, and particularly the effects these have had on the stage they are clandestinely privy to. The manner in which these surveillance cameras produce a stage within the stage of the drug game, furthermore, becomes self-consciously exposed when the gangsters, cognizant that they are being watched, explicitly perform for the police, play to their expectations or ludically thwart their reconnaissance efforts. At the same time, these self-reflexive moments – playing with the rhetorical force of visual estrangement – force us to think of ourselves in terms of a spectatorship in which we function as the extradiegetic counterpart to the police, who are the diegetic audience of a game staged for both their and our edification. When it self-consciously goes public, the police work, of course, is equally theatrical. Repeatedly, McNulty and his team, angered at precipitous raids that will shut down the wire, note that the brass upstairs want a circus, and indeed, the attacks on stash houses are shown to be staged for the press and the politicians. Like the signifying corpses, the arrests the police make are conceived as theatrical acts with multiple signification. More than mere warnings to all involved in the drug game, they serve to legitimate a particular law-enforcement policy that declares itself to

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be effective even though – or precisely because – those on the ground know it is not. To underscore the TV show’s own comment on the theatricality of police interventions, we find at the end of season 3, in a particularly self-reflexive scene, Deputy Commissioner William Rawls playing Richard Wagner’s ‘Ritt der Walküren’ (‘Ride of the Valkyries’) during his raid on Hamsterdam, explicitly citing the infamous attack on a Vietnamese Village in Francis Ford Coppola’s1979 film Apocalypse Now, which is itself a quote from D.W. Griffith’s Ku-Klux-Klan-glorifying 1915 silent film The Birth of a Nation. During the press conferences following these raids, the commanding officers and politicians repeatedly present their show of force as evidence of their authority, while – and this brings in the final aspect of theatricalization of power in The Wire – David Simon deploys this public display ironically. His unequivocal assessment of this war on drugs is, after all, that while it may make for good theatre, it fails as good police work. In other words, we – the audience – are called upon to look with a double vision. Thought of as a pinboard, unfolding in five acts, The Wire displays for us a complex network of players, their positions and moves, yet – in contrast to the work of Daniels’s special unit – it does more than disclose the lines of connection between them. The radical contingency of the present moment that Cheese calls ‘the street and the game and what happen here today’ transforms into dramatic personalized narratives involving several orders of viewing. We look at the police looking at and with the onlookers at crime scenes looking at signifying corpses. We follow the police as they capture and then comment on the drug game. Yet, David Simon decisively calls upon us to offer a commentary on this theatrical display of violence that is also different from that of the police, press or the politicians precisely because we are privy to the emotionally charged portraits he presents of his dramatis personae  – be they pawns, muscle or royalty. Simon’s point is that these players are precisely the warriors from whom – especially since 9/11 – our attention has been withdrawn. As the police surveillance sheds light on their clandestine activities, they gain visibility for us as well. The wire may be legally and morally dodgy, but from a narratological point of view, its function is to make sure that this part of American culture does not remain invisible. By turning Baltimore into a stage where each must play his part, this overlooked world becomes our stage as well. We empathize in pity and awe, as we would with Shakespeare’s characters even if we do not

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condone, perhaps do not even fully comprehend what we have become privy to. As Michael Wood notes, the final montage sequence at the end of The Wire allows us to ‘hold the city (home of dealers of all kinds) and the City (the imaginary civic stage on which we watch what we imagine we have become) in a single thought. Business as usual is an unending nightmare; but this grand nightmare is ending with a terrific grace.’34 It is useful to recall that the sequence comes right after Jimmy McNulty – bringing back the homeless man he had abducted as part of his own personal vendetta on his superiors that ultimately cost him his job – has stopped his car and gotten out to look at the skyline of Baltimore. The camera begins to zoom into a close-up, catching a brief smirk on the face of this former detective, and then moves to vignettes of what has become of the surviving players. The pawns are, if still alive, still on the corner, the cops, if still in service, are still in the bar, some players celebrate their success in public, some in private, others have silently cut their losses. The ordinary power relations, subjecting individual fates into their all-encompassing network, have once more been reinstalled. The individuals we, over five seasons, have come to invest with our sympathy fade back into oblivion as the editing moves to even shorter snapshots of urban street life. Seamlessly, we return to short clips of scenes from The Wire – including D’Angelo’s chess instruction – so that for a brief moment of nostalgia, the past is resuscitated. Then, just before this montage sequence ends, we get a final parade of anonymous faces. We are about to withdraw our gaze, and yet, for these few seconds, they are part of the visual kaleidoscope that stands for the City of the early twentyfirst century. The editing returns to McNulty, whose smirk is now more ambivalent, and who, facing the camera while he looks one last time at his view of Baltimore, implicitly appeals with his gaze to us, before telling his passenger: ‘Larry, let’s go home’. In contrast to the montage sequences that put closure on the four previous seasons, this one is marked as McNulty’s dream; a dream, to boot, about the many scenes that have made up (or could be part of) a TV show called The Wire. After McNulty’s car has driven out of the frame, the camera tarries with a final image of Baltimore’s skyline. McNulty’s final (re)vision prompts the return to a home that is more than a concrete place  – that is an imaginary visual composite signifying the place one belongs to because it is familiar, because it

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has become known. The end of this final montage sequence is also a form of waking up, not just for Jimmy McNulty (who, discharged from the Baltimore PD, will no longer pursue his dream of ruthless law enforcement) but also for us. As bleak as this single contemplation of business as usual may be, it leads us to a different genre, recalling the closure of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Here Robin consoles us that the visions that appeared before our eyes are ‘no more yielding than a dream.’35 The Wire ultimately proves to be a dream, nightmarish perhaps, about watching a series of dreams unfolding on screen, in actual urban locations but above all in the minds of those who, as the intended spectators inside and outside of this TV show’s diegesis, came to be part of it. Gently nudged by David Simon’s Puck, we are asked to return to a home, altered by this dream we have shared.

9 QUEEN OF CHESS On Serial Reading

Rules of the game Discussing the manner in which an interpretation of rules influences our actions, Ludwig Wittgenstein asserts that even though we may have been trained to react to the expression of a rule (such as a sign-post) in a particular way, we would only comply with what the sign-post directs us to do ‘in so far as there exists a regular use of sign-posts, a custom’.1 Because interpretations in themselves do not determine meaning, to follow a rule does not mean reacting to this rule (or sign-post) in a particular way only once in our lives. Instead, at issue, Wittgenstein argues, is understanding this action as being part of a series that – like the playing of a game of chess – is shaped by conventions, customs, and institutions. So as to interrogate what happens when a game based on serial usage suddenly experiences an unfamiliar re-encoding, Wittgenstein takes recourse again to a scene in which two people sit at a chessboard: But now imagine a game of chess translated according to certain rules into a series of actions which we do not ordinarily associate with a game – say into yells and stamping of feet. And now suppose those two people to yell and stamp instead of playing the form of chess that we are used to; and this in such a way that their procedure is translatable by suitable rules into a game of chess.2

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With this uncustomary game of chess in mind, we must, however, distinguish between a social and a hermeneutic perspective on the question of rules. Regarding the social perspective, rules are conceived in relation to the actions they compel. We act (and speak) by following rules to which we concede (or attribute) a habitual or conventional usage. By virtue of the fact that we apply these rules repeatedly, they receive a normative character. The hermeneutic perspective, in turn, treats rules in relation to the way they are formulated. When we come to agree on an action predicated on certain rules, we do this by virtue of interpreting formulations of rules, which is to say by interpreting the expression (or articulation) of a rule. According to Wittgenstein, we could continue to say that the two people sitting at the chessboard are playing a game because they are following a code of practice in which a series of actions corresponds to the rules of a chess game, even if these are unaccustomed. Yet it is important to define more precisely how this interpretation relates to the determination of modes of action, based on obeying rules. After all, Wittgenstein is not interested in a hermeneutic exegesis, seeking to discover behind every interpretation yet another one. Rather, he seeks to claim that ‘there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call “obeying the rule” and “going against it” in actual cases’.3 Interpretation is not the result of a slow unveiling of layers of meaning mounted on top of each other. Instead, Wittgenstein seeks to restrict the term interpretation ‘to the substitution of one expression of the rule for another’.4 If, regarding the example Wittgenstein offers, we ask ourselves what game is actually being played, we interpret these rules – or, to be more precise, the formulation of the rules of this particular game. At issue is not, in fact, that a game of chess is being played and that rules are being applied, but rather that we come to agree on these rules and, concomitant with this, come to ask which figures can be said to belong to the chess game, which moves are permitted, and what the objective of playing this game is.5 Regarding the hermeneutic perspective, a re-interpretation or reencoding of a game’s rules can occur, with the result that a different game emerges that can, in fact, actually be played. At issue, however, is not primarily the application of a rule but rather its negotiation, so that an investigation into the seriality inherent to this concept of rules as interpretive operations also speaks to the fact that the chess

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game itself encompasses a series of moves, the meaning of which only comes to be articulated in the course of constant and consistent practice. If a rule comes to be expressed only when it is applied, case by case, this brings into play two further series that proceed in opposite directions. Looked at from a hermeneutic perspective, the application of a rule either serves to continue a custom or to discontinue this usage by transposing the actions into another serially conceived game, which means adapting them in the process. At stake is, thus, the question who formulates the rules that determine each newly conceived game. Who has interpretational sovereignty? While the decisive re-encoding can be ascribed to an authorial intention, it can also – and this is the line of investigation this essay on serial reading will pursue – serve to disclose both a textually engendered reading effect as well as the hermeneutic process itself, which is brought into play so that a given set of texts may be recognized as a signifying (and significant) series. Decisive for the following discussion of serial narration in contemporary quality TV that depicts games of chess at significant moments is the application of those rules of the game that consciously bank on the translation of one system of rules into another. As such, a conception of interpretation is brought into play that pointedly brings into focus the substitution of one expression of the rule for another. Application, in turn, is to be understood as a textual refiguration that either follows a pre-set thematic sequence or pits something against it. At the same time, at issue is taking into account a mode of serial reading on the diegetic level of each given narrative  – namely in relation to the way a set of fictional characters seek to interpret and manage the conflicted situation in which they find themselves emplaced  – as well as uncovering an extradiegetic line of connection running between a set of texts that repeatedly have recourse to scenes in which a game of chess is being played. The differences that emerge in the course of this crossmapping are as significant as the similarities from which the claim to interpretation as a metatextually conceived serial game emerges in the first place. Chess code I have chosen as my point of entry not a TV series but Tomas Alfredson’s 2011film adaptation of John le Carré‘s spy novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy because it can be seen as the beginning of the series of chess games

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I wish to analyse. The narrative begins with the failure of a secret mission. In Budapest, Jim Prideaux (Mark Strong) was meant to find out the code name of the member of the British Secret Service’s inner circle (called ‘the circus’) who is working for the Soviet enemy. His arrest instead leads to the dismissal of Control (John Hurt) and his right hand, George Smiley (Gary Oldman). After Control dies soon thereafter, Smiley – who has now assumed the position of outside observer – is given the assignment by his former superior to follow up on the rumour regarding this alleged spy. From the beginning, Smiley’s investigation is presented as the enmeshment of a narrative series and its serial cinematic representation. Even before Smiley accepts this assignment, the faces of the four men eligible as traitors flicker before his inner eye. This flashback montage visually recalls the meeting of the circus during which Control, in response to the debacle in Budapest, signed his resignation as chief of these five spies. Armed with this imagined series of portraits, Smiley and his assistant Peter Guillan (Benedict Cumberbatch) visit the flat of the deceased man, where they will encounter a haptic correspondence for it. The discovery is consciously staged as a theatrical scene. Only once Peter has pulled open the curtains behind the desk so that light can fall from outside into the darkened room do the two men notice the chess pieces onto which Control has taped photographs of the other members of the circus: Percy Alleline (Toby Jones) as the white rook, Toby Esterhase (David Dencik) as the black knight, Roy Bland (Ciarán Hinds) as the black king and Bill Haydon (Colin Firth) as the white bishop (9.1).

9.1

Film still from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Tomas Alfredson, 2011).

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Film still from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Tomas Alfredson, 2011).

Smiley hears a voice-over of the deceased man calling to him while his gaze falls upon the black queen that, as we only see at the flashback’s end, bears his own photograph (9.2). This translation of one series (the chess pieces) into a second one (the five members of the circus) not only establishes a system of ordering but also points to a key problem in the film’s interpretation of the Cold War as a game. If Control’s own ranks include both white and black figures, this duplicity serves to signal that he has suspected for quite some time the presence of a double agent at the heart of the British Secret Service. Attention is also drawn, however, to the fact that this chess game has been and continues to be fought through in the circus that consists of these five men. The successful attack on Control, which cost him his position as their superior, is cinematically underscored with a further flashback, triggered by Smiley’s discovery of these chess pieces:  the scene in which Control and his ally Smiley are informed about the existence of the clandestine project ‘Witchcraft’ that, in the course of the narrative, will emerge as a brilliant master plot designed by their arch enemy Karla (Michael Sarne). Alleline and his cohorts, thinking that they have acquired a reliable source among the ranks of their Soviet enemy – not least of all to satisfy personal ambitions and a hunger for power – have in fact opened up a breach in their own defence line. At the same time, this second flashback engenders a series on the level of the film narrative that  – given that we are now influenced by Smiley’s subjective gaze – compels us to look differently at the preceding

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portrait series of the four suspects, namely through the lens of the series of chess pieces that bear their photographs. In other words, the narrative seriality operates thematically by assigning specific roles to the individual players in a spy game that is reconceived as a chess game, in which each position comes with moves dictated by the rules of the game. At the same time, a visual series is also produced by virtue of the editing that, in the form of interpolated flashbacks, repeatedly returns to scenes from the past during which the members of the circus had their conflicted meetings in the soundproof conference room. In this case, at issue is not the creation of an ordering system but rather the attempt to use a narratively constructed series heuristically so as to find out who the internal traitor is. With Smiley, we continually look back at the sequence of close-ups of the four suspects that changes in the course of this serial inspection. The additional information brought into play by Smiley’s subsequent investigation has as a result that a significant factor of differentiation comes to be inscribed into the narrative repetition. Precisely by virtue of this serial return to the same faces of the circus’s other members, Smiley (and we with him) can, in each case, recognize something new. He sees something he had not, indeed, could not have seen before. This accumulation of information is what makes serial reading operative. What is equally decisive, furthermore, is that Smiley continues Control’s work of translation by adding more figures to the sequence. In other words, Smiley not only takes the dead man’s chess pieces with him to his new office in a secluded hotel. In this new location, he also begins a second game of chess. At first, only black chess pieces are lined up on his desk so as to underscore the difference to the one white piece, the queen, onto which, in lieu of a photograph, he has taped the name ‘Karla’ (9.3). Having picked up a black pawn, Smiley proceeds to assign to his assistant Peter the first in a series of dangerous tasks that will ultimately allow him to solve the case. The mise-en-scène thus clearly distinguishes between two, albeit interrelated strategic games. The first is concerned with the power game at the heart of the British Secret Service that first Control and now Smiley have observed as outsiders, hoping to track down the figure that allowed Karla, also in the role of outside observer, to take part in and indeed manipulate this game. So as to signify that, with the help of Control’s labelling of five chess pieces, he is beginning to solve the case, Smiley continues this series, including a further suspect in the set.

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9.3

Film still from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Tomas Alfredson, 2011).

9.4

Film still from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Tomas Alfredson, 2011).

He soon places the black bishop, onto which he has taped a newspaper photograph of the soviet cultural attaché Polyakov, next to the white queen, Karla, already standing on his desk (9.4). Smiley has understood that this man literally runs errands for his personal opponent and, as such, needs to be allocated a position in a second game of chess, which takes on a superordinate role in the film narrative. In this case, Smiley and Karla are sitting across from each other at a chessboard, and, represented by the black and the white queen, are playing a game that will not result in a checkmate but rather in a stalemate that will allow both to survive. How seminal this parallel strategy game is for the resolution of this serially conceived film narrative becomes clear in the scene in which Smiley confesses to Peter that he once personally met Karla. However,

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we are offered no flashback for the direct confrontation between these two chess queens. Instead, Smiley’s memory culminates in the confession that he had made to his opponent at the time: ‘We’re not so very different’. The film thus not only draws our attention to the fact that successful interpretation is predicated on an action undertaken in relation to a set of rules, but also that Smiley’s investigation itself constitutes a performative action. In that he not only conceives of the suspects in terms of a series but in fact continues this series, he can himself intervene in the game played amongst the remaining members of the circus. He can influence their moves and bring about a situation that will compel the traitor in their midst to betray himself. If the chess pieces, conceived as a series, not only serve to encode the spy work but also to identify a breach in the system, Smiley, in the course of his investigation, must reconstruct a strategy game in which a role has been attributed to himself as well, namely that of the black queen. Supported by the repeated flashbacks, he produces a series within the film narrative. In so doing, he not only comes to understand the rules of the series of re-encoded chess figures Control has devised. After repeating this series mentally in the form of his own memory work, Smiley is able to apply it to his investigation and, in so doing, come up with a viable interpretation. His serial observation of the four suspects compels us, in turn, to adjust and refocus our own gaze several times, helping us to see more clearly as well. Information – which has appeared in a scattered manner on the distributional level of the film narrative – can, with the help of the series we, as spectators, are called upon to construct retrospectively along with Smiley, be integrated into a coherent interpretation. As such, the narrative sequencing emanating from Smiley’s internal gaze is heuristically effective. Only once these dispersed details are thought by him as a series – and read serially by us – can a solution for this case be found.6 Smiley’s continuation of the series of chess pieces as surrogate figures for those suspected of being national traitors ultimately leads to the flashback of another seminal scene from the past. His memory of a Christmas party, celebrated by the entire staff of the Secret Service – and, in retrospect, proving to have been the primal scene of his own vulnerability – is framed by him sitting, once again, at his desk. He contemplates his row of chess pieces – this time consisting of three white and three black figures. In the flashback, we then see the three suspects – Alleline,

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Toby and Roy – standing next to each other, singing the Russian national anthem along with all the others present in the room. Smiley is not with them, because he set out to look for his wife Ann (Katrina Vasilieva). The fact that he espies her outside in the garden, passionately embracing a man whom he sees only from the back, leads Smiley to suspect that her clandestine lover is his colleague Haydon. At the end of the flashback, we return to Smiley and his chess figures, which include the white bishop. Conceived as a series, Smiley can now integrate the narrative fragments that revolve around this Christmas party into a meaningful whole, which reveals precisely this figure to be the sought-after traitor. In his last conversation with Smiley, Haydon will confess that the affair was, in fact, a brilliant chess move on the part of Karla: ‘He reckoned if I was known to be Ann’s lover, you wouldn’t be able to see me straight’. Only in the course of reconstructing the past through the lens of his current investigation – and thus only once this singular event is conceived as part of a series – can Smiley recognize what he had implicitly already known while the Christmas celebration was taking place: The figure who was not standing next to the other singers was not only the disturber of his marriage but also the traitor in their midst. Yet the deployment of chess figures in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is even more complicated. Only late in the film do we discover that Control has been operating with a second translation of his series of chess figures/suspects into another game, itself conceived as yet another series. As Jim Prideaux confesses to Smiley, the night Control gave him the assignment to travel to Budapest, the director had also disclosed the code names of his chess pieces. Once more we see this nocturnal conversation as a flashback. While reciting the names of each member of the circus, Control places one chess piece after the other on his desk: Alleline ‘Tinker’, Haydon ‘Tailor’, Bland ‘Soldier’. Because neither ‘Sailor’, nor ‘Rich Man’ seems appropriate for this transference, he gives to Esterhase the code name ‘Poor Man’, but leaves out Smiley, his fifth piece, entirely. Not being part of his game of suspicion, his confidant falls outside the sequence. The enmeshment of chess pieces with a nursery rhyme is decisive precisely because this counting game is sometimes also used to determine who, in a game of hide-and-seek, will be the one who does the searching. The editing of this film scene is such that we return one last time to the faces of the four men that have come to be transposed onto a series of elements in two different games – pieces in

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a chess game and stereotypes in a nursery rhyme. Smiley, sitting alone in his office, recalls one last time a meeting of the circus in the soundproof conference room. At this point in the film narrative, however, at issue is the turning of the counting came into an action: Which of the men is not allowed to hide, because, as a counterspy, he must be handed over to the law? The logic of investigation proposed by the film suggests that a diffuse suspicion can take on concrete shape when it is played through as the crossmapping of several figural series. The interpretation that comes to unfold in the course of Smiley’s serial reconstruction, allows him to identify the white bishop, designated by Control as the Tailor of the counting game, as the man he has been searching for all along. The game of chess is, of course, particularly well suited for a transposition into the rules of Cold War culture, given that this particular royal game, which came from Arabia to Europe in the early modern period, has a long tradition as a trope for wars fought between feudal rulers. At the same time, the rules of this game can so fruitfully be transferred to the power network organizing the world of international espionage because chess, as Michel de Certeau has suggested, is played on a board on which movements stand in a proportional relation to situations. The chess game formulates and formalizes not only rules that organize the choice of possible moves. The game is also predicated on a memory of previous strategies to which one can, in each new case, have recourse.7 Each figure has a clearly defined position with predetermined possibilities of action within a hierarchical order, the main aim of which is to protect the royal couple (and its power) from attacks. When the Secret Service is reconceived as a chess game, furthermore, this draws attention to the way all of the players involved are limited to the chessboard. Once they have signed on to Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the decision not to play is not an option. There is simply the possibility that, by removing certain pieces of one’s opponent as a result of a particularly crafty strategy, one’s own pieces can occupy more advantageous squares in the playing field, yielding more power to one’s side or even oneself. Given that, by virtue of translating the rules of chess into the figures in the counting game to which the film title refers, the white and black chess pieces come to be mixed together, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy draws attention to the fact that an issue of foreign policy, namely the battle between the West and the Soviet Union, is as much at stake as a conflict at the heart of the British Secret Service. At the same time, the omission

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of the queen in the second series signals this piece’s particular status. The supremacy of this figure is, indeed, the fulcrum of this game of transpositions’ continuation and re-encodings in contemporary quality TV. It is, thus, worth recalling the portrait with which Alfredson’s spy film ends. In the final sequence, we see George Smiley, reinstalled in Her Majesty’s Secret Service, once more take up his battle with Karla. The porter cheerfully greets him as he enters the building, then his assistant Peter mischievously smiles to himself as their paths briefly cross in front of the conference room. Finally, Smiley is shown sitting alone at the top end of the table, beaming proudly. The war game, veering towards a competition between the two queens who have both survived the investigation, can continue. A black and a white queen In my reading of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the focus is on serial narration as a thematic concern, supported by montage editing and flashbacks. My discussion will now engage the way intertextuality also banks on serial reading. When a text refers to a precursor, the assumption is that, owing to certain similarities, the spectator will read seminal narrative sequences as a series that connects both texts with each other. Once more at issue is the integration of elements that are dispersed on the distributional level – now however regarding two different texts – into a coherent narrative interpretation. Or put another way, something becomes clear, takes on meaning, based on its repeated usage. As such, however, the act of reading is also understood to be a performative act that, by drawing out a line of connection suggested by one text to a second one, produces an interpretation. Very much along these lines, the BBC miniseries The Honourable Woman (2014) twice makes use of a chess game as a trope for an intricate political power game. It is, of course, necessary that spectators remember the previous strategic deployment of chess in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in order for it to be recognized as a citation. At the same time, the argument negotiated over this game can be deciphered even if the spectators lack this cultural memory. They simply miss out on the genre memory on which Hugo Blick’s own engagement with international espionage at the beginning of the twenty-first century relies, given that we also find the queen of chess at the centre of his TB narrative, albeit significantly refigured. She no longer stands in for a game amongst men that is conducted in secret in the name of Her Majesty.

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Instead, she draws attention to the question of feminine political sovereignty at diverse sites that, precisely because of this multiplicity, are conceived as a series.8 The first game of chess in Hugo Blick’s The Honourable Woman already occurs in the credit sequence. Sir Hugh Hayden-Hoyle (Stephen Rea), head of the Middle East Desk at MI6 meets his counterpart in the Israeli secret service in a London club so as to exchange information with him. He shakes the pouch containing the chess pieces so vigorously that one – the black queen – falls off the table and onto the empty chair next to it, where it lands standing upright (9.5). This short image sequence follows upon two temporally separate scenes from the past, both serving as background information for the fall of this particular chess piece. The first concerns the birth of Kasim resulting from the rape of his mother Nessa Stein (Maggie Gyllenhall) while she and her translator Atika Halibi (Lubna Hazabal) were held hostage in Gaza. The second scene represents the primal scene of violence that now, 29 years later, flares up at the centre of a political intrigue. Posing as a waiter, a Palestinian terrorist had murdered an Anglo-Jewish arms dealer while the latter was dining in a posh London restaurant. His two children, Nessa and Ephra, who had been sitting next to him at the table, have used their father’s estate to set up the Stein Foundation in an effort to forego all sense of retribution

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Film still from The Honourable Woman (Hugo Blick, BBC 2, 2014, credit sequence).

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and, by instead relying on reconciliation, support the peace process in the Middle East. Thus, captivity and violence precedes the credit sequence regarding both the film narrative and the visual montage. Following the shot of the black queen on the empty chair, the camera moves into a close-up of the adult Nessa Stein. She is wearing a red satin robe, laced with ermine and black ribbons to signify that she has just been appointed life peer by Elizabeth II and, as Baroness Stein of Tilbury, now has the right to use the title ‘The Honourable’. Chess occurs a second time in the first episode, now as part of the film’s diegesis. Unwittingly, Nessa Stein has, in fact, become the pawn in a complex political intrigue instrumentalizing her foundation’s project aimed at expanding the glass fibre network in the West Bank so as to convince the US ambassador to the UN Security Council to support the recognition of an independent Palestinian state. This specific political power game comes to be negotiated as the tragic drama of the Stein family, with Kasim at its centre. His being taken hostage at the beginning of the film narrative triggers a series of violent acts that render visible the impossibility of a simple political solution for the Middle East precisely because the parties involved have conflicting interests. The fact that, in order to retrieve the young boy, two honourable women have to enter the political battlefield for which the chessboard stands in also focuses our attention on the fact that what binds the players in this family drama together is ultimately an unsolvable ambivalence of loyalties. Since the liberation of the two women from their captivity, Atika, who had claimed the boy was her son, has been working for Ephra Stein as his house-keeper. In the course of the film narrative, Sir Hugh, who like his predecessor George Smiley is conducting an investigation into this case, will not only discover this exchange in maternal identity but also expose the Palestinian as an agent in a cause of her own, and thus as the actual embodiment of the black queen. Parallel editing is deployed to introduce this second game of chess, now part of The Honourable Woman’s plot, so as to perform a visual analogy between the meeting between the two women in a café and the meeting of the two secret agents in the chess club. This time, as Sir Hugh, who as arrived first, empties the pouch containing the chess pieces onto the board, the white queen is the one to land upright on the empty chair next to the table (9.6). As such, it is the white queen that is understood to be representing the fulcrum of a serially conceived figural constellation

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Film still from The Honourable Woman (Hugo Blick, BBC 2, 2014, episode 1).

giving body to both the personal and the political confrontations at issue. Indeed, since Sir Hugh is already sitting behind his white chess pieces when his counterpart arrives, his white queen can unequivocally be assigned to Nessa Stein who, like him, is already sitting at the table drinking wine before Atika enters the café. So as to visually underscore the analogy between the two sequences, the entrances of both the two-faced Palestinian as well as the Israeli secret agent are staged in such a way that, in each case, it is the British characters who look up at the foreigner approaching their tables. The fact that the white queen has replaced the black one from the credit sequence opens up a series of interpretative options. The implicit series, splicing together the white queen with Sir Hugh and the honourable Nessa Stein, corresponds on the narrative level to the fact that the aim of his investigation is to protect the Baroness Tilbury of Stein. The black queen, who, in turn, heads the series of figures more directly involved in the Middle East conflict because this is the land from which they come, gives body to the suspicion clouding the intimate conversation between both sets of alleged allies. Although the two women and the two agents are playing with each other, they are also opponents in the context of the political game revolving around the issue of Palestinian statehood, and this ambivalence opens up a further level of interpretive possibilities. If, when read serially, the white queen replaces the black one, this not only compels us to recognize that the title ‘honourable’ applies to both. Rather, the notion of being honourable

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also proves to be the character trait that irrevocably connects these two seemingly adversarial players. Now, once we connect the first of the series of figures – conceived in relation to chess pieces – with the intertextual reference to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, what becomes clear is precisely the issue of difference so seminal for serial reading. The two men playing chess are not enemies and, instead, use the chess game to exchange vital information. In contrast to the logic of Cold War culture embodied by Smiley (as the black queen) and Karla (as the white queen), the overriding political battle to which the chess game refers is far more contradictory. Neither is there a clearly delineated frontline regarding the parties directly involved in the MiddleEast conflict nor is there an unambiguous alliance between the British and the American secret services intervening in this conflict, albeit with different political purposes. Furthermore, the two chess queens do not stand in as a code for male spies. Rather, they open up a further line of connection that allows us to transpose their ambivalent relation to another series of characters, in this case a string of powerful women in the international world of espionage, both working with and against each other. While Nessa and Atika are the most obvious points of reference for this coupling, the interchangeability of the black and the white queen also dramaturgically shapes a conflict inside the British Secret Service, involving the fall of one and the restitution of another ambitious female player. The dark-haired Monica Chatwin (Eve Best), tactician in the British Foreign Office, seeks to eliminate the blonde Dame Julia Walsh (Janet McTeer), head of MI6, so as to take over her position. In order to succeed, Chatwin has teamed up with those Palestinian forces who are also supporting Atika in her treacherous double game with the Stein family. At the same time, another female politician stands behind these two adversaries, namely the American Secretary of State (Lachele Carl; recalling Hilary Clinton), who, at the end of The Honourable Woman, publically comes out in support of a two-state solution. What thus unfolds in the course of the narrative is a series of female politicians, both playing with and against each other as a reflection of and commentary on a conflict that – in contrast to the Cold War – cannot be conceived as the continuous variation on a simple opposition between two superpowers. At the same time, reading the exchangeability of the two chess queens serially means focussing on the fact that Blick’s TV series also negotiates a conflicted image of feminine political

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agency. In The Honourable Woman, the queen of chess not only no longer functions merely as a code name. Rather, as the piece that falls off the chessboard, it instead draws attention to the way that the ambivalence of loyalty inscribed into the series of politically powerful women who are actual players in this game of international espionage also gives shape to a cultural anxiety regarding feminine sovereignty. The fall of the black queen in the credit sequence announces the fact that the resolution of the narrative conflict will depend on the fate of the character associated with this chess piece. Pitted against the exchangeability of the black and the white queen – signifying as it does the duplicity of feminine political power – is the fact that, in each case, only one of these chess pieces lands upright on the chair; first the black and then white piece. In contrast to the final image of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Blick’s spy series does not veer towards the open-ended continuation of the series but instead culminates in a decisive confrontation. If, in a figural sense, Palestine is the chessboard on which conflicting political interests are contested, Atika as the black queen will ultimately bring about her personal checkmate and sacrifice herself so that Nessa can survive with the child for whom both function as a mother of sorts. This narrative closure follows upon the honourable mission Atika undertakes for her homeland that requires an insidious betrayal of the Stein family. While this tragic decision ultimately resolves the conflict between the two women, it does not repair the issue of political undecidability negotiated over their ambivalent friendship. At the same time, the fact that Dame Julia, in the form of a second check-mate, uses an internal purge of the British secret service to literally extinguish her opponent allows a further contradiction to flare up. Regarding the Stein family, the game of chess is over, regarding the political conflict in the Middle East – for which this family’s tragedy was a placeholder – a serial game of violence persists, in which revenge is answered with ever more retaliation. Like her genre predecessor George Smiley, the white queen of chess who was able to successfully ward off all attacks on her claim to being the sovereign head of MI6 can count on the fact that the next round of political power play has already begun. A queen, both white and black As Stanley Cavell argues, the heuristic value in determining an intertextual relation consists in asking what the consequences of this might be.

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The serial appearance of comparable themes or tropes draws our attention to those textual events to which further signification needs to be assigned.9 Primarily in the differences that are rendered visible by such serial reading can we begin to interrogate the shapings and concerns specific to each text. In my readings thus, far I have discussed this in relation to a narrative detail, namely the playing of a game of chess. As a third and final step, I want to bring another TV series into the conversation in which the queen of chess – as a trope for feminine political power – assumes a central role, although there is no explicit intertextual relation to either of the texts discussed so far. Rather, at issue now is the performative juxtaposition of these diverse texts so as to present interpretation itself as a serial game. Beau Willimon’s House of Cards (since 2013) does not work with the mutual implication of the black and white chess queens. Instead, the heroine Claire Underwood (Robin Wright) occupies both positions so as to give voice to a conflict within herself. The game of chess that appears three times in the first season is, furthermore, one the Shakespearean hero Francis Underwood (Kevin Spacey), the Democratic whip in Congress, plays with himself. A serial reading of these narrative events draws attention to the fact that, in contrast to the other texts discussed, what we are dealing with here is a hermetically sealed-off playing field. At issue is neither a conflict between two nations conceived in terms of the binary logic of the Cold War nor an ambivalence of loyalties. Rather, this political thriller draws our attention to a power game playing itself out inside the US Democratic Party and as such serving as a cypher for a crisis in democratic processes. If, in this case as well, everything hinges on the queen of chess, negotiated over her self-doubts as well as her persuasive powers is the survival of post-democratic power games. Let us recall:  After the President of the United States Garrett Walker (Michel Gill) and his Chief of Staff Linda Vasquez (Sakina Jaffrey) initially bypass their House Majority Whip Francis Underwood for the post of Secretary of State because they judge his role in Congress as more important, a long and intricate political intrigue sets in, which will culminate in Underwood himself becoming President at the end of the second season. Furthermore, he appoints his wife as Ambassador to the United Nations during the third season, and she, in the course of the fourth season during which he runs for re-election, has herself nominated as his running mate. Throughout, their political happiness depends on the

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Film still from House of Cards (Beau Willimon, Netflix, 2013–, season 1, episode 5).

question whether the marriage of these two ambitious people can hold. Can they always come together again, although at times they pursue different projects that are sometimes even at odds with each other? Or will their fantastic ambition pull them apart irrevocably? The first time a chessboard is deployed in House of Cards as a trope for the political battlefield in Washington DC on which the Underwoods ruthlessly assert themselves is during a nocturnal scene in their home.10 While Francis is developing a strategy with his closest advisor Doug Stamper (Michael Kelly) aimed at sidelining a lobbyist for the Teachers Union, we see Underwood playing a game of chess against himself (9.7). Having moved the black knight, he proceeds with a move on the white side, although we cannot see which piece he has chosen; an indication, perhaps, of the secret move he holds in his hand by which he hopes to pull through a successful attack on his opponent.11 In contrast to the brightly lit living room in which the two men are vehemently arguing with each other, the dining room where Claire is working on her own project is completely dark. Only the screen of her laptop casts light onto her face, suggesting that we are to understand her as the white queen (9.8). For a brief moment, she gazes silently at her husband before returning to her own work. As though he had felt this gaze, Francis interrupts the

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Film still from House of Cards (Beau Willimon, Netflix, 2013–, season 1, episode 5).

discussion he is having with Stamper and walks towards her, asking: ‘I’m sorry, are we being too loud?’ Without looking up from the screen, she responds confidently: ‘A little’. While the two now start speaking about the gala dinner, Francis remains standing in the half-dark. If initially they had been working separately, each on his own persuasive strategy, she has now successfully drawn him to her side. In other words, while the ambition for absolute power driving Francis finds its perfect figuration in a game of chess he plays exclusively with himself, conducting his political intrigues in reality requires a conversation with his wife. And indeed, only once she is ready to discontinue this intimacy – for the moment at least – can Francis pick up his discussion with Stamper. What this brief inclusion of a game of chess thus entails is a detail on the distributional level of the narration that, in the scenes that follow, will come to be integrated into an interpretation. Francis Underwood’s henchman carries out his superior’s orders without looking at the chessboard, signifying that he is willing to obey this absolute sovereign without knowing the rules of the game (and as such also without pitting anything against the rules Francis dictates). Quietly but firmly, Claire in turn transcribes the solitary game her husband is playing into one that insists on a recognition of her position and as such demands a conversation between them as two equal political players.

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Film still from House of Cards (Beau Willimon, Netflix, 2013–, season 1, episode 5).

In the following episode, Claire invites her husband’s bodyguard Edward Meechum into her kitchen one evening for a cup of coffee.12 As the former marine is about to describe his war experience in Afghanistan, a brick crashes through the living-room window. We know already that Doug Stamper has devised this attack so as to put the blame for this act of violence on the teachers union and their strike. Significantly, the brick is thrown through the window behind Francis Underwood’s chessboard, causing several chess pieces to tumble over. Only one actually falls to the ground, and, as Claire and Meechum enter the room, they see the white king lying amongst the pieces of broken glass as a visually marked counterpiece to the brick next to it (9.9). Read serially, this detail signifies two things. The fall that threatens Francis if he does not gain control over the precarious situation regarding the teachers’ strike comes to be articulated by proxy over the fall of the chess piece ascribed to him. At the same time, this assault responds to the sovereignty that Claire, as his white queen, makes claim to, especially once the spectator understands who is behind it. Not only does she repeatedly intervene in the male bonding between Francis and his loyal henchman. In the course of House of Cards, she is also compelled, time and again, to recognize that while she can distance herself from her husband’s action, she cannot extract herself from the consequences these have.13 The chess game assumes a prominent role a third time after Claire – out of anger that her husband deems her own political aims to be secondary to his – has decided to seek out a former lover Adam Galloway

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Film still from House of Cards (Beau Willimon, Netflix, 2013–, season 1, episode 5).

(Ben Daniels), who is living as a photographer in Manhattan. By leaving Francis, Claire wants to show him that they can only be powerful as a political couple if they make their decisions together. This time, the camera moves into a close-up of the chessboard on which Francis, once again in conversation with Doug, is about to make his move.14 We see the white king next to a white bishop and a white rook, yet without the queen by its side because Underwood has just moved this piece to the other side of the board (9.10). Suddenly he asks his henchman whether he wants to join him in this game. Doug, pointing out that he does not know the rules, declines, warding off Francis’ offer to teach him how to play chess. After Doug has left the room, Francis embarks on one of the infamous asides with which he confides his innermost thoughts to the audience. While the camera moves into a close-up, he confesses his own annoyance at having been abandoned by Claire and slowly but resolutely moves the white queen back to its king. Once more, the cinematic language underscores how the chess game Francis Underwood plays with himself serves as a proxy for precisely the confrontation with his wife that he must be willing to take upon himself before she in turn can again consent to their political bond as a couple. While at this point in the narrative, Francis makes this move for her, the rules of the game dictate which action – but also which strategy – is now open to Claire given the situation into which she has placed both of them.

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If everything revolves around the white queen – which must be brought back to the side of the vulnerable king – it neither functions as a code for a game amongst men, nor as a cypher for the exchangeability of two heroines. If we read the deployment of the chess queen as the continuation of a series that connects House of Cards with The Honourable Woman as well as with Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy, a degree of genre memory comes into play regarding the chess piece with which Claire Underwood is unequivocally associated. Strategically she, like Smiley’s Karla, is on a par with the other player (who sometimes functions as her opponent), yet, like Nessa Stein, she is also haunted by anxieties. Claire may be as power-hungry and ruthless as her husband, but in contrast to Francis, who – despite his asides to the audience – is conceived as a static, one-dimensional tyrant, she emerges as the emotionally complex character whose nightmares give voice to her hidden scruples. Although the political ambition that they, as a couple, pursue, is never called into question, she does not avert her gaze from the consequences their evil deeds have. She not only perfectly masters the role of the queen of the people’s hearts, but also experiences a sense of responsibility in decisive moments, which leads to decisions that may be ethically correct even if politically calamitous. If the ambivalence of feeling that, in The Honourable Woman, is divided amongst the two heroines, comes to be condensed in the figure of Claire Underwood, the fact that she figures as both the black and the white queen in her husband’s game also surfaces in her choice of clothes. In a series of scenes, she hesitates between a black and a light-coloured dress, for example when she meets Adam again for the first time since they ended their affair, or when, at the end of the third season, she actually leaves Francis. How much she performatively ups the ante on her husband’s attempt to recapture her as his chess piece is addressed at the beginning of the fourth season. During a telephone conversation, she asks her mother whether she should wear a black or an ivory-coloured dress for the State of the Union address, and then, without taking her advice, opts for the lighter colour. If, in public, Claire is compelled to continue to perform the role of the First Lady who unequivocally stands by the President, then Francis is also meant to realize that this is a role she has consciously chosen to play. The transposition of the chess queen onto the political power game played through within the Underwood marriage thus consistently serves to articulate the question that remains key throughout the first seasons

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of House of Cards. Does Claire allow herself to be reduced to this chess piece – powerful as it may be – in a game her husband plays with himself (and exclusively for his own interests), or will she succeed in changing the rules so as to sit across from him at the chessboard, as his albeit convivial opponent? After all, Claire is not only aligned with the white queen whom Francis moves freely in his solitary game but also with the political power field onto which he transposes the rules of chess, even while  – by switching between black and white  – she also consciously stages herself for the public eye. This TV series thus not only operates by superimposing two chessboards one on top of the other. Rather, while Francis Underwood is able to move the white queen on his actual chessboard according to his will, in the political game of Washington, his flesh and blood queen represents a danger that can only be contained by constantly re-avowing their conversation as a couple, where both are equal. The series of chess queens transposed onto Robin Wright’s performance of a ruthless female politician, sometimes wearing white, sometimes wearing black, has recourse intertextually both to the series of mutually implicated political players who in The Honourable Woman are condensed in the coupling of the white queen Dame Nessa and the black queen Atika. Taking as its point of departure the spy movie Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which reflects (and reflects on) the logic of ColdWar culture by deploying the simple opposition between two opponent male secret agents, the series my crossmapping has performed not only draws into focus a gendering of the way in which quality TV at the beginning of the twenty-first century shapes concerns relating to political sovereignty and its misuse. Rather, at issue also is the proposed hermeneutic practice. In that the interpretive series my reading constructs renders visible a narrative system of ordering predicated on repetitions, attention is also drawn to the differences inscribed in these repetitions. Having discovered this series brings me to ask why House of Cards uses the chess game to give shape to its specific cultural critical concerns. At the same time, the proposed crossmapping also helps me to interrogate which specific concerns all three texts are negotiated over the specific status ascribed to the chess queen. Finally, my crossmapping raises the question how one is to understand the shapes for which, in the course of transposing one game onto another – namely that of the fictional text – we are call upon us to find further signification. That would be the wager of serial reading.

PART II GENDERING THE UNCANNY, IMAGING DEATH

10 THE HORROR OF THE FAMILIAR Freud’s Thoughts on Femininity and the Uncanny

The homely turned strange In one of his few essays on literary motifs, Freud discusses experiences and situations that evoke an uncanny feeling rather than fear or anxiety. As he explains, ‘the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.’1 While in German the word ‘uncanny’ (‘unheimlich’) is the antonym of ‘heimlich’ (‘homely’) as well as ‘heimisch’ (‘native’), which is to say the opposite of what is familiar, Freud rejects the conclusion that something comes to be taken as uncanny and frightening simply because it is not known and unfamiliar. His investigation of the etymology of the word unheimlich suggests instead that the semantic meaning of this concept can, in fact, not be determined unequivocally because it belongs to two paradigms. Indeed, rather than delineating a clear opposition, the proximity between these two semantic fields renders visible the murky line of demarcation that runs between what is familiar, intimate and trustworthy on the one hand, and what is hidden, secret and thus seemingly unreliable, on the other. The meaning of ‘Heimlich,’ he comes to concede, ‘develops in the direction of ambivalence until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich’ 226). Freud, of course, wrote far more extensively about femininity than about questions of aesthetics. Women – and what they want – assume a

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central position in his description of psychic processes, particularly in his thoughts on anxieties and wish-fantasies, on the language of distortion and dislocation in which the unconscious speaks, as well as on object relations and the desires they promote and sustain. Yet it is possible, and indeed fruitful, to conjoin Freud’s discussion of the uncanny with his theoretical construction of femininity because both call forth intellectual uncertainty. Put differently, those trying to understand either the uncanny or femininity find themselves asking whether an unequivocal definition of either is, in fact, possible. Because Freud supports his thoughts on the uncanny with a reading of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s novella ‘The Sandman,’ the ambivalent emotional experience it affords is discussed in relation to the murky interface between life and death. The text’s uncanny effect results from doubts about whether an ‘object is alive or not,’ because an inanimate object has become ‘too much like an animate one’.2 This intellectual uncertainty is, furthermore, played through as an opposition between the protagonist’s two love objects. One the one hand, Nathaniel is betrothed to Clara, a clever but unsentimental young woman who will not heed the psychic demons haunting her lover. On the other hand, he dotes on the doll Olympia who tersely responds to everything he says with the exclamation ‘Oh, oh, oh,’ thus encouraging him to treat her as a screen for his narcissism. Nathaniel ultimately goes mad precisely because he begins to wonder whether a living being might not be dead (his critical bride), while a deanimated object might, after all, have a soul (the docile doll). However, as the protagonist of Hoffmann’s novella can no longer determine unequivocally whether the woman he desires is alive or not, this intellectual uncertainty also entails a psychic gain. His hesitation signifies his wish to defer all final decisions about which of the two women he should choose as his wife. He is able to keep his desire for both alive precisely by keeping the boundary between fantasy and reality blurred. The fact that this confusion results in a pleasurable experience of something terrifying does not contradict Freud’s claim that the uncanny protects the narcissism of the subject. According to Freud, the double or doppelgänger – yet another typical example of the uncanny  – also emerges out of the fissures produced by the murky demarcation between narcissistic fantasies of immortality and the necessity of acknowledging death. If, by virtue of performing a reduplication of the self, the double initially helped sustain the fantasy

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of the ego’s continual survival, mythopoeic stories soon altered its encoding, turning it into a harbinger of death as well. Freud thus came to understand the uncanny as a cipher for an intellectual hesitation sustaining narcissism even while thwarting it. To be more precise, he understood all emanations of the uncanny as embodiments of the desire to sustain a psychic uncertainty regarding the question whether two separate domains such as the animate and the inanimate, immortality and mortality, could be neatly severed from each other. Also seminal to a reading of Freud’s writings on gender difference in light of the ambivalence of feeling evoked by the uncanny is that in both cases, he insists on clearly determining a chronology for the psychic process at stake. Freud’s interpretation of the aesthetic phenomenon revolving around an intellectual uncertainty about the difference between a life-sustaining reality and a lethal fantasy have a seminal figure of thought (Denkfigur) in common with his theory of the development of gender difference. In both cases, Freud posits a primary narcissism that comes to be replaced by a condition disturbing the sense of unity and implenitude narcissism affords. Freud claims that the double is actually a psychic creation, ‘dating back to a very early mental stage, long since surmounted – a stage, incidentally, at which it wore a more friendly aspect,’ before it became a ‘thing of terror’.3 In his version of the genesis of the uncanny, the fantasy of self-duplication initially functions as an apotropaic charm against mortality before it turns into its opposite and becomes a harbinger of death. Before a similar trajectory for Freud’s construction of femininity can be more closely examined, we must recall another rhetorical gesture that works against Freud’s chronology of the subject’s psychic development. The double, he claims, is part of a more general tendency of fantasy work to sustain a belief in the omnipotence of thought. Acquiring mature subjectivity – which according to Freud goes in tandem with an acceptance of castration – in turn means relinquishing precisely this narcissistically satisfying belief. At the same time, the repressed psychic material comes to be preserved as a foreign body in the psychic apparatus and returns from the unconscious as a memory trace, rebelling against the mature subject’s certain knowledge of its own implenitude. The uncanny thus not only pertains to all harbingers of human mortality, but more particularly to the subject’s resilient psychic oscillation between an acknowledgment of vulnerability and a belief in omnipotence.

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The maternal body and the uncanny Perhaps the most seminal parallel between the uncanny and Freud’s construction of femininity consists in the fact that both recall the psychic condition of narcissistic happiness that had to be relinquished for psychic maturity to set in, but continues to tarry in the psychic apparatus as a trace of lost plenitude. At one point in his essay, Freud elaborates: It often happens that neurotic men declare that they feel there is something uncanny about the female genital organs. This unheimlich place, however, is the entrance to the former Heim [home] of all human beings, to the place where each one of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning.4 If, according to Freud, a man says to himself, while he is still dreaming: ‘this place is familiar to me, I’ve been here before’, we may interpret the place as being his mother’s genitals or her body. In this case too, then, the unheimlich is what was once heimisch, familiar; the prefix “un” is the token of repression.5 The maternal body as the first home of all human beings emerges as a seminal concept in Freud’s thoughts on the uncanny, given that it allows him to render visible the complex process of disfiguration subtending his notion of repression. At stake in repressed memory of the maternal body’s resilient return is precisely his claim for an originary fusion with another body that can, however, only be recognized belatedly, once it has been irrevocably lost. Decisive about the uncanny is, after all, the epistemological ambivalence inscribed in this trope. The return of a familiar emotion, rendered uncanny by virtue of the process of repression, forces the subject to confront the fact that while the process of psychic maturation has called upon him to relinquish the notion of a happy fusion with the maternal body, in fantasy he has been able to sustain this scene of bliss. At the same time, the maternal body is always ambivalently encoded in psychoanalytic theory. While it stands for the unlimited security afforded by the mother’s womb before birth, the maternal body also serves as a cipher for the vulnerability that the child is forced to accept along with

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the gift of birth. The denaveling from the maternal body signifies the fact that all human beings are subject both to the law of mortality as well as to the cultural codes that curtail individual drives and demands. When, in the course of lovemaking, the genitals of the beloved are perceived as an uncanny doubling of the maternal body, repression on the part of the man has failed. The desirable woman he is holding in his arms promises a return to the place ‘where each one of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning.’ The beloved, so often – according to Freud – chosen in the image of the mother, appears uncanny in a manner that satisfies the male subject’s narcissism. Because in his fantasy she now embodies a double of the maternal body, the repression of the originary home, which went in tandem with the cutting of the umbilical cord, can, in turn, be repressed. At the same time, in her function as a double, the beloved also reminds the male subject of the act of repression that not only forced him to relinquish his first home inside the maternal body but, concomitant with this loss, forced him to accept the reality of mortality as a by-product of the gift of life. The oscillation between repressed psychic material and its phantasmagorical return emerges in all articulations of the uncanny. In his discussion of involuntary repetition, however, Freud adds a further component to his equation. The repetition compulsion, which renders an innocent situation uncanny, introduces the idea of fate’s necessity where one would have preferred to speak about an unlucky accident. Since the uncanny is primarily sustained by the feeling that a particular person or situation is already familiar, it is by definition predicated on the recognition of a repetition. Repetition compulsion, in turn, functions as a wishfulfilment in so far as it allows the subject to reconfigure coincidence into a question of fate. Even though, as a result of this phantasmagorical re-encoding, something familiar suddenly appears to be terrifying, psychic gain has been achieved. Compelled to repeat an unpleasant action, the subject can convince himself that he is not responsible for what is happening. Some force beyond his control is driving him. A fortuitous chance event has come to be endowed with meaning, a coherent schema has successfully been grafted onto the complexity of accidental contingencies and thus reduced to a simple, unequivocal formula. The replacement of coincidence by fateful necessity represents a psychic relief. As was the case, once upon a time, while the unborn child was still enjoying the protection of the maternal womb, so, too, the person overwhelmed

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by the experience of an involuntary repetition can give himself up to a law he has no power over without having to judge or act on his own accord. The emergence of the uncanny allows him to suspend his own responsibility. This is true also for expressions of the uncanny such as the animistic omnipotence of thoughts Freud calls ‘the subject’s narcissistic overvaluation of his own mental processes,’ with which he or she strives to ‘fend off the manifest prohibitions of reality’.6 Although each adult subject knows that the world of fantasies has no power over reality, he or she nevertheless harbours traces of the belief in the power of magical thinking, indicating that along with a belief in immortality and in personal implenitude, the privileging of fantasy over the reality principle has not been fully relinquished. Thus, any scene or situation that touches on a more original psychic condition, and in so doing reactivates it, is uncanny. ‘This uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien,’ Freud explains, ‘but something that is familiar and long-established in the mind and that has become alienated from it only through the process of repression.’7 As with the double, so too a belief in the omnipotence of thoughts produces a psychic relief, based on the reduction of contingency in favour of a coherent story of fate and necessity. The uncanny coincidence between one’s own fantasies and real events need no longer be seen as an inexplicable accident. Instead, in the sense of a conspiracy theory, this coincidence can be attributed to a meaningful, albeit terrifying system regulating all events. Intellectual uncertainty thus emerges as the flip side of the belief in a superior force responsible for producing coherence and consistency. Poignant about Freud’s discussion is the persistency with which he reads the psychic hesitation induced by the uncanny as a cipher for our relationship with death. Time and again he discovers in it a competition between the originary belief in immortality and the scientifically proven fact that death is necessary, even if under normal circumstances, it will often occur accidentally. At the same time, Freud insists that the uncanny must be attributed to the castration complex, because it revolves around primary repression. As such, the uncanny signifies the fact that while certain sexual fantasies sustaining the subject’s narcissism must be relinquished in favour of cultural laws and codes, a memory of unrestrained pleasure is never fully obliterated. In all cases, at stake in Freud’s thoughts on the uncanny is an over-valorization of psychic reality, predicated on the effacement of the distinction between imagination and reality ‘as when

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something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality, or when a symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolizes’.8 Regardless whether we are confronted with the reanimation of repressed infantile complexes or the resurgence of allegedly surmounted primitive convictions, the return of a narcissistically satisfying omnipotence of thoughts comes to be negotiated over the subject’s relation to femininity, more precisely to his remembrance of the maternal body and her affective afterlife in her double, the beloved. Uncanny femininity Precisely because the maternal body emerges as the lynchpin of Freud’s thoughts on how effects of the uncanny support narcissism, connections can be drawn to his essays on the way fantasy helps assuage the psychic wounding the laws of reality impose on narcissism. In his article on ‘Fetishism,’ Freud claims, for example, that for men the sight of female genitals is ‘uncanny and traumatic’ not least of all because it induces a psychic hesitation.9 Faced with an allegedly castrated body, the male subject has recourse to a fetish so as to deny this lack. In so doing, however, he entertains precisely the ambivalence of feeling that according to Freud makes up the core trait of the uncanny. So as to keep open the question whether the woman is, in fact, castrated or not, the male spectator, shaken in his own sense of implenitude, treats the fetish, meant to cover over the anatomic lack of the feminine body, with a mixture of affection and hostility ‘which run parallel with the disavowal and the acknowledgement of castration’.10 The fetish thus serves as a disfiguration played through in fantasy, owing to which two incommensurable claims can come to be united. Freud points to a similar ambivalence of feeling in his article ‘Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes’. Two reactions, he claims, determine the boy’s relation to women: ‘horror of the mutilated creature or triumphant contempt for her’.11 Above all, in his notes on ‘Medusa’s Head,’ he explicitly returns to his notion that the female genitals are uncanny because they recall the maternal womb as the first earthly home of each human being. In his interpretation of this ancient myth, Freud is less concerned with the familiar at the heart of what appears to be strange and threatening. Instead, he foregrounds the way in which the anxiety the male subject experiences when faced with the alleged lack of the female genitals in fact narcissistically reassures him. According to Freud, the sight of the

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decapitated head of Medusa is to be understood as a ‘terror of castration that is linked to the sight of something’. This mythopoeic image recalls the moment, when, catching sight of the female genitals for the first time, the little boy is convinced of the reality of the threat of castration he has hitherto been seeking to deny. Significantly, the analogy at stake for Freud between the mythopoeic image and the little boy’s first sight of female genitals consists in the fact that these are ‘surrounded by hair, and essentially those of his mother’.12 The maternal body is not only uncanny because the exhibition of the female genitals literally renders castration visible, but also because its sight can be used as an apotropaic charm to ward off enemies, in whom it induces a sense of horror as well. In other words, marked as it is by a terrible lack, the feminine genitals visually transformed into a decapitated head are uncanny precisely because seeing them confirms the male subject in his sense of potency. Freud interprets the frightening snakes that make up the hair of Medusa’s head as a mitigation of horror, ‘for they replace the penis, the absence of which is the cause of horror’. At first sight, Medusa’s head ‘makes the spectator stiff with terror, turns him into stone’, yet, once again, Freud comes up with a chronology of events inscribed by contradictory emotional responses.13 The stiffening the male spectator of Medusa’s decapitated head immediately experiences quickly transforms into a disfigured expression of a different affect, namely the male erection; a consolation to the spectator, given that the stiffening reassures him of the fact ‘he is still in possession of a penis’. Thus we find Freud returning – in his interpretation of Medusa’s head – to the core rhetorical gesture at stake in all his discussions of the effects of the uncanny. By virtue of disfiguration, a compromise is found between a wish fulfilment (the denial of castration) and the reality principle (the recognition of bodily vulnerability). Owing to the power of the imagination, what was initially experienced as a sign of lack comes to be transformed into an expression of excess. The rhetorical move that allows Freud to interpret the snakes on Medusa’s head as a ‘multiplication of penis symbols,’ and as such as a protective fiction, reassuring the male spectator in his potent masculinity, can be found in his earlier reading of another mythopoeic motif. In his thoughts on ‘The Theme of the Three Caskets,’ woman also embodies a narcissistically wounding law against which the male subject seeks to defend himself. Castration in this case pertains to knowledge

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of mortality rather than to any sense of sexual lack. Once more at stake is, Freud notes, the attempt to pit fantasy against the reality of unsatisfied desire. Forced to acknowledge the terrifying necessity of death, the male subject has recourse to a psychic distortion that allows him to ward off this recognition. As in his essay on the uncanny, Freud once more attributes this ambivalence of feeling to the sight of the feminine body as well as the transformation of accident into fate it entails. Freud’s interpretation of the choice of the three casket’s in William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice traces a gesture of imaginary triumph similar to the one he claimed to be at work in the sight of Medusa’s head. In the case of the ancient Greek myth, the spectator’s stiffening in terror seamlessly transforms into the stiffening of his male member, a metonymic shift from body to body part that allows him to believe he is not inscribe by bodily lack in the way the feminine body appears to him to be. For the choice of the third casket, Freud’s point is, in turn, that while in many versions of this story, the third sister was initially thought to be a goddess of death, her beauty allowed her to be transformed into a goddess of love. Rather than thwarting her lover’s narcissism, she comes to sustain it: ‘the third of the sisters was no longer Death she was the fairest, best, most desirable and most lovable of women’.14 At the same time, a second transformation is at stake in this literary theme, namely the re-encoding of fateful necessity into an active, free choice. As Freud notes, the power of the imagination allows man ‘to overcome death, which he has recognized intellectually.’ No greater triumph of wish fulfilment is conceivable: ‘A choice is made where in reality there is obedience to a compulsion; and what is chosen is not a figure of terror, but the fairest and most desirable of women.’15 The feminine body proves to be uncanny because it can function both as a cipher for the necessity of fate as well as for the possibility to choose where in fact one has no choice. A sense of uncanniness is, however, also inscribed in the choice of the third casket because the distortion the fantasy produces does not succeed perfectly, leaving traces that show through and betray the presence of the death the woman’s beauty was meant to occlude. The free choice, Freud continues, is properly speaking ‘no free choice.’ Not only must it fall on the third casket. The fairest and best of women it represents, ‘has kept certain characteristics that border on the uncanny, so that from them we have been able to guess at what lies beneath.’16 An acknowledgement of the necessity of death – as the more originary

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insight – thus emerges as precisely the familiar (heimlich) knowledge that has to be repressed even while it continues to survive, albeit in distorted form, in the figure of the most beautiful, most desirable woman. It is pertinent to note the similarity in language with which Freud describes a different psychic triumph, namely the fantasy of the fetishist. He also uses an imagined distortion as a supplement for an earlier insight, allegedly relinquished, but in fact buried in the unconscious of the adult man. ‘The fetish is a substitute for the woman’s (the mother’s) penis that the little boy once believed in and – for reasons familiar to us – does not want to give up.’17 The recognition against which the fetishist seeks to defend himself – namely woman’s lack of a penis – can thus be seen to assume an analogous function as the adult man’s refusal to acknowledge the necessity of death. Narcissism resists both mortality and bodily implenitude. But if the fetish is meant to function as an insurance of one’s invincibility, this is, once again, only possible by virtue of an uncanny compromise. The disjunction between belief in the mother’s penis and an insight into her bodily implenitude proves to be a conflict between the weight of the painful perception one seeks to ward off (given that it reflects one’s own lack) and the power of the assuaging fantasy (meant to assure one of one’s own invulnerability). The fetishist’s compromise again consists in an uncanny distortion: Something else has taken its place, has been appointed its substitute, as it were, and now inherits the interest that was formerly directed to its predecessor. But this interest suffers an extraordinary increase as well, because the horror of castration has set up a memorial to itself in the creation of this substitute.18 In Freud’s discussion, a triumph over castration always finds itself counter-balanced by knowledge of the necessity of vulnerability. In this equation, woman embodies a two-fold warning. One must befriend oneself with the necessity of dying as well as with the law of human implenitude both in a sexual and a psychic sense. At the same time, femininity remains ambivalently encoded. In Freud’s writings, woman embodies both the narcissistically satisfying condition of the familiar, known of old, which for a diversity of reasons must be relinquished, and she comes to embody a knowledge of castration that, in turn, must

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be mitigated. Woman thus proves to be fundamentally uncanny, because over her body, fantasies have come to set up a memorial both to the notion of masculine invincibility as well as to the necessity of curtailing masculine narcissism. The enigma of femininity In his writings on femininity, Freud keeps returning to two modes of repression, implicitly referring to the question of the uncanny; namely the death of the father and the castration of the mother. The nature of the feminine continued to embody a riddle for him throughout his life as a psychoanalyst, not least of all because gender difference implies more than the question of anatomy. It refers to the attitude the subject assumes towards the phallus, as privileged sign for paternal authority. In his lecture on ‘Femininity,’ at stake is, therefore, is less the question what woman is. Instead, Freud asks ‘how a woman develops out of a child with bisexual disposition’, suggesting that what male psychoanalysts call the riddle of the nature of femininity may well be an expression of bisexuality in the lives of women.19 In Freud’s thoughts on how the young girl becomes a woman, we once again find the figure of thought (Denkfigur) so seminal to his discussion of the uncanny. The development of the female subject likewise requires the repression of an originary psychic disposition, which nevertheless leaves its traces in the mature woman. In contrast to the boy, for whom female genitals are uncanny because they reminds him of the lost home in the mother’s womb as well as the possibility of his own castration, the girl does not have to repress knowledge about sexual lack. Rather, she must forget that she once had a double source of sexual pleasure (her clitoris and her vagina). As Freud notes, during the phallic phase, girls think of themselves as small men. In the same way that sexual maturity requires of the young woman to relinquish her bond to her mother in favour of choosing her father as the prototype of love object available to her, so too, ‘with the change of femininity the clitoris should wholly or in part hand over its sensitivity, and at the same time its importance, to the vagina.’20 Like the fetishist, however, the mature woman also recalls the preoedipal girl, who was in possession of a phallic sexual member and who, therefore, does not want to fully relinquish her belief in her clitoris. If one reads Freud’s description of the development of feminine sexuality in light of his discussion of the uncanny, the repressed clitoris represents

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precisely the familiar source of sexual pleasure that the prefix ‘un’ has allegedly obliterated. In the unconscious of the adult woman, traces of her earlier fantasy of sexual self-empowerment continue to tarry. Freud believes to have discovered: The girl’s recognition of the fact of her being without a penis does not by any means imply that she submits to the fact easily. On the contrary, she continues to hold on for a long time to the wish to get something like it herself and she believes in that possibility for improbably long years; an analysis can show that at a period when knowledge of reality has long since rejected the fulfilment of the wish as unattainable, it persists in the unconscious and retains a considerable cathexis of energy.21 Thus, analogous to the way failure is by necessity written into the choice of the third casket, because although manifestly it stands for the most desirable woman, it obliquely also implies the choice of death, Freud likewise attributes an aspect of failure to the successful development of feminine sexual identity. In the course of her sexual development, woman never fully surmounts her pre-oedipal identification with the maternal body and – concomitant with this – her clitoral pleasure. Thus, the successful attainment of femininity is predicated not on a repression of the knowledge of the lack inscribed in her sexuality. Instead, what comes to be repressed is the knowledge of the uncanny doubling of her earliest zone of sexual pleasure. In the case of the mature woman, what uncannily affects both a pleasurable as well as a disturbing hesitation is the memory of her bisexuality, grown strange by virtue of repression. Without making any explicit reference to his thoughts on the head of Medusa, Freud makes the following claim about the typical woman around thirty: ‘she frightens us by her psychical rigidity and unchangeability. Her libido has taken up final positions and seems incapable of exchanging them for others.’ He speculates that this terrifying stiffness is a result of the fact that ‘the difficult development to femininity had exhausted the possibilities of the person concerned’.22 Yet one could read this image, with Freud’s own terms in mind, differently. The frightening appearance of the adult woman at thirty obliquely gives voice to her more primary, carnal knowledge that she has had to relinquish by adjusting her sexual desire to the oedipal norm prevalent in Western

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culture. If we align the various effects of the uncanny discussed so far, it becomes evident that the familiar yet clandestine knowledge it gives voice to can involve the necessity of death, the vulnerability of body, the fragility of the power attributed to the phallus, but also the bisexuality of woman. Indeed, splicing together the figures of thought (Denkfiguren), which Freud develops in his texts on femininity and on the uncanny, we notice that the bisexuality of the pre-oedipal girl takes on the same position as death and vulnerability. Taking Freud’s speculations on femininity in a different direction than he was interested in, one could surmise: The originary masculinity inhabiting femininity proves to be an earlier self-perception, known of old and long ago, that – owing to the repression culture demands – can only find a distorted phantasmagorical expression. For this reason it is necessary to insist on a decisive difference between the masculine fetishist and the mature woman of thirty, who frightens with her psychic rigidity. The terror that overcomes the fetishist at the uncanny sight of the feminine body allows him to hold onto the belief that he is in possession of a penis. Initially functioning as a monstrous warning, the feminine body allegedly lacking the male member seamlessly transforms into a protective fiction. For the adult woman, however, her own uncanniness signifies the exact opposite. She has come to acknowledge the need to relinquish her bisexuality even while she harbours her knowledge of this two-fold zone of sexual pleasure (her clitoris and her vagina) as her most intimate secret. Woman, willing to face her own uncanniness, thus accepts the knowledge the male fetishist seeks to deny. For this reason, the relation she entertains towards her culture’s oedipal norms is fraught with fissures. Julia Kristeva foregrounds the illusory aspect of the symbolic laws on which the primacy of phallic cultural order is based.23 She does so in order to draw our attention to the notion of play (ludere) contained in the word ‘illusion’. Kristeva insists that the laws and forbiddances of patriarchal authority, which ensure the coherence and viability of social communities, while not being nothing, are also not all that can be said about the uncanniness of femininity. For this reason, she proposes that the female subject assume an ironic attitude, which entails believing in the illusion of the phallic law. To maintain the illusion as an illusion would allow the female subject to explore aesthetic possibilities that emerge from an understanding of symbolic laws as a necessary symbolic fiction.

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For Kristeva, this play with illusion is comparable to precisely the intellectual hesitation I have foregrounded as the core trait of the uncanny, and as such an attitude both men and woman can assume.24 The female subject, however, is predestined to demonstrate to her male peers why an acknowledgement of the fictionality of cultural laws need not result in hallucinatory madness or repression and denial of undesirable knowledge. Instead, it could call forth a playful engagement with and appropriation of culture norms and codes. As Freud himself notes, the mature female subject has been forced to recognize, in a far more lasting manner, that even though the femininity she is required to assume is based on the repression of bisexuality, she never fully succeeds in forgetting her earlier sexual pleasure. Traces of her repressed bisexuality remain, and call forth – as their uncanny effect – in her a hesitation regarding the primacy of the phallus as embodiment of symbolic laws. Freud himself had interpreted this hesitation as a form of narcissistic protection. In ‘Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes,’ he maintains that woman’s super-ego ‘is never so inexorable, so impersonal, so independent of its emotional origins as we require it to be in men.’25 From this, he deduces that women are less ready to submit to the great exigencies of life. At the same time, Freud also claims that ‘all human individuals, as a result of their bisexual disposition and of cross-inheritance, combine in themselves both masculine and feminine characteristics, so that pure masculinity and femininity remain theoretical constructions of uncertain content.’26 The uncanny woman proves to be a cipher not only for the failed repression of her belief in her own sexual omnipotence but also for the bisexuality of man. This recognition on Freud’s part has allowed Shoshana Felman to foreground how his writings on gender implicitly deconstruct any simple and unequivocal opposition between the feminine and the masculine.27 The trouble femininity poses for any stable gender definition resides in the fact that one must speak of an uncanny difference inhabiting femininity from within, and as such radically undermining any neat distinction between the two sexes. Femininity, Felman claims, cannot be relegated to the position of an originary home, a clandestine (heimlich) memory preserved after loss, given that woman is neither complementary to man nor his mirror reflection.28 Instead, femininity inhabits all notions of masculinity as its intimate foreign body. Conceived as

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an uncanny internal difference, bisexuality also induces uncertainty in the masculine narcissists as to whether his gendered identity is as unequivocal and stable as he would like to think; it allows him to become strange to himself. If we take Freud’s figures of thought (Denkfiguren) further than he himself was willing to do, one could claim: The uncanny helps articulate the need to recognize sexual strangeness in both sexes. This insight proves to be more originary than any narcissistically satisfying insurance that the masculine can be neatly severed from the feminine. The masculine subject, however, often prefers to repress this insight, transferring the uncanny safely onto his fantasy of femininity. Surrealism’s game with the feminine uncanny In our cultural image repertoire, constructions of an uncanny femininity have served a complex array of protective fictions about omnipotence, immortality and prenatal homes even while exceeding these narcissistic fantasies. Simplifying the critical tropes of psychoanalysis, the surrealist movement appropriated woman as a projection screen for its valorization of the irrational, the visionary as well as madness. Owing to the privileged access to the spiritual, to the occult and to magic that the surrealists were willing to ascribe to femininty, woman came to be understood as the key to the logic of dreams and other parapsychic phenomena as well as to the relationship between sexuality and the unconscious. At the same time, woman was also declared to be an embodiment of the primitive, the childlike and the criminal, and thus – as Freud had already claimed  – a dark continent that the male artist had to investigate and conquer. Whether in the guise of a divine creature or a witch, whether as desired erotic object or a femme fatale, woman was thought to complete masculine creativity. Her role was to inspire his art, helping him fulfil his aesthetic vision. Although she was thought to harbour a sexual force of her own, this could only take shape with the help of the male artist’s visual and poetic language. In line with Freud’s rhetoric of fetishism, woman became the idealized and demonized object of fantasy for the surrealists. Over her body, core concerns of this art movement could be negotiated and disseminated, such as the myth of love, the primacy of desire, the mechanisms of repression. At the same time, as Whitney Chadwick has noted, woman represented a category the surrealists designed so as to give voice to male anxieties that, projected onto the other sex, could be warded off.29 By having woman embody dangerous emotional states, the

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artists of the surrealist movement were able to shield themselves from insights that are, in fact, inescapable, such as the fragility of all sexual identities, the contingency of the rational and – above all – the ordinary disorder of the modern world. Yet within the field of surrealism, the uncanniness of femininity was never limited to her function as a mirror for masculine creativity. Instead, artists like Claude Cahn, Hannah Hoch, Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington and Meret Oppenheim appropriated Freud’s claim for an uncanny femininity even while conceiving it as a challenge. Their work takes on a playful attitude towards the intellectual hesitation that the sight of their own sexuality affords them. In so doing, they came to develop aesthetic strategies for exploring different experiences and effects of uncanniness. When faced with the uncanny sight of the feminine body, they seem to ask whether the only options are either to grow rigid with fear or, by virtue of a phantasmagorical distortion of the feminine body, to experience a sense of sexual potency. Or might one not playfully undermine Freud’s claim that one can either accept the reality of human implenitude, so wounding to one’s narcissism, or hold onto deluding fantasies of plenitude? Turning uncanniness into their creative gestures, the female surrealists came to trouble all fixed categories of identity, rendering all identity politics fluid. They foreground bisexuality along with the notion of identity as masquerade; they celebrate the monstrous, the grotesque, indeed the implenitude of the feminine body; they blur the difference between human beings and animals, between the animated body and the deanimated doll. Mimicking surrealism’s fetishism, they self-consciously perform the body in fragments, the body as fragment. In all cases, they underscore the alterity inhabiting the self as its most intimate kernel, along with the distortions and disfiguration on which all images of the self are based. This artistic appropriation of Freud’s construction of femininity as a figuration of the uncanny anticipates Judith Butler’s discussion of gender performance as a strategy of political resistance.30 Predicated on the cultural construction of all sexual difference, gender – thus her claim – is an embodiment of cultural norms and practices. One can arrive at a sexually marked identity only by embodying an ideal that one can in fact never fully inhabit. At the same time, however, there is, according to Judith Butler, no identity before or outside cultural influences. Gender, one might surmise, is always already uncanny, because it knows about its

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own constructed embodiment. To self-consciously acknowledge that it is necessary to don these embodiments also opens up the possibility for a parodic play with gender roles. This ironic play is aimed at subverting prescribed sexual identities, reconfiguring them as well as troubling cultural codes by virtue of an idiosyncratic appropriation and rearticulation without ever obliterating them. In the work of women artists working on the periphery of surrealism or in response to it, the unlimited reversibility of all stable identities is nothing terrible. Uncovering the strange within the familiar, difference within the same, knowledge of old in new guises, proves instead to be the lucky collateral of uncanniness and its cultural effects.

11 GENDERING CURIOSITY The Double Games of Siri Hustvedt, Paul Auster and Sophie Calle

Siri Hustvedt’s postmodern Pandora Although Siri Hustvedt dedicates her first novel to her husband Paul Auster, the first part of her heroine’s rite de passage in fact pays homage to another artist, Sophie Calle. By 1992, when The Blindfold was originally published, this French conceptualist had become a cult figure of sorts. Her work revolves around the performance of seemingly trivial projects aimed at collecting data as well as documenting meaningless sequences of events. So as to come up with a dossier or an identity kit of arbitrarily chosen strangers, Calle takes note of objects that belong to them or gestures that characterize them. A piece like The Sleepers (1979), where she asked people to give her a few hours of their time in order to come sleep in her bed while she looked at them, photographed them, and wrote down their comments on this experience, could be called conceptual bookkeeping. At the same time, it blurs the boundary between the intimate and the public. In other works, such as the project where Calle randomly chose a man and followed him through Venice, photographing him and taking copious notes on his behaviour (The Venetian Suite, 1979), or where she got herself hired as a chambermaid in a hotel, hoping to surmise the identity of the guests living there based on the objects they left lying around in their rooms (The Hotel, 1981), stealth, deception, detection and intrusion dominate. As Luc Sante notes, ‘the

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commanding metaphor here is espionage […]. In this way, Calle’s work suggests the forensic process of a police investigation:  she assembles clues, descriptions, guesses as well as allusions and pieces them together into an approximate rendering.1 As though Hustvedt had conceived of Mr Morning as a perverse imitation of a typical Sophie Calle project, she has him hire the doctoral student Iris as his research assistant in the opening section of The Blindfold. The young woman is to help him with a project that consists in writing the biography of a dead girl based on the objects she left behind. Because he feels that they carry her imprint and are thus clues to her life, he has boxed these items and is willing to pay an assistant sixty dollars for a tape-recorded description of each object. This task both intrigues and disturbs Iris precisely because she finds herself overwhelmed by her own interest in the identity of the strange girl. However, the curiosity this job awakens in her proves to be at crosspurposes to Mr Morning’s own fetishism. Having discovered that this is, in fact, a police case, given that the girl in question was murdered in Morning’s building, she confronts him with accusations of keeping her in the dark. His response is significant for the gendering of curiosity at stake in the cross-reading of Hustvedt, Calle and Auster I am about to propose. ‘I hired you precisely because you know nothing,’ he explains. ‘I hired you to see what I cannot see, because you are who you are […]. Knowledge of her will only distract you from your work’.2 While Iris is resentful of the fact that her employer will not allow her to bring her own identity to bear in this investigation, he explains that the entire project is neither about her as spectator nor about the deceased as object of speculation, but rather meant to shield him from the wounding violence the corpse represents to him.3 It is, he assures her, about ‘atonement […] for the sins of the world’.4 The ironic imbalance set up by Mr Morning is not lost on Iris. Even while he indulges himself in a belated documentation of a murder victim, his compulsive desire to know in fact emerges as a refusal of knowledge. Using a stranger to indulge in his fascination for this victim is actually meant to cover up the knowledge he pretends to seek. For in the process of documentation he proposes, the dead feminine body is actually turned into a trope for his – or man’s – spiritual restitution. As Iris embarks on her own investigation, refusing her designated role of ignorance, she ultimately discovers that Mr Morning was in fact the murder suspect. When she confronts him with this discovery he, however, refuses to offer her the confession she seeks. He will

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not assuage the anxiety to which her curiosity has given birth, insisting instead on her complicity: ‘You’ve invented the story yourself. It belongs to you, not to me’.5 So as to re-establish a boundary between herself and his necrophilic fetishism, she decides to throw away all the boxed objects, along with the check she cannot cash because she gave him a false name. As the narrative of Iris’ hallucinations and obsession unfolds, we come to recognize how fundamentally she is marked by morbid curiosity. In the second part of The Blindfold, we read about her hateful encounter with a photographer. Because she is excited by the danger of transgressive intimacy he promises to afford her, she consents to a work session. In the photograph George designates as the only perfect shot  – an image of her cut off below her breasts, with her extended arms severed at the elbows  – she not only finds material proof that the boundary between private exhibitionism and public self-exposure has been radically blurred, leaving her utterly vulnerable. Rather, because her sexual fascination for George has come to be enmeshed with her aesthetic curiosity about the photographer, she is not as readily able to disentangle herself from this mutual project. Instead she begins, much along the lines of the classic hysteric, to somatically enact the murky interface between fiction and reality that this image comes to represent for her. The photograph initially takes on the function of a fetish in her fantasy life. She begins to believe that ‘the parts of me that weren’t in the photo were really absent’, as though this were the depiction of ‘a face without reason’.6 As she begins hallucinating, she comes, furthermore, to attribute animated qualities to the hated image:  ‘The image was changing. With more curiosity than alarm, I noticed a small black hole in the face […] The hole grew, eating away the left eye and nose […] I was transfixed. The hole was devouring the entire image, the face and hair, the shoulders, breasts, and torso.’7 Imagining her own dissolution, in turn, leads to an indulgence in bodily incapacitation (migraine and depression), only to feed a second hallucination, namely the paranoid obsession that the image documents the fact that she, as an authentic individual subject, has been ‘dropped out of sight’.8 She believes she has been turned into an object of exchange, circulating among strangers; her photograph transformed into a floating signifier that is not only detached from her body but actually takes her place. As in the earlier episode, she once again confronts her fetishist. George rebukes her, claiming

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to have no moral qualms about displaying images of disfigured, distorted feminine bodies. In his exhibition he in fact plans to couple the distorted photo of Iris with that of a woman seized by an epileptic fit, writhing on the sidewalk. As was the case with Mr Morning, Iris’ criticism of his project consists in accusing him of robbing those who purport to be the subjects of his representational gesture of their dignity. Seemingly propelled by a desire to investigate something secret (the embodiment of some intimate kernel of the subject rendered external), his photographs prove to be documents of brutal voyeurism. And one could add that by denying all subjectivity to the depicted person, they, on a latent level, signify a refusal to acknowledge and represent the difference the female body represents for the masculine spectator. Although Iris challenges the men who hire her as a mediator for fulfilling their fetishist fantasies about appropriating the lure emanating from the feminine body, she nevertheless repeatedly allows herself to be fascinated by these projects because her own curiosity steers her towards states of radical self-expenditure. Indeed, Professor Michael Rose who, in the final section of the novel, hires her as a research assistant to help him translate a German novella entitled ‘The Brutal Boy’ directly names the ambivalence of her own complicity: ‘It’s a Pandora’s box of sorts, isn’t it?’,9 he asks her tauntingly, recognizing that in the process of absorbing the text, Iris has not only come up with an English equivalent for the original German, but has also begun to hysterically re-enact with her own body the story of a young boy who, troubled by sadistic daydreams, begins to roam the streets at night in order to indulge in his taste for cruelty. Translating herself into a fictional character by cutting her hair short so as to embark on nocturnal adventures cross-dressed as a young boy, Iris hopes to have access to the secret knowledge embodied by the other sex, i.e. to investigate the difference the male body represents for her: ‘The brutal boy found his second incarnation in me, and as soon as I took his name, I knew that from then on, the nights belonged to Klaus.’10 Indeed, the impersonation not only allows her as translator to fill in the blanks in Klaus Kr üger’s life, but also to explore the other sexuality within herself: ‘The gap between what I was forced to acknowledge to the world – namely, that I was a woman – and what I dreamed inwardly didn’t bother me. By becoming Klaus at night I had effectively blurred my gender.’11

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Yet her curiosity about sexual difference deviates from that of the male fetishists she encounters in a significant manner. She recognizes that privileging the embodiment of one’s day-dreams over reality not only represents a hysterical response to a psychic malaise she cannot name. For Iris the crucial point consists, furthermore, in traversing this phantasm of nocturnal self-transfiguration so as to ultimately wake up from these hallucinations. In final episode of The Blindfold, we recognize that she has finally learned to refuse the temptation of masculine seduction. A former friend offers her another experience of sexual transgression. ‘Aren’t you curious?’, he asks, yet she abruptly turns away from him and flees his apartment.12 As she explains in the culminating sentence of the text ‘I took off my shoes and ran to the IRT; ran, as they say, like a bat out of hell’.13 She has left her furies behind, and in so doing is able to break with her attraction to danger, perversion and psychic cruelty. Thus Iris emerges as Siri Hustvedt’s critical refiguration of Pandora, the first mortal female that ever lived. According to the poet Hesiod, Hephaestus made Pandora out of clay at the request of Zeus. Her name combines ‘pan’ (‘all’) and ‘doron’ (‘gift’) to signify that, upon animation, all the gods endowed her with gifts. From Aphrodite, Pandora received beauty, from the graces the art of captivating, from Apollo the art of singing, from Hermes the art of eloquence, and from Pallas Athena she received rich and splendid ornaments. But the most significant gift came from Zeus himself. He had asked Hephaestus to create her so as to punish Prometheus for the insubordination he had shown to the gods by stealing fire from them. The box he bestows upon this fabricated woman contains all possible woes of humanity. While Prometheus senses the deceit and sends Pandora away, his brother Epimetheus proves to be less canny and – though sources vary as to who ultimately came to open the box – the result of this couple’s curiosity was that the multitude of evils and distempers contained by it escaped so as to afflict and torment the human race ever since. Only hope (Elpis) was left at the bottom, perhaps to counterbalance the fatality of this portentous event. However, as is noted in Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary, while some commentators have maintained that [I]t is she alone who has the wonderful power of easing the labours of man, and of rendering his troubles and his sorrows less painful in life, others consider that Elpis, being one of the evil things, means rather the gambler’s belief in luck, which lures him on to ruin.14

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One of the central stakes in the story of Pandora is, then, precisely how one chooses to interpret hope – as an apotropaic gesture against fatality or as the duplicitous appearance of chance, which, though seemingly offering a choice to the afflicted subject, is but another figure for the inescapability of fatality. Read within the context of this mythopoeic rendition of curiosity, Hustvedt’s Iris can be seen to imitate her mythic predecessor in the sense that she opens mysterious boxes, enters into forbidden rooms or roams through clandestine nocturnal sites only to discover the secrets they contain and in doing so encounters her own alterity – the difference inherent to her psychic apparatus that makes her foreign to herself. At the same time, given that Iris finally leaves her furies behind, The Blindfold suggests a way out of a narrative of fatality connected with feminine curiosity. As though Hustvedt wanted to offer a critical reiteration of the classic story, her heroine is able to indulge in her curiosity, but fully in accordance with the belle indifference of the hysteric that allows her to abandon a symptom once it has served its purpose, Iris is ultimately able to relinquish her compulsive desire to investigate something secret. In the same year that The Blindfold was published, Laura Mulvey presented an article entitled ‘Pandora:  Topographies of the Mask and Curiosity’ at a conference at Princeton University, offering a psychoanalytic discussion of feminine curiosity which uncannily resonates with the refiguration Siri Hustvedt undertakes. For Mulvey suggests that while the myth of Pandora purports to be about feminine curiosity, it can only be decoded by a feminist curiosity that critically reiterates the traditional iconography. Taking the fact that images of woman often mean something other than the depicted woman as her starting point, Mulvey claims that ‘they often bear witness to a difficulty of sexuality and sexual difference and mark sites of repression where “something” that cannot find conscious articulation is displaced onto “something else”.’ In the case of Pandora, this leads to a significant duplicity. ‘She is artificial, made up, cosmetic,’ Mulvey explains. ‘As a manufactured object, Pandora evokes the double meaning of the word fabrication. She is made, not born, and she is also a lie, a deception. There is a dislocation between her appearance and her meaning.’15 In other words, Pandora is not only the fabrication of male imagination, but she also anamorphotically reflects the act of artificial creation, given her allegorical value as lure, trap and arch-dissembler. Indeed, one

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could say that she functions not merely as the first mortal woman, but in fact as the figure of femininity as object of male speculation and specularity par excellence – the quintessential enigma that arouses masculine curiosity and over whose body endless representations of the masculine will to know can be negotiated and exchanged. At the same time, however, precisely because the feminine body stands in for the site of radical alterity to the masculine subject and thus promises an insight into sexual difference, it is also the catalyst for tremendous anxiety.16 For Mulvey, this duplicitous codification of Pandora consists in the difference between seeing (with the feminine figure embodying an enigma, but as an object of sight), and knowing, where the feminine figure performs the act of looking into, of uncovering the very secret, she represents. Or put another way, standing in for the feminine body that has so resiliently fascinated male curiosity over the centuries, Pandora is both an allegorical figuration of how woman lures man into a hermeneutic quest and an example for how woman might herself embark on a journey of detection and investigation. Mulvey suggests that two elements come to be enmeshed in the iconography of Pandora:  femininity as enigma and female curiosity as transgressive and dangerous. Reformulating these elements as a feminist psychoanalytic critic, she explains ‘Pandora’s curiosity acts out a transgressive desire to see inside her own surface or exterior, into the inside of the female body metaphorically represented by the box and its attendant horrors.’17 Yet given this duplicitous signification, Mulvey goes on to ask not only what it is that has transformed the image of woman into a vehicle for the inscription of sexual fantasy and anxiety. Rather she emphasizes that precisely because the sight of the feminine body has so persistently been connected with dread, the binary structure of fetishism – the enmeshment of attraction and disgust – is fundamentally inscribed in its cultural representation: To ward off castration anxiety, the female body’s topography presents a facade of fascination and surface that distracts the male psyche from the wound concealed beneath […] while the mask attracts and holds the gaze, anxiety produces a dread of what might be secretly hidden.18 The wager subtending my own presentation of the intertextual relations played through between Siri Hustvedt, her husband Paul Auster

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and their mutual friend Sophie Calle19 follows the gendered distinction Mulvey sets up between feminine curiosity and masculine fetishism in the conclusion of her article: While curiosity is a compulsive desire to see and to know, to investigate something secret, fetishism is born out of a refusal to see, a refusal to accept the difference the female body represents for the male. These complex series of turning away, of covering over, not of the eyes but of understanding, of fixating on a substitute object to hold the gaze, leave the female body as an enigma and threat, condemned to return as a symbol of anxiety while simultaneously being transformed into its own screen in representation.20 While all three artists explore the murky interface between fiction and fact by fashioning characters compulsively driven by a desire to see and to know, to investigate something secret, to document clandestine knowledge, curiosity is in each case counterbalanced by fetishism. As has already been shown, Iris takes on the role of Pandora in The Blindfold, and while she indulges in her own curiosity, she finds herself turned into a fetish object by the men whose investigations she undertakes  – the alleged murderer, the photographer, the professor. Yet  along the lines suggested by Mulvey, her function is a dual one. Even as she satisfies the voyeuristic desires of her male spectators, offering them a shield against the very knowledge of alterity they believe her to embody, she also undertakes a process of self-knowledge. She pits a desire to recognize the wounding knowledge harboured in her psyche – her own selfdestructive violence as well as the transgression of gender boundaries she is fascinated by – against their desire to see her without allowing for a real qua traumatic encounter with the Other.21 The hope Hustvedt’s Iris finds at the bottom of the box, having experienced the depths of her own vulnerability, proves to be the question of choice. Having traversed the phantasm of being the fetishized object of male curiosity, she finds herself able to decide when the game of curiosity is over. Paul Auster’s conceptualist artist Turning to Paul Auster’s novel we also find an uncanny resonance of the gendering of curiosity proposed by Laura Mulvey – for here, too, what is

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foregrounded is the fetishism of the male author driven by a compulsive desire to see and to know, even as he refuses to accept the difference represented by the feminine, thus obliterating the very femininity that is the catalyst of his curiosity. Equally significant for the proposed crossmapping, however, is the manner in which the figure of hope – Elpis – comes into play. For it does so precisely not as an antidote to human suffering, but rather as an embodiment of chance, luring the subject into ruin. That the issue of contingency should be negotiated over the figure that embodies Auster’s debt to the work of Sophie Calle suggests a very different mode of intertextuality at play in their double game. Finally, it is also worth noting that Leviathan, also published in 1992, is dedicated neither to Siri Hustvedt nor to the French conceptualist whose fictional counterpart comes to play such a vital role in the demise of its protagonist, but rather to a fellow postmodern author, Don DeLillo. This dedication mirrors the central theme of the novel, namely the relationship between an older and a younger author, as this is marked by a curious enmeshment of rivalry and admiration. Having read about a man who blew himself up by the side of a road in northern Wisconsin, the narrator Peter Aaron finds the FBI at his door several days later because they found a slip of paper bearing his initials (notably the same as the author of Leviathan’s) and telephone number in the wallet of the unidentified subject. Aaron, who lives in New York City, is sure that the corpse is that of Ben Sachs and seeks to ‘explain who he was and give the true story of how he happened to be on that road in northern Wisconsin’.22 His act of documenting the life of his deceased friend – whom he met one cold afternoon, when, because of a snowstorm, the reading in which they were both to participate had been cancelled and they decided to go drinking instead – is consciously pitted against the investigation undertaken by the FBI agents. Sitting at the table where Ben Sachs used to spend every summer writing, Peter’s body not only occupies his beloved rival’s place at the site of writing. He also undertakes to assume his place in the figurative sense, namely by writing the authoritative story about this man who always inspired awe in him, and deciding to give it the same title Ben had wanted to give the second novel he never came to finish. But the dedication is also significant because it signals that women are meant to be only minor players in this game of authorship between men. Indeed, Siri Hustvedt comes to be encrypted in the text in the figure of the wife of the narrator who,

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like the protagonist of The Blindfold, is called Iris.23 Physically recalling his actual wife, Iris is ‘a dazzling blonde presence, six feet tall with an exquisite Scandinavian face and the deepest, merriest blue eyes to be found between heaven and hell.’ At the same time, she – like Hustvedt’s fictional alter-ego in The Blindfold – is a graduate student of English at Columbia University. However, in contrast to Iris Vegan – whose subject is George Eliot – Peter’s wife is ‘about to begin a six-hundred-page dissertation on the works of Charles Dickens’.24 Nevertheless, her role is limited to that of wife and mother, functioning as the sole stabilizing factor in a world otherwise ruled by doom, fatality and futility. Indeed, the narrator explains: ‘Iris had become my happy ending, the miracle that had fallen down on me when I was least expecting it’; a counter-point to the fall of chance that will envelope and destroy his male rival Ben Sachs.25 He decides to tell her nothing about the fact that the dead man is their mutual friend or about the writing project he has embarked on because he fears that she will try to prohibit this transgressive project, given that he could get in trouble with the FBI. A second woman does, however, repeatedly surface throughout the narrative about his dead friend:  Maria Turner, Paul Auster’s fictional refiguration of Sophie Calle. She proves to be the seminal agent in a series of chance events that, for Ben Sachs, ultimately turn fatal, while at the same time, this sequence of interrelated random events comes to authorize Aaron’s authorship: If I  hadn’t met Maria Turner, I  never would have known about Lillian Stern, and if I hadn’t known about Lillian Stern, I wouldn’t be sitting here writing this book […]. As much as Sachs himself, I’m the place where everything begins.26 This self-possessed young woman, with whom he maintained an extremely independent sexual alliance for two years, is perceived by him as an unorthodox person who lived her life according to an elaborate set of bizarre, private rituals. Every experience was systematized for her, a self-contained adventure that generated its own risks and limitations, and each one of her projects fell into a different category, separate from all the others.27 Projects he attributes to her include that of saving all the birthday presents ever given to her and neatly arranging them on shelves according to the year, indulging in a chromatic diet, restricting herself

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to foods of a single colour on any given day and dressing a stranger she met at a party by sending him individual pieces of clothing over a longer period of time. Significant about some of these projects is the hysteric gesture of belle indifference they display, given Maria’s tendency to suddenly abandon any given game in order to move on to something else: ‘These were not more than whims, I suppose, tiny experiments with the idea of classification and habit.’28 Others, in turn, exhibit a hysteric blurring of the boundary between fiction and fact, by implicating herself and others in projects driven by a spirit of investigation, by a passion for taking risks: Her subject was the eye, the drama of watching and being watched, and her pieces exhibited the same qualities one found in Maria herself:  meticulous attention to detail, a reliance on arbitrary structures, patience bordering on the unendurable.29 Fully in accordance with the manner in which Sophie Calle speaks about her projects, Auster’s narrator explains that Maria uses strangers’ itineraries to ‘speculate about their lives and, in some cases, to compose brief, imaginary biographies,’ even while, when in one project she lets herself be followed and photographed by a detective, she also comes to chronicle her own alterity: ‘When he handed in his report at the end of the week […] she felt as if she had become a stranger, as if she had been turned into an imaginary being’.30 At the same time, the manner in which Auster’s narrator describes Sophie Calle’s projects also articulates an uncanny enmeshment between fetishist voyeurism and exhibitionism as an act of self-knowledge. In a piece entitled The Naked Lady, Maria asks a friend to come along one night and take pictures of her as she performs a striptease in a club: Not to show anyone, but for herself, in order to satisfy her own curiosity about what she looked like. She was consciously turning herself into an object, a nameless figure of desire, and it was crucial to her that she understand precisely what that object was.31 Having a friend document her act of unveiling her body satisfies two diametrically opposed desires – the fetishism of her male spectators and

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her compulsive desire to see and to know what she, as a fetish object, looks like from the outside. Adopting the point of view of the fetishist consciously when, after the event, she reads her striptease as a sequence of photographs, she also colludes with the gaze of feminine curiosity. As Roland Barthes has so brilliantly noted, the striptease is a manner of shielding the male gaze from the horror of feminine nakedness, yet by consciously turning herself into both object and spectator of this act of exposing the feminine body, Maria breaks the visual logic where uncovering proves to be a form of covering over, and instead transforms it into a viable strategy of self-investigation; one that recognizes that the sexualized self can only be discovered within a network of relayed gazes.32 Maria proves to be a postmodern Pandora, however, in more ways than one. Not only are her projects motivated by feminine curiosity, but she is also above all else the figure in Leviathan who takes risks, indeed courts contingency. In the passage where Peter describes how he met his second wife Iris, he notes that this meeting took place under her influence. The manner in which he acknowledges this is, however, significant for the role she will come to play in a text that is first and foremost about Ben Sachs, the other figure Peter feels influenced by: ‘I feel indebted to her […] Not to Maria as flesh-and-blood woman, perhaps, but to Maria as the reigning spirit of chance, as goddess of the unpredictable’.33 For even while Auster’s narrator describes Maria Turner’s projects within the framework of Sophie Calle’s aesthetic premises, the function this conceptualist takes on in Leviathan is precisely that of Pandora as an allegorical figure, courting trouble, whose compulsive curiosity brings people together in a fateful manner, who lures them into ruin, but who ultimately remains an enigma. As Freud notes in his writing on the mythopoeic theme of the three caskets34, the human subject has difficulty accepting the contingency of its own mortality and for this reason cherishes stories in which necessity or destiny are transformed into a moment of choice:  ‘A choice is made where in reality there is obedience to a compulsion.’35 Applied to the desires of Paul Auster’s narrator, one could say that by choosing Maria as the figure who, in retrospect, is responsible for Ben’s fall – ‘Maria was the link between Sachs and Lillian Stern, and if not for Maria’s habit of courting trouble in whatever form she could find it, Lillian Stern never would have entered the picture’ – he is able to turn random contingency

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into a coherent narrative.36 Though chance is the recurrent theme of this reconstruction of a chain of random events, the figure of Maria allows him to transform contingency into fate, because he can name the person and the act responsible for all the woe that came to befall his friend. The little black address book she finds on the street one morning turns into a Pandora’s box of sorts: ‘That was the event that started the whole miserable story. Maria opened the book, and out flew the devil, out flew a scourge of violence, mayhem, and death.’37 For Maria decides (as Sophie Calle did in her project The Address Book) to interview the people listed in the book so as to construct a portrait of the owner in absentia. While Sophie Calle published twenty-eight of these interviews in Liberation in the summer of 1983 – until the enraged owner of the address book returned to Paris and forced her to put an end to this project – Paul Auster uses the story of a project that ended badly to allow Lillian Stern, an old childhood friend of Maria, not only to reappear in her life. Taking the place of Maria in one of the interviews, she meets and marries one of the people in the book, who, in turn, will prove to be the man Ben accidentally killed several years later; a gratuitous act that will ultimately lead to his suicide. While in the case of Peter’s marriage to Iris, the spirit of chance attributed to Maria leads to a happy ending, she is also the one who flirts with Sachs during a party held at one of his friend’s houses to celebrate the one-hundredth anniversary of the Statue of Liberty, and, having aroused his desire – like the classic femme fatale – lures him to the fire escape from which he accidentally falls while she stands next to him. Though Ben survives the accident, this fall comes to completely transform his life, because he decides to turn this random event into a narrative of transgressive seduction within which the fall comes to signify a ‘form of punishment’.38 Maria, in turn, takes on a positive meaning, for within the scenario he designs so as to turn contingency into fate, she figures as the muse who seduced him into risking his life and, concomitant with this, inspired in him an urge to ‘change everything’.39 The narrator, however, sees that ‘Maria was the embodiment of his catastrophe, the central figure in the drama that had precipitated his fall’.40 By thus allegorizing her into a figure of chance – regardless of whether this is seen as a moment of luck or of disaster  – both authors subscribe to the gesture of the fetishist. Neither is interested in accepting the difference the feminine body represents to him. Rather, by encoding the flesh-and-blood Maria into

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the figure of feminine curiosity, whose desire to know can take a lucky or a catastrophic turn, they are able to shield themselves from a traumatic encounter with the otherness she embodies. It is, however, crucial to note that while Paul Auster plays through a dialectic between male fetishism and female curiosity, he does so in order to deconstruct it. For he not only points to the limits of the narrator’s knowledge – making it perfectly clear that Peter never understood the friendship between his ex-lover and the author he feels such awe for. More importantly, Auster includes a scene that his narrator dramatically misreads to such an extent that his own complicity in the downfall of his friend becomes transparent. After the accident Maria decides to work on a mutual project with Ben Sachs: they decide to spend every Thursday together, with Maria documenting these meetings. Once, because he wants to know what it feels like to be watched, she decides to resurrect one of her old pieces (Calles’ The Detective), only this time reversing the gender roles. As he roams the streets of Manhattan, she follows him like a private detective, taking photographs. While Maria never develops these Thursday sessions into a ‘coherent, ongoing work’, the playful enactment of private detection proves to be a turning point in the narrator’s relationship to Ben Sachs.41 He accidentally becomes a witness of this scene, and while Maria immediately spots him, he recognizes belatedly that he must have concentrated so hard on Sachs that he was blind to everything else. In fact, obsessed with his own fantasy of Ben’s downfall, he reads the scenario as ‘conclusive evidence of my friend’s misery’ and recognizes only belatedly that ‘the story of those months was finally much more complicated than I had allowed myself to believe’.42 What Paul Auster suggests by including this belated confession is that precisely because Peter’s curiosity was inextricably inhabited by fetishism – namely a refusal to accept the difference Ben Sachs represents to him and perceiving him instead exclusively as the screen for his Oedipal desire to take the potent father’s place – his blindness could just as easily have been responsible for the author’s sad fate as Maria’s courting of contingency. Indeed, as Peter, returning to this scene several pages later, further explains, I found a man living in what looked like a state of utter abjection, and I  couldn’t bring myself to accept what I  had seen:  my

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once brilliant friend, wandering around for hours in a quasi-trance, scarcely distinguishable from the ruined men and women who begged coins from him in the street.43 The depression he feels after returning home propels him to convince Ben Sachs to put together a book with his old pieces of writing, and it is this proposal which actually precipitates the fated sequence of events: Ben leaves his wife Fanny, goes to his summer house in Vermont alone, encounters a threatening stranger during one of his lonely walks through the woods, whom he kills, and thus decides first to disappear and then, when he discovers the identity of the victim from Maria, chooses to go to the widow in an act of atonement that will ultimately lead to his suicide. In other words, even as Maria is encoded by the narrator as the figure of chance, she also marks the blind spot of his narrative. She forces him to acknowledge the fallibility of his knowledge not only in relation to the scene of private detection he came by chance to witness, when she confronts him many months later with her knowledge of his limited point of view. She also holds back the knowledge she has about Ben Sachs’ whereabouts, protecting his secret. He had turned to Maria after his killing of the stranger and, because she recognizes him as her friend Lillian’s husband, Ben was able to construct for himself a final scenario – giving the widow the money he found in the car of the man he killed  – as an act of penance. Peter, however, chooses to interpret Maria’s role as yet another example for the fact that she was the spirit of malign chance – her silence and her complicity with Ben causing more damage – even as he fantasizes that, had he known the truth he could have prompted his friend to go to the police and thus save his life. Yet Paul Auster suggests that two very distinct double games have been played, which both intersect over Maria’s body. On the one hand, the Oedipal fantasy of his narrator, where the death of the father is the condition for his authorship, with the woman wrapped up in her own curiosity simply functioning as a figure of contingency. On the other hand, a fantasy scenario that utterly excludes him, and in which Maria is the muse the aging author emulates having realized, as a result of his fall from the fire escape, that his creativity has run out. In this second story she is the Elpis figure of hope, who inspires him to shift his aesthetic medium. After abandoning not only his project of writing a second novel about America’s corruption but also their Thursday sessions, he

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continues to work in her key. He uses his own body as the medium in a project of atonement, and when this fails, decides to blow up replicas of the Statue of Liberty as the material performance of what has gone awry both in contemporary American society at large and his biography in particular. Like Maria Turner’s projects, these explosions involve extensive planning and preparation: Once he had selected the town, he had to find a way to spend some time there without arousing suspicion. The first step was to concoct an identity and cover story, and since he was never the same person twice, his powers of invention were constantly put to the test.44 Truly in the spirit of Sophie Calle, one impersonation consisted in him visiting a small Nebraska city ‘as a newspaper reporter, at work on a feature article about the attitudes and opinions of people who lived in places with their own replicas of the Statue of Liberty’45, documenting their attitudes towards the bombings. However, a fundamental misunderstanding has written itself into his imitation of the conceptualist artist: Maria is able to juggle invention and truth, and in so doing she celebrates the spirit of contingency, while Ben has recourse to conceptual performance so as to authenticate a narrative of fatality, wherein a chain of material destruction leads from the detonated Statues of Liberty to his own corpse. Both privilege fictionality, indeed insist that while true stories are also invented, even if stories are invented, they are also true. Yet Maria’s hysteric oscillation between these two realms marks the fact that she not only knows the difference. She also understands the provisional status of each of her projects, which, though true in itself, is never all the truth there is, is never final, is never complete. Ben’s insistence on constructing a tautology between invention and true story, where material performances and the message they proclaim form a transparent relation, means getting rid of the difference at the heart of representation. Only in what Maurice Blanchot calls pure textuality can the bar dividing the signifier from the signified be obliterated – a moment of truth he significantly aligns with the advent of death.46 The double game of authorship is thus significantly refracted into two parties in Leviathan. On the one hand, we have the writing couple Ben Sachs and Peter Aaron. The younger author sits down to write his rendition of the true story of the older man with whom he not only

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shared his lover Maria, but with whose wife Fanny he also had an adulterous affair. His narrative is an act of ventriloquism; his personally inflected reworking of the confession Ben made to him in lieu of turning himself over to the FBI and he intends to turn the manuscript over to them once they have cracked the case. Ironically they do so by tracing the forged signature of Peter Aaron, which has been turning up in cities he never visited. This had been a way for Ben to stay in touch with his young friend, or so Peter surmises. In this relation, Maria functions not as co-author, but as the reigning spirit of chance. Yet Paul Auster also conceives of her as a foreign body, who plays a seminal role in the relationship between Ben and Lillian the narrator will never understand, who embodies the one contingency he can never fully calculate, yet one he is also not curious about, because it does not fit the narrative of fatality provoked by feminine curiosity he seeks to endorse. Maria is thus shown to play a double game of her own. On the one hand, she functions as the enigmatic figure of chance both Peter and Ben need to play through their separate fantasy scenarios. As an embodiment of feminine curiosity she, furthermore, lures these two writers into a dangerous investigation of forbidden or repressed psychic realms even as, along the lines discussed by Laura Mulvey, she also provokes the opposite desire. Fetishized into a body that can never be fully known, she sanctions a refusal to see, and most importantly a refusal to engage with the difference of female sexuality that proves to be tantamount to the emergence of the text commemorating the bond between the two male writers. Yet Auster does not so much depict as critically enact this dialectic, for he shows the failure of the aesthetic project that requires the refiguration of feminine curiosity as fetish body. Ben Sachs falls silent as an author, then disappears, and resurfaces only once he has fully obliterated himself in suicide. Peter Aaron is empowered by the spirit of the dead man to write his novel for him, but must recognize that this is nothing other than the work of ventriloquism. The only artist who is shown to be successful in the game of chance, living productively with contingency, resiliently redesigning herself even in the face of disastrous failure, and whose authentic voice emerges precisely from her hysteric play with the truth of inventions and the invention of truth, is the very figure they have sought to obliterate, and the difference of whose voice they have refused to accept – Maria Turner.

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Sophie Calle goes by the book In this irony, I want to suggest by way of closure, we find Paul Auster’s genuine tribute to the version of female curiosity Sophie Calle has come to represent. She responded to her friend’s appropriation of her work in Leviathan by not only materializing some of the projects he attributes to Maria, but also integrating them into some of her other conceptualist projects so as to publish this collaborative work under the title Double Game.47 This book uncannily resonates with Laura Mulvey’s claim that while the Pandora iconography posits femininity as enigma, and female curiosity as transgressive and dangerous, a feminist reappropriation of this myth transforms ‘the topography of Pandora and her box into a new pattern or configuration, which can constitute a political, critical and creative drive.’48 For by turning herself into her own fetish object, Sophie Calle creates a short circuit between fetishism’s covering over and that of curiosity’s uncovering. What emerges is neither Siri Hustvedt’s celebration of feminine curiosity within a rite-de-passage narrative nor Paul Auster’s deconstructive enactment of how masculine curiosity requires a feminine figure of chance in order to play through the narrative of the death of the author in the face of the birth of his text. Rather, because she assumes the positions of both the curious spectator and the fetishized object, Sophie Calle moves beyond the dialectic of artificial surface and horrific interiority, celebrating a playful oscillation between a wide array of self-inventions instead. These not only feed on a compulsive desire to see, to know and to investigate secrets, but also to support a public performance of feminine curiosity where the revelation of intimate, clandestine knowledge is enacted as the celebration of surfaces. Double Game significantly begins with a double dedication. As we open the book we find, on the left side of the first page, a dedication to Frank Gehry, and on the right side a sheet, the size of a paperback book page, inserted into the binding, giving (on both sides of the sheet) information pertaining to copyright law, but also a note circled in red: ‘The author extends special thanks to Paul Auster for permission to mingle fiction with fact.’ This, we realize, is an imitation of the copyright page of Leviathan, where Auster had had the same note of thanks printed. Sophie Calle then proceeds to explain the rules of the game: In his 1992 novel Leviathan, Paul Auster thanks me for having authorized him to mingle fact with fiction. And indeed, on pages

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60–7 of his book, he uses a number of episodes from my life to create a fictive character named Maria, who then leaves me to live out her own story. Intrigued by this double, I decided to turn Paul Auster’s novel into a game and to make my own particular mixture of reality and fiction. Her book is divided into three sections, the first pertaining to ‘the life of Maria and how it influenced the life of Sophie’, the second to ‘The life of Sophie and how it influenced the life of Maria’, and the final section pertaining to ‘one of the many ways of mingling fact with fiction, or how to try to become a character out of a novel’. In the first section she decides to ‘go by the book’ so as to bring Maria and herself closer together. Thus she enacts both the chromatic diet as well as the idea of living whole days on a single letter of the alphabet that Paul Auster invented for her. In the second section she then presents those projects he ‘borrowed’ from her to shape Maria. Yet before either of these sections begin, we find a facsimile of the relevant passages from Leviathan inserted into the binding of the book, where on page 60 she writes over Auster’s text in red ink ‘Hello maria,’ and ends with a decided leave-taking on page 67 in the same key (‘good-bye maria’). Throughout this facsimile, she corrects words and passages in Auster’s text, strikes through whole sentences, or comments in the margin with notes like ‘excessive!’, ‘over the top’, ‘too much imagination’. Accepting the fact that he has given her a script to write herself into, she proceeds by setting his fiction right. In so doing, she not only presents herself as the final authority on the murky exchange between fiction and fact they have mutually undertaken. More crucially, she also isolates a part of the novel from the whole, endowing it with a life of its own, much as a fetishist would sever the body part he is obsessed with from the entire feminine body. This gesture, however, serves not only to celebrate her compulsive desire to investigate something secret but also cuts off all the passages in Leviathan in which feminine curiosity is turned into a figure of fateful chance. Or put another way, even as she foregrounds Pandora’s proclivity towards transgressive and dangerous encounters, she forecloses the fetishism that turns feminine curiosity into the allegorical figure of enigma and fatality par excellence. The belief in an inescapable fatality that can only lead to selfobliteration, as this gave support to both Peter Aaron and Ben Sachs’ fantasy life is, in fact, precisely what is left out of the Double Game. The

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projects Sophie Calle presents are either terminated as suddenly as they began – such as The Birthday Ceremony, where to alleviate her anxiety that people might forget her on her birthday, she decided each year to invite the exact number of people corresponding to her age and preserve the presents as tokens of affection, only to put an end suddenly to this ritual when she turned forty. Or they are purposely left incomplete, such as The Wardrobe, where she decides to dress a strange man from head to toe, sending him a piece of what will be the perfect wardrobe each Christmas. Or she simply abandons a project once it no longer fascinates her, such as To Follow, where for months in 1979, she would follow strangers on the street and photograph them without their knowledge, only to ultimately lose sight of them and forget them. In all cases she follows the gesture of the hysteric’s belle indifference, getting obsessed with a ritual or a venue of detection and investigation, only to withdraw her libido from this project as suddenly and as resolutely, as she attached herself to it. Because she, like the conceptualist that Paul Auster creates artificially in her image, cheerfully oscillates between fact and fiction, never confusing the one with the other, even while insisting on their mutual implication, she can relinquish her objects of curiosity long before they become pathological, let alone lethal. As Luc Sante notes, while the accidental, the random and the contingent are her material, ‘Uncertainty is an inevitability when it comes to information:  information is uncertain in the same way that humans are mortal. But information nevertheless strives for certainty, or rather its purveyors do, whether quixotically or disingenuously.’ He then proceeds to explain: ‘The police tipster, the industrial spy, the political clairvoyant, the highly placed source – all are in the business of pretending infallibility.’49 Yet in so doing, he is describing Auster’s fetishist narrator, who understands knowledge to be contingent, but who uses the process of detection and notation to protect himself from this recognition. Sophie Calle, however, undercuts precisely this fetishism in her conceptual performances so as to emphasize not the anxiety induced by a knowledge of fallibility and uncertainty but rather the creative energy this releases. In Double Game, the project with the lost address book plays as central a part as in Leviathan. The important difference is, however, that – far from serving as a catalyst for a project of self-obliteration – it serves as the traumatic kernel of the text, the moment where her game with fact and fiction came violently to crash. As Sophie Calle explains

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in her text, she had left her home to move into the strangers’ neighbourhood as well as donned his habits and tastes in order to immerse herself more radically into his life and habits (a gesture undertaken by Ben Sachs when he moves in with Lillian and finds himself identifying with her absent husband). In fact, Calle plays with the idea of a romance about to begin between her and the strange man once he has returned to Paris. Wondering in the last interview published by Liberation whether he will be angry with her, she is not really surprised when he responds by expressing his indignation at ‘the methods used, the intrusion into his privacy’, and returns her indiscretion in the same coin: ‘he said how it had wounded him, signing this response and sending a photograph he had obtained using my methods, showing me naked. It ended badly. Although in a way, he had authenticated my story.’50 The full story of The Address Book is missing from The Double Game so as to warrant that no violation or infringement of privacy has taken place. It exists simply as a sign of a project gone awry, as a story that can only be told in a truncated manner. Yet in contrast to the narrator of Leviathan, who insists on organizing unrelated events into a sequence dictated by the laws of necessity and fate, Sophie Calle refuses any stories that rearrange random or accidental occurrences into a narrative about consequences. Instead, she simply celebrates the act of chance meetings and the images she comes to make under the auspices of Pandora. Perhaps because she so staunchly refuses the fetishist’s refusal to see, because she precisely does not turn away from a dangerous and potentially wounding encounter, there is nothing to screen off. Her projects seem to feed off the recognition that by looking it straight in the eye, contingency looses the frightening face it gets when it is turned into a narrative of unavoidable fate. For the conceptual artist unabashedly indulging in her feminine curiosity, contingency proves to be simply a game, a possibility, that is endlessly negotiable, reiterable, refigurable. ‘Anything can happen,’ the narrator of Leviathan explains. ‘And one way or another, it always does.’51 For someone like Sophie Calle, acknowledging that the rules of chance reign in all her projects of self-discovery qua self-invention, thus forcing her to relinquish all belief in her own infallibility, is not a problem. It is a gift from the gods.

12 THE OTHER SELF OF THE IMAGINATION Cindy Sherman’s Hysterical Performance

‘I don’t do self-portraits’, Cindy Sherman explained to Andreas Kallfelz in an interview for the journal Wolkenkratzer. ‘I always try to get as far away from myself as possible in the photographs. It could be, though, that it’s precisely by doing so that I  create a self-portrait, doing these totally crazy things with these characters’.1 Sherman, one of the most widely discussed contemporary American artists, thus poses a serious challenge to art and cultural critics, because, if it is not the artist herself, then who is the woman depicted in her photos? If she does not want to create portraits of herself, then why does Sherman use her own body – distorted by costumes, make-up and props – as her main model? If it is not a question of self-representation, then what is the relationship between the depiction and the female body being represented? We must consider further, at least in relation to the work she produced up to 1991, that Sherman always staged her portraits of women as a scenario that quite self-consciously employs multiple references to American film and TV culture since the 1950s, to costume gothics and romances, science fiction and horror thrillers, film noir, melodrama, advertising and, in the ‘History Portraits’, to classical paintings she studied in college. In view of this, we could certainly bring into play the distinction between selfportrait and self-performance, but we would immediately have to ask, who is staging herself here, and why?

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For Cindy Sherman has also explained that she uses her photographs to reveal the latent psychological material that we do not normally see on the surface, in a subject’s face or gestures, namely the material that contains the subject’s imagination. At the same time, however, this other self of the imagination can only be articulated through surface appearances, through the knotting together of different self-representations. The way Sherman tells the story of how she became a photographer characteristically revolves around this contradiction. Using as its point of departure the image of the solitary young woman we are so familiar with from Western narratives and paintings, to be more precise, the young woman who withdraws from the world, finds refuge in her own room and there occupies herself with her own fantasies behind closed doors, Sherman describes how she first felt alienated within her own family, how she later felt threatened existentially by the urban violence of New York City, and how, to reduce this threat, she learned to transform herself into other people, initially in her own room, then later in her studio. She started to study her own face continually from different angles until it began to look like a stranger’s face. She began to disguise herself by dressing up in different costumes, until she could no longer recognize the figure in the mirror. Her portraits were produced precisely in such moments of complete alienation, emerging from her discontent with the gender roles prescribed to her by her family and later by the conditions of her existence as a woman in a major urban centre. As such, these portraits always also articulate Sherman’s sense of dissatisfaction with the expectations of femininity that prevailing culture has. In a television interview with Mark Stokes, Cindy Sherman describes how, as a child, she borrowed her mother’s clothes to disguise herself, but actually transformed herself into an ugly old woman. Imbued with exactly the same gesture, her photographs are brilliant and at the same time painful parodies of the imperative imposed by media images on every American girl, namely that she should perfect her clothes, her make-up and her posture so as to imitate an apparently desirable but simultaneously unattainable model of immaculate feminine beauty. Crucially, Sherman chose never to represent herself as an idealized figure. Perfection, Roland Barthes poignantly argues, exalts in so far as it wipes out the distance between code and performance, between origin and result, between model and copy. Since this distance, however, is part of the human condition, Barthes concludes:

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[P]erfection, which annuls it, lies outside of anthropological limits, in supernature, where it joins the other, inferior, transgression: more and less can be generically placed in the same class, that of excess, what is beyond no longer differs from what is short of a limit; the essence of the code (perfection) has in the end the same status as what is outside the code (the monster).2 This is precisely the dialectic that Sherman performs in her photographs. The perfectly beautiful body and the monstrous body are shown to be mutually dependent on each other. There is yet a further distinction that Cindy Sherman’s self-portraits that are not self-portraits undermine, namely the difference between ‘performance’ in aesthetic practice and ‘performance’ in linguistic speech-act theory. The latter refers to a verbal utterance that simultaneously performs the action it also describes. Sherman presents us with a dual gesture. She stages herself in scenarios by virtue of distorting her appearance, putting on costumes, performing a masquerade. But in so doing, she additionally points to the fact that, as a woman who grew up in a specific cultural context, she has also been performatively constructed by the discourse specific to her environment. By presenting herself other than what she is, by refashioning the media images and narratives that have influenced her self-image, Sherman insists that the act of self-representation, as a means of expression, simultaneously always also performs the act it designates. Her explanation ‘I don’t do self-portraits’ can thus also be understood as referring to the notion that the portraits she makes of herself function as an aesthetic ‘performance’ of the following utterance. The subject of the portrait has been created performatively, in fact it can only be articulated as a performance. The represented subject can, therefore, be understood as a knot, binding together the various languages that have shaped it and through which it is able to express, in a displaced and dislocated manner, its traumas, its memories, its desires and its fantasies. In addition, this represented subject performatively embodies the laws and imperatives imposed upon it by the family and by society, as well as any culturally acquired image repertoire. In the course of every selfrepresentation, the depicted subject is always also a cipher for collective wish fulfilments and anxieties; in Sherman’s case, it is above all so manifestly a cipher for the way in which perfection and monstrosity

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are enmeshed. If we recall that the Latin etymology of the word ‘monster’ links this concept with that of the omen and the miracle, given that miraculous phenomena were seen as warnings of an inevitable and threatening future event, we can begin to grasp how Sherman’s disturbances of the self-portrait incorporate the notion of mutability as one of their central themes. These self-representations are proleptic; they point towards something that has not yet become visible, even as they articulate the fact that although it may be invisible, the event of the subject’s demise is, nevertheless, also inescapable. Adept in postmodern theories, Cindy Sherman thus quite consciously uses her photographs to transform herself into a representation, thereby rendering problematic the relationship between the image, the depicted body, and any citation, serving as cultural model for the representation. She stages her memories of media images and personal fantasy images, and at the same time seeks to trigger memories and fantasies in her viewers by performing her very specific understanding of this culturally given image repertoire. In so doing, she draws on a rich archive of images from childhood reading, television, film, and high-gloss magazines, as well as from the entire catalogue of high art. Significantly, she says of herself that she belongs to the first generation of American artists who have grown up with television. If postmodernist theory works on the assumption that the socialized body is always already inscribed by the image repertoire within which it finds itself emplaced, then Cindy Sherman, we could say, in turn inscribes these culturally transmitted images with the ‘performances’ recorded in her photographs. In the process, she unsettles the relationship between authentic body and its pictorial representation, between original image and body masquerade. In her non-self-portraits, composite images emerge, assembled from body parts and prostheses; bodies that dissolve gender boundaries, that trouble the distinction between human and animal, between living body and corpse or prosthesis. At the same time, Sherman also produces hybrid bodies, given the enmeshment of model image and body performance, between memory and self-fashioning, between latent psychic material and manifest expression. ‘I see myself as a composite of all the things I’ve done’, she explains.3 Sherman’s self-representations can thus be seen, on the one hand, as the serial fashionings of a plethora of potential identities. On the other hand, they raise the question whether this highly intricate role-playing

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stages the represented subject as a false self, a mimicry; whether the illusion of authenticity is preserved even though such a gesture is intended to deceive; or whether beneath the surface, beneath the media composite, an autonomous self nevertheless does exist. Are we irrevocably caught up in the free-play of simulacra, or can an authentic articulation of the self emerge in the midst of postmodern simulations? Can we as spectators discern an intact subject behind the performance and in addition, can we recognize in these non-self-portraits a woman who is radically other than ourselves? Or are we, as Sherman at least suggests, primarily expecting to find our own self-image mirrored in the representation of this other? ‘People are going to look under the make-up and wigs for that common denominator, the recognizable. I’m trying to make other people recognize something of themselves rather than me.’4 Sherman thus not only addresses the hermeneutic problem that spectators will first and foremost find themselves as well as their memories and fantasies reflected in the image. Rather, she also points to the fact that, in order to become meaningful, each image requires an interpretive story, regardless whether in the process the series of stills is supplemented by a narrative, or whether it is reshaped into our own fantasy scene. By calling upon us to exercise our own memory and imagination, but doing so precisely by staging stereotypic figures – from the image repertoire of femininity, of fairy tales, or of horror films – Sherman succinctly raises the question whether the fantasies thus aroused are really authentic or perhaps nothing more than clichés. Concomitantly, she forces us to consider whether we, the spectators of the images, might not be like the represented hybrid bodies, namely the composites of a play of simulacra, as she equally asks us to consider whether in the process of spectatorship, we are able to reach that realm of the imagination that is specifically unique to each of us. In addition, by turning herself into the image and at the same time constructing this image herself, Sherman not only knots together what are otherwise separate entities – the cited media image, the model, the representation and the effect of viewing. She also stages herself as a hybrid being, oscillating between empowered subject and disempowered object of the gaze. She critically refashions the relationship of the artist to the traditional image repertoire of femininity out of which, but also against which, she designs herself. She does this by installing and as it were parodying the traditional analogy between femininity and the image, even as she performs the extent to

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which the femininity being represented is in fact a viewing effect, given that each still implicitly elicits an interpretive narrative to accompany it. Craig Owens argues: Sherman’s photographs themselves function as mirror-masks that reflect back at the viewer his own desire (and the spectator posited by this work is invariably male) – specifically, the masculine desire to fix the woman in a stable and stabilizing identity … but while Sherman may pose as a pin up, she still cannot be pinned down.5 No matter, therefore, how much we are tempted to see Sherman’s photographs as a way of processing the media image repertoire that she quite explicitly sees as her artistic material, it must not be forgotten that the reason these photographs are not self-portraits in the conventional sense may be because they articulate that other, unconscious self that can only emerge in the process of staging the imagination, i.e. by virtue of a displaced representation. For although in the interview with Kallfelz Sherman insists that she does not do self-portraits, she is quick to concede that her photographs do have a real psychic point of reference; ‘and that’s the other aspect. It could be that I really do let out some crazy person inside me in this way.’ Ultimately, Cindy Sherman’s hybrid and composite technique aims at making manifest the way in which vulnerability and masquerade, perfection and monstrosity are enmeshed. The performance of her masked, disfigured or displaced body is meant to serve as an apotropaic gesture against and as a reference to the body’s vulnerability, to the fallibility of identity, and to anxieties about destruction and death, regardless of whether these fears have their origin in an actual experience of threatening events, or merely in childhood nightmares. While Sherman seeks to evoke memory and fantasy images in her spectators in order, on the one hand, to demythologize traditional stereotypes – especially regarding femininity – and to deconstruct the primacy of the idealized body, she aims, on the other hand, to induce those images of horror that are usually repressed anxieties about fragmentation, dissolution, or the substitution of the human body with artificial body parts and prostheses. Staging a masquerade of the self serves a critical, even if displaced project. If the postmodern subject is conventionally conceived as a ‘network of quotations, a complete blurring of image and identity’, Sherman on the

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one hand shows what the logical conclusion of the idealized image of the intact body as well as the reference-free simulacrum is, i.e. the female body petrified into a mask, a prosthesis, a doll.6 On the other hand, she points to the realm that is foreclosed by both of these representational gestures, but nevertheless remains a part of the visualization – the formless body mass, the abject, decay, the process of decomposition. Cindy Sherman’s multifaceted performance of the female body thus serves to deconstruct various codes, namely traditional images of femininity, aesthetic idealization and the concept of an intact body of plenitude. Against these codes, she sets the multiplicity of female identity, a collapsing of the distinction between designing an image and becoming an image, as well as images of the transience of the body. Her photographic performance exposes what lies beneath the cosmetic surface (Disaster Pictures (1980), Fairy Tales (1980)), or reduces everything to a simulacrum (Film Stills (1977–80), Centerfolds (1981), Fashion (1983)), to anatomical body parts and prostheses (Specimens (1991), Sex Pictures (1992)). What is staged is the following question: ‘Where is the subject located, given its performative constitution through trauma, sexuality, and media images?’ This performance, in turn, points to what has been foreclosed, to the traumatic material that inhabits each of us, just as it also points to the fact that our subjectivity is the result of the discursive field which has inscribed us. In lieu of self-portraits, Sherman offers the knotting together of a given cultural image repertoire, with memory traces, creations of fantasy and figures of the traumatic. In contrast to her earlier work, Cindy Sherman no longer appears as the model in her photographic transformation of the Grimm fairy tale ‘Fitcher’s Bird’.7 Her body is replaced by dolls and artificial body parts. Nevertheless, this series is perhaps the artist’s most manifest selfportrait to date. Here, too, she draws on a familiar archive of culture, the image repertoire of fairy tales, and chooses from it the story of a clever and sly girl who, after initial passivity, begins to revolt against the imperative of female obedience. She uses her curiosity as a form of selfprotection so as to act in ways that transcend gender roles. After all, she not only ignores the magician’s prohibition to enter the room with the smallest lock and disobeys his command always to carry the magic egg with her. In this story of violence, dismemberment, and resuscitation, she also carries out the act of creating artificially – an activity normally relegated to the masculine realm. Without a trace of sentimentality, the

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sly girl, having shed a few tears, puts back together the body parts of her dead sisters that she finds in the forbidden room. At the same time, she claims the magician’s deadly power for herself. He exercised power over other people’s lives by hewing intact bodies  – above all those of beautiful women – into pieces and then demonstratively putting them in a cauldron that, deliberately placed in the centre of the forbidden chamber, resembles an exhibition display. In her photographic transformation of the fairy tale, Cindy Sherman stages this cauldron as the focus of a horrific display, illuminating it with a golden ray of light and placing it in front of a curtain with a skull, an iron chain and barely recognizable instruments of murder. What is then seminal to the required happy ending of the story is the fact that the girl ultimately destroys the wicked magician, this artist of dismemberment, but that apparently she can only do so by creating new body objects herself, and doing so precisely on the border between life and death. Firstly, the dead body parts of the demonic artist’s victims, with which Cindy Sherman recalls her own use of dolls, artificial body parts, and prostheses as substitutes for her own body in her previous work, are put together again by the sly girl so as to form new bodies. The sisters are thereby resuscitated. In the photos, however, it is still only fragments of hands, hair, nose, mouths that are visible, as if, in contrast to the fairy tale’s plot, Sherman uses her photographic language to insist on an analogy between the fragmentation of female bodies by the wicked magician and the fragmentation of the represented body as an object in any aesthetic image (#267). Secondly, the girl transforms herself into a fantasy figure, a feathered hybrid between animal and human being. In this image, too, Sherman only represents a section of the body from waist to knee, illuminated from behind. The two hands are held in front of the stomach, the left one hovering slightly above the navel while the right one almost rests on the hipbone. Some fingernails are visible through the feathers (#277). Thanks to this mimicry, the sly sister is able not only to leave the magician’s house with impunity but also to entice the evil bridegroom to his death. Significantly, she does this by creating one last time on the threshold between life and death. She decorates a skull with flowers and jewels, and, placed on a small pedestal, she exhibits it from her window. This composite body also resembles an art display (#272). The decorated skull becomes a dual representation. It functions as a standin for the sly bride, but it is also an inverted rendition of the magician’s

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conceptual coupling of bride and corpse, given that it corresponds to the dismembered body parts of the other beautiful women he courted. In both acts of creation – the magician’s murderous performance of dismembering and displaying his brides, and the girl’s self-protecting act of exchanging a substitute body, the decorated skull, for her own bodily presence the concept bride is linked to dead body parts and to aesthetic display. If in Sherman’s photographs of these brides, the feminine body appears to be inanimate – the artificial body parts of the two dismembered sisters decoratively arranged in a pattern, the feathered body of the third, in which a human form is barely recognizable, the substitute bride, the decorated skull, by contrast, gives the impression of being animate. Both bride substitutes, however – the bird-woman and the skull bride – render the boundary between what is animate and what is inanimate fluid. Upon approaching his home, the wicked bridegroom asks the bird-woman where his bride is and she tells him that she is sitting at the window waiting for him to return. ‘The bridegroom looked up, saw the  decorated skull, thought it was his bride, and nodded to her, greeting her kindly.’ With this statement, the sly daughter, working with, but also against death, introduces a death performance of her own. Her correlate site to the magician’s forbidden chamber-of-death scenarios where she found herself confronted with the traumatic spectacle of her dismembered sisters is the magician’s entire house. Set on fire by her father and her kinsmen, it has become the site of death for the magician himself. By emphasizing the nipple of the dead artist, Sherman offers one last blurring of gender boundaries the magician, too, is a hybrid, bearded and female (#274). These fairy-tale photographs thus also serve to illustrate the revenge that art can take. Sherman presents us with images of violence meant as an apotropaic gesture against a fatal art project, but also as a statement about the cost of artistic creativity. Art needs dead bodies, art creates dead bodies. In the images of the beautiful but dead female faces, the sisters’ chopped-off heads as well as in the decorated skull, the perfection of aesthetic idealization meets its opposite – monstrosity. The former represent the traumatic spectacle of what the sly girl found in the cauldron. As such, they stand for death as the prerequisite for the masculine artists’ creative act. They function as the representation of a destructive fragmentation externally imposed by an artist on his medium. The latter image, by contrast, offers an aestheticized rendition of what the sly sister

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sets up against this spectacle of horror – a representation of death that stands for herself and that constitutes her self-representation. With ‘Fitcher’s Bird’ in mind, we can, then, isolate three aspects of the performative in Cindy Sherman’s artistic practice, each thematizing how the survival of the self is coterminous with the destruction of the intact body as well as its transformation into a new body. First, the image of the sisters’ dead body parts points to the concrete materials Sherman uses in her performed scenes  – to the inanimate set pieces, dolls and props, but also to the iconographic bits and pieces she borrows from a collective image repertoire. On two scores, the production of her photographs can, therefore, be seen as an act that consciously employs the process of assembling body parts and image fragments. Second, the image representing Fitcher’s bird is a radical reference to Sherman’s multifarious masquerades, to her playing with disguise, mimicry, as a screening of the self, as though she wanted to demonstrate how it is only with the help of such a strategy of displacement that she can offer herself to the view of the photographic lens. Finally, Sherman stages the image of the dead and deadly substitute bride as though it were a self-portrait. The face is reproduced frontally, looking, with almost impudent candour, directly at the spectator; her other self of the imagination represented by the image of a decorated skull. But the decorated skull allows a further association to emerge, namely the report of one of Sigmund Freud’s hysteric patients, Emmy von N., who told him of the horrible dreams she had had the night before. She had to lay out and decorate a number of dead people and put them in coffins, but would not put the lids on. The role that this hysteric ascribes to herself in the dream fantasy is that of a woman who refashions dead bodies, dresses and adorns them, indeed we could say embellishes the dead, even as she also commemorates the presence of the dead amongst the living by virtue of the fact that she is compelled to leave the coffins open. If in what follows, I speak of Cindy Sherman’s self-representations, which are not self-portraits, as manifestations of a hysteric language of the body, I am interested in this analogy from the point of view of aesthetic strategy. Hysteria, one of the most resilient psychosomatic disturbances in the history of medicine, continues to be a compelling issue today because it so poignantly stages the problematic interface between identity, gender and representation. One of the definitions of hysteria that is still currently used in medical discourse,

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according to Stavros Mentzos, describes this psychosomatic disturbance in the following manner: Those affected by hysteria move internally (in accordance with their experience) and externally (in accordance with public appearance) into a state in which they experience themselves as quasi-other, and in the eyes of those around them appear as other than they are. They place themself into a psychic state in which their own body functions and/or psychological functions and/or character traits are experienced and appear in such a way that an (apparently) other, a quasi-altered self-representation results.8 Symptoms of the hysterical tendency to experience oneself and to present oneself as other than one is are histrionic behaviour, emotional instability, over-excitability, and seductive gestures, although Mentzos is careful to qualify his definition. Expressive behaviour and heightened excitability can only be termed hysterical when the self-presentation involved is not the spontaneous expression of a momentary experience, but rather where the inverse is true. Excitability and histrionic behaviour are chosen, and a particular scene is staged and played through as though such an experience and such a dramatic situation had in fact occurred.9 The term ‘hysteria’ is taken from the Greek word for the womb (hystera), because in antiquity medical discourse was of the opinion that when the uterus became dry, it wandered all over the body in search of moisture; one day it would settle in the throat, the next in the appendix, later it would make its appearance in the breast or in the leg. This somatic cause was then retrospectively invoked when a capricious, fickle, or extremely theatrical woman showed symptoms that could not be attributed to any organic disturbance. Such a diagnosis of hysteria of course corresponds to the traditional image of femininity Western culture has preserved over the centuries – it is a cultural commonplace to view the female body as an enigmatic, untamed, uncontrollable nervous system, as it is equally common to stereotype the feminine character as having a proclivity towards inauthenticity, imitation, deception, and mimicry, as well as toward an

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unrestrained and unpredictable fantasizing. Hysteria, however, was always also considered to be the language of feminine discontent with culture; the code of dissatisfaction and boredom, melancholy, world-weariness, effusive day-dreaming and narcissistic self-preoccupation, as well as the self-destructive anger with which many talented young women reacted to the constraining gender role offered to them by the bourgeois family. Even before Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer published their pioneering Studies on Hysteria in Vienna in 1895,10 physicians saw this psychosomatic condition as being a disorder that staged the problematic relationship between self-identity and self-presentation. Not only is it impossible to identify any organic lesions as the cause of hysterical symptoms. Each historic period also seems to show its own specific form of hysteria. Thus already in the late seventeenth century, the British physician Thomas Sydenham suggested that hysteria should be seen as a disease of imitation, given that it merely imitates other diseases without itself taking on any fixed characteristics and without abiding by the rules of anatomy. The hysterical strategy of self-expression, Mentzos concludes, is like a chameleon, making use of the most widely differing shades of somatic disturbances and adapting itself to the style, the modes of expression, and the contents of various cultures and epochs. Since hysteria is a consequence of tensions, crises of meaning and beliefs as well as conflicts within the culture surrounding the woman or man affected by this psychosomatic disturbance, the symptoms marking the condition of hysteria in fact merely reflect the culture from which this disturbance emerges. Psychoanalysis, in turn, shifted the medical discourse radically by insisting that hysteria above all involves the suffering from memory traces of a psychic trauma whose origin is either unknown to the person affected, or which he or she has suppressed. While the French psychiatrist Pierre Janet calls hysteria a malady of representation (maladie par representation), caused on the one hand by the cultural images that it imitates and on the other hand producing condensed and displaced repetitions of an original psychic disturbance, Freud also introduces the notion of memory traces and ideas that have become pathogenic owing to repression.11 His claim is that for the hysteric certain memories retain their original quantity of affect and thus lead to the formation of symptoms precisely when there is no satisfactory abreaction of a psychic trauma. The hysteric, he repeatedly notes, is haunted by impressions

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that have not become free of affects and whose memory has, therefore, remained vivid. The hysteric suffers from incompletely abreacted psychic traumas, from reminiscences, and because she cannot free herself from the past, she neglects her immediate reality. However, Freud also believes to have discovered that the language of hysteria is nothing other than the articulation of unconscious imaginations that, in the course of conversion, return from their banishment into the conscious. What the hysteric symptomizes is the transformation of psychic energy into a somatic mode of expression. Freud understands the conversion undertaken by the hysteric as a symbolic transformation of psychic material into a somatic language, as the displaced staging of unconscious fantasy scenes at the material site of the body. What is common to all these definitions is the fact that hysteria performatively stages precisely the same problematic that characterizes Cindy Sherman’s displaced self-representations. The hysteric uses her body to repeat by representation an earlier trauma, and, in the course of this mimetic self-representation, she oscillates between memory and figuration, between masculine and feminine self-definition, between resuscitating what is dead, inanimate, artificial and killing off what is animate and material. With the help of her body performance – the theatrical display of intimate fantasy scenes, the simulation of various roles towards each of which she affects a belle indifférence the hysteric decorates the past and draws new life from the dead. Hesitating between consciousness and trance, the hysteric uses her performances to render the concealed visible. She allows the other self of the imagination to speak. She stages the body in relation to a past trauma, to retained memory traces, whose vanishing point is death. As Georges Didi-Huberman has shown, while the hysteric articulates her discontent with the performance of gender her culture expects of her, she does so, however, by having recourse to precisely the same representations of femininity which this culture dictates to her.12 She imitates, represents and parodies with her own body the feminine roles celebrated in Western art – the woman possessed by demons, the day-dreamer, the seductress. Because she experiences herself and appears to others as being other than what she is, her self-representation stages the incongruity between any so-called genuine feminine being and any visualization or staging of femininity. Viewed as precisely such a strategy, the language of hysteria can, I suggest, be useful to any discussion about the way the self is constructed by representations. Because,

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as something goes awry in the process of imitating given cultural codes of gender identity and perpetuating the simulacrum of inscribed media images, the self that emerges proves ultimately to result as a knot formed in the context of and the conflict between traumatic psychic material and its representations. In other words, it is precisely at this interface that both the hysterical and the postmodern subject emerge. To read Cindy Sherman’s photographic work as a postmodern performance of hysteria involves, on the one hand an interpretation of the content of her images, given that the themes of her portraits of women are often the somatization of a wandering desire, a bodily imitation of culture and an expression of discontent with it, a malady caused by fantasy, representation and reminiscences. Repeatedly, her portraits represent the vagabonding, the boredom, the day-dreaming of the feminine subject. On the other hand, the undecidable question posed by art criticism – ‘Are Sherman’s portraits of woman only meant as surface phenomenon, a free play of signifiers without any specific non-semiotic point of reference, or can a feminine essence, an authentic woman be discerned beneath the surface of the image?’ – in fact mirrors the question posed by any hysterical self-representation. Because, owing to her somatic disorder that has no contingent organic disturbance, even as this disorder nevertheless reflects an authentic trauma, the hysteric oscillates between the critical exposure of her discontent with the identities that her culture either offers or prescribes to her, on the one hand, and the imitation of precisely this image repertoire, on the other. In hysteria, whose symptoms are so different in every epoch, what is performatively articulated, however, is not only the discontent with society’s prescription of specific gender roles. Rather, at stake is also the knowledge of all the trauma that serves as the ground and vanishing point of any representational gesture. After all, the hysteric suffers as much from memory traces whose origins she cannot determine as she does from her need to commemorate the dead, whose graves she is compelled to leave open. The series of photographs Cindy Sherman has been working on for almost twenty years now – all under the auspicious label ‘Untitled’ – offer us various modalities of the language of hysteria. My speculative suggestion is that they do so by enmeshing, in the gesture of a negated self-representation, the performance of her body, and later of the artificial body parts that take its place, with performance as a discursive

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constitution of the self. After all, Sherman stages herself primarily not only as an image, but also and perhaps above all as a knot of traumatic material which finds articulation owing to ideational representations in a substitute manner, namely in representations of the materiality of the body caught in the act of decomposition, or having become completely mechanical, nothing but matter, abjected flesh, plastic, wood. Possessed by memory traces, suffering from representations, her other self of the imagination oscillates between the play of simulacra, the essence of the aesthetic code of perfection, and a traumatic mass, the monstrous. Apodictically put, Sherman repeatedly stages traumatic disturbances connected to the body as it is turned into a series of representations that themselves hysterically perform the disturbance in the image and of the image; notably a language of the body that veers ever more urgently towards the crisis of representation itself. I would like to speak of Sherman’s self-representations as a hysteric language of the body because she performs – albeit self-consciously in the way the early patients of Freud did not – the disjunction between feminine identities traditionally offered by Western culture and what feminine subjectivity ‘actually’ is. As Laura Mulvey argues, ‘because Sherman uses cosmetics literally as a mask she makes visible the feminine as masquerade’.13 In her first photographs, the Untitled Film Stills, Cindy Sherman presents reconstructions of film scenes of the 1950s and 1960s – film noir, melo, nouvelle vague – in which she quite consciously poses as the stereotypical heroine of post-war Hollywood films, indeed literally turns her body into a representation, into the prototypical signifier ‘woman’. If we, furthermore, take into account that she was born in 1954, then we realize that the media images she cites include those representations of femininity with which her mother tried to identify as she was conceiving and giving birth to her daughter. These photographs stand as the legacy of the maternal image repertoire. Reconstructing these imaginary film scenes allows her, on the one hand, to identify with her mother’s attempt to try out the feminine roles her post-war culture offered her. But on the other hand, the scenes also represent fantasy scenes about her own origins, and as such revolve around three central questions coupling fantasies of origin and the origin of fantasy: Where do I come from? What is my gender? What do I desire? Significantly, Sherman performs these questions in relation to the way they find their source in the fantasmatic register of her own mother.14

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Because Cindy Sherman pays scrupulous attention to the details in her strategy of citation, the photographs appear entirely familiar to the spectator. In an uncanny manner, they thus evoke memories of films, but of films that never existed, because Sherman’s photographs are quite consciously designed as pure simulacra, as authentic copies without an original. The represented subject and the representing image are identical. The disjunction between empirical woman and woman as representation is here endowed with a very special variation, given that the actual model of these photographs could potentially be other cinematic photographs, but that these are all purely invented film stills. If the classic hysteric suffers from non-abreacted reminiscences, finds herself subject to belated memory traces whose origins are unknown to her, Sherman provokes both in herself and in her viewers the analogous effect of being confronted with freely floating and overdetermined memory traces. She represents one moment from a film, captures a whole film in a single image. With every image she suggests that something is about to happen, but leaves open which event it is that is about to occur. These women, self-preoccupied, pausing in mid-sentence, hesitating in mid-action, recall the hysteric whose unsatisfied desire produces a permanent state of feverish expectations and fragile anxieties. But we, too, are drawn into the spell of momentary hesitation, of uncertainty. Arrested at the interface between memory and expectation, we too begin to dream or to anticipate hysterically. Above all, however, in so doing, Cindy Sherman presents the other self of the imagination and of representation as a knot of given cultural representations precisely because the constructed subject is neither in reference to any earlier representation nor in reference to herself as model, but rather the function of the act of self-representation which, once we see the Film Stills as a series, stages her represented body as the nodal point of multiple identities. The subject appears to be wandering – to return once more to the resilient metaphor for hysteria, the uterus that has gotten unhooked and gives body to roaming feminine desire, to inconstant feminine fantasy. This heroine does not appear to be a firmly established character but the integrating knot of curious non-integrated details, ‘the sum of curious particularities’.15 That is to say, Sherman deconstructs the tradition of Western iconography, which equates Woman with the image. She discloses the performance of femininity as a fake in the gesture of the hysteric’s so-called dissimulation the

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hysteric woman who in her self-representations pretends to be another person, without ever fully identifying with this assumed other role. What Carla Schulz-Hoffmann writes about the heroine of the Film Stills  – namely that we are presented with a woman pretending to be someone else, but never quite getting fully into the role, so as never fully to expose either herself or the other – is equally applicable to the strategy of hysteria.16 Not only owing to the analogy that can be drawn between the hysteric’s and Sherman’s heroines’ dissimulation and the reduction of self-expression to pure surface phenomena. But rather, because the hysterical subject can only be represented as one oscillating between various positions; hesitating between expression and imagination; appearing even as it vanishes and at the very end withholding a final residue from any self-expression, even as the trace of a residue constitutively influences the self-representation. By virtue of this hysterical gesture, Sherman self-consciously demonstrates to what extent the reality of femininity is produced by the representational medium, how the represented subject exists as a knotting of signifiers of femininity, as the integration of arbitrarily assembled details from our cultural image repertoire without any material non-semiotic referent. As Rosalind Krauss argues, the portrayed feminine subject is imagined and embodied by virtue of the function of the signifiers, and as such her identity is purely a function of the mise-en-scène, of lighting, distance and camera angle.17 Thus, when Sherman repeatedly insists that it is futile to seek her true identity behind the woman performed in and by the image, that there is no depth to these photographs, that beneath the surface of the photographic image no intact, authentic self can be found, she is in fact emphasizing that her identity emerges only obliquely, as the conglomerate performance of her many masquerades and displacements of the self. Here, too, we can locate an analogy with the hysterical mode of selfreproduction. For like the hysteric, Sherman articulates herself by adopting other bodies and figures, by resorting to the histrionics of different self-fashionings and a belle indifference towards any one of these. After all, her works all remain untitled. Indeed when she speaks about her mode of working, the scenario of artistic creation she offers resonates with the language of Freud’s hysterics. ‘The level of energy brought to the otherwise faked emotions, as well as the staging of my photographs, leaves me drained’, she explains. ‘The only way I can keep objective towards the characters I’m portraying is to physically distance myself from the

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activity … I don’t see that I’m ever completely myself except when I’m alone. I see my life as a training ground because I’m acting all the time; acting certain ways to certain people, to get things done, what I want, to have people act towards me the way I want them to.’18 While Laura Mulvey argues that in the Film Stills, ‘each of the women is Sherman herself, simultaneously artist and model, transformed chameleon-like into a glossary of pose, gesture, and facial expressions’,19 Judith Williamson opposes such an essentialist interpretation. She suggests instead that  – because Sherman offers a lexicon of represented feminine identities – each image calls upon the viewer to construct the inextricability of femininity and the image, the enmeshment of femininity as a phantasy projection onto any single image and the depiction of a woman concretely given figure to by any single image. Sherman’s work is neither exclusively a witty parody of media images of femininity, a deconstruction of the supremacy of the simulacrum, nor merely a series of self-portraits in a search for identity; ‘the two are completely mixed up, as are the imagery and experience of femininity for all of us … femininity is trapped in the image – but the viewer is snared too’.20 Where the classic hysteric  – rather more disempowered by than in control of her strategy – performs femininity as a symptom without any clear lesion, Sherman self-consciously and self-controlled elicits the false search for a real, coherent, homogeneous identity. She performs a maladie par representation, rather than becoming its victim, as is the case of the hysteric, even as she also has recourse to the undecidable interchange between surface and essence. As Williamson puts it, Sherman’s photographs are to be understood as a ‘surface which suggests nothing but itself, and yet insofar as it suggests there is something behind it, prevents us from considering it as a surface.’21 By virtue of the fact that her photographs turn the viewer into an accomplice, in an act that constructs the represented woman as an image, the ideology inherent in this aesthetic act is disclosed. Clearly we should question any univocal allegorical reading of Sherman’s work, such as that offered by Arthur Danto, who reads the Film Stills as a representation of the essential Woman, eternally the same in the midst of all her guises: The Girl is an allegory for something deeper and darker, in the mythic unconscious of everyone, regardless of sex. For the Girl is

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the contemporary realization of the Fair Princess in the Far Tower, the red-clad child in the wolf-haunted woods, the witch-sought Innocent lost in trackless forest, Dorothy and Snow-White and The Littlest Revel in a universe of scary things. Each of the stills is about the Girl in Trouble, but in the aggregate they touch the myth we each carry out of childhood, of danger, love, and security that defines the human condition where the wild things are.22 By thus interpreting the represented woman as a cipher for universal characteristics of the masculine psyche, Danto has been taken in by Sherman’s hysterical performance because he thereby enacts precisely what she is trying to demythify. Above all, however, such an interpretation deflects the disturbance that emerges from Sherman’s deconstructive staging of stereotypes of femininity, by transforming this unsettling gesture into a stabilizing tropic reading. Such an allegorizing interpretation is blind to precisely the critical moment in Sherman’s work, namely the way in which she performs the disjunction between ideational notions of the self, self-representation and identity. Instead, I  would argue that works from the series Film Stills, Rear-Screen Projections, Centerfolds, and Fashion produce an effect of uncanny and irritating recognition that elicits a gesture of counterdirection. They seem to call for an interpretative oscillation between the desire to integrate the free-floating signifiers into a narrative that would once again mitigate the sense of disturbance evoked by the images precisely by having recourse to metaphors of danger, desire or fantasizing. At the same time, however, they force upon the viewer recognition that the engendered composite is inhabited by an internal dissolution, by the traumatic psychic material as well as the real body as the ground and vanishing point of any representation and its interpretation. These photographs perform the fact that to be subject to representation means neither an image-produced falsification of the represented self (signifier without signified) nor an identity between image and self (transparency between signifier and signified) but rather the production of a knotted subject that in one and the same gesture is conscious of the fact that it is represented as it is aware of the dissolution inherent in any image representing it; a hysterical, postmodern subject which articulates itself precisely in the interface between monstrous, formless materiality beneath the surface of the

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image and an outward appearance of perfection, the coherence of any aesthetic object. This counter-directional gesture, this oscillation between integration and dissolution, sublimation and desublimation of aesthetic coherence, is no longer merely the privileged subject, but rather transforms into the privileged strategy itself in the later photographs, the Disasters, Fairy Tales and Sex Pictures. While the protagonists in the Film Stills, Rear-Screen Projections, Centerfolds and Fashions depict, in a variety of ways, the hysterical body performing a maladie par representation, this hysterical body nevertheless remained intact within the frame of the representation. The displacement and dissolution of the subject here took place, as Rosalind Krauss argues, primarily by virtue of the photographic medium  – the lighting, the depth of field, the grain, and the cadrage. In the later works, by contrast, the subject fades almost completely from the field of vision, disfigured into monstrous body shapes or cut up into body fragments. It is reduced to a gaze without any reference point (#167 and #175), or appears only by virtue of the objects that metonymically refer to the absent subject (#168 and #170). In these representations, the hysterical body appears wounded, fractured, dissolving. It is often absent, replaced by or supplemented with prostheses. In Mulvey’s words, we are shown ‘a monstrous otherness behind the cosmetic facade’.23 At the same time, these photographs make manifest what had been implicit in Sherman’s earlier demythification of cultural images of femininity; the conflation between the depiction of the disintegrating feminine body and a disintegration of the cohesive formal organization of the photographic image. These photographs self-reflexively stage phantasy scenes of bodily fragmentation as an aesthetic principle, and as such they form the horrific inversion of the earlier scenes, in which, analogous to the hysterical self-performance, an illness by representation was staged. For what is now being performed is the malady aroused by a traumatic knowledge of one’s own mutability, transformation and decay. The represented monstrosity inundates the aesthetic coherence of the image and turns idealized perfection inside out. Both the represented body, as well as the strategy of representation seem to be caught up in a movement of desublimation, of dissolving, of disseminating. In so doing, these photographs elicit a different kind of hysterization in the viewer, now no longer in relation to assimilated memory traces without

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origins, but rather in relation to the viewer’s own anxieties about fragmentation and dying. Thus, two modalities of a language of hysteria emerge in Cindy Sherman’s work. On the one hand, her photographs stage the hysteric’s proclivity to extravagant fantasy, day-dreaming, self-preoccupation, as the thematic subject of the Film Stills and Centerfolds. Here we, as viewers, are placed outside the scene, permitted to watch the self-contained, seductive, dreaming, psychically and physically vagabonding heroine, as she appears to be tormented by anxiety, engrossed in her desires, consumed by her anticipations (#2, #6, #52, #48, #85, #93). We gaze at her from outside, as she is caught in the act of fantasizing something, the content of which, however, in the fashion of the true narcissist, she keeps to herself. What is staged here is the gesture of dreaming, while we are forced to use our interpretation to come up with the content of these fantasies. In the Disasters, Fairy Tales and Sex Pictures, this relationship is reversed. Owing to the fact that the subject of the image with whom we have been identifying has begun to fade, we ourselves partake of the scene of fantasy and are no longer excluded from its content. We do not see the dreamer; rather, we have entered into the realm of her fantasy space. We are now presented with the intimate drama at which we were only able to guess in the earlier photographs. We are directly drawn into the intimate spectacle, the other self of the imagination. We could say that we are now asked to look into the evil magician’s cauldron, and, much like the sly sister in ‘Fitcher’s Bird’, we are not spared the horrific sight it contains the dismemberment of the body, the monstrous dissolution of the self, the fantastic composites that create hybrid creatures. Sherman repeatedly displays the hysteric’s oscillation between fixed identity positions. According to psychoanalytic theory, the hysteric defines herself in relation to a figure of paternal authority by constantly renegotiating her relationship to this other. In dialogue with the representative of paternal alterity, she constantly re-poses the question ‘what am I – in relation to my gender and in relation to the contingency of my existence?’ Sherman’s work performs a similar strategy of selfinterrogation as a means of self-fashioning, though here it is quite specifically the spectator, who serves as representative of the patriarchal code. For the photographs are constructed in such a way as to implicitly draw the viewer into the exchange, indeed this implied viewer serves as the other to whom the staged interrogation of identity is addressed. In

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the Centerfolds and the Color Tests, we find the classic hysteric indecision ‘am I  feminine or masculine?’ (#103 and #112); in the Film Stills, the Rear-Screen Projections and Fashions, the question ‘do I  exist or am I the mere repetition of an image?’ (#56); in the Disasters and Fairy Tales, the questions ‘am I human or animal, human or fantasy creature?’ (#140 and #146), ‘do I exist as an animate body or do I negate my existence through inanimation?’ (#91 and #173), ‘am I  human or model, doll, prosthesis?’ (#264). Norman Bryson has poignantly described the transition within Cindy Sherman’s work as that from the conventional postmodern notion that ‘all is representation’ to a reformulation that privileges ‘the body as horror’; from a notion that the simulacrum is the only reality we have to the breakdown of the simulacrum into a body of disaster.24 It is in the counter-directional gesture so typical of the language of hysteria, namely the gesture of hesitating between two diametrically opposed registers – that of pure representation and that of horror – that I want to locate the common denominator of all Cindy Sherman’s work. In her early series, the heroine composed of citations from invented film stills, advertising and pornographic images functions as a serial display of stereotypes of femininity perpetrated by the image repertoire of Western culture. Sherman here not only stages a vulnerable, precarious, hesitant, vagabonding and seductive feminine protagonist. Rather, the performance itself aims at highlighting the exclusively semiotic quality of this photographic subject. In her later work, Sherman turns surface beauty inside out to reveal human mutability, the decomposed, vulnerable body and the monstrosity that is inherent to any aesthetically coherent image, its ground and vanishing point, meant to remain occluded by the perfection of sublimation. Now, her performance aims precisely at making manifest what is excluded from and foreclosed by the representation, the alterity that crosses cultural constructions of femininity with the real. I want to call this aesthetic strategy the language of hysteria because it doubles the dissolution of the represented subject by offering a threat to the coherence of representation itself. However, what is privileged is neither the sublimation performed by representation (perfection as the essence of the code), nor a desublimating disturbance of the image (the monstrous situated outside the code). Rather, we have an oscillation between the two. Cindy Sherman traces two modalities of feminine selfrepresentation within the discursive formulations of Western cultural

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practices, thereby transforming representation into performance. On the one hand, there is the simulacrum heroine who functions as a knot of traditional images of femininity; Woman as a fetish, as a seemingly integrated body symptom, uncannily screening the truth of human vulnerability and contingency. On the other hand, there is the feminine body as representative for denavelling and mutability, for those moments of bodily castration that are irrevocably inscribed into all human existence beyond gender. The disgusting fragments of the body, the abject body fluids stand in for that real which can never be entirely captured within the frame of aesthetic coherence. As the logical conclusion of her trajectory into the interiority of the body and into scenes of the body’s woundings, Sherman in Specimens and Sex Pictures takes leave of the human body completely, only to replace it with dolls and anatomical figures. In so doing, she once more seems to deconstruct certain tacit presuppositions about gender and the body that continue to be so dear to our culture. For aren’t dolls the artificial bodies given to girls so that, by playing with them, they might learn the power of feminine masquerade? And aren’t anatomical figures the plastic reconstructions, given to the medical students so that, by probing into them, they might explore the secrets of the human body that lie beneath the skin? Cindy Sherman’s photographs, all labelled ‘Untitled’, urge us to endow them with a title, to bind them into narratives. But like the case histories of the hysterics, so disconcerting and at the same time so heuristically stimulating to the analyst Freud, to whom they were addressed, precisely because he was incapable of finding any solution to them, this series, too, is interminable. Of the Film Stills, Sherman says:  ‘What I  was trying to do was to make people make up stories about the character so they could imagine a whole film, perhaps based around that character.’ By forcing us, however, to invent narratives for her images, she hystericizes us. Like her, we are haunted by representations that remind us of familiar images, even as they always miss their mark. Like her, we are possessed by memory traces that have no clear origin. Her performance of femininity, of the monstrous, and ultimately of the mechanical body, compels us to see this staging as a performance. In one and the same gesture, she urges us to focus both on the process of figuration and on the traumatic material that is screened out by any aesthetic figuration, or, if it can’t be contained, that emerges from it in its excessive, monstrous shape. If the

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starting point of her self-displacements was her sense of dislocation and alienation in her home, its end point is the fact that her photographs have the same effect on us. We, too, begin to feel uncannily dislocated in our own image repertoire, in the fantasy scenes transmitted to us by the media, and the protective fantasies we use to give coherent meaning to our contingent existence. If in her self-portraits, which are not self-portraits, Sherman articulates her discontent with culture, her performance of this dissatisfaction consists precisely in making this discomfort disturbingly our own. In the television interview with Mark Stokes, Cindy Sherman describes how she at first dismissed the suggestion – made to her by a doctoral student – that her entire work was one long confrontation with death, but upon reflection recognized that her interest in horror films, in artificial body parts as well as in fairy tales could indeed be understood in this way since these representations allow her to prepare herself for the potential incursion of violence and death. ‘I don’t know why, I think of death perhaps every day, but maybe it’s living in Manhattan, and reading the paper, and thinking how it can happen at any moment … there are so many variables’, she explains. I think what’s fascinating is that you are never prepared for it. And I’m not exactly afraid to die, once you’re dead, what is there to be afraid of ? It’s just the unknown, and I think that is what’s triggered in the films that I like, and somehow, I guess, I try to come to terms with it in my work, somehow. All of Cindy Sherman’s work, we could say, revolves around staging this hesitation, this ‘somehow’. It performatively transforms her sense of being haunted by nightmares, memory traces and inherited representations into renditions of a coherent photographic subject. Yet at every turn she makes sure that one never loses sight of the underlying trauma.

13 EVA HESSE’S SPECTRAL BRIDE AND HER UNCANNY DOUBLE

A staple of gothic imagination, spectres are phantoms that draw attention to the uncanniness inhabiting visual perception. Their appearance destabilizes the security of knowing that what we are seeing is actually there. In the face of a spectral apparition we are uncertain what we are looking at. The figure we see undoubtedly exists, but as what? Is it a messenger from the dead or a harbinger of death still to come? Is it the materialization of someone else’s spirit or the figment of our own imagination? Does it give body to a piece of knowledge of which we are already in possession, but owing to repression to which we have no access? Or is it a prophetic manifestation of foreign knowledge? After all, spectres are also invoked to give voice to a haunting possibility. What paintings, in turn, share with spectres is that they, too, give existence on canvas to an inner vision of the artist, making present in lines, shapes and colours what is in fact absent in body. One might thus surmise: Spectral apparitions on canvas sustain a self-reflexive gesture on the part of the artist. They function like a mise en abyme, an image within the image, reflecting on what it means to appear in paint. When, however, the haunting rendered visible involves a bride and her uncanny double, a very particular engagement with the fascinating danger of creation, with its play between absence and presence, flesh and paint, seems to be at stake, especially if the artist is a woman?

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Mary Shelley is perhaps the gothic writer who comes to mind most readily when we add gender to a discussion of a spectral aesthetics. It is, therefore, worth recalling how she envisions the first encounter between her scientist Victor Frankenstein and the monster he has created by animating body parts gathered together from graveyards and charnel houses. Unable to endure the sight of the grotesquely misshapen being lying in his laboratory, Dr. Frankenstein flees to his bedroom, seeking forgetfulness in sleep. Yet the dream that ultimately comes to him only renders visible all he is seeking to shield from his sight. The vision that unfolds before his inner eye offers him a scenic interpretation of the impressions that his act of creation has left on his fragile psyche. At first, he sees his bride Elizabeth, walking in good health in the streets of Ingolstadt, and  – both delighted and surprised  – he embraces her. ‘But as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death,’ Frankenstein notes, ‘her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a shroud enveloped her form, and I  saw the grave-worms crawling in the folds of the flannel.’1 Like the sight of the monster he has created, the vision of the bride transforming into the maternal corpse is one Frankenstein cannot endure. With the same horror that drove him from his laboratory, he wakes from his sleep. Mary Shelley thus uses this nightmare scenario to implicitly draw a connection between a dream representation, welding into a condensed image the living bride, the dead mother and a scientist’s fantasy of appropriating the maternal function. Frankenstein’s awakening then cements this analogy. By the dim light of the moon, Shelley’s creator finds himself facing what he simply cannot not see. He finds the miserable monster whom he had created holding up the curtain of his bed, with its yellow watery eyes fixed upon him. Frankenstein’s uncanny dream vision offers a useful point of departure for a discussion of the untitled ‘spectral paintings’ Eva Hesse produced in 1960, not least of all because in one in particular she seems to tap into Mary Shelley’s gothic conflation of a bride and a resurrected feminine corpse, even while sharing with the romantic author an autobiographic touch. If the letters on the page of the novel Frankenstein render an internal dream vision legible, recoding Mary Shelley’s own anxiety of authorship, Eva Hesse’s canvas emerges as the screen where affects and fantasies troubling her psychic reality can come to be embodied. In a diary entry from the beginning of 1960, she notes, ‘I have so much

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stored inside me recently, I need to paint … I am overflowing also with an energy of kind needed in investigating ideas, and things I think about.’ By painting herself out, as she calls it, Hesse hoped to confront the sense of abandonment and insecurity, ‘the scars of my early beginnings’ that continued to haunt her throughout her life. At the same time, the interface between her psychic reality and painting also emerges as her drive for survival because it allows her to interrogate obsessions she cannot help but invoke: ‘Only painting can now see me through and I must see it through. It is totally interdependent with my entire being’ she notes on 27 December. ‘It affords the problems which I  can think through, form ideas which I can work with and arrive at a statement. Within its scope, I can develop strength and conviction.’2 Thus, in contrast to Mary Shelley’s scientist who wishes to avert his gaze not only from his monstrous creation but also the psychic knowledge of human vulnerability it is an embodiment of, Eva Hesse has recourse to a gothic image repertoire out of her conviction that we cannot afford not to pay attention to the spectres that haunt us. Apodictically put, if Eva Hesse in 1960 conceives of her paintings as interdependent with her being, this is precisely because the canvas allows her to externalize psychic material that insists on being addressed. More than simply referencing her emotional anguish, however, the phantoms that emerge on the canvasses of these ‘spectres paintings’ also attest to her resilience in precisely not averting her gaze from psychic monstrosities. Turning to her rendition of the bride and her uncanny double (13.1), we might thus ask how Eva Hesse refigures what in Shelley’s novel is clearly a nightmare vision pertaining to a scientist who appropriates the maternal function for artificial creation. Do we find threatening anxieties or optimistic desires embodied in this spectral scene? Should we see the encounter between these two figures as a premonition or as a return to past wounding? Does the enactment afford closure or does it attest to a perpetual haunting? Indeed, is the one stable aspect of this aesthetic refiguration its semantic overdetermination? Furthermore, in contrast to Mary Shelley’s unequivocal condemnation of her scientist who refuses to assume responsibility for his creation, Eva Hesse’s spectral scene raises the question whether the artist is ironically distancing herself from the bride and her spectre or whether she uses this double portrait as a reflection on her own feminine artistic power. If so, given that Hesse conceives of her painting

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Eva Hesse, No title, 1960, oil on canvas, 125.7 × 125.7 × 3.7 cm, Ursula Hauser Collection, Switzerland. Copyright: The Estate of Eva Hesse. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.

as precisely the creative act that sustains her being, does she also align creativity with transgression? The painting itself places two figurations of the feminine next to each other, visually sustaining a tension between them. Taking up two thirds of the canvas is a bride, poised on a chair, her left hand holding her colourful wedding bouquet. With the exception of two large breasts, drawn in bold white strokes, her body and face show no distinct features. She appears simply as a contour, taking shape in shades of white, purple and grey. Her yellow tinged veil sits stiffly above her head, picking up the colour of some of the flowers in her right hand as well as the backdrop behind her. While the bouquet she is holding is so densely painted that its colours are opaque, the bride’s body appears almost transparent. Although the grey arms and face stand out against the background, the rest of her figure seems almost to bleed into it. In the lower right corner, her wedding dress has a long tear, through which a strip of brownish

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yellow emerges unfiltered from behind her.3 Indeed, the longer one looks at the bride, the less clear it becomes whether she is in the process of emerging on the surface of the canvas or disappearing into it, given that at several points the background seems to have penetrated into the whiteness of her dress. The left third of the painting is occupied by her monstrous spectre. She is standing with her back to the bride, facing us, while her body posture suggests that she is about to depart from our field of vision. Where the anonymous face of the bride is drawn in broad vertical brush strokes of grey and white, the veiled skull of the spectre is endowed with distinct facial features. Her eyes seem to be turned downward as though she were consciously averting our gaze, yet at the same time aware that she was drawing our attention. In contrast to the almost transparent shape of the bride, the spectre is, furthermore, clad in an opaque grey cloth, tinged with tones of green and brown. Her dress also has a slit at the bottom, although the strip of yellowish brown we see through this opening is far slimmer than that the bride’s. In the case of the spectre, there can be no question about her emerging from the canvas. Though the shape of her body is blurred, the movement it indicates is one of protrusion. She has clearly emerged on the surface of the canvas to indelibly leave her mark. To visually underline this act of appearance, Eva Hesse has used dripping paint in a far more pronounced way in her rendition of the brides’ phantom. As though she were shaking excess paint off her body, these drippings cover the spectre’s brow as well as the left arm she holds in front of her upper body. Anticipation is written into this scene in more than one sense. The posture of the bride, hovering on her chair as though she were about to get up, could be read as an indication that she is about to pass into a new state of being, namely that of wife and mother. Given that the spectre, in turn, seems to already be on the move – as though prompting the woman behind her to get up from her chair – one might read this double portrait as a portentous sign that the bride’s passage into her new condition is to be accompanied by a spectral haunting. Yet given the contrast between the bride’s transparent figure – so indistinct from the empty grey space surrounding her – and the spectre’s opaque figure – so distinctly emerging in front of this shared background  – their relation to each other seems ambivalent at best. Who, one must ask, is the supplement, who the host? Is the spectre haunting the bride, a dark companion on her passage

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into marriage? Or is the bride haunting the spectre, clinging to her as a light shadow while the latter resiliently seeks to move beyond the frame of the image? Is the spectre to be thought of as a dark kernel that the bride needs to jettison before she can get up from her chair – be this her insecurities about her self or her resistance against being reduced to one identity, that of the married woman? Or is the bride about to envelope the spectre, about to cover her monstrosity with her whiteness, so as to shield from view all aspects that do not fit the expectation of feminine domesticity? Is the bride hovering over her spectre or falling behind? Indeed, we cannot tell for certain whether the bride and her spectre are about to separate or merge completely, as we cannot tell who is haunting whom. All we can tell is that the appearance of the bride and her spectral apparition on the canvas are mutually implicated. Poignant about the juxtaposition Eva Hesse’s painting unfolds is, thus, above all the indeterminacy it evokes. In this, she follows Sigmund Freud’s definition of the uncanny as that moment in fantasy work when boundaries come to be blurred and ‘the subject identifies himself with someone else, so is in doubt as to which his self is, or substitutes the extraneous self for his own. In other words, there is a doubling, dividing and interchanging of the self.’4 One of the key tropes in our cultural image repertoire for such uncanny doubling involves an uncertainty whether someone is animate or inanimate, bringing back into focus the gothic conjunction of bride and corpse. After all, the fact that Hesse’s faceless bride shares the canvas with a hooded spectre whose skull by contrast shows fairly distinct facial features also recalls the curious anecdote involving Gustave Courbet’s unfinished painting, La Toilette de la Mariée (13.2). In 1977, using an x-ray photograph as evidence, the art historian Helen Toussaint argued that not the dressing of a bride but rather the preparation of a corpse for her wake was in fact the subject of the painting. The central figure, initially a life-less nude, had been painted over, given not only the dress of a bride but also a change in face. The head was raised slightly to make it appear more animate and a disconcerting smile drawn across it. Upon closer inspection, the redressed canvass in fact proves to be far uncannier than the x-ray image of its original. While the initial nude figure is serenely composed in death, her resurrected spectre gives the impression of a grotesquely animated doll. The proximity, or indeed interchangeability, between bride and dead girl is actually cemented by virtue of this curious touching up of what

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Gustave Courbet, La Toilette de la Mariée (Preparation of the Dead Girl), c.1850–5, oil on canvas, 77 × 99 in, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA. Copyright: Bildarchiv Foto Marburg.

was an unfinished painting. In the palimpsest, the nude dead body shines through the bride being dressed for her wedding, bringing death as the ground and vanishing point of the bride’s portrait back into focus. If, on the diegetic level, the bridal gown reanimates a dead girl, on the extradiegetic level the paint makes present what is irrevocably absent from the canvas, namely the living flesh of the model. If, furthermore, the initial layer of paint is meant as a protective veil, shielding us from the sight of a nude corpse, the imperfection of the cover-up implicitly reveals what it conceals. We see double, sensing the spectre of mortality inhabiting the bride, who is only seemingly cleansed of all visual signs of death. Let us also recall that according to Freud, the double is both an assurance of immortality and an uncanny harbinger of death. Indeed, the uncanny effect of the added layer of paint is such that while the retouched face looks like a doll’s mask, the face of the dead nude, which

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can be seen only on the x-ray, bears the distinct facial traits of the model who sat for Courbet. The dressed bride thus emerges as the spectre of the dead girl, unfolding a resilient afterlife of death even as she is meant to cover it up. Not only can no clear boundary be drawn between the animate and the inanimate, since both are the effects of paint. Rather, we are also called upon to oscillate between denying the presence of death on the canvass and acknowledging it  – even while drawing our attention to the fact that by privileging one we can not deny knowledge of the other. Returning to Eva Hesse’s spectral painting with Gustave Courbet’s redressed canvass in mind, a further aspect of her refiguration of a gothic image topos comes into focus. Though she, too, enacts the proximity between bride and corpse, we have no cover-up. Rather than death shining through the superimposed figure, we see both simultaneously. The visual tension of her scene of haunting does not feed off an oblique gaze, oscillating between the surface and what lies beneath. Rather, it banks on the conjunction between two veiled figures, one hooded, one faceless; each the spectre of the other. Furthermore, bearing in mind also that Eva Hesse conceived of her painting explicitly as helping her form ideas about the scars of her early beginnings in order to arrive at a statement about her deep-rooted insecurity, it is worth asking once more: Why, in this double portrait, do we have such a pronounced difference in texture? Why is the spectre endowed both with dense, opaque colours and distinct facial traits while the bride is a semi-transparent faceless schema? Is this to indicate that the bride functions as a surface for a plethora of projections, while the spectre embodies all the psychic baggage making up a singular individual, and as such resists any simple reduction to one identity? It is, of course, tempting to colour in the white apparition with the old associations of Eva Hesse’s past retained not only on her art during her life time but also, owing to her untimely death, on any subsequent interpretation of her work. The bride and her spectre can be read as a way of thinking through her mother’s depression and suicide. In such a reading, it would reflect the double mental portrait Eva Hesse had preserved of her mother’s extraordinary beauty coupled with her self-destructive psychic anguish. The spectre could, however, equally be seen in reference to Eva Hesse’s psychic insecurity given the past trauma of her family’s flight from Nazi Germany in 1938. In

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this case, the spectre might be seen as a cypher for her own survival under the shadow of knowing about all the life that had irrevocably been destroyed by this historical catastrophe. Equally, the juxtaposition of a faceless bride with her skeletal double could be read as a premonition about her own marriage to Tom Doyle, roughly a year later, which would indeed lead to a devastating separation in 1965. Or one could see in this doubling a portrait of the young female artist of post-war America in more general terms, for whom the domesticity connected with the bride was an imprisonment she needed to abandon. The bride, after all, is semi-transparent, as though there were nothing there to resist the stereotypical role she is asked to assume as her identity. In this reading, the bridal gown might fruitfully serve as an anonymous uniform of conformity haunted by the female artist, the densely coloured spectre that troubles any conventional conception of femininity. While any one of these readings must ultimately remain a speculation, they unfold Eva Hesse’s ability to transform psychic reality into a visual enactment revolving around the two aspects contained in the art of resurrecting obsessions as spectres. The act of remembering, after all, means being possessed by, but also taking possession of, our past. More importantly, to juxtapose two figurations of the feminine – the bride and her skeletal phantom – means questioning the idea that the psychic security of a single identity position can be attained. As Griselda Pollock notes, the question Eva Hesse asked of who she was is ‘of immense prescience and perpetual necessity’ because it means ‘resisting culture’s attempts to confine the subject to limited and partial categories’.5 Psychoanalytically speaking, the uncanny double destabilizes fixed categories. Instead, it insists that the over-determined relation between an anticipation of a new state and a recollection of the fatality inhabiting the very fabric of life must be thought as two sides of the same coin. Subjective particularity, Eva Hesse seems to argue in her spectral paintings, means being at least double, suspended between two figurations of the feminine that haunt each other. Regardless, then, of how we specifically interpret the relation between the two figures, the psychic reality Eva Hesse thinks through on canvas, the statement about herself she comes up with, insists on an equation of the bride and her spectral double. This brings us back one last time to Freud’s claim that moments of the uncanny defy distinct boundaries not least of all because the

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double hovers between articulating a warning of death and a promise of immortality. Though Eva Hesse was known for insisting on the complete absurdity of life, what her spectral paintings enact is the complexity of thinking about oneself as the survivor of catastrophe. Regardless whether we want to locate mortality in the bride vanishing into the white of the canvas, or the densely dark spectre carrying associations of the dead back into the present, death explicitly hovers on the edges of the painting. At the same time, because any spectral apparition attests to an act of resurrection, a return from the dead, survival is indelibly inscribed into the fabric of the painting as well, even if only by virtue of its ghostliness it attests to its own fragility. Possessed by past catastrophes, Eva Hesse uses her painting to take possession of these obsessions, turning the dream visions that haunt her into a monstrous creation. On 16 November 1960, she notes in her diary: ‘I must be totally engrossed in my own work, it is only thing that is permanent, matures and is lasting.’6 Perhaps it matters less whether we see the spectre as ridding herself of the bride or the bride as transcending the spectre. Compelling is that they both attest to the survival of two counter-directional psychic attitudes:  on the one hand the opaque spectre bringing past and present affects to bear on any aesthetic refiguration of psychic reality, on the other the semi-transparent bride moving into an abstract whiteness beyond all figuration. The scene Eva Hesse unfolds sustains the tension between the two. It neither celebrates a complete sublation of all anxieties and premonitions nor does it succumb to an unconditional enjoyment of personal and collective obsessions with catastrophe. Rather, the statement about her self at which Eva Hesse arrives involves the way obsessions can be contained and controlled by aesthetic figuration – both as a warning and a vision.

14 WOUNDS OF WONDER Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin, Nabuyoshi Araki

As Socrates explains to Theaetetus, ‘This sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher. Philosophy indeed has no other origin, and he was a good genealogist who made Iris the daughter of Thaumas’ (Plato).1 However, the name of this son of Neptune and Terra, ‘wonder’ (Thaumas), was not only readily connected to the astonishing natural phenomenon of the rainbow (Iris).2 His daughter Iris, who according to this ancient saga thus signifies the embodiment of what sets the philosopher’s enquiry into motion, was also seen as a helper and messenger of the gods and most particularly of Juno. Amongst her many duties, she was responsible for cutting the thread that detained the soul in the body of a deceased person, and as such she came not only to convey the message of human mortality, but also to assist in the release from the constraints of terrestrial existence. It was in this function – as the intermediary between the omnipotent maternal deity and individual mortals – that she also came to be associated with the rainbow, which was thought to mark the trajectory of her flight. Given that her father had endowed her with the trait of the wondrous, while her mother, the oceanide Electra, had bestowed the elements of light and water on her, Iris was usually represented as a winged creature whose gown would radiate with all the variegated, brilliant and lustrous colours of the rainbow. However, within the mythopoesis of antiquity, when earth and water come together, they not only

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give birth to an iridescent daughter whose rainbow signifies a place that is nowhere – even while it serves as a phantasmagorical materialization of a utopic site where phantasies can be given shape without impunity and restriction, where our hopes for plenitude and protection will be unconditionally fulfilled. Like this wondrous creature, whose message from the gods bespeaks the existence of a lustrous world beyond that of mortal constraints – though doing so as a phantasmatic effect – the harpies were equally fathered by Thaumas. They, too, were winged creatures, but also – unlike their iridescent sister – monstrous hybrids that had the faces of women and the bodies of vultures, with their feet and hands armed with sharp claws. They, too, were messengers sent by Juno, but their task – far from bedazzling mortals with an astonishing appearance within the realm of natural phenomena – was to spoil and defile whatever they touched with their filthy bodies.3 As figures of the abject, emitting an infectious smell, they were sent to plunder those wretched mortals who had incurred the maternal deity’s wrath, to spoil their foods and possessions as well as to predict calamities. Whenever, then, we speak of wonder’s progenies  – of effects or appearances that are so rare or so extraordinary as to amaze and astonish us  – the iridescent and the abject apparently come to be strangely enmeshed. Thus, if the marriage between earth and water produces a brilliant mirage, the message this chimeric figuration proclaims inevitably points to the contingency of our being and to our vulnerability before the law of life and death, regardless whether the portentous embodiment is a beautiful woman, trailing behind her a lustrously colourful arc, or a monstrous hybrid, leaving behind a horrific stench. And it is precisely in the way that their photographs perform such a chatoyant figure, with the brilliantly phantasmatic and the horrifically monstrous emerging as mutually dependent, inextricably linked and incessantly transforming into each other, that the works of Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin and Nobuyoshi Araki can so fruitfully be linked together. For in respect to both subject matter and style, their photographic work offers us images of wonderful woundings, of astonishing appearances that simultaneously fascinate and repel us. Their mutually shared desire to record the flaws, frailties and abnormalities – indeed the fragility of human existence – leads each to explore and commemorate precisely the cracks and the frayed margins of our social and cultural norms. As a result, they have brought forth images that claim to represent life as it really is, beyond the protective

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fictions (Schutzdichtung) of integrity, infallibility and omnipotence we chose to live by so as to shield us from any traumatic knowledge of our own implenitude. Of course, the medium of photography is particularly adept at endowing what is astonishing and phantasmatic with an aura of verisimilitude, especially when the gesture of documentation seems to overshadow that of the artist’s personal vision. However, even while the works of these three photographers invite us to look directly at a person or an event that in daily life we would either have no access to or would not chose to contemplate at any length, they simultaneously point to their own constructedness, to their setting and their framing. Apodictically put, these photographs – calling upon us not to avert our gaze from the flaws of human existence  – also insist that we do not overlook the flaw of the photographic image that offers such a direct view. In other words, the same gesture that offers an apparently just representation of human vulnerability insists on also capturing the contingency of its own lighting, cadrage and focus. Furthermore, even while the subject matter these three photographers share are the freaks, hybrids and pariahs of culture, excluded from what is considered to be the social norm, it is precisely these inhabitants of sites of transgression or marginality who emerge as human subjects truly committed to their phantasies  – either by choice or by destiny materializing at their bodies the wondrous imaginary scenarios that make up the kernel of their existence because they allow them to organize their enjoyment, their anxieties and their behaviour. And if it initially appears as though in one image the enchanting beauty of Iris seems to dominate while the other seems to be saturated with the stench of the harpies, at closer scrutiny we are ultimately drawn by the power of these images precisely because brilliancy and sordidness keep ricocheting back into each other. Finally, in the midst of this wondrous depiction of human vulnerability meant to document life in all its real imperfection but also its real imaginative power, the representation of each singular situation – as true to life as it purports to be – always also carries the signature of the photographer. As they capture the wonder contained in the wounded and the wounding members of society, each of these three photographers transforms the individual incident – which in its unique specificity and its alterity resists any full appropriation by a spectator – into an accessible metaphor and a legible narrative. It is thus the individual vision of each of the three artists  – precisely as it turns amazing, fascinating and repelling scenes

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into representations of the human condition – that these photographs ultimately also document. As Diane Arbus remarked, ‘A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.’4 Born into a New York Jewish family of wealth, power and protection, she was fascinated by the perverse, the alienated, the extreme; by those socially marginalized, excluded and felt to be superfluous; by freaks and eccentrics who were fully committed to living their eccentricities. Excited by anything out of place, she came to explore those other worlds that exist alongside everyday normality – the stages of freak shows and drag balls, the dressing rooms of seedy bars and night clubs, nudist camps, asylums for the mentally retarded, urban parks and ghettos, but above all private interiors of all kinds. Arbus was convinced that by going to places she had never been before and photographing her subjects in these other sites, she would be able to record a part of the mysterious and extraordinary knowledge they had come to embody for her. Attracted by the peculiarity of each individual human being, by what makes the other look strange, by the flaws that mark each individual as being unique, yet at the same time seeking to recognize in the stories her subjects would tell her about themselves during the photo sessions something common she could also identify with, Diane Arbus was, however, always aware of a duplicity subtending her photographic project. As she explained in the introductory text to the monograph of her work, her photographs were meant to document precisely the gap between intention and effect.5 For what initially attracted Diane Arbus to any given subject was on the one hand the disjunction between the way people fashion themselves – guided by notions of how they want to impress others – and, on the other hand, the way they actually appear to someone who looks at them from the outside, a stranger to their private theatre of the imagination. Ironically, the notion that to a certain degree everyone is inevitably foreign to her- or himself, that the image one harbours of oneself is never all there is to one’s truth, becomes most convincing when intimate phantasies are externally embodied, when one stages oneself in a public space or poses for a stranger one has admitted into the intimacy of one’s living quarters. For as two ways of seeing collide – the self-image with which a particular person presents her- or himself and the objective gaze of the person to whom this self-fashioning is addressed – an uncanny double body emerges: a phantasmatic, iridescent self duplicates the real

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corporeal body with all its flaws. This duplicity is, of course, most obvious in photographs where Arbus documents people who have explicitly chosen to transform their bodies into sites where phantasy scenarios can be materialized – the pariahs Hezekiah Trambles (The Jungle Creep, NYC, 1960), Max Madwell Landar (Uncle Sam, NYC, 1971) or William Mack (Sage of the Wilderness, 1962), as well as the many transvestites and club singers she chose to portray. Yet the fact that, as Arbus claimed, ‘if you scrutinize reality closely enough, in some way you really, really get to it, it becomes fantastic’6 is a conviction that sustains even those images of people who are posing in what we would consider to be normal scenes – eating hot dogs in the park (A Young Man and His Girlfriend with Hot Dogs in the Park, NYC, 1971), parading their bikinis on the beach (Two Girls in Matching Bathing Suits, Coney Island, NY, 1967), sitting next to a toy poodle in their living room (Lady Bartender at Home with a Souvenir Dog, New Orleans L.A., 1964). Thus, on the one hand, Diane Arbus’s photographs seek to document those who have the courage to turn their dreams into reality and – by going further than we do in their commitment to their peculiarities and their transgressions – showing us what is possible. For her people who self-consciously present themselves as costumed or masked subjects function not only as living metaphors in the sense that they show us how much our social identities are inevitably tied up with masquerades of the self. Rather, they also appear as bearers of a clandestine message, calling upon us to decipher them. Yet even while the reverential awe she felt in the presence of freaks (which she tried to capture in her photographs) was supported by her sense that they had access to a clandestine knowledge we lack, Arbus always also insisted that something about their wondrous appearance resists full legibility. These living metaphors, putting on masks in order to draw our attention to what they have to tell (and concomitantly any representation commemorating their act), inevitably preserve a part of the very secret they are meant to proclaim. On the other hand, while her photographs seek to duplicate the awe and fascination that subjects of repelling, peculiar or terrifying appearance came to inspire in her, they also aim at making the familiar uncanny so as to educate us in recognizing that what we think is normal, secure and infallible actually contains cracks. Highlighting those other facets of reality that contradict any sense of coherence and plenitude, she forces us to see the trace of the harpies in the very midst of everyday normality. As Susan Sontag notes, ‘The photographs of deviates and real

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freaks do not accent their pain but, rather, their detachment and autonomy … Pain is more legible in the portraits of the normals.’7 Indeed, the universalizing eye of Diane Arbus, seeking to privilege the chatoyancy between the horrific and the wonderful above all other social categories, renders the difference between the deviant, the freak, the insane, the poor and representatives of middle-class normality insignificant. As Sontag adds, ‘For Arbus, both freaks and Middle America were equally exotic.’8 Ultimately, all of Arbus’s photographs aim at drawing us into an incessantly spinning vortex where the foreign becomes familiar and the familiar becomes foreign. At the same time, duplicity is also written into her position as photographer, for even while her images aim at identifying with the other’s story, recognizing something familiar in what is strange and fantastic, this effort only emphasizes the very gap it also seeks to bridge. As Arbus insists, ‘it’s impossible to get out of your skin into somebody else’s. And that’s what all this is a little bit about. That somebody else’s tragedy is not the same as your own.’9 Thus, although she seeks to represent a proximity to another’s intimate knowledge, distance is self-consciously preserved on her part as well. One could call this gesture voyeuristic in so far as it seemingly renders the other as an exotic creature. However, given that these photographs imply a scene of complicity between Arbus and her subjects, I suggest instead that this distance be understood as a gesture of empathy, whose aim is to resist a full appropriation of the other that would be tantamount to obliterating the difference between the photographer and the subject she chooses to represent. At the same time, of course, precisely because distance is maintained, the shame and awe Arbus felt when faced with the flaws embodied by another human being inevitably came to produce photographs where a specific subject transforms into a metaphor for the way all human existence is marked by vulnerability and fragility. Significantly in the titles of her photographs, most of her subjects are not referred to by their proper name, but rather by an attribute pertaining to a particular detail of their clothing, to their origins or to the action that is being captured in the image (A Puerto Rican Housewife, NYC, 1963; Boy with a straw hat waiting to march in a pro-war parade, NYC, 1976). In other words, even while – by virtue of highlighting strange details – Arbus offers us images that appear to be visual facts, these seemingly just renditions of what a particular subject really looks like readily change into representations that illustrate her philosophic

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conviction that the reality of all human appearances lies in what disturbs familiarity, what is out of place, what does not fit the image. Yet even though she admitted that someone else’s tragedy is not the same as your own, she nevertheless also maintained that physical and psychic woundings were precisely what her photographs rendered visible and legible. As we gaze at these photographs, we are touched not by specific cases of passion and anguish. Rather we are asked to read each of the figures as living representations for the way we are all subjects of trauma. At the same time – although Diane Arbus uses photography to illustrate that human vulnerability is a universal trait, that indeed precisely because implenitude is what we all have in common, an encounter with the other is even possible – she was also convinced that those human subjects who are unable to hide their personal psychic harpies beneath colourful masks and veils, who unwittingly exhibit or self-consciously flaunt defilement and disjunction, were closer to this truth. ‘Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience,’ she suggests. ‘Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.’10 And once again in line with the chatoyant duplicity so characteristic of her work, while on the one hand externalized bodily marks of trauma that cannot be overlooked are rendered iridescent in her photographs, precisely because Arbus represents these subjects as royalty, on the other hand disturbing details mar those scenes where the chosen subjects present themselves as bearers of protective fictions whose aim is to shield from a direct acknowledgment of this traumatic truth:  In the photograph of an Atlantic City burlesque performer sitting in front of her mirror, the costume contradicts the squalor of the dressing room, the debris scattered on the floor (Burlesque comedienne in her dressing room, Atlantic City, N.J., 1963). And yet, even while she seems oblivious to this disarray, ready to turn even this unlikely site into the scene for her splendid self-display, the framing of the photograph is such that it eliminates most of the reflection of her face in the mirror. As we see her gaze at us provocatively self-assured, we simultaneously see the reflection of her defacement refracting her pose. In the photograph of a gallery opening in New York, four people in glamorous dresses stand next to an empty white wall (Four People at a Gallery Opening, NYC, 1968). Its starkness provokes a sense of the disempowering contingency of human existence their self-assured posture and the wealth of their costumes seeks to evade. Then, upon closer

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scrutiny, they appear like marionettes, uncannily animated, accidentally fallen out of a picture frame. As Freudian psychoanalysis argues, we are all born with a matrix of trauma. Though inaccessible to our conscious and unconscious representations, yet also inevitably marking our subjectivity, it is this knowledge that makes us move. Indeed, one could say that the economy of our psychic apparatus is such that it seeks to maintain a certain distance to this repressed – yet also clandestinely harboured – knowledge that nevertheless insists on being heard, though by returning in oblique articulations – in the guise of psycho-somatic symptoms, hallucinations, but above all in phantasy work of any kind. For in the mise-en-scène of our desire, we are able to play through those scenarios of self-destruction and selfexpenditure that would be too threatening to our psychic health if confronted directly. In his early work on the traumatic aetiology of neurosis, Sigmund Freud furthermore ascertained that we only know of our own trauma by virtue of its belated inscriptions, which is to say when it resurfaces in events and encounters that, though different from the original experience, are similar enough to recall the traumatic impact of the prior event that has been effaced. In other words, any originary experience of trauma is irrevocably demarcated by a gap in the consciousness, even while it is this effaced matrix upon which so much of our phantasy work feeds and which resonates in the images we fashion of ourselves, be they informed by splendour or by sordidness. As though she were offering a visual metaphor for this psychoanalytic dictum, Arbus admitted, ‘I really love what you can’t see in a photograph’ so as to explain why, in her later work, she actively sought to include an actual physical darkness in her photography, uncannily leaving its trace within the frame.11 And if the foreignness at the most intimate kernel of one’s being is what she sought to record, the gap between intention and effect points to another gap, namely that between the traumatic imprint with which one is born and any belated embodiment of this mark. A sense of strangeness is, then, inherent to the photographic situation itself. For when Arbus explains, ‘I work from awkwardness’, she is referring to the way her subjects  – though willing to present themselves to her camera in a particular pose – are never fully at home in their bodies, their social positions, their gender, their employment.12 Whether her subject is a transvestite, presenting his naked body as though it were a woman’s, or whether it is a young girl, looking forlornly into the camera with her equally young partner

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overpowering her with his embracing arm that seems to clench her right shoulder while her arm hangs listlessly along her side (Teenage Couple on Hudson Street, NYC, 1963), invariably strangeness inhabits the image. At the same time, courting contingency, each photograph also expresses the awkwardness of the photographer as well. Endowed with the power not only to chose her subjects but also to construct their meeting in such a manner that the photograph records an encounter rather than an object, Arbus nevertheless felt that the final image was the result of an accident, with a traumatic cut irrevocably demarcating her vision and her staging from the way the photograph ultimately turned out. Regardless of their subject matter, her photographs are informed by the certainty that they can capture a part of Iris’ colourful arc before this wondrous mirage once again fades from sight; ‘it’s very subtle and a little embarrassing to me, but I really believe there are things nobody would see unless I photographed them.’13 At the same time, however, Diane Arbus never lost sight of the fallibility inherent to her visual power, for she also understood herself to be as much a victim of the gap between intention and effect as her subjects: ‘I have never taken a picture I’ve intended.’14 The realities we find documented in these photographs are neither private nor public, but rather a strange enmeshment of the chosen subject’s self-fashioning according to phantasy scenarios developed so as to organize enjoyment and Arbus’s deployment of poignant details, which draw out the flaws in normality and render the horrific wondrous. As we place these photographic representations side by side to form a sequence, those dressed up for public functions, regardless whether their clothes conform to the norms of fashion or – by virtue of excess or cross-dressing – dismantle the conventionality upon which any public self-display is based, serve as mirror inversions of those exhibiting their barely clothed bodies in scenes of posed intimacy. For it is, ironically, the costumes and masks that help expose a hidden dimension of the represented subject. Not some disembodied psychic truth, but rather how these people want to look, whom they want to resemble, how they want to be perceived by others is what shows their identity, of which Arbus says ‘it is what remains when all else goes.’ Those scenes, in turn, where the chosen subject apparently lays bare its identity by exposing a scarcely dressed body in fact only serve to cover something up again, for if Arbus renders the difference between what is freakish and what is normal insignificant, so too, does the horrific wonder her photographs bring forth

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obscure the distinction between masking and revealing. As the conventional and the transgressive double each other, so too does the exposed body emerge as but another form of dress. The traumatic truth that all of these self-fashionings address remains markedly unrepresentable, present in the frame by virtue of its explicitly staged absence, the lack around which any self-display revolves. And precisely because they commemorate what is missing – the alterity the photographer can never fully understand in her subject, the traumatic knowledge of our irrevocable roundedness we must veil so as to survive – they also represent a bond. Acknowledging vulnerability is what unites three distinct and irreducible scenes into a mutual encounter: the phantasmatic intensions of both the photographed subjects and their interpellator Diane Arbus, the photographic session, and our moment of viewing its progeny. Given that in these photographs her subjects are always posing, presenting themselves as if on stage  – in urban parks and streets, on dance floors, in dressing rooms and private interiors  – the embodied enactment of phantasy seems to correspond with their presence in what Michel Foucault calls ‘heterotopic sites’; real, actual spaces that have been inscribed into public institutions, counterplacements or abutments, realized utopias, which is to say sites exterior to social normality even while they are clearly located sites.15 Although they are utterly different from sites of everyday existence, heterotopias reflect, speak about and refer to that of which they are outside. They enmesh actually existent spaces with impossible, fantastic positions, for while on the one hand they are real for the subject as long as it inhabits this space, they are on the other hand also totally virtual because they are constructed by virtue of an individual or collective phantasma. For Foucault, heterotopias can be culturally constructed interim sites, such as honeymoon resorts and tourist parks, mental hospitals, old-age homes, prisons and military bases. They can demarcate scenes for secular rituals, such as cemeteries, or scenes for profane enjoyment, such as cinemas or gardens. Finally, they can also be those sites where our cultural knowledge and our cultural image repertoire are stored – museums, libraries and archives. In all cases, however, heterotopias create an illusory space whose function it is to denounce the space of human existence – and all the constricting emplacements that this imposes on human subjects – as being even more illusory than these other sites. Or they can create another actual site, so perfectly constructed as once again to reflect the implenitude, fallibility

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and disjunction of our social reality. Whether they pronounce their utterly phantasmatic quality or enact scenes of perfect sociability, heterotopias for Foucault as the arsenals of the imagination are themselves precarious because they are contingent upon being liminal even while they point to the implenitude of the world of normality from which they are detached. Diane Arbus, one could say, made it her profession to track heterotopic sites, to capture scenes of liminality where, for a limited period of time, self-conscious illusion and more than human perfection could be materialized. And if the message with which these images confront us uses the fact that they represent the realization of a non-site, external to our reality yet also inherent in it, to reflect back on the fragility and implenitude of our own world, the scene of the photographic session is itself heterotopic, for it hovers uncannily between private and public self-presentation, between an iridescently phantasmatic sense of the self and its concrete materialization in the photographic image. Coming to these photographs after the event – as we inevitably do – we construct an interpretive narrative in which these highly disparate images resonate with each other under the aegis of Diane Arbus’s idiosyncratic photographic eye. At the same time we also infer that each separate scene captures a dialog. As the subjects stare back self-consciously into the camera, posing alone or with someone else, the narrative that becomes legible for us is clearly the result of an understanding between the photographer and her subject. However, the message we begin to decipher hovers between separate intentions, knotting together what is also irrevocably severed. In that these subjects clearly address the photographer, they present themselves in a manner that factors in what they believe she wishes to see, only to merge the image they wish to create with her expectations. Likewise, Diane Arbus, seeking out subjects that confirm her aesthetics of the strange and the flawed, nevertheless also preserves their heterotopic difference. Not only does she stage them in sites that are located outside normality, but she also stages the fact that they are irrevocably external to her perception and our reading of them by explicitly pointing to the darkness that marks what is absent from the image, the gap between intention and effect, the detail that cannot be known of the other. Ultimately, then, the fascination that continues to emanate from these representations, which are both utterly accidental and highly constructed, resides in the chatoyancy between revealing a given subject’s clandestine truth and preserving this traumatic knowledge

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as an inaccessible body. As Doon Arbus has astutely noted, the last photographs her mother made before her suicide, taken at picnics, costume balls and Halloween parties in various mental hospitals that Diane Arbus came to visit between 1969 and 1971, are images that challenge our gaze even more poignantly than her previous work.16 For in these radically heterotopic sites, Diane Arbus found herself confronted with subjects who were utterly uninhibited, neither awkward nor self-conscious as they posed for her camera, because they were living in a world entirely external to that of their photographer and fully resistant to any attempt at metaphoric appropriation. But precisely because these subjects are so clearly indifferent to her gaze, completely oblivious to her intentions, utterly caught in the realization of their phantasms and fully selfpossessed they also let us pass over the threshold of a world to which we will never have full access. Faced with these photographs that remain stubbornly silent, serene and indifferent, we remain in the antechamber, only there to experience the full onslaught of the arsenal of the imagination. And precisely in line with the rhetoric of Foucault’s heterotopias, these subjects – whether masked, in costumes or shamelessly exposing their grotesque bodies to the photographer’s eye – reflect back on the other images of masked people in Arbus’s work, who were also enjoying themselves in public sites by transforming these into scenes where intimate phantasies can be performed. Yet these other images – themselves critically reflecting back on public conventions – were so uncannily disturbing because in the midst of all the flaws and peculiarities they came to represent, their strangeness could be recuperated back into the language we use to describe and understand our everyday reality. Here, however, as the viewer hovers between a sense of astonished fascination and the recognition that in so far as these images can be deciphered they signify the limit of our readability, these enigmas without words and solutions also harbour something soothingly familiar. Even though these subjects irrevocably recede from our interpretation, they do not elude our understanding. Significantly, Diane Arbus’s last photographs were left untitled, as though perhaps she hesitated to label them because she was aware that it would have been unseemly to even attempt to tell parts of their stories for them. For the aporia these images perform is such that on the one hand, owing to Arbus’s documentation of a world external to ours yet located in its midst, we are drawn into the intimate proximity of this phantasy world, while on the other hand, although the

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indifference of its subjects seems to obliterate all barriers, their secret is only the more staunchly kept. Indeed, precisely because the barrier between the spectator and the represented subject has seemingly dissolved, which is to say because we come too close in a sense, we actually see nothing of this strange presence. And yet, just because clandestine knowledge is preserved does not mean that these representations lose their traumatic impact. On the contrary, as Nicolas Abraham notes, the most potent phantoms objectify the gap that the concealment of some knowledge has produced in us. ‘What haunts,’ he explains, ‘are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others.’17 Neither repressed nor fully revealed, this traumatic knowledge, though unspeakable, exists, encrypted in our collective image repertoire as a foreign body that is able to haunt the spectator only the more powerfully because it takes the shape of a spot of darkness evading representation. Nan Goldin suggests that Arbus was obsessed with people who manifested trauma, maybe because her own crisis was so internalized. She was able to look full in the faces we normally avert our eyes from, and to show beauty there as well as pain … She undertook that greatest act of courage: to face the terror of darkness and remain articulate.18 A similar claim could be made for the ‘visual diary’ Nan Goldin has presented publicly since the early 1980s. For as she documents people whom she has befriended precisely because they have the courage to live their phantasies of refashioning the self, of enjoying scenes of transgression and self-expenditure as well as fearlessly taking risks as they explore worlds beyond the constraints of normal sociality, Nan Goldin herself offers iridescently colourful images of human vulnerability, violence and mortality. In contrast to Arbus, however, Goldin’s approach is not to choose a subject because it fascinates and amazes her. Rather, as she explains: I photograph directly from my life. These pictures come out of relationships, not observation … There is a popular notion that the photographer is by nature a voyeur, the last one invited to the party. But I’m not crashing; this is my party. This is my family, my history.19

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Although the moments of passion, anguish and intimacy she brings to the public eye draw us into heterotopias – culturally marginalized sites such as transvestite clubs, bars, sordid or abandoned hotel rooms as well as private interiors – unlike Diane Arbus, for whom the act of photographing was the ticket into worlds where she had never been, Nan Goldin, seemingly obliterates all distance between herself and those she photographs. Indeed, she is explicitly implicated in the scenes she also records, even while – like Diane Arbus – she sees her photographs as being accidents, capturing the contingency of a given moment, not her intention. Her camera, she insists, is like another hand, and photographing as much a part of her everyday life as ‘talking or eating or sex’. As Peter Schjeldahl notes, these photographs are, ‘like snapshots, souvenirs of their occasions. Unlike snapshots, they record occasions of breathtaking significance.’20 Their visual power, he suspects, resides in a pitiless verisimilitude that gives us the feeling that we are in the same room with their subjects. At the same time, however, this participation in a foreign world can never be anything but vicarious. Seeking for the adequate term to describe the process we are privy to while confronting Goldin’s photographs, Schjeldahl recalls that ‘the function of adventurers is to do what we cannot or fear to do, then to tell us about it.’ Goldin is ‘an adventurer for our time, when “wilderness” no longer shows up on maps but belongs to the far and nether reaches of human behaviour.’21 Though different from Arbus’s play with proximity and distance, the intensity of human passion preserved in these images is, therefore, also inevitably inscribed by a duplicity of the signifier. Nan Goldin and the friends she photographs, one could say, are enjoying for us so that we can go on with our everyday normality. The scenes she documents appear as though they belonged to the archive of our own memory perhaps because she is able to capture the bodily presence of her subjects. And in so far as we seem to know people we have actually never met, one could say that Goldin’s photographs also function like heterotopias on the level of reception. Confronted with these images, we take on a place that is no place precisely because the scene appears to include us as well. The place we take on within the represented scene as we look at these images appears to be real even while this is an unreal site, given that it can only be perceived owing to this virtual point of reference. At the same time, these scenes of human frailty remain as different from our familiar worlds as the freaks and pariahs of Arbus’s photographs

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because although in the act of viewing, we can imagine that these scenes could be ours, the psycho-social worlds they represent – the traces of addiction, violence and self-destruction written on the bodies of these members of the margins of society – are so fascinating precisely because they are not part of the everyday reality in which we live. Like the mythopoeic adventurer Iris, who will travel to the bottom of the ocean if this be necessary to transmit her messages, what Nan Goldin relates are significant scenes revolving around the threat of loss, destruction and mortality inherent to living. Yet, as she explains in her preface to The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986), her photographs are meant to portray the strength and beauty that she finds to be the inversion of human vulnerability; ‘I want to show exactly what my world looks like, without glamorization, without glorification. This is not a bleak world but one in which there is an awareness of pain, a quality of introspection.’22 As she documents the lives of herself and her friends, what she above all seeks to commemorate is, then, the bond that holds together this recreated family, born out of a common interest in challenging conventional morality, in pushing limits, in living without consideration for the future but in full consideration for each other. Thus, along the lines Roland Barthes that discussed regarding the mythological signifier, although the depicted milieu is particular, the subjects in these photographs readily transform into figures signifying the human condition in general. Against the criticism that her subjects are utterly unfamiliar and thus illegible for viewers who do not belong to her re-created family, Goldin defends herself by explaining ‘the concerns I’m dealing with are universal … it’s about the nature of relationships.’23 At the same time, however, that her photographs impose her vision on the world she lives in, drawing out the splendour she finds in the midst of depravation and vulnerability and turning these scenes into universally applicable figures of the ambivalence with which the human need to form bonds is fraught, she also sees these images as preserving something very specific and doing so against the reality of loss. Significantly, her first published visual diary was dedicated to the ‘real memory’ of her sister Barbara Holly Goldin, who committed suicide in 1965. As Nan Goldin explains, this death left a traumatic imprint on her not only because it signified the loss of someone to whom she was extremely close, but also because, in the process of leaving her family and refashioning herself, she found she had also lost ‘the real memory’ of her sister. Left only with the version

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of her sister she had reconstructed belatedly, she had irrevocably lost any recollection of ‘the tangible sense of who she was, her presence, what her eyes looked like, what her voice sounded like.’ Simultaneously living and recording her life in images came to be her way of not repeating this double loss. The uncanny chatoyancy between the familiar and the foreign, the universal and the specific that is played through in these photographs is then such that the condition of boundless proximity from which they emerge achieves an aporetic gesture – it preserves a lost presence. Not only the boundary between the photographer and the woman partaking in the represented scene is rendered fluid, so that the subjects that stare back at her implicitly stare at us and in so doing draw us into the scene as well. Rather, what also becomes fluid is the boundary between the rhetoric of representation, implying an exchange between physical presence and a sign standing in for, and making the absent present though as an intangible, spectral body. For Goldin’s photographs are not only meant to record a particular subject, a particular scene, a particular encounter, so that the image allows one belatedly to remember the event, though in so doing inevitably also signifying that its presence is gone. Working against oblivion, they are also meant to trigger ‘an invocation of the colour, smell, sound, and physical presence, the density and flavour of life.’24 Foucault’s description of heterotopias thus applies not only to the sites Goldin depicts but even more crucially to her aesthetic intention. In response to the traumatic knowledge that we lose our ability to remember the presence of another person unless we record an event even while experiencing it, she posits a form of documentation where what is lost returns in all its visceral effect. Of course, Nan Goldin is fully conscious of the duplicity inherent to this undertaking at creating tangible bodily memory. As she admits, ‘I want to be uncontrolled and controlled at the same time. The diary is my form of control over my life. It allows me to obsessively record every detail. It enables me to remember.’25 For what Nan Goldin does is split herself into two subjects – the first unabashedly embraces moments of human intensity, regardless of the risks, and with an equal lack of inhibition exposes her own vulnerability and despair along with her desire: the passionate lover, the woman who has endless sympathy for her friends. The other controls these moments of excess by making images, so that at the high point of self-absorption or loss of the self in the passionate

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embrace of the moment the same self is also fully conscious, observing the scene, in possession of itself: the calculating artist, constructing images. Her photographs, one could say, offer us the chatoyant performance of an aporia – namely that one can take part in a scene and watch; that one can lose oneself and nevertheless not lose control. Like Diane Arbus’s photographs, these images strike one as being neither voyeuristic nor improper. They neither appropriate another’s intimacy nor stage shameless exhibitionism because, although they capture the intensity and the bodily presence of the other during significant and highly personal moments, they also commemorate the subject in its specific uniqueness, and in so doing always also preserve the other’s alterity. As Marvin Heiferman notes, Goldin ‘empowers people by representing them.’26 Taking images allows Goldin always to live in the present, even while she can be certain that her remembrance of things past will never be coloured by a belated nostalgia. It allows her to assume two roles simultaneously – to be participant and witness, to be subjectively involved and offer an objective testimony. And if, initially, this was an autobiographical project, aimed at preserving images of the way certain moments really looked and felt like, the fascinating contradiction Goldin succeeds in performing for us spectators who are allowed over the threshold into a world to which, nevertheless, we will also never actually belong, is that we feel sympathy for her recreated family, indeed feel we know her friends even though they are utter strangers to us. As Elisabeth Sussman puts it, Nan Goldin is the impassioned historian of love in the age of fluid sexuality, glamour, beauty, violence, death, intoxication, and masquerade … Her camera freezes the comings and goings of the social experience of desire: love and hate in intimate relationships; moments of isolation, self-revelation, and adoration; the presentation of the sexual self freed from the constraints of biological destiny.27 Indeed, the photographs that were initially part of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency confront us with the violence that binds us to those we love, the unappeasable desire to unite with another and the scars such bonds leave. ‘I often fear that men and women are irrevocably strangers to each other, irreconcilably unsuited, almost as if they were from different

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planets,’ Nan Goldin argues. ‘But there is an intense need for coupling in spite of it all. Even if relationships are destructive, people cling together.’ Exploring what makes coupling so difficult, this series of photographs documents the struggle between autonomy and dependency, the irresolvable contradiction between craving security and resisting the claustrophobic proximity of the other, the friction between romantic phantasies and the alienation and violence inherent to the reality of sexual relationships, the wounds lovers inflict upon each other. Initially, Goldin’s photographs were addressed to those who had been there, presented as slide shows, accompanied by music. By virtue of the way the individual shots were edited together into sequences, with Goldin continually rearranging the images as well as owing to the lyrics accompanying them, these photographs came to represent an open, ongoing story. In the course of time, however, the narrative thread that had initially served to organize this visual material into an autobiographical story meant to be shared by those who had taken part in the depicted events ultimately transformed into a document of an era, the commemoration of a community of artists and socially marginalized subjects that no longer exists. As Goldin poignantly notes in her postscript to The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, written ten years after the book was initially published: photography doesn’t preserve memory as effectively as I  had thought it would. A lot of the people in the book are dead now, mostly from AIDS: I had thought that I could stave off loss through photographing. I always thought if I photographed anyone or anything enough, I would never lose the person, I would never lose the memory, I would never lose the place. But the pictures show me how much I’ve lost.28 Time has irrevocably altered the way we view these images, for they no longer draw us to them as implicit participants of the represented world, but rather touch us because we are the implicit survivors of a world that has vanished. And yet these photographs also haunt us precisely because they do preserve the visceral effect of the represented subjects even while they attest to their irretrievable absence. The life they preserve staunchly rivals the death that is equally present in these images, just like Iris and the harpies have the same father and mutually refer to each other. The presence of two bodies signifying one and

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the same subject – the first preserving the visceral effect of the represented woman and the other proclaiming the fact that she is irrevocably gone – is particularly compelling in the sequence Nan Goldin put together in 1991 to commemorate her friend Cookie Mueller, an actress and a writer who died of AIDS in 1989 (The Cookie Portfolio 1976–1989). This narrative, positioned against death, bespeaks both the real memory of her friend and the irrevocable truth of her loss. The Cookie represented by these images returns in all the iridescent colours that make up the moods of a single person – playing with her son, dancing with her friends, absorbed in her solitude, sharing her laughter, asleep, comforting her friend Nan or simply responding to her camera’s eye. Some of these images were previously part of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, in which Cookie had come to assume the part of one of the powerful female players in Goldin’s complex and ambivalent tale of human relationships.29 Once these images reappear in a sequence explicitly meant as a tribute to a dead friend, however, their signification seems to change. The chatoyancy Goldin’s photographs perform as they oscillate between the particular and the universal now touches the fact that even while this series documents her mourning the loss of a very particular friend, the subject Cookie Mueller also emerges as a cypher, epitomizing an era and its victims, the high riskers. As Goldin writes in ‘A Last Letter’, they were people connected to the arts who lifted the quality of all our lives, their war was against ignorance, the bankruptcy of beauty, and the truancy of culture. They were people who hated and scorned pettiness, intolerance, bigotry, mediocrity, ugliness and spiritual myopia; the blindness that makes life hollow and insipid was unacceptable. They tried to make us see. At the same time the last photographs of the sequence – when death is already in the frame – also illustrate that dying is so cruelly a personal affair where something inevitably recedes from the understanding gaze of those not directly implicated in the process. Standing at her husband’s coffin, Cookie gazes past us, caught as she is walking away, as if out of the frame of our viewing (Nan Goldin, Cookie at Vittorio’s Casket, NCY, Sept. 16, 1989). Her anguish is apparently one of simultaneous acceptance and proud defiance of the truth of their mutual facticity. As Goldin notes, ‘On September 14th her

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husband Vittorio Scarpati died from an AIDS-related illness and after that Cookie kind of gave up.’ What we thus invariably read into this scene belatedly is that her husband’s corpse bears the harpies’ message, functioning as a harbinger of her own demise. Perhaps the most disturbing image in the sequence is that of ‘Cookie being x-rayed’ (Nan Goldin, Cookie Being X-rayed, NYC, Oct. 1989). Within the large black field her face alone is lit, jettisoned from the body. Although her expression indicates that she is still intensely alive, her eyes are closed and her entire face is marked by the shadows of the x-ray machine. Functioning like a visual grid, these shadows place Cookie into a liminal site, as though they were signifying the fact that, at this point in her illness, she was already marked by immanent death. Indeed, the grid of shadows seems to place her behind bars, separating her from the living but also cutting us off from the world of dying she has entered. The aporia this photograph performs is precisely that even while it so poignantly arouses our sympathy for Cookie’s anguish, she is also more solitary, more inaccessible than in any of the previous shots. In so doing, it not only captures the harsh isolation of the woman afflicted by death, but also signifies our own helplessness once we are confronted with the dying of another. For it documents that we can inevitably only watch the spectacle of death from the other side of a threshold which we can never cross. One month later, Nan Goldin took a picture of Cookie Mueller in her coffin, laid out in iridescent hues of red, gold and black (Nan Goldin, Cookie in her Casket, NYC, Nov. 15, 1989). She is now completely distanced from us, her corpse a resemblance of the living woman but also signifying its radical alterity to her. And in this state of being depleted of her living spirit, we perceive Cookie as an image of herself, a deanimated beautiful copy of the deceased woman, serenely posed, so that the photograph strangely acquires a self-reflexive moment. Simultaneously standing in for the dead woman, but also signifying that she is absent from the body representing her and thus the image representing this depleted body, this photograph transforms into a representation of the process of representation. Finally, the last image, taken one month after Cookie’s death, records only the traces of her presence  – an empty living room, the couch on which she sat with her son in a previous photograph (Nan Goldin, Cookie and Vittorio’s Living Room, NYC, Christmas 1989). In this concluding scene, Cookie is visually present only in the photographs of her that hang on the wall behind the couch. As though it were meant

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to serve as the mise en abyme of the entire sequence, this photograph thus also self-reflexively refers to Nan Goldin’s photographic project as a whole, where photographic representations of people are embedded within a visual narrative in order to capture the traces these friends have left in her memory, and by endowing visceral effect to phantasmatic bodies, allowing her to preserve and interpret the past. More than any of the others, this photograph stages the inextricable and therefore permanent knot between memory and loss, turning the entire sequence into a statement about both her faith that photography preserves life against death and the realization of her own fallibility. In this image, where the absent body of her friend is reduplicated by photographs that only make her absence more obvious, the facticity of real death marks the limit to Goldin’s notion of ‘real memory.’ And yet, uncannily, the visceral effect of Cookie Mueller is nevertheless preserved. Precisely at the impossible nexus point between an empty couch and the photographs recalling the woman’s image whose living body has irrevocably vanished, which is to say at this most subtle of all heterotopic sites that realize virtual phantasies, Cookie’s presence haunts the image. Alongside her fearless interrogation of both the need for heterosexual coupling and its destructive addictive quality, Nan Goldin’s work also explores ways in which, as she explains, rather than simply accepting the constraints of gender distinctions, the point is to redefine one’s sexual formations. In part, she documents this in photographs of women alone, absorbed with themselves, as well as in images that show women together, giving voice to the solidarity and tenderness that binds them. Her most compelling exploration of the joys and the empowerment that a redefinition of gender can afford, however, occurs in the photographs of transvestites (The Other Side, 1992). As she admits, drag queens have been her obsession since the early 1970s, when she first wanted to use her photography to pay homage to the courage of her friends to recreate themselves according to their phantasies, by transforming themselves into living embodiments of Oscar Wilde’s dictum ‘you are who you pretend to be.’ For her, the inhabitants of The Other Side, a transvestite bar in Boston, were never simply men dressed as women but rather something radically other, a third sex, liberated from the constraints any homogeneous sexual definition entails. The fascination and admiring wonder she not only felt when she first fell in love with transvestites but that she chose to document over two decades comes down to the fact

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that they refashion themselves in defiance of all categorization. Using their bodies not only to materialize phantasies of what they want to look like, but also to publically declare that one can appropriate cultural formations of the feminine without relinquishing masculinity, they succeed in performing an astonishingly iridescent palette of genderings. ‘Some of my friends shift genders daily  – from boy to girl and back again’, Goldin explains and adds: Some are transsexual before or after surgery, and among them some live entirely as women while others openly identify themselves as transsexuals. Others dress up only for stage performances and live as gay boys by day. And still others make no attempt at all to fit in anywhere, but live in a gender-free zone, flaunting their third sex status.30 Dressing up as a woman not only means altering the self to fit an intended image that conforms with conventional modes of gendered self-display, but also in some sense always implies an uncanny double body. For as the transvestites’ phantasmatic, iridescent self – proudly flaunting its costumes, its jewellery and its makeup – comes to duplicate the real corporal body, the fact that the refashioned body is so self-consciously a masquerade also serves to interrogate the claim to essentiality that the dictate of homogeneous gender definitions tacitly presupposes. However, where Arbus was fascinated by the gap that irrevocably but unwittingly emerges between intention and effect, Goldin shows her transvestite friends to be playing, both adroitly and ironically, with precisely this gap. The liberation from the constraints of gender that they stage occurs not outside our cultural codes, aimed at an obliteration of gender differences, aimed at a revolutionary recasting of the subject beyond gender. Rather, they perform what is the logical consequence of the fact that the subject is always socially constructed. Often challenging us with the directness of their gaze, what they seem to be saying is: ‘given that any existence within culture implies abiding by certain gender formations, then to consciously chose masquerades of the self can turn subjection before the law into a moment of agency.’ One could call the transvestite bodies represented in these photographs an embodied living heterotopia, for their dismantling of gender binaries is located at the very heart of cultural conventions and expectations. They reiterate existing forms of gendered self-display

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but with a playful exaggeration of normalcy and thus a liberating difference. The transvestites she represents astonish us – in part because they are perfect embodiments of femininity, in part because, when caught in the process of dressing or undressing, they highlight the fact that perfect femininity is nothing but an iridescent construction. However, regardless of whether the representations privilege a mimicry of femininity that is so perfect to be indistinguishable from its model or whether  – owing to exaggeration and creative reassemblage  – the representation privileges a discrepancy between the conventional code of femininity and the body imitating it, in all cases the interpellator to whom this masquerade is addressed, indeed without whom it could not take place, enjoys precisely this gap between intention and effect. The heterotopic gesture these representations of transvestism perform not only insists that the self emerges only as a staged subject, but also that the spectator, whose surprise is at stake, is in on the duplicity. In this colourful dismantling of gender constructions, the effect is both brilliant and startling precisely because all secrets are out in the open. In contrast to the photographs exploring the agony and passion of heterosexual coupling, where anguish, wounding and destruction emerge as the inversion of romance’s iridescent rainbow, there is nothing painful in these images. Much like Arbus’s freaks who, born with trauma, are aristocrats because they have already passed the test of life, Goldin’s transvestites are the heroes in her saga about human relationships. She insists that these photographs do not document people suffering from their gender. Instead, they pay homage to their sense of ease in relation to their gender: ‘They are the real winners of the battle of the sexes because they have stepped out of the ring.’31 As Craigie Horsfield notes, Nobuyoshi Araki’s fame in the West was in part contingent on the fact that, by choosing to read his work alongside artists like Robert Frank, Larry Clark, and Nan Goldin, art critics were able to fabricate an interpretive narrative which helped overcome the cultural difference with which his photographs inevitably confront us. For like these Western photographers, Araki is an obsessive artist. Carrying his camera with him at all times, he takes pictures incessantly so that by recording what happens to him day by day, he can produce a seemingly unmediated intimate visual diary. Blurring the line between his own life and the bohemian sites of Tokyo, the bars and love hotels of Shinjuku that he documents, his

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photography allows him to cut out a precise moment in time so as to preserve its visceral effect without fully disclosing its secret. Given, then, the fact that regardless of their cultural and personal specificity, all of these photographers came to present a universally legible narrative about human vulnerability precisely because they ‘show bruised and stunted lives clear-sightedly and appear to put themselves on the line,’ Horsfield suggests, ‘their very lives, as shown, satisfied the perpetual bourgeois hunger for verification and vicarious experience through the surrogate artist.’32 However, even while Araki fits this cultural myth of the artist, whose subject matter revolves around social taboos – notably eroticism and death – and who, owing to an aesthetic practice where taking pictures and living scenes of excess conflate, appears to enjoy transgressions for us so that we can go about our everyday lives, something disturbs this neat classification. For, while the personal vision of Diane Arbus and Nan Goldin obliquely yet emphatically informs their work, the photographs by Araki explicitly include him in the role of the artist and not the participant within the very frame which is meant to offer as unmediated a representation of the chosen subject as possible. In other words, even though his photographs are about the frayed margins of Japanese society as well as the clandestine obscenities inhabiting its very centre and depict squalid scenes of self-expenditure, touched by decay, mutability and death, they are always also about the production and legibility of cultural signs. Although the bodies he photographs are endowed with erotic as well as mortal connotations, because he presents them as the actors in scenes revolving around sexual phantasies, these bodies simultaneously also function like letters in an ironic and highly selfconscious game with visual iconography. In contrast, then, to Arbus and Goldin, Araki not only plays a part in the scenes he represents. Rather, he also plays with the represented reality, fixing life into a stylized image, so that the staging of an intimate dialogue is inevitably a chatoyant image, readily changing into a message about semiotics. The images he makes accidentally as he ceaselessly presses the shutter of his camera ultimately commemorate the creative power of their maker rather than unabashedly reflecting human contingency. Presenting himself as a ‘genius’ who relies on his instincts and intuition, he adds, ‘of course, the results of my work aren’t a coincidence and they aren’t the consequence of a great murky understanding and

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feeling for everything either. The external circumstances, call it coincidence, I create myself.’33 Although Araki’s photographic obsession, revolving around the subject of transgressive eroticism, aims at making clandestine phantasies public and illustrating that obscenity resides in hiding rather than exposing genitalia, all of his photography ultimately expresses his relationship to death. In his book, Sentimental Journey, Winter Journey (1989/90), documenting the death of his wife Yoko, who had been his favourite model, in 1990, these two concerns came to be enmeshed. As he explains: to speak of true taboos these days means to speak of death. No one would have minded if I had merely glued the pictures in my private photo album. But when Yoko’s sickbed, her coffin, her limp hand with pricks from infusions suddenly showed up in galleries, people were indignant.34 And yet, unlike Goldin’s sequence dedicated to Cookie Mueller, Araki’s images are neither concerned with preserving a living memory of the woman he lost nor do they seek to express his grief, which remains a wholly private, indeed unconscious affair. Rather, gathering together images of Yoko into a narrative where scenes of shared enjoyment are replaced by those that bespeak their irrevocable separation allows him to transform the affective reality of her death into a semiotic issue. As he explains, ‘I found consolation in unmasking lust and loss, by staging a bitter battle of positions between symbols.’ This sequence of photographs pays homage to the beauty, vitality and courage of a woman as she comes to accept her own demise, and yet, in contrast to Goldin’s sequence, in which all the photographs concentrate on Cookie’s bodily presence even when this is merely the trace her absence leaves, as in the photograph taken on Christmas after her death, Araki’s images relate Yoko’s death to him as an implied witness as well as to objects that, because they are connected with her, will come to represent her by proxy, once she is gone. Initially we see her dancing with her husband, holding their cat, smiling at him with the hospital bed separating them, but she is soon replaced by images that represent her only in the way that her dying is registered by Araki himself. Direct shots of her are followed by images of him at her bedside, anxiously gazing at her, holding her hand, while the rest of their bodies fall outside the picture frame. Alongside these

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self-portraits, Araki includes images signifying her demise by representing her absence avant la lettre  – a wooden female figure holding a cat, recalling the earlier image of Yoko in the same pose, images of Tokyo he sees while she is dying in the hospital, the flowers at her bedside – a metonymy for the scene of death. The last three photographs of Yoko most poignantly illustrate Araki’s conviction that the traumatic truth of death can only be represented as a battle of positions between symbols. The first is an image of her head, turned away from the camera, surrounded by medical instruments as well as those personal objects that have come to stand in for her, especially the toy cat and the flower blossoms, with the ephemeral flowers duplicating Yoko’s demise, while the toy cat seems to refer to the permanence of artificial objects. The image of her corpse in the coffin repeats the hospital scene; only now her head alone is visible, while the rest of her body is covered with flower blossoms. Next to her serenely composed face we find a copy of one of Araki’s books with an image of their cat’s face on its cover, a visual repetition of Yoko’s head. Both are framed by the sides of the coffin and by the hands, gently touching the flowers, as though to emphasize that this is a double portrait within a photographic image, with the significance that Yoko’s death has for her husband emerging as the relation between the corpse’s head, his photographic reproduction of their pet and the other objects adorning and framing her dead body. This composition is once more repeated in the photograph of the display Araki assembled to honour her memory. The living Yoko is now replaced by a photograph of her face, and this is once again surrounded by flowers. The dynamic power of life, however, is included in the image in the figure of their pet cat, walking across the display, even while it is reduplicated by an array of toy cats. Assembled into a sequence, this visual narrative about the reality of dying, loss and memory turns into a statement about the semiotics of death, staging an intricately codified exchange between the dying body, the corpse, inanimate objects belonging to the deceased, photographic representations recalling her, and the surviving husband. Because Araki understands all photography to be a confrontation with death, mortality, however, inhabits even those images whose subject matter is an excess of life. As he explains: ‘After Yoko’s death, I didn’t want to photograph anything but life – honestly. Yet everytime I pressed the button, I ended up close to death, because to photograph is to stop

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time.’35 In other words, the sequence commemorating Yoko’s death is also a sequence proclaiming his aesthetic project given that the transformation of her living, dynamic body into static objects and images representing her by proxy itself refers to the structural trajectory all photography traces as it arrests the flow of life into deanimated though vibrant images. Because it inevitably recalls the harpies’ message of death even in Iris’ iridescent images of happiness, Araki is right to insist that ‘Photography is murder.’36 Furthermore, photography’s irrevocable involvement with death not only touches the subjects represented by the images but also the photographer himself. As Araki puts it, taking pictures is ‘an act in which my “self ” is pulled out via the subject.’37 Even while – along the lines discussed by Nan Goldin – photographs allow him to interpret an event belatedly in a manner not possible during the experience itself, the subject matter and his own subjectivity mirror each other, so that – insofar as all photography is a message about the stasis inherent to the dynamic force of existence – they always also signify his own demise. Since the death of Yoko, Araki’s privileged subject has been the staging of sexual phantasies and, like Arbus and Goldin, he insists that photography implies an encounter with the other. Accordingly, his photo sessions stage heterotopic scenes, where his subjects transform themselves into living metaphors by re-fashioning themselves along the lines of a particular mise-en-scène of desire. Whether naked, draped with tissues or fully dressed in traditional costumes, whether directly addressing the camera, looking askance or with their eyes closed, his models enact scenarios of humiliation, strangulation, bondage and submission, where an exhibitionist desire to be seen abandons itself to a voyeuristic passion to gaze at the most intimate details of the other’s body. In these chatoyant images, the feminine body, tied up by ropes or simply frozen in the posture of fascinated expectation, appears to be an immobile figure and, as though to ironically comment on this deamination, Araki will sometimes place a toy animal at the edge of the picture’s frame. Death haunts these images, whose manifest subject matter is the life of sexual passion, for the women’s bodies, fixed into positions by virtue of ropes, self-reflexively reduplicate within the image the process of photography itself, given that it, too, fixes the flow of life into a framed scene. Thus, these images of sexual bondage transform into statements about the art of photographing, with the women, fixed into an immobile sign, and the

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static stylization informing the image as a whole mutually reflecting each other. At the same time, however, the models also appear to be embodied metaphors, with the ropes and tissues that bind them an external materialization of their fascination with the power of sexual attraction and passionate surrender. In other words, the bondage embodied by these models duplicitously signifies two contradictory messages. Even while they enact scenes where women are transfixed, their vitality arrested in the image of sexual fascination they are willing to enact, as well as in the image the photographer, to whom they address themselves, seeks to bring forth, they are fully implicated in this transformation of body into sign. Indeed, Araki insists that his photographs do not reduce his models to passive objects of fetishist decoration but rather capture the action between them, the flow of time, mood and words they exchange in the course of this encounter; ‘My models … are more than mere visual filling material, they are partners, part of a dialog, and as indispensable as the cocked camera … In my photos I  reproduce the space and time between my model and me.’38 As in Arbus’s photographs, the represented communication is fraught with duplicity, for in Araki’s heterotopias an uncanny double body emerges as well. In the midst of a self-consciously stylized and codified scenario, the image his models are willing to give shape to so as to please the infamous photographer, whom they have chosen as the master of their erotic ceremonies, not only effaces the real corporeal body but also conflates with the language game Araki himself wishes to express by virtue of their pose. Embodying intimate phantasies (on the part of the models) and troping the body (on the part of the photographer) emerge as two acts that are inextricably knotted together. As Araki explains, ‘what I was aiming at was the female heart. That’s what I wanted to put in shackles. As time went on, the models, so to say, tied themselves up, bound themselves to me.’39 Traditional voyeurism is transcended in so far as the dependency informing these photo sessions is mutually shared by model and photographer. The women play to Araki’s gaze, dependent in their self-fashioning on captivating his masculine desire. At the same time, however, he is dependent on their willingness to abandon themselves to the laws his desire dictates so that his self might be pulled out via the subject. Thus, if, on the one hand, these images blur the boundary between dynamic bodies and static representations so as to reinforce Araki’s conviction that photography introduces death into

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life, on the other hand, this uncanny performance of the chatoyant interplay between death and the image nevertheless requires the drawing of a boundary that assures difference in the midst of semiotic play. As Araki ironically reinstalls the masculine gaze so as to interrogate his culture’s voyeuristic fascination with the exhibition of the submissive feminine body, undressing itself and binding itself for the pleasure of the other’s gaze, gender difference inevitably re-enters the frame. In these strange scenes where appropriating the body of the other transforms into a dialogue between the subject and her spectator, Araki explores the space that emerges between himself and his models as both partake in the staging of a mutual phantasy. And if the represented women are presented as living metaphors for the bond that ties them to their photographer, what their knotted bodies also articulate is that the proximity these erotic bodies – so artfully stylized – promise is nothing other than a strategy to preserve distance. The unabashedly direct gaze with which Araki confronts us ultimately proves to be directed at nothing less than the act of representation itself, while the intimacy of his models’ phantasies remain skilfully hidden behind the exposed sexual body parts. Faced with Araki’s images, aesthetic value ultimately lies in the eyes of the beholder precisely because the codes of Japanese erotic iconography with which he so self-consciously plays as he stages phantasy scenes of bondage and vulnerability remain foreign to us. While some spectators read a misogynist and pornographic appropriation of the feminine body into these images, Nan Goldin argues for an appreciation of their liberating effect. ‘Much of his recurring imagery  – girls in school uniforms, girls in complicated rope tricks, girls in love hotels – is popular in Japanese pornography; but Araki crosses the line between pornography and art,’ she explains and adds: His work is coloured by love, and meant as homage – to women and to beauty and to his own desires. In Japan, where women’s roles are in a period of flux and the idea of female identity in the Western sense is a new one, many young women find Araki’s images liberating. To show their bodies, to flaunt their sexuality, feels to them like freedom.40 Along the lines suggested by Goldin, critics have indeed read Araki’s work as an interrogation of the sado-masochistic phantasies so deeply

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inherent to Japanese cultural iconography and as an act of dismantling the clandestine obscenity underlying his culture’s censorship laws. At the same time, other critics suggest that the images of artfully naked, draped, costumed and bound women – rather than degrading the models into passive objects of a masculine gaze – seem to give the right to self-determination back to these models. As Jean-Christophe Ammann notes, given that his models often appear to be contemplative, enchanted, absent-minded or caught in a rapturous trance, Araki is less a voyeur than a precise observer of what embodiments of desire can evoke in others. The women Araki photographs in complex figurations of bondage, Ammann speculates, experience this as a form of violence, but at the same time transcend this violence in a scene of autoerotic pleasure, where their bodies become the heterotopic site over which they transform themselves into living metaphors. Araki is not just a critic of social prejudices and a liberator from sexual constraints. Because his images create scenes of mysterious inaccessibility, because he gives back to sexuality its secrets, prevents it from being unmasked, withholds its truths from us, he is above all a visionary.41 Whichever way one ultimately choses to read these images, one point remains uncontested. They are an ironic reiteration and an iridescent play with the conventional Japanese codes of erotic language that quite self-consciously works with the duplicity of the photographic signifier. If, in these scenes, the female models stage themselves in poses normally forbidden to them, the phantasies of sexual liberation they embody can only be articulated within the very codes regulating what is permissible and what is an obscene representation of sexuality that had determined their constraints. Thus, in one sense, the artfully tied up bodies of Araki’s models can be read as metaphors for the way Japanese society binds its women into constrictive modes of behaviour, restricts their agency and their creativity even while, in another sense, by illustrating the interchangeability between the fetishized feminine body and food items or flowers, these images dismantle the gender presuppositions upon which Japanese pornography tacitly thrives. Either way, however, the one constraint these images concede is that whatever the intention of the posed erotic body might be, it is inevitably a framed performance, for its miseen-scène of desire can only be articulated in reference to the very visual iconography it seeks to transgress. Read as tropes for the photographic process that represents phantasies, these artfully displayed feminine

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bodies – exhibiting everything and revealing nothing – seem to broadcast a message about the fallibility inherent to creative innovation. Only by accepting the constraints of conventional iconography, indeed by excessively and self-consciously exhibiting them, can one dismantle the bonds that make up the wonder of fascination. One image sums up Araki’s photographic project in all its irony playfulness (Nobuyoshi Araki, Untitled, in Bokujukitan, 1994). In front of an open window, showing an array of trees in full blossom, Araki is lying bare-footed on a couch in semi-upright position, apparently day-dreaming. His head, tilted backwards, rests on his right hand, his eyes are closed. His camera, along with other photographic paraphernalia as well as a writing pad and pens, has been placed on the floor next to the head of the couch at whose foot we see an empty water bottle. Separate from him, yet almost perfectly reduplicating his pose, we see a woman, bound together and hanging from the ceiling. Her head is completely tilted backwards, her eyes, like his, are closed; yet conspicuously unlike him, she is still wearing high-heeled shoes. She, too, appears to be lost in reverie, so that the scene enacted for our benefit depicts two actors, bound together in a mutual scene of phantasizing yet  also blissfully oblivious to their surroundings, with neither directly addressing the other. What was implicit in the other photographs is here quite self-consciously staged – namely the presence of an uncanny body double, articulating the oblique encounter between two separate mises-en-scène of desire. On the one hand, the model, phantasizing about how she might captivate her chosen photographer, and on the other hand Araki himself, dreaming about the language game he will enact over her exhibited body. And the message this photograph conveys to us, as though on behalf of all the others, is: ‘I am offering you the tableau of a heterotopic world where mutual erotic phantasies obliquely intersect as the model playfully consents to the artist fixing her body into a trope.’ Together, yet also separate, the artist and the model recreate themselves, even while the model, though submitting to the act, also resists any appropriation. Yet, in the midst of this humorous scene of shared pleasure, what we are suddenly struck by is the distance that Araki’s interrogation of conventional codes of erotic visualization and their ironic and self-conscious reassemblage calls forth. Though implicitly present, we have been banished to the other side of the threshold. Araki and his model are

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enjoying for us and, despite their chosen pose of self-abandonment, they are letting us know that we can be nothing but mere onlookers in a performance they share. The joke might well be on us. Dialogue was a crucial part of writing this piece. For their comments and their criticism, I  want to thank Birgit Erdle, Susanne Hermanski, Walter Keller, Benjamin Marius and Nikolaus G. Schneider.

15 THE FRAGILITY OF THE QUOTIDIAN Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s Work with Death

Sigmund Freud notes that while our possibilities of happiness are already restricted by our constitution, unhappiness is much less difficult to experience. He concludes: We are threatened with suffering from three directions from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men.1 In his late writings, Freud thus comes to insist that both the individual psyche as well as culture in general are as informed by a drive towards death as they are by a desire to pursue happiness. If, then, the fragility of quotidian life and our propensity toward unhappiness emerge most poignantly in moments when death actually occurs, this is also a solitary, highly individual and incommunicable event, an experience of utmost intimacy. At the moment of our dying, we are alone. While death is generally acknowledged as the one certainty we have in life, as the one unequivocal measure of human existence, it is impossible to say with certainty when it will occur. No one can know in advance what death will

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be like, and the actual event of death eludes all knowledge of the survivors. All that can be said about death is that it entails an irrevocable fissure, a break with the ordinary everyday, with its language, its structures, and its rules. For the mourners, the event of death produces a crisis in the quotidian we might call an undoing of the world. In Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s film Today (Tänään, 1996), the death of a father is recounted in three parts. The first shows his granddaughter, throwing her ball in the backyard of her home, emotionally detached from the terrible event. She can grasp death, which is nothing to her, only through the effects it has produced in others, such as the excessive crying of her father who normally never cries. The second part, allegedly more concerned with the daughter Vera’s cultural malaise, briefly includes a few seconds of the fatal nocturnal drive through the woods, an ominous trace of something that has occurred but can neither be clearly named nor located. Not until the third part, entitled ‘Dad,’ do we finally see the father, silently walking along a path in the woods and then lying down. This part is staged far less realistically than the other two, as though it were a hallucination. The intentionally artificial lighting of the scene prompts us to ask who is telling this part of the story. Has the spectre of a dead man returned to enact his death for us? But if so, the revenant can do so only in the form of a dumb show, and only by way of setting the stage for a death he anticipates. We are watching a scene that allows us to expect death, not the actual event, although we are doing so after knowing that it has occurred. The cinematic medium allows us to simultaneously partake of this death before and after it has happened, but there are no images for the event itself, which remains literally unimaginable. At the same time, we might also ask whether this surreal scene is not the son’s fantasy, given that the narrative shifts to him as he, getting up from his bed, recalls the idiosyncratic behaviour of his father. Only after this account does he offer his version of the fatal drive through the nocturnal woods he took with his family because they wanted to go for a swim. The unreality of the scene is heightened by the words he chooses to describe the accident. He remembers pointing out to the others the black shadows of the trees that lay like stripes across the road, until suddenly one of those shadows stood up, ‘and then, again, an accident happened.’ If we recall that the dead in Hades were called shades by the authors of antiquity, we might speculate that ‘Dad’ is a shade from the underworld returned to haunt the living even before he is a corpse.

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Indeed, we might wager, he is dead because he was a shadow who suddenly stood up. We see the glaring white of the headlights and hear the screeching of the tires. But ‘Dad’, alive in this recollection of his death, remains completely elusive. Eija-Liisa Ahtila approaches death from multiple temporal and spatial perspectives and different voices, zeroing in on an event for which no image and no words can be found. In so doing, she renders visible that death, in all its certainty, remains outside clear categories. It is nowhere because it is only a gap, a cut, a transition between the living body and the corpse, a before (the painful fear or the serene anticipation of the person about to die) and an after (the mourning and memorial of the survivors). Its intrusion into everyday life occurs from an ungraspable point, outside all relatable experience, lacking any empirical object. Nevertheless, we must respond to death, must make sense of it, must assign to it a place in our quotidian lives, even if we can do so only in the form of a belated recapitulation of its occurrence. Because death is the one privileged moment of the real, we can speak about it only through highly formalized, figural language, foregrounding its break with mimetic representation. At the same time, we must find closure so that we can move back into the reality of everyday life. The last shots of Today return to the site where the accident occurred, while the voice-over of Vera explains that they planted a small silver spruce by the side of the road. The day has re-asserted itself. We are in the present, together with the traces death has left there, marked by this memorial. Today serves as a useful departure not only for the way Eija-Liisa Ahtila herself repeatedly returns to the theme of mourning and commemoration, but also how she insists on a rigorously formalized enactment of the loss death affords and the recuperation it requires, because she, in so doing, addresses the seminal aporia inherent to any aesthetic engagement with death. By having recourse to a mode of visual storytelling that foregrounds a simultaneity of perspectives, with realistic depictions flowing seamlessly into hallucination, Ahtila points to the fact that  – non-negotiable and non-alterable  – death is the limit of ordinary language. It is a disruption of our image repertoire, even as it has always elicited a plethora of aesthetic representations. As the point where all language fails, death is also the source of all aesthetic formalization.

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Precisely because any representation of death is self-consciously nonmimetic, it also points to the real, beyond quotidian reality, evoking the referent that narratives may point to but not touch. For the survivor, it is a speculation, a spectacle, and a spectre. Yet, as death’s after-effects invariably haunt us, stories about it also serve to protect us against the survival of its power in quotidian life. As we recapitulate the events leading up to and following upon the demise of a loved one, we once again come to orient ourselves in the world of the everyday and to learn to reaffirm its laws. We need narratives about our survival even though we realize that the event of death evades them. Having prompted our account, it exceeds all language of recuperation because all stories about death come after an event the survivors who speak experienced only by proxy. As Eija-Liisa Ahtila has explained about her appropriation of the cinematic medium, she seeks to find moving images of stories that have already happened. The issue of the belatedness at the core of her work proves to be particularly poignant when viewed in conjunction with her thematic interest in death. The images Ahtila creates not only explicitly return to the past, and return this past to the present. They are also moving in a two-fold sense. On the one hand, they perform a movement in time, corresponding to the manner in which death is a temporal process. After all, the fragility of our mortal existence expresses itself in the fact that life is temporally limited. Living means moving towards death, whether we actively pursue it or not. On the other hand, to speak about moving images meant to recollect and perhaps even overcome events that have already occurred also invokes their affective quality. The effect of death is that it appeals to us emotionally as no other state does. Yet, by breaking open ordinary categories of time and space, death also displays a curious proximity to the work of cinema. Indeed, Jean Cocteau once compared making movies to watching death at work. Cinema is a medium that unfolds as a sequence of time, twenty-four images per second, much like death expresses itself through time. Each second – during which in cinema we might see twenty-four images, it comes closer and approaches us, who are still living. In her self-conscious enactment of moving images of stories that – because they have already happened  – invariably have death inscribed in them, Eija-Liisa Ahtila however takes the correspondence between death’s work and that of cinema further than Cocteau intended. While

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Ahtila’s narrators perform confessions of stories that move them, the narratives she enacts, by using multiple screens and a disjunction between the image we see and the voice we hear, juxtapose different times and different spaces, real and imagined. By offering comments on themselves, her narrators enact for us the split between a person experiencing death and the one recalling this experience. They move us even though – or perhaps because – there is a distance between the event and their narration. The scripted words, the montaged images, and the occurrence they recall are not together, yet are conjoined by death, which has no fixed place, no clear category. Disembodied, the voice of the narrator may at times appear to be spectral. Voiceless, the face of one of the players in the story may seem particularly haunting, as though marking the return of somebody who no longer exists. In all cases, however, bringing onto the screen an event that has already occurred so as to record – and in so doing recuperate something lost – invariably invokes the loss itself. This is the ruse subtending Ahtila’s cinematic work with death. The Hour of Prayer (2005) begins with a black screen and the sound of dogs barking. Then, on a quartered screen, images of New York City during a snowstorm appear, moving the narrative that is about to unfold from day to night, from the external public space into the intimacy of a hotel room. Only then does the narrator begin to recall a nightmare about losing her dog Luca she had that January. We see her fall asleep again, while on the far right an image of the dog appears as though her dream were a premonition of the real loss about to occur. At the same time, the rhetorical trick Eija-Liisa Ahtila deploys is that the image of the dog, which on the level of the visualized story about to unfold effectively seems to counter-balance her dream of Luca’s loss, on the level of the narration only confirms that the premonition became reality. Given that we soon come to realize that Luca’s death is the catalyst of the story, the image we see is spectral from the start; a visual recuperation within the  narrative and by the narrative. The cut to the narrator, facing us directly, follows cultural rituals of mourning. The bereaved must remember the dead by exchanging their corpses with memory images. Ahtila, therefore, begins the next sequence with images celebrating Luca’s inhabitation of his space. These correspond to the succinct description of what he meant to her, as though reducing a life to an inscription on a tombstone: ‘I spent a lot of time with my dog. We shared our senses and used them to think about our surroundings together.’

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The narrator then moves to the actual confession. She faces us, as on a stage, so as to recollect the past, thereby offering an account of herself. Returning to the situation leading up to the dog’s death, she describes how, during the Easter holidays, she decided to walk with Luca along a lake close to her country cottage, where the sun had begun to melt the snow. Interspersing realistic images of the landscape, awakening to new life, we see the narrator on stage, enveloped by darkness, frozen into the pathos gesture of the bereaved, as she remembers the moment when Luca broke his leg. The story then moves to images, documenting the x-rays, the operation, and finally the diagnosis of fatal bone cancer. ‘On that day, death entered the house’, the narrator explains, falling into what Joan Didion has called the magical thinking death induces.2 Seeking to express the guilt her own survival has called forth in her, she goes on to confess: ‘I prayed that we could keep Luca Boy at least for the summer, and then later, when Luca died on the second of August, I blamed myself for not praying to have him at least until Christmas.’ What follows are images of the surroundings she used to share with her dog, coloured by the presence of death; an undoing of the world in which the loss of her companion corresponds to her psychic numbness. Her home is empty; the landscape outside is once more covered in snow and ice. Both function as metaphors for the withdrawal from life her state of mourning requires. Yet, as all rituals of mourning insist, a recuperation of life must occur. Sitting once more on the dark stage and giving an account of her mourning, the narrator mentions the Finnish artist residence in Benin, West Africa, where she was able to procure a place for herself. As her story moves to its final location, the Manhattan snowstorm with which The Hour of Prayer began is both recalled and transformed. Having left the snow-covered landscape surrounding her country cottage in favour of a hot African November, the story once more shifts from images of a bustling city centre to the intimate solitude of a bedroom, and with it from day to night. Yet, a significant transformation has occurred, placing the emphasis on waking up from mourning into the dawn of a new morning. The narrator recalls that across the road from her residence was a Catholic church, where early every morning bells began to chime at the break of dawn. She comes to think of the dogs’ howling that accompanies the sound of these bells as a collective canine prayer. This ritualized awakening of her surroundings offers a figural enactment of her waking

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up from the experience of death. In contrast to the sequence with which The Hour of Prayer began, she does not remain in bed, restlessly tossing and turning. Instead, having gotten up, she walks onto another dark stage, the formalized site of her confession, so as to sing her ‘small song’. In so doing, she moves beyond her prophetic nightmare and its traumatic realization into the morning after, invoking her grief even while staging an exuberant triumph over loss. The space of her performance remains enveloped in darkness, but, framing it on the left and the right, images of a morning in Benin eventually appear. When her song is done, these come to replace even the close-up of her face. Turning grief into a song prompts a screen filled with four images of a new day to signal a successful translation. As cultural anthropology has shown, death is conceived as a wound to the community of the living. Rituals of mourning thus fall into two phases. Initially, the bereaved survivors enter into a liminal phase, separate from everyday life. Then, in a second phase, society reasserts itself by symbolically reintegrating the departed. It replaces the dead body with a tombstone and in so doing exchanges the actual corpse with a commemorative image and text. These rituals thus work with the assumption that death is a regeneration of life. In his discussion of the psychic aspects of mourning, Freud in turn has suggested that the second, liminal phase resembles melancholic psychosis. In response to the loss of a loved one, the survivors not only cling to the departed, unwilling to give up their psychic investment in what is gone. Rather, because the mourner fantasizes that what in reality is lost continues to be present to her, her perceptions of her surroundings come to be overflooded by hallucinations. In Consolation Service (1999), Eija-Liisa Ahtila uses the tripartite structure of rituals of mourning as the driving metaphor for her visual narrative about a divorce. The film begins with a narrator explaining that she is writing a story about a couple that has decided to split up. ‘It is a story about an ending’, she explains, in three parts. The first, showing Anni and J.P. visiting their family therapist, sets the stage for the death of their marriage. In the second, the separation they desire comes to be realized. After celebrating J.P.’s birthday in the home of one of their friends, they embark on a fatal nocturnal walk across the frozen lake. As the ice breaks, all of them fall into the freezing water. The hallucinatory images of Anni, a shade, floating beneath the water’s surface in an aquatic Hades, accompanied by both her voice-over and that of the

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narrator, describing the state of timelessness and limitless place, visualize divorce as death. The disregard and loss of love Anni had come to experience in her marriage is now embodied by images of J.P. floating past her. They have lost all contact. In death, each is alone. Yet, like all tales of mourning, this story about an ending also requires a third, recuperative phase. Anni, alone at night in her living room while watching over her sleeping child, suddenly hears someone entering her home. Her grief over the separation from her husband has produced a state of overvigilant psychosis. No longer able to distinguish between hallucination and waking perception, she believes the departed has returned to her. Twice, J.P. magically reappears before her, but as she tries to grab him, he begins to shrink and finally dissolves into specks of dark colour, as though the film image were falling apart. Then Anni, realizing that this spectre has a message for her, simply faces the man, who is dead to her, and as he bows before her she imitates his gesture of respect. With this acknowledgment of his separateness from her, she releases him in what the narrator asks us to read as ‘a kind of consolation service.’ The psychotic presence of a lost husband can now vanish completely. But at the beginning of this last scene, Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s camera had already drawn our attention to a photograph of the couple from the time they were still happy together, standing on the table next to the couch. This quotidian image of the departed commemorating a past union will remain even after the hallucinated return of a dead man has come to an end. Thus, even as Consolation Service in its equation of divorce and death enacts the process of closure and recuperation all rituals of mourning require, Ahtila sets the stage for a sustained haunting on the level of the visual traces left on the screen. In so doing, she not only acknowledges the ubiquitous work of death in the midst of life, but also at the heart of her appropriation of the medium of cinema. In all her moving images of stories that have already happened, the hallucinations Eija-Liisa Ahtila records draw the spectator into the liminal realm between life and death, between the occurrence of death and its ultimate recuperation. If the event of death functions as a disruption of the ordinary, which in turn prompts the bereaved to talk about their relationship to the dead, the liminal phase of mourning, which corresponds to their time of confession, must come to an end so that the everyday can successfully reassert itself. Yet, the moving stories Ahtila constructs around these confessions implicitly sustain the antagonism

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between the reassurance that, in the end, the everyday will assert itself against death, and a recognition that death irrevocably leaves its traces. After all, the cinematic image and the narrators’ voices are nothing other than traces of something that has already happened even while the film has magically been made present again. The medium of cinema thus itself dictates that all efforts at recuperation are fragile. As she patches together fragmented narratives, exploring the event of death from different perspectives, Ahtila’s idiosyncratic use of the cinematic medium renders visible that the regained order is riddled with disruptions, gaps, and disjunctions. Her work with death self-consciously thrives on the proximity between the fabrication of a psychotic reality and the fabrication of cinematic images. Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s newest film Where Is Where? (Missä On Missä?, 2008)  takes the speculation that death, while ubiquitous, has no fixed place as its point of departure. In this story about the killing of a young French boy by his two Arab friends during the Algerian civil war, different times and places flow together, fracturing each other. To the female poet, whose vision is necessary to commemorate this fateful event, death appears at night as a man dressed in black, his face painted white. Yet, he does not enter her house until the next morning, as her two sons leave for school, and he does so because he needs a word with her. In response to her question why she should do this, he replies: ‘So you can construct this time after death by being in these words.’ Yet, the hallucination her poetic gift calls forth  – moving back into the past, making it present again  – also serves to disorientate the present. Her work of death is nowhere, between Europe and North Africa, between the late 1950s and the present. But she also hovers between her personal attempt to understand the events she was not a witness to and the actual occurrences of death, the massacre of Algerians by the French and the revenge of the two Algerian boys. Because her words are irrevocably separate from this particular incursion of death, we remain in the realm of a spectral speculation, which disrupts the stable order of the everyday even while seeking to offer a complex memorial to all the violent deaths of the past. Indeed, the poet’s dreaming produces precisely the strangeness Maurice Blanchot identifies as the point of connection between the work of death and the aesthetic image:  ‘Where there is nothing, that is where the image finds its condition, but disappears into it.’3 Because a dead body is neither the same as the person who was alive nor some

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other thing, it occupies two places, namely the here and the nowhere. Neither of this world nor absent from it, the corpse not only appears as the uncanny double of the departed. It also has no relation to the world in which it appears, except that of an image, of a shadow, constantly present behind the living form even as this living form is about to transform into a shadow. For the one facing a corpse, its dead body enacts a moment of reduplication that turns back on itself to sever all links to any exterior world. But in so doing, it addresses the disorientation inscribed in the work of cinema as well. According to Blanchot, what makes the resemblance of the cadaver to itself so haunting is that its point of reference is ultimately nothing. It renders visible ‘the position of that which remains because it lacks a place.’4 Like the departed, moving images of stories that have already occurred haunt us in a very specific way. Blanchot concludes: ‘One does not live with dead people under penalty of seeing here sink into an unfathomable nowhere.’5 As if to respond to his claim, Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s poet discovers that trying to enter into past events of death in an effort to understand them undoes not only fixed categories of identity but also of space. She imagines the older of the two Arab boys asking: ‘Is death always a private death? When you die, where are you? And where is where?’ Death opens a space where the personal becomes impersonal as the deceased transforms into an image, which can be appropriated by someone living somewhere else, in and at a different time. This is also what the medium of cinema does. It records the work of death not only by foregrounding the ephemerality of existence. As Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s poet enters a virtual realm of images, where her introspection transforms into a projection, generating the cinematic narrative Where Is Where?, her work with death obliterates all reference to any fixed space. The words Ahtila and her poet give to death refuse to fix its meaning. They neither judge nor do they seek to forgive. Instead, they respectfully bow before death, rendering visible that the drive towards death has sustained our history as poignantly as any pursuit of survival. As we are faced with this work of death, we, too, are drawn into nowhere, where the past and the present, the other and the self, the real and the fantastic, where timelessness and time meet – for the brief, fleeting and fragile moment of our viewing.

16 PICASSO’S WAR WOMEN

A painting is a sum of destructions. Pablo Picasso While Pablo Picasso liked to assert ‘I have not painted the war because I am not the kind of painter who goes out like a photographer for something to depict,’ he also openly admitted: ‘I have no doubt that the war is in these paintings I have done. Later on perhaps the historians will find them and show that my style has changed under the war’s influence.’ His privileged subject throughout this period of exile in Paris, in turn, was the representation of women reclining on sofas or sitting upright on chairs, lost in their own thoughts or assertively looking out at us from the canvas. Given Picasso’s self-conscious strategy of displacement, what does it mean that he chose to focus his attention on women’s nude bodies and portraits so as to give oblique expression to the catastrophe of war he did not want to engage directly? And what are its effects on a belated viewing, given that – according to the artist himself – the traces war left on his painting can only come to be detected in hindsight? Steven A. Nash suggests that what changed in response to the war was not the visual style itself but rather the degrees of exaggeration to which Pablo Picasso pushed his spatial disruptions, his deformations of natural forms and his idiosyncratic choice of colour. Equally significant,

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however, is the way that this degree of exaggeration should work precisely by giving war a feminine face. John Berger specifically speaks to this curious thematic fusion when he points out that if the period from 1931 to the end of the Second World War is one in which Picasso found his subjects most successfully, his paintings bring together two profound personal experiences – the triumph of fascism in Europe and his passionate love affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter. Indeed, Guernica (1937), featuring direct references to the collateral damage of war that are unusual for Picasso’s oeuvre, allows us to discern not only the way this painter came to image the affective effects of military actions. It also gives evidence to the way he inscribes his deeply personalized figuration of a war scene with a second theme of embattlement, the latter concerning not military but erotic tension. To the woman holding the lamp, and as such shedding light on the pain, despair and anguish of the victims of the infamous Nazi bombardment of this Spanish town, Picasso gives the face of his lover Dora Maar. She was the only photographer allowed to enter Picasso’s studios while he was painting Guernica so that her photos alone came to record the process of this famous war painting’s genesis. However, the woman with the lantern also recalls, as Mary Ann Caws notes, the woman in Picasso’s Minotaur series modelled on Marie-Thérèse Walter, and as such gives oblique reference to a different battle, contested in the arena of sexual rivalry. Even though Pablo Picasso refused to disclose the symbolic tradition he had tapped into, he called this representation of war’s damage on a civilian population an allegory. Unexpected as such a designation for Guernica might be, it suggests a line of association not only to Francisco de Goya’s Los desastres de la guerra (The Disasters of War, 1810–14), conventionally regarded as the visual predecessor to Picasso’s war women. In that this double portrait transforms two lovers into an allegorical figure of admonishment, it also renders visible Picasso’s debt to classic feminine figurations of war such as Jacopo Palma il Giovane’s Allegory of War and Peace (1544–1628). Because war has been thought to be the business of men since antiquity, Roman mythology casts Mars as the god of war. Yet he is often accompanied by Bellona, conceived as his sister, daughter and wife, who sometimes also serves as his muse or can be seen driving his carriage. As personification of pure destructive force, she in turn recalls both the mythic Amazons and the Greek patron goddess of just war Pallas Athena, who intervenes in the battle of men to help the

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Greeks defend their homeland. Significant for the associative relation between Picasso and Palma il Giovane’s allegory this essay proposes is the way this goddess herself gives body to a double figuration of war. Pallas Athena is victorious in battle precisely because she bears on her shield an image of the head of Medusa, severed from her body, her face distorted in anguish. Her opponents flee from her in terror because she personifies both: a powerful feminine warrior and the monstrous body part of a deity vanquished in battle, bespeaking both to the glory of war’s destructive force and the terrific damage it entails. In Jacopo Palma il Giovane’s allegory, not only peace but also both of these aspects of war are represented by female figures. In the centre of the painting, we find a couple amorously united, the two doves at their feet indicating that their harmonious marriage marks a victory over aggression and strife. The male figure is the one to push away the personification of war, yet what he is casting aside is its feminine manifestation, the youthful Pallas Athena. Leaning on her shield and staff, she visually corresponds to the beautiful beloved he is clasping in his other arm. On the opposite side of the painting, we see a third, somewhat older female figure, tearing her long flowing hair in anguish. The woman in the centre may, in turn, have serenely turned her back to this embodiment of the suffering of war, and yet she is spatially aligned with Athena’s dolorous visual counterpart. The immaculate nudity peace puts on display is set off against a backdrop depicting the pathos gesture of feminine lament, accusation and admonishment. The graceful serenity the couple in the centre is thus not only framed by an allegorization of war that shows its double face  – its powerful furor and its terrible consequences. Palma il Giovane’s Allegory of War and Peace also indicates that feminine figures of war continue to haunt the world of peacetime, if only as that which hovers on the periphery of the image. These war women are there to persistently remind us of the violence on which civil peace is based, insisting that the affective remains of this experience cannot (and must not) be effaced from our view. How then does Pablo Picasso continue this tradition of a double portrait of war, using the feminine body not only to represent fantasies of peace to be gained by combat but also its passive and its aggressive aspect? Typical for one set of paintings from the war years is Femme en pleurs (Weeping Woman, 1937), conceived as a study for Guernica, which focuses on the face of his beloved Dora Maar, contorted in pain. Rather

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than tearing her hair in despair, she is wiping away her tears with a handkerchief. Yet the hand with which she seems to hold this piece of cloth close to her eyes resembles a pair of scissors while the face itself is scarred by her anguished frown and the tears running down her cheeks. We not only get the impression that she is bearing imagined war wounds on her own skin, symptomatically recalling the scared faces of veterans returning from the front lines. The hand, resembling a potentially violent instrument, also renders her passivity more ambivalent. Even while the portrait registers a psychic battle, in which internal suffering anticipates the external destruction of war that had already begun to be staged in Spain and was about to be unleashed on the rest of Europe, the mode of expression is itself aggressive. The materiality of the woman’s pain, most notably rendered in the starred eyes that seem to protrude like explosive grenades from the face’s surface, attack us as viewers. Indeed, in its violence, the visual contortion is such as to leave our eyes as crossed as those of the crying woman herself. The handkerchief, in turn, indicates a further attack on our vision, transforming the woman’s psychic agony as allegory for the collateral damage of war into the depiction of a different adversarial relation, now regarding the model and the spectator. We are affectively called upon to share her pain because this painted rendition of her agony injures us. The portrait emerges as the site where distanced viewing and tactile engagement with another’s suffering bleed into each other because the surface of the face (marked by pain) and the canvas (marked by brush strokes) have come to be conflated. At the same time, Picasso’s war women all function as displaced self-portraits of sorts. By painting the sorrow of his beloved, the painter finds an image for his own experience of the catastrophe of political violence. Her demonstrative exhibition of lament is also his. The pointed hand holding the handkerchief recalls that of the painter wiping his canvas. And yet, if her face mirrors his despair, its effect is to produce our anguish as well. We are called upon to share with the painter the process of bringing forward an expression of the emotional traces left by war’s destructive might. A second set of paintings can be seen as the counterpoint to Pablo Picasso’s doleful war woman, focusing instead on feminine embodiments of military power. In Femme se coiffant (Woman Dressing her Hair, 1940), painted in response to the defeat of France, the female nude and the enemy soldier form a unified if distinctly dissonant whole. Recalling

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Grande baigneuse (Large Bather, 1921), we see a huge woman towering over us, intimidating us with her excessive physical presence. In the earlier painting, one might take the looming figure to embody fantasies about the unrestricted proximity of and protection to be expected from the maternal body. In the latter painting, all enjoyment of surrendering oneself to a powerful feminine figure is absent. Far from sitting serenely on a chair and gazing into open space as though lost in her own thoughts (as is the case in the earlier painting), this wartime nude is placed inside a confined space, the walls of which she threatens to break down with her proudly defiant arm gesture. She, too, towers above the viewer, only now her enormous left foot is no longer languidly curled in upon itself but aggressively stretching outward; a metonymy of the invading troops’ boots about to crush anything that comes in their way. Even her nudity no longer signifies a nakedness to be taken possession of by the viewer. Her fragmented body parts, the firm protruding breasts, the full belly, the horizontally elongated upper body presents the naked skin as a soldier’s armed uniform, its rib cage spreading out like a protective shield. In response to the invading Nazi forces, Pablo Picasso not only exaggerates the body fragmentation he had come to perfect in his cubist phase but also uses his reassembling of this nude figure to merge the feminine with the masculine. As our eye moves along the painted surface, a conventional image of vanity – a woman engrossed in her toilette – transforms into the representation of a terrifying birth. The hair she is brushing has morphed into a split face. The left side, slyly smirking at us, recalls the brutal gaze of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (The Ladies of d’Avignon, 1907), the right side, with its open mouth, its moustached nose, and its dark patch of hair could, in turn, be seen as uncannily referencing the face of Adolf Hitler. Diametrically opposed to Jacopo Palma il Giovane’s allegory of peace, this anagrammatic body signifies a coupling of the sexes in which the treacherous femme fatale and the invading soldier emerge as two sides of the same coin. What comes to be staged is a capitulation before the enemy cast as an overpowering woman, her abundant physicality a sign of phallic prowess. But in the tradition of the double vision to which the classic vanitas belongs, we must also ask: Does Picasso cast the horror of military defeat as a defiant naked woman so as to use her sexual attraction as a cover for death? Does her alluring beauty allow us to avert our gaze from the masculine figure of destruction emerging from the back of her head? Or is the nude presented as

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an inversion of a crushing military force so as to mask her threatening power? Indeed, might we speak of the reawakening of a modern Medusa whose contortion disturbs us not by wounding our eye in an effort to call forth our tears of empathy? Instead, the attack on the safe distance of the viewer consists in drawing us into a terrifying phantasmagoria of military furor in which a nude shifts shape to give an alluring face to military aggression. Taken together, Femme se coiffant and Grande baigneuse are emblematic of the way Pablo Picasso uses body distortions to express his personal experience of the political catastrophe of the 1930s and early 1940s. In these oblique references to the war around him, he implicitly recalls his cubist experiments with a radical liberation from traditional figurative representation. In hindsight, of course, this earlier exploration into visual sensation more interested in tactility, in breaking apart and recomposing body shapes, proved to be the last optimistic expression of an esprit moderne lost with the First World War. With veterans returning from the horrors of trench warfare, their actual bodies blown to bits and reassembled with the help of prosthesis, this aesthetic project found itself painfully realized in actual experience. Picasso’s move towards an exaggerated visual distortion thus finds itself framed by two war experiences. While the playful utopianism of the cubist way of seeing had lost its force once the political reality after 1918 had caught up with its aesthetic project, its violent energy is what Picasso taps into when, two decades later, the mass death in the trenches no one had imagined before the outbreak of the First World War finds its fateful repetition. Only now, the sombre tone of the subject matter catches up with and corresponds to what was initially a playful aesthetic process of fragmentation and reassemblage. If, then, Pablo Picasso repeatedly uses the feminine body to depict the two sides of war (which in Jacopo Palma il Giovane we find contained in one frame), both the anguish and the terrifying empowerment they put on display articulate his subjective experience by dislocating it onto the body of the sexual other. This gendering plays to the dangerous side of sexuality – the fallibility and self-abundance all coupling entails, even when it is undertaken in the spirit of a peaceful battle between the sexes. Indeed, his war women are less a dramatic change from previous depictions of female sexuality, already so brutal in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon that inaugurated his cubist phase. Instead, they simply underscore the

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dark threat inherent to all sexual pleasure, which in times of peace feminine beauty successfully screens out. Rather than collaging the female body in line with violent fantasies of desire whose danger remains on the level of fantasy, these reconfigured war women explicitly exude a potent intensity bespeaking to the fallibility of the male artist no longer merely as lover but as the victim of political aggression. As Steven A. Nash puts it, the ‘darkly limned, torturous deformations of female anatomy’ serve to articulate the ‘distorting, transformative powers of wartime emotion’. If these wartime women can be taken to be reflections of Picasso’s psychic reaction to the threat of fascism looming over Europe, they must, however, be read as double-voiced self-portraits. In them, the lover’s playful erotic vulnerability transforms into the bleak helplessness of the civilian in the midst of a city under siege by occupying military troops. Yet these powerful wartime women also remain indebted to the rhetoric of the double vision so dear to surrealism in general. Looking at La femme à l’artichaut (Woman with Artichoke, 1941), we once again find the masculine and the feminine welded together in the figure of a woman, seated on a throne-like chair, sternly staring out at us. The experience of occupied Paris makes even the most ordinary things threatening, with the presence of war twisting and distorting all diurnal vision. The sharp fingers of her left hand seem like the claws of an armoured glove. The vegetable she is holding in her right hand has taken on the sinister shape of a military weapon, perhaps a grenade, perhaps a cudgel, perhaps a sceptre. The thumb, in turn, seems to be pointed directly at us, as if underscoring her menacing appearance. Again, the head is split, with a masculine face emerging from her forehead as though he were her brainchild. The visual distortion of her figure is such that her resolute if grim posture bespeaks to a sense of doom even as it remains unclear whether this references the stoic attitude of a civilian woman who continues to perform her domestic duties despite the military presence of an enemy who is always on her mind. Or does the doubling of the faces imply her complicity with the enemy, which would, in turn, reference the ability of the housekeeper to spy and inform on those civilians she works for? It remains unclear whether Picasso imagines in her the face of the collaborator, the sinister artichoke a displaced image of her treachery. Or does her Janus face help him imagine a civilian woman’s fear of the enemy, visually aligned with the elongated artichoke to signify the occupiers’ intimidating presence at the hearth of her home? Or

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are we to see in this seated woman a resistance fighter, ready to use her weapon in self-defence? Pablo Picasso’s idiosyncratic reassembling serves to render all fixed identity positions impossible. The aggression thus resides partly in the effect Picasso’s shape-shifting has. If we are called upon to reassemble this body in the act of our viewing, what we also recognize is that in times of war, we can never be certain of our perceptions. In a similar manner, the painting Femme au chapeau, assise dans un fauteuil (Woman with Hat Seated in an Armchair, 1941/42) confronts us with the duplicitous face of suffering. With her split face, the woman we see poised on her chair could be an informant, sitting in a Gestapo office. Or she could be the one examining, threatening and judging one accused of a crime. But she could equally be a spy for the resistance, with her dainty hat masquerading as an elegant woman of the world to cover her true intent. Yet the elegant costume also stands in stark contrast to the bestial details her body contains, in reference perhaps to more primitive instincts breaking through her civilized mien. The nose recalls the beak of a bird, her hands its claws. We cannot tell whether she is the object of suffering or the one out to take revenge. We are perhaps to think of one of the Erinys of Greek mythology who mercilessly haunt those guilty of spreading violence and destruction. All we can make out is that in a world that threatens to fall apart  – referenced by the disarray of the ceiling and wall behind her – this seated woman too has lost her unified contours. Furthermore, while the left, almost masculine side of her face is hard and sombre, the right side wears a coy smile. With frivolity pitted against resignation, we are disturbed by her direct gaze because it seems both to interrogate and to seduce. Above all, it appeals to us in such a way that we, in turn, cannot avert our gaze from the knowledge of destructibility she insists on proclaiming. There, is, however, a further aspect to Pablo Picasso’s war women that focuses not on their threatening power but rather on the fragility of their erotic allure. Between 1941 and 1942, he repeatedly returned to the subject of the reclining nude, whose outstretched bulbous body is placed inside a room spatially so confined as to suggest a prison cell. In L’Aubade (The Aubade, 1942) we find the woman doubled, one lying on her back on a bedspread whose stripes recall a torture rack while the other sits beside her, playing a string instrument. The fragmented background in which this double figure is placed evokes not only a sense

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of entrapment to serve as the psychic correspondence of the everyday experience of living in an occupied city. The walls and the floor also seem to have lost all relation to gravity. The women seem to be floating in space. They seem lost in a fantasy that holds together the day-dreamer and the musician, regardless whether this refers to a pleasurable escapist illusion or a defeatist capitulation to a world caving in on them. This shared experience of enclosure, in which creative activity is pitted against entrapment is, however, also striking in that it recalls a similar double figure in an earlier painting. In Deux femmes (Interior with a Girl Drawing, 1935) we also have two women crowded together in a confined space. The central figure, while not reclining on a bed, has placed her head on a table, and, though fully dressed, recalls the dreaming nudes in Femme aux cheveux jaunes (Woman with Yellow Hair, 1931) or Jeune fille devant un miroir (Girl before a Mirror, 1932). And as in L’Aubade, she, too, is accompanied by a second female figure, lost in her own thoughts as she is sitting on the floor facing a mirror, serenely sketching. While the earlier Deux femmes is clearly less sombre regarding the distorted setting for this scene of shared reverie – a curtained window can be seen in the back; flowers adorn the table – the division into two feminine bodies anticipates the fragmented bodies of the war women. At the same time this doubling puts on display the very complexity of transference on which Pablo Picasso’s dual feminization of war is based. The distortion of both bodies and space serves to distance us from any safe viewing, foregrounding instead the tactility of both the object and the subject of the artistic process. The adversarial tension in this case, however, does not pit a woman lamenting the destruction of war against one signifying its powerful furor. Rather, the two female figures draw attention to the insurmountable gap on which all artistic production is based. Facing a mirrored self-image that we are not shown (and which thus functions as the blind spot of the painting), the woman sketching is creating an image on paper that implicitly fuses a self-portrait with the portrait of the model leaning over the table. Her gaze, furthermore, is reverently attached to what she is drawing and not to what she might see if she raised her eyes from the paper. She is clearly re-imagining even though – and therein lies the tactile force of the painting – she senses the presence of the other woman along with her own reflected self-image. She is re-conceiving her mirrored self in line with the sensual experience of the other with whom she is sharing this moment of inspiration.

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The visual analogy of the sleeping woman in Deux femmes to Femme au cheveux jaune, in turn, further brings into play the conceptual alignment of woman and war we find in the erotic subjects that temporally bookend Pablo Picasso’s wartime women. In both paintings, Picasso selfconsciously admits that as an artist he was able to give shape to, indeed experience his emotions only by virtue of an intermediary, be it a version of himself in the act of sketching or simply the model he will recreate on canvas after having turned his eyes from his muse. That in Deux femmes both are female figures indicates the gender complexity inscribed in this artistic exchange. John Berger, suggesting that Picasso could only fully see himself when he was reflected in a woman, surmises that it is as though ‘only through the marvellous shared subjectivity of sex that he can allow himself to be know’. If the majority of his paintings are of women, most of them, he adds, ‘are composite creatures – themselves and he together. In a sense these paintings might be called self-portraits – not portraits of himself alone and untransformed, but self-portraits of the creature he and the woman became as they sensed one another’. At issue, then, is an exchange of sensual intensities that works with precisely the separation between two individual subjects that the sexual act seeks to bridge. The artist discovers his emotions in and through the women his artistic vision (and then his painter’s hand) transforms into a bifurcated representation, referencing both himself and his model. The image he creates is more than self-projection. As his brushstroke reconceives the sensations of his eye, passing over the woman’s body, it captures a complex sense of touch. The pleasure of her body is both his and hers. All objective distance is disbanded. Instead, as we see the woman in Femme au cheveux jaune through Picasso’s brushstroke, we not only sense him seeing her but are also called upon to share in his visual touch. Yet the visual distortion this pre-Second World War nude works with also indicates a two-fold refraction. Over and against the painter’s appropriation of the pleasure of his model, she is shown to be separate from him, entranced by a reverie of her own that his eye and hand can only sense but never fully grasp. Deux femmes pointedly renders visible the three positions pitted against each other, which in the other nudes of the early 1930s are only evoked: the model, the painter and the canvas as site of projection and self-reflection. If Pablo Picasso requires an intermediary as mirror so as to discover his emotions, his paintings are also self-consciously conceived as mediations. They stand if for an imagined touch, but are

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not the sensation itself. They reference violent disruption in that the shared sensuality they celebrate gestures toward the fragility of all erotic pleasure. The dreaming woman will wake and leave the scene, will withdraw from the artist’s grasp. It is precisely the separateness of the painter and his model that calls forth a composite creature on canvas. And it is this adversarial relationship that makes both for an anticipation of the spirit of war in the paintings of the early 1930s and its continuation in his post-war woman. Returning one last time to Jacopo Palma il Giovane’s allegory, it is fruitful to recall the way the erotically united couple he uses to symbolize peace emerges from but is also framed by two feminine embodiments of war. This bespeaks to a mutual implication of peace and war along the lines suggested by Michel Foucault, who notes that politics is a continuation of war with other means in that ‘war is going on beneath peace; peace is a coded war’. Particularly resonant with the way Pablo Picasso uses the feminine body to discover and depict his responses to the war is the further point Foucault makes. Even after an armistice has been signed, the spirit of war continues: A battlefront runs through the whole of society, continuously and permanently, and it is this battlefront that puts us all on one side or the other. There is no such thing as a neutral subject. We are all inevitably someone’s adversary. In Picasso’s work, the notion that even in peacetime we are at war with one another surfaces most clearly in the antagonism played out in the arena of sexual desire, re-encoding military furor in erotic terms, and thus conceiving the sexual act as a scene of gender battle. Indeed, if we turn to two particularly adversarial couples by Picasso – Deux têtes de femmes (Two Heads of Women, 1931) from before the war and Le baiser (The Kiss, 1969) painted long after peace had returned to Europe – we find the spirit of antagonism, which in Palma il Giovane’s War and Peace is neatly severed, conjoined in the composite body of a vehement embrace. The sense of despair and disempowerment of the war experience comes to be refigured as the mutually induced and painful bliss of sexual ecstasy. Werner Spies speaks of Picasso’s post-Second World War couples as giving in to continuous trench warfare. Equally important is the way this sensual violence is not only shared by both players.

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Fusing the masculine and the feminine position, Picasso’s post-war couples also collapse the distinction between compliance and imposition. The woman takes on the role of an adversarial opponent in this game precisely because she is conceived as a self-empowered player in the martial battle of peacetime erotics. The sense of impotence in the presence of an occupying force that has taken on the face of a woman is transformed into a sustained antagonism in which both are empowered precisely because they are mutually overwhelmed. They both acknowledge their vulnerability. The exaggerated visual distortion now speaks to the way they come together even while doing so as separate subjects that are – when it comes to sexual desire – indeed anything but neutral.

17 CONTENDING WITH THE FATHER Louise Bourgeois and her Aesthetics of Reparation

If, throughout her life, Louise Bourgeois thought of herself as an archaeologist, digging tirelessly in the past to discover the source for her anxiety, one of her most resilient primal fantasies revolves around the scene of a domestic crime. As she explained in an interview with Donald Kuspit: What frightened me was that at the dinner table, my father would go on and on, showing off, aggrandizing himself. And the more he showed off, the smaller we felt. Suddenly there was a terrific tension, and we grabbed him – my brother, my sister, my mother – the three of us grabbed him and pulled him onto the table and pulled his legs and arms apart – dismembered him, right? And we were so successful in beating him up that we ate him up. Finished. It is a fantasy, but sometimes the fantasy is lived.1 First exhibited at 112 Greene Street in 1974, The Destruction of the Father (also called Le Repas du Soir) not only re-enacts this murderous scenario, but also gives evidence to the ambivalence at stake in putting an intimate fantasy on public display (17.1). The violence Louise Bourgeois imagined in her childhood home in Antony, France, is relived not in mind but as a sculpted scene, recreated in a different time and place for the benefit of an audience she is inviting to share her resuscitation. Furthermore, by

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Louise Bourgeois, The Destruction of the Father (detail), 1974, Latex, plaster, wood, fabric and red light, 237.8 × 362.3 × 248.6 cm. Collection The Easton Foundation, Photo: Peter Moore. Copyright: The Easton Foundation/VAGA, New York/ DACS, London 2017.

giving body to her fantasy within a clearly set frame – a dark box, theatrically lit with red light, set up in an exhibition space – boundaries between the animate and the inanimate, the present and the past, the other and the self uncannily dissolve. Recalling what was from the start an imaginary refiguration of her actual family life resurrects the past as the return of her own psychic phantoms. The artist is reliving not the real evening meal but the way she had come to recast it in her psychic reality. Her recreation brings the

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past back into the present even while freezing the retrieved affect in a virtual third space that sustains the tension between an original anxiety and the belated effects this has had. At the same time, the re-enactment taps into the magical belief in the omnipotence of thought, which Sigmund Freud called one of the key elements of the uncanny.2 By transforming reminiscences of the past she chooses not to relinquish into a sculpted hallucinatory scene, Louise Bourgeois exerts control over the paternal aggression at the heart of her lived fantasy. She manipulates the recreation, deciding what will be shown and what will remain hidden from sight. Yet it is equally important to note that we come to the scene of the crime after the event. What we see, encased in the dark box, is the crime scene, not a re-enactment of the crime itself. On display are the leftovers of the second meal rather than the actual act of devouring the dismembered father, as this horrifically doubles a quotidian evening dinner. Foregrounded in the sculpted reliving of the fantasy scenario is thus not the father’s crime of showing off, but rather the murder it prompted. While we are called upon to imagine the presence of the mother and the three children, first captivated by the father’s unabashed selfaggrandizement and then capturing him, we are shown what remains after the violence triggered by the father’s aggressive usurpation of the evening dinner table has taken place. Relegated to the status of evidence, these body parts themselves serve an ambivalent articulation. On the one hand, by drawing our attention to the fact that a crime has been committed even while eliminating the actors, Louise Bourgeois gives voice to the guilt her murderous impulse calls forth. Precisely because exhibited on the table are the father’s dismembered body parts cast in plaster and latex, this sculpted meal (repas) can be seen as an emblem of the daughter’s need to repair (réparer) the damage her fantasy has inflicted. In a gesture of atonement, she accuses herself publicly, using the re-enactment to claim responsibility for the destruction fantasy that has lived on in her mind. On the other hand, given that the only body still present is the father, now passively showing off, one might also say: inside the dark box, on the level of the theatrical scene put on display there, the dismembered father continues to hold forth, albeit in an enactment orchestrated by his daughter. In his destruction, we are to surmise, the father is all the more powerful. He is, after all, what the installation is about, while those who have survived the killing, having vanished from the scene, are present only by the traces they have left behind of their act.

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As such, Louise Bourgeois cannily taps into the duplicitous power of belated reparations, commemorating the very crime they are meant to atone. In a late diary entry from 14 March 1997, after declining the verb réparer (to repair) she adds, ‘Eating at a table, devouring also a form of “faison table rase”.’ In that The Destruction of the Father literally puts on the table what is to be erased from the mental slate, resuscitating as a hallucination in the real what has been devoured in fantasy, however, nothing is cleared away. Instead, a monument is erected to the father, whose obscene self-exhibitionism has simply migrated from an actual person to a figure of fantasy, remembered in a re-assemblage of his dismemberment. Where, during the war, spies got rid of evidence by swallowing it, Louise Bourgeois wallows in presenting the remains of her personal resistance against tyranny, sustaining the antagonism between her act of destruction and her father’s phantomatic return.3 There is, however, even more to the ambivalence inhabiting this recreation of a domestic scene of crime. As Louise Bourgeois reformulates the family story behind The Destruction of the Father, her comments tap into yet another aspect of repetition compulsion. Psychic reparation seamlessly transforms into a complex gesture of reappropriation in which the daughter and the father exchange positions. The terrifying family dinner table, headed by a father who sits and gloats, with the mother initially trying to satisfy the tyrant while the children, reduced to a state of utter incapacitation, sit in silence, also emerges as the scene of a battle over who owns the right to excessive self-expression. In the statement Eleanor Munro published in her profile of the artist, we have a slightly different version of the same story: There is a dinner table and you can see all kinds of things are happening. The father is sounding off, telling the captive audience how great he is, all the wonderful things he did, all the bad people he put down today. But this goes on day after day. A kind of resentment grows on the children. There comes a day they get angry. Tragedy is in the air. Once too often, he has said his piece. The children grabbed him and put him on the table. And he became the food. They took him apart, dismembered him. Ate him up. And so he was liquidated. It is, you see, an oral drama! The irritation was his continual verbal offence. So he was liquidated: the same way he had liquidated his children.4

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In this case, the story is told not as the personal confession of one of the actors at the table, but from the position of a distanced spectator of a ritual who wants us to read it as a mythic narrative of retribution. Significantly, the mother is absent from the scene of trans-generational struggle, with the children doing onto the father what he has done onto them; literally paying him back in kind. If his compulsive storytelling reduced them to nothing, they now obliterate him. Furthermore, eating the father who has selfishly been feeding on their attention, demanding their pity and their reassurance while leaving no room for their own emotional needs, also involves another turn to the literal. The children answer the father’s harsh demand to partake in the stories he compulsively tells about himself by actually partaking of his flesh, rendering the distinction between paternal words and body obsolete. Yet for the daughter-artist, who commemorates this act of destruction by recreating it, more is at issue than simply recalling a ritual punishment. If the attack puts an end to the father’s abusive speech, it also marks the moment when her previous silence becomes aesthetically loquacious. By incorporating the father, she ironically also takes on what was at the root of the killing fantasy to begin with, namely the act of projecting oneself in storytelling. In commenting on her sculptured scene, she not only claims for herself the right to speak the last word, judging the father who incessantly judged her. She also poignantly places her act on a par with other mythic tales of filial insurrection, from William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus to Freud’s Moses and Monotheism. Finally, what these commentaries, recapitulating both an intimate scene of fantasy and uncovering the back story to a sculpture also draw attention to, is Louise Bourgeois’s deep emotional investment in aggression as the driving force behind her artistic work. In her writings, she consistently connects paternal presence with a destructive force, noting: ‘Whenever my father would come in, we no longer existed.’5 If, however, the father is remembered as bringing an intensity of emotions with him whenever he entered the house, turning her childhood into ‘much melodrama, intense suffering, wished friendship, compliments or support fervently awaited, feared punishments, the blames, the shame, given with difficulty and “reluctantly” ’, she also admits that her own fantasy work itself often takes a violent turn. ‘From everything, I make up an awful story where things go from bad to worse […] children conspire against the parents, parents cook their children.’6

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A proclivity to destruction is thus for what she faults her father but also what she shares with him. Indeed, to take on the father emerges as a duplicitous gesture. Even while, in fantasy, she draws scenes of competition with paternal authority, in her work as a sculptor she is beginning to handle her paternal debt by implicitly engaging the father as one of her key sources of inspiration. She appropriates the annihilating power she attributes to his presence (and above all his words), so as to productively refigure this legacy into her own artistic language. Indeed, as she confesses in a diary entry from 24 March 1978, ‘it is through Identification with aggressor or with God I manipulate them, they do not manipulate me.’ The murderous impulse on display in The Destruction of the Father emerges as the lynchpin to the shift her work took in the early 1970s because it puts her interest in conquering her personal fears and anxieties on display.7 Yet her re-enactment of the fantasy scene of paternal devouring does more than cathartically exorcize his demon. It takes on her complex debt to the father, identifying his abusive verbal power as the source of her own destructive reconstruction; self-consciously taking possession of a past that possesses her. Resculpting past trauma Returning to The Destruction of the Father with Louis Bourgeois’ own commentary in mind allows me to read it not only as a cathartic workingthrough of one of her seminal primal scenes of fantasy. My claim is that it can also be understood as a reflection on what living fantasy in the act of re-sculpting a traumatic past entails. As such, it functions as a key to the way psychoanalysis came to inform Bourgeois’ aesthetic process in more general terms. According to Freud, the work of fantasy does more than summon up an imaginary object; it stages it as a visualized drama of wish-fulfilment. The fantasizer is invariably present in this scripted scene, taking on multiple roles in a mise-en-scène of desire to which she belongs. As the one responsible for organizing its shape, however, the author of the fantasy is always also the privileged viewer, both inside and outside the scene. Indeed, the pleasure fantasy affords has to do with the way it allows Bourgeois to control her fears by imposing a coherent visualized scenario onto what would otherwise be undetermined affects. As claustrophobic as the recasting of her evening meal might be, it is unequivocally a theatrical scene of her own making. Louise Bourgeois is the creator of the bulbous mounds hanging from the ceiling and covering

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the floor. She has carefully calculated how to arrange the moulds of lamb and chicken legs in midst the egg-shaped rounds on the table. At the same time, fantasies are mental representations of affects that make sense of unconscious anxieties and desires by regulating how these come to be voiced. Rather than screening out uncomfortable truths, they encrypt them in scripted scenarios that make use of dream rhetoric of psychic distortions. As such, fantasy affords a compromise between the unconscious psychic material that insists on drawing attention to itself and the psychic censor who protects the ego from too traumatic an articulation of repressed knowledge. Reading The Destruction of the Father as an emblematic performance of the work of fantasy thus means focusing on the destabilizing of meaning it brings into play. There is, first and foremost, the frame, establishing a scene which both reflects and contests what Freud had come to call the other scene of the unconscious. Intimate psychic material has been externalized, allowing us, as distanced spectators, to visually partake in the sculpted recasting of her father’s remains, even while we are clearly unable to enter into the encased theatrical scene so as to move around in it ourselves. Our position is fixed in a frontal gaze, confined to peering around the bulbous shapes encircling the table, but prevented from looking behind or beneath, much as we can neither penetrate into the dark recesses from which they seem to emerge nor into the folds of the curtain functioning as a backdrop. We are staged as the external voyeurs of a grotesque distortion of paternal exhibitionism. If, implicitly, there is no way out for those in the scene, for us as spectators there is no way in. We are not only coming to a scene of crime after the event, but are also held back by the invisible fourth wall of an implicit theatre stage, unable to transgress this obstacle. The father’s uncanny presence-in-absence, thematically at issue in this darkly melodramatic display of his dismemberment, becomes part of the aesthetic effect. Louise Bourgeois draws us into her recreation of lived fantasy by underscoring that something recedes from our visual grasp; analogous to the way the return to consciousness of repressed knowledge is always also curtailed. Indeed, while the mise-en-scène of desire circumvents prohibition by encrypting the troubling knowledge that fantasy gives an oblique voice to, the sculpted re-enactment re-installs this rhetoric of duplicity. We have only a curtailed access to a reconstruction that tantalizes us by playing with our own desire for complete vision even while

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prohibiting its fulfilment. If in Louise Bourgeois’ narrative fantasy the father liquidates the children with his abusive words, in her restaging of his liquidation, she takes on his aggressive power by diminishing us. Straining our eyes as we delve into the dark recesses and folds, we find ourselves constricted in our visual power. Furthermore, far from protecting us from the claustrophobic overproximity of ominous bulbous shapes that leave little room for any movement inside the scene, we – though distanced and constrained – are nevertheless affectively drawn into the set. We are let in on a secret even though we can never fully penetrate it because, as in all dreams, the dramatic visualization is overdetermined. The surplus of moulded chicken legs functions like a double vision, metonymy for the many limbs the children tore off the father, but also for the fowl proper to a typical bourgeois (and, presumably, Bourgeois) evening meal. The ominous bulbs, in turn, could be seen as grotesquely embellished breasts, exerting pressure on the deconstructed father as though constaining his space. Yet their claustrophobic effect also recalls Louise Bourgeois’ description of how her father’s self-aggrandizing behaviour at the dinner table made his children feel small, dwarfed by the words coming out of his mouth and by the emotional demand these made on them. Furthermore, three different fantasy scenarios come to be juxtaposed in the visual dramatization of The Destruction of the Father. If, in her narrative comments on this work, Louise Bourgeois begins with the experience of incapacitation  – ‘my father is eating me with his verbal abuse’  – and then moves on to an active rebellion  – ‘I am eating my father to finish him off’ – in her recreation of the lived fantasy, she welds together these two moments into a temporally duplicitous domestic scene of crime. This both testifies to the destruction of the father and the reconstruction of his terrifying presence: ‘A father has been eaten.’ Again, the framed encasement of the sculpted scene can be taken as a canny gesture towards the duplicitous power at issue in any retrieval of a painful past. The stifling affective intensity the daughter came to attribute to her father’s presence is fixed in the act of re-capturing his destruction. The dismembered father will always be lying on the table. Retained in the display of his destruction is his phantomatic return. As such, the scene contains the father’s aggressive omnipotence in both senses of the word; it restricts his strategic power by encircling it with the bulbous shapes even while it preserves it in the enclosure of this visualized spectacle. Yet

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it also brings a further aspect of the site chosen to commemorate this captivating capture into play. As the artist explains in her interview with Christiane Meyer-Thoss, a ‘lair is a protected place you can enter to take refuge. It has a back door through which you can escape.’ It may not be a trap, but, as she mischievously adds, transforming incapacitation into power, ‘my form of being active is building a trap myself. The fear of being trapped becomes the desire to trap the other.’8 In The Destruction of the Father, the perpetrators (as well as the artist recreating the crime) have clearly slipped out through a back exit that we cannot see and, indeed, have no access to. Yet, if this work is emblematic for the way Louise Bourgeois transforms her fear of being trapped into a successful entrapment of the other, it is less clearly determinable to whom this refers. Is it the father, whose devouring has been recaptured? Is it the past that has been feeding on her, even while she also feeds on it? Or is it us, transfixed by the spectacle of this overdetermined feast? Furthermore, if having recourse to sculpture is in general conceptualized by Louise Bourgeois as a refuge, allowing her to confront a past she can neither abandon nor accept, one might ask in what way this work about a father’s demise, shown for the first time one year after her husband’s death, speaks emblematically to the way her art compulsively retrieves and works through past trauma by giving plasticity to reminiscences and, in so doing, repossess them. To explain the fraught tensions inscribed in her relation to her parents, Louise Bourgeois notes, in a piece entitled ‘A Catastrophic View’ (6 January 1993): ‘when I was born my father and mother were fighting like cats and dogs and the country was preparing for war, and my father who wanted a son, got me.’ Seeing herself as the child of both familial and national contention, she takes this strife further by internalizing it, transforming herself into the battleground for her parents’ private war. ‘Louise,’ she claims, ‘had the brain of her mother and the emotion of her father.’9 In what way, then, does The Destruction of the Father pick up on and refigure her idiosyncratic family romance? While in her reminiscences the father is unreasonable, dependent on the attention of others and yet vulnerable in his compulsive exhibitionism, the mother is patient and analytical, always trying to entertain her husband, and above all, after the war, putting up with his amorous transgressions. The child Louise, in turn, is riddled with a persistent fear that  – owing to the battle between her parents  – she has come to be

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deprived of the love and attention she feels is her due and is cast as the one trying to please both mother and father by making herself indispensable. A general pattern emerges in the written self-meditations that runs parallel to the psychoanalysis Louise Bourgeois subjected herself to after the actual death of her father in 1951. Repeatedly, she posits an undefined sense of emotional lack and fear of abandonment as the catalyst for fury, seeking revenge on others for the psychic pain inflicted on her, only to find that any act of retribution can never be really satisfying because the initial sense of dispossession was overdetermined to begin with. Recasting her own psychic malaise along the distinction between an emotional father and an analytical mother, she notes on 12 March 1952:  ‘depression is connected with my father in the analytical situation – the rage is connected with my mother.’ There is, however, more to the way Louise Bourgeois came to think of herself as the stake in the feud between her parents. Her birth is recast as the scene of a duplicitous sexual interpellation. Imagining the disappointment her father must have felt when his third child proved to be yet another daughter, she attributes to her clever mother the following ruse: ‘She was not without imagination and she said, “Don’t you see, this little girl, we are going to name her for you. Do you know that that child is your spitting image?” ’ In her fantasy, the sentimental father responds, ‘Gee, it is true. She is very pretty and she’s just like me.’ Yet Louise Bourgeois finishes by underlining the price she had to pay for siding with her mother in duping her father: ‘So this is the way I made it, you see, but he made me feel that I was supposed to fulfil his dreams of having a successful descendant.’10 The lack of not being a boy transforms into a sense of obligation to satisfy the father, in imitation of her mother’s ceaseless effort at appeasing her husband. Once again, the rhetoric of fetishism is at play. To appropriate the status of the son against her biological sex erects a monument to the very lack that claiming to be her father’s proper descendent is meant to cover up. Also noteworthy is the fact that the likeness is one detected by the mother. As in the lived fantasy of the father’s destruction during the evening meal, she is in cahoots with her daughter. They both share the desire to appease the father’s disappointment that there is no biological son to carry on the family name, even as they share in tricking him into believing the daughter to be his living portrait. A counter-scene can be found in a dream, noted on 4 November 1953:

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We get in the carriage and I ask my father if I can carry his luggage He says no thank you but I grab a large flat case and it comes apart half broken at the hinges; I am embarrassed then I say can I carry your suitcase and I do when I look down at it after carrying it is two arm bones – I think they are carrying their leg of lamb eaten up by now. The bucket is 3 [sic] quarters full of a pink bloody liquid a little gelatinous I as I look further I see a brain whole and floating and I wake up in horror thinking. It is my own body she put in there – then my mother calls loud to me and say ‘Louise do you know that your red trunk which is in the luggage compartment has holes in it.’ Not only does she insist on carrying her father’s bag despite his refusal, as though denying her the succession she is claiming. The baggage she shares with him, containing her dissipating body, is itself fragile, coming unhinged the minute she violently takes possession of it. And, once more, it is the mother’s voice that makes the connection between their shared vulnerability, drawing attention to the holes in the daughter’s own red trunk, as this supplants the father’s large flat case in this dream scenario. A pattern of shifting identifications with the father emerges in Louise Bourgeois’ writings, ranging from the demand for exclusive love to the expression of murderous hatred. Repeatedly, she presents herself as aggressively vying for her father’s attention, needing to eliminate all rivals, wanting to be the first in his emotional life or nothing. At the same time, she also feels aggressive envy towards her father because, in his transgressions, he was everything but pitiful, rewarded with pleasure, success and social standing. She not only repeatedly takes fault with him for having demanded complete surrender and obedience from his children. Rather, he is also placed at the heart of the many fantasy scenarios revolving around her sense of having always already been abandoned, betrayed, jipped and left unprotected, prompting a cycle of emotional helplessness, turning into anger and then calling forth the desire to repair what in the heat of her fury she sought in fantasy to destroy. Yet part and parcel of an ingrown sense of failing to get what she feels she is entitled to is an equally intense critical sense of the deadliness of her jealousy, wanting to kill those whom she believed betrayed her. In all cases, her fantasies invariably lead back to the strife-riddled identification with her parents, locating in the fraught double heritage

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the two sides to her aesthetic process. In a late entry from 20 April 1992, she recalls: In real life, I identify with the victim in my art I am the murderer. I  was supposed to make myself be forgiven for being a woman, eventually the cruelty against the self flows into the cruelty against the others the desire to please is the motivation. The aggressive destruction that Bourgeois needs to sculpt her material is attributed to the mother, the emotions of pain and reparation driving her to rework her past are, in turn, conceived as her paternal legacy. In the same diary entry, she adds: ‘I inherited my mother’s rationality, but my father’s foolish heart.’ Ultimately, however, the ‘father’ in her writings functions as a composite signifier of the many figurations of paternal authority including her teachers, her analyst and God – all of whom she incessantly challenges even as she admits to being unable to function without their protection.11 Thus, even while her work as an artist feeds on the desire to destroy the father she found wanting, she also recognizes that she works so that she will retrieve his love. In her sustained reparation compulsion, she is fully aware that a return to the real father is impossible; therefore her need for approval must be transferred to one of his surrogates, the most prominent of whom, in her writings, is Robert Goldwater. On the one hand, she ascribes to her husband the role of legitimizing the hereditary lineage she is claiming based on a counterfeit likeness. On 12 May 1952, she notes: Robert who is an authority in History and authenticity and critical study of document is called upon by Louise to establish the fact that she is the only one who can rightfully stand next to Luis Bourgeois in a picture gallery. Along with her mother, her siblings are discarded from this ancestry, so that she can stand alone next to her father for all eternity. Yet the fact that she needs a second father to sanction the position she has usurped for herself indicates the fragile grounds on which her audacious claim is based. However, precisely because he is cast as the one ascertaining the likeness between her and her father, her husband can also be relegated to the

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maternal position. Uncannily anticipating her murderous recreation of the family’s evening dinner, she writes on 8 March 1952, ‘Stone silence of my mother at the dinner table her way of being critical my father goes away in despair pattern of getting out of the house Robert turns me into my father,’ adding ‘all day in bed.’ The suicidal depression, which came to incapacitate her to such a degree that during the initial years of her analysis she found it difficult to leave her home, is aligned with her paternal legacy as much as the immense jealousy that drives her to eliminate the rest of her family from the family portrait gallery. In her idiosyncratic family romance, her husband, in turn, is the one to affirm her alliance with her father’s position, either in response to her demand for self-authentication or by opposing her with his silence. Sometimes the similarity between the real father and his surrogate is foregrounded, when, for example, she recognizes that she only becomes fully conscious of the hate she had for her father in the extreme irritation and jealousy she feels towards her husband. On 18 March 1964, in turn, the two are played off against each other. ‘The suicide wish has receded and has been replaced by attacks to destroy what is most dear to me – my husband and my work,’ she notes. ‘When I am good with my father, I want to kill my husband, the allegiance or fixation to the father. When I am good with the present, I want to silence and destroy the past.’ In all cases, the cyclic pattern of destruction and creation remains the same. An intense need for love and approval from father and husband is balanced by a desire to destroy those she blames for not living up to her expectations, followed by the guilt this murderous desire induces. Within this triangulation between herself and her two privileged figures of paternal authority, the sustained struggle with the past finds articulation either in the incapacitation of a suicidal depression or as the aggression of artistic recreation. Yet if her innate sense of abandonment and a need to retaliate and to repair was predominantly played through in fantasy in relation to the father and his surrogates, the sense of dispossession is heightened in the face of real loss. One of the most revealing statements linking the two father figures comes the same year that The Destruction of the Father is first exhibited. On 9 March 1974 she notes: ‘it is a loss of balance more than a break down: when my father died I lost my equilibrium – when Robt [sic] died I fell in a state of shock for a year.’ To understand the balance that is disturbed when in psychic life the position of the father momentarily falls away, it is worth recalling that in

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Civilization and its Discontents, Freud casts the harsh super-ego in an individual’s psychic life as a punisher of gothic dimensions produced by the neurotic himself. ‘His aggressiveness is introjected [sic], internalized,’ he argues, ‘sent back to where it came from – that is, it is directed towards his own ego.’ Feeding on one’s own aggression in turn produces a psychic split, setting a portion of the ego over against the rest, ‘which now, in the form of “conscience,” is ready to put into action against the ego the same harsh aggressiveness that the ego would have liked to satisfy upon other, extraneous individuals.’12 The sense of guilt, according to Freud, is thus the result of a battle the ego fights with itself; a form of self-punishment in the course of which the aggression it would like to impose on others is instead redirected toward the self. Taken as one of the seminal fantasy scenarios in Louise Bourgeois’ idiosyncratic psychic drama, The Destruction of the Father can be seen as a belated recapitulation of the way fear, aggression and guilt feed off each other. In the installation, taking on the strength of her own aggression is re-enacted as a devouring of the father. Viewed in conjunction with her writings, we can view the sculpture as a palimpsest inscribed with the many turns which guilt over usurping the father’s power had taken in her fantasy life: the hate directed outwards towards a composite of figures of paternal authority that threaten punishment, and the suicidal hate directed inwards to punish herself for seeking such violent retribution when the actual fathers fall away. Rather than renouncing her aggression out of fear of conscience (or external retribution), however, Bourgeois reclaims guilt as one of the most prominent energies sustaining her work. In her writings as well as the installation, devouring the father also serves as a powerful trope for the way that incorporating an external punitive authority allows the daughter to take charge herself of the act of punishment to be feared from paternal authority. As terrible as the psychic effects of this guilty take-over may be (with the father explicitly identified in Bourgeois’ notes as the source of her depression), it also inaugurates the possibility of psychic self-determination. It marks the transition from being abusively acted upon to actively taking possession of external threats. The daughter is now herself the agency imposing the aggression, either by construing fantasy scenarios that threaten the other or by giving in to the depression her guilt induces. Finally, in a cathartic act based on retrospective remorse, Bourgeois recreates, as an installation, a sculpted fantasy

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scenario revolving around the fear a father calls forth, the destruction this prompts and the need for reparation. Aggression is once again sent back to its source; to the daughter where it came from, who now, however, figures as the author of the secondary enactment. While the aesthetic reparation commemorates the very act of aggression it also seeks to overcome, the empowerment it affords resides in the transition from passive endurance to active confrontation and confession. In the installation, recreating as it does her incorporation of aggression, Louise Bourgeois is able to tap into the same aggressive energy, hacking away at her materials to give plastic shape to psychic phantoms. At the same time, inscribed in The Destruction of the Father is the way that the intense identification Louise Bourgeois entertained with her father was predicated on the destructive power she attributed to him. A particularly chilling fantasy scenario from 7 March 1952 entitled ‘Insomnia’ foregrounds this lethal exchange: a little child is lying in a crib a man comes, puts his big foot in the crib. The child is afraid and he bites the foot coming down on him. Then the man beats the child to death – he stays dead for 38 years then he is not quite dead and the doctor wiggles him out of the crib. In the next crib another child cannot be wiggled out and dead he lays there with his eyes still opened – the name of the second one is Pierre Bourgeois. In an afterthought, phantasmatically conjoining her new home with the one she left in 1938, she adds ‘dinner at Italian restaurant. It is a dinner in Antony. Colère because I am my father.’13 The daughter’s complaint By bringing forward a complaint against the father in precisely the same gesture that she presumes herself to be his likeness, Louise Bourgeois discloses yet another debt to psychoanalytic thinking. Fascinated with hysteria, which the surrealists had praised as the greatest poetic discovery of the nineteenth century, she too takes inspiration from the Studies on Hysteria Freud wrote at the beginning of his career.14 Famous as a psychosomatic disturbance for which no actual organic lesions can be found, hysteria had already entered the annals of medical discourse as an expression of unsatisfied desire. What Freud came to discover, in addition, was

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the pertinacity with which his patients, often highly intelligent daughters of Victorian bourgeois families, held onto their bodily incapacitation. As though satisfaction was what they sought at all price to defer, they would energetically develop new symptoms whenever he managed to retrieve an event from the past to explain their current psychic distress. In the notes she writes in tandem with the psychoanalysis that she began in 1951, Louise Bourgeois exhibits the same double consciousness Freud detected in his patients, straddling emotional excess with shrewd self-awareness. Repeatedly, Bourgeois notes that the love one gets is never enough, that something will always be missing. At the same time she tirelessly plays through all possible permutations of her psychic discontent, taking from the discourse of the hysterics above all the privileged role they had come to ascribe to the father in their persistent family broadcast. Her exaggerated disappointment emerges in Louis Bourgeois as an exact measure of her equally excessive adoration; challenging his authority is a measure of her love. To insist on having been deprived of and betrayed in his love is unabashedly presented as a demand for his approval. Self-consciously aware that she wants to please the father and his surrogates for fear of being rejected, she also recognizes that overdoing this uncovers the aggression at the core of her demand for exclusive attention. As she notes on 5 May 1957, regarding her insatiable search for a reliant figure of paternal authority, ‘this new father must also be abandoned and renounced because it’s the eternal lost cause. The ambivalence for the father needs two fathers: the old bad one and the wonderful new one.’ Idealizing the father and denigrating him are two sides of the same coin. Each new father must be found lacking, so that he too can be replaced, unable to deliver the excessive promise she projects onto him. As the intensity driving Bourgeois’ work, psychic pain must be preserved, much as those obstacles that she incessantly needs to destroy in fantasy so as to reconstruct them in her sculptures and drawings. Indeed, like Freud’s hysterics, she too loves her phantoms. As she notes in her diary, ‘this attempt at explaining my father is in order to by making him out forgive him and also break the spell that his words and behaviour still has on me.’15 For the equilibrium between fear, aggression and guilt to hold, the position of the father to whom her challenge can be addressed must, however, remain consistently occupied. The exorcism of her psychic demons can only be conceived as an incessant attempt, a trust in future developments predicated on the assurance of the father’s sustained return.

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At the same time, Louise Bourgeois’ productive deployment of the insights of psychoanalysis involves balancing the debt to both parents. She explains: Today in my work there is a strong emotional motivation, but it is held in a kind of formal restraint. The two things have to be together. The motivation is emotional and murderous or whatever you call it, but the form has to be absolutely strict and pure.16 Reformulating this statement in relation to her family romance, one might surmise that the subject of her persistent family broadcast is the intensity of passion she always attributed to her father, along with the hate, fear, love and guilt he inspired. The formal perfection in turn derives from her mother’s silent rationality. The Destruction of the Father puts an archaeological find on display, uncovering a fantasy to explain why she is so anxious. At the same time, precisely by tapping into unconscious material, sculpting the return of the repressed in the shape of a dismembered father, Bourgeois also exhibits the process by which fear can be conquered. Her claim to the artist’s ability to ‘immediately short-circuit the conscious’, trusting an unconscious she is at ease with, is, however, based on a two-fold confidence.17 After all, sculpture, as she also maintains, can be produced only in a state of controlled emotional intensity. She can trust the unconscious and its arsenal of melodramatic representations of violence and filial revenge revolving around the abuses of the father, because she can also rely on maternal restraint when reshaping this material into works of art. In the third space of the installation, maternal silence and the paternal language meet to be refigured as a conversation between intense emotion and formal perfectionism. Returning one last time to The Destruction of the Father, regarding it through Bourgeois’ psychoanalytically informed writing, the dark recesses, shadows and folds suggestively open up a mental site. Forced to recognize that not everything retrieved from the unconscious can be rendered visible, we begin to understand that in the course of translation, something remains hidden in the dark, not lost but as yet undetermined. The material that cannot directly be seen tarries on the scene along with the prominent bulbous shapes and the recast limbs. The dark recesses creating depth for what we do see contain an affective power of their own, a potent message about recapitulating shards of a past that can be recreated

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only as an assemblage of dismembered parts. Putting back into shadow as much as revealing, the act of reparation entails parting as well as partaking. Louise Bourgeois sharply recognizes that, in tandem with tapping into her traumatic past, separateness from the father must be acknowledged. In a canny counterpoint to the chilling identification with the murderous father in ‘Insomnia’, she notes in another diary entry: ‘Each blade of grass has the right to be stared at, examined, separated and differentiated from the others; it is not only a right, it is a need, an obsession, I am not my father.’ Again, as though it were an afterthought, she adds, ‘I am portrayed by what I do not know. I may not know what I am, but I know what I am not.’18 More than mere negation, her emphasis on the word not is above all a mark of confidence. Comparing herself to a blade of grass is a way of invoking the biological connection to the father who brought her forth, even while insisting on the unique difference of every natural growth. In noting this separateness, she can also repair the connection. As with the hysteric’s vibrant resistance, the declaration of what one is not requires a paternal position against which it is posited. While any unequivocal self-knowledge is impossible, as unfinished as the past with all its grievances, trusting the knowledge of what one is not proves to be a most viable form of self-definition: ‘I am my father’ – ‘I am not my father.’ For Louise Bourgeois’ tireless psychic archaeology, both are true. On the level of reparation, oxymoron underwrites the fantasy scenario. Exorcizing a traumatic past by reworking it is not an act of re-injury but a resourceful work in self-differentiation. Painful as the revisiting of a scene of domestic crime may be, it trusts that strict artistic formalization will control all returns of repressed knowledge. If Louise Bourgeois refused to relinquish her stories of psychic abandonment, then because these allowed her to reveal to herself and others, over and again, how she could manipulate them to her advantage, as an artist and a woman. Paying back the father proves to be tantamount to recognizing her own indebtedness to the very paternal authority she challenges. Not just because any attack – like all other forms of love – requires an object, but also because she needs constantly to reassert that she is her father’s successor. As the only one authorized to stand next to him in her imaginary portrait gallery, she is also a unique entity. In the double portrait she exhibits in The Destruction of the Father, likeness and difference hold each other at bay, leaving the case elusive and conclusive, which is to say utterly open.

NOTES

Introduction 1 Quoted in Dorothée Bauerle, Gespenstergeschichten für ganz Erwachsene:  Ein Kommentar zu Aby Warburgs Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (Münster: Lit, 1988), p. 13. See also Ernst H.  Gombrich, Aby Warburg:  An Intellectual Biography [1970] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). 2 Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1988). 3 See Friedrich Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral [1887], Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienasgabe, vol. 5, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1980), pp. 313f. 4 Greenblatt: Shakespearean Negotiations, p. 19. 5 Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness:  The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 142. 6 Cavell: Pursuits of Happiness, pp. 144–5. 7 Mieke Bal: Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 7. 8 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York/London: Routledge, 1990). 9 See Joan Didion, We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction (New York: Everyman’s Library, 2006). 10 See Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form [1956] (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972). 11 Roland Barthes, ‘Myth Today’ [1957], in Mythologies (New  York:  Hill and Wang, 1972), pp. 123f. 12 Cornelius Castoriadis, L’Institution Imaginaire de la Societé (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975). 13 See Georges Didi-Huberman, Die leibhaftige Malerei [1985] (München: W. Fink, 2002).

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14 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Methuen, 1981), p.14. 15 Sigmund Freud, ‘Negation’ [1925], trans. James Strachey, in The Ego and the Id and Other Works, Standard Edition, vol. 19, ed. Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1961), pp. 235f. 16 Sigmund Freud, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fließ 1887– 1904, ed. and trans. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 253. 17 Sigmund Freud, ‘Fetishism’ [1927], trans. James Strachey, in The Future of an Illusion, Civilisation and its Discontents, and Other Works, Standard Edition, vol. 21, ed. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), p. 154. 18 Laura Mulvey, ‘Pandora’s Box: Topographies of Curiosity’, in Fetishism and Curiosity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 64. 19 Sigmund Freud, ‘The ‘Uncanny’ [1919], trans. James Strachey, in An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, Standard Edition, vol. 17. ed. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), p. 244. 20 Freud: ‘The Uncanny’, p. 226.

Chapter 1: Facing Defacement: Degas’ Portraits of Women 1 Georges Jeanniot, ‘Souvenirs sur Degas’ [1933], cited in Robert Harbison, ‘Edgar Degas: The Darkness Within’, Artnews 92/10 (1993), p. 66; translation by the author. 2 G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures in Fine Art, vol. 1, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), p. 165. 3 Richard Thomson (ed.), catalogue to the 1989 exhibition Degas:  Images of Women (Liverpool and London), p. 30. 4 Richard Kendall and Griselda Pollock, Dealing with Degas: Representations of Women and the Politics of Vision (New York: Universe, 1992), p. 64. 5 Robert Gordon and Andrew Forge, Degas (New  York:  Abrams, 1988), p. 87. 6 Henri Loyrette and Gary Tinterow (eds.), catalogue to the 1994–5 exhibition Impressionnisme: Les origins 1819–1869 (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux / New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994–5), p. 194. 7 J. Sutherland Boggs, H. Loyrette, M. Pantazzi et al., catalogue to the 1988 exhibition Degas (Paris, Ottawa and New York), p. 205. 8 Charles Baudelaire, ‘Le Portrait’, in Œuvres Completes, vol. 2, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), p. 655. 9 Hans Bächthold-Stäubli and Eduard Hoffman-Krayer, Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens [1927] vol. 1 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1987), p. 592. 10 David Freedberg, The Power of Images:  Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 278.

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11 John Berger, The Sense of Sight (New York: Pantheon, 1985), p. 2. 12 Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Feminity, Feminism and the Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 505. 13 Pollock: Vision and Difference, p. 153. 14 Pollock: Vision and Difference, p. 113. 15 Kendall and Pollock: Dealing with Degas, p. 23. 16 Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 122. 17 Harbison: ‘The Darkness Within’, p. 66. 18 Carol Armstrong, Odd Man Out: Readings of the Work and Reputation of Edgar Degas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 545.

Chapter 2: Naked Touch: Disfiguration, Recognition and the Female Nude 1 See Max Imdahl, ‘Reflex, Methode, Theorie’, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1953), p. 575. 2 Mieke Bal, Double Exposures:  The Subject of Cultural Analysis, (New  York/ London: Routledge, 1996). 3 Georges Didi-Huberman, Die leibhaftige Malerei (München: Fink, 2002), p. 63. 4 Didi-Huberman: Die leibhaftige Malerei, p. 132. 5 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972), p. 54. 6 Kenneth Clark, The Nude:  A Study in Ideal Form (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1956), p. 3. 7 Lynda Nead, The Female Nude. Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (New  York/ London:  Routledge, 1992). See also Marcia Pointon, Naked Authority:  The Body in Western Painting 1830–1908 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1990). 8 Sigmund Freud, ‘Fetishism’ [1927], trans. James Strachey, in The Future of an Illusion, Civilisation and its Discontents, and Other Works, Standard Edition, vol. 21, ed. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), p. 154. 9 Laura Mulvey, Fetishism and Curiosity (London:  British Film Institute, 1996), p. 64. 10 See Stanley Cavell, ‘The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear,’ in Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 267–353.

Chapter 3: Leaving an Imprint: Francesca Woodman’s Photographic tableaux vivants 1 Sigmund Freud, ‘On Transience’ [1916], trans. James Strachey, in Writings on Art and Literature, Meridian:  Crossing Aesthetics (Stanford:  Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 177.

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2 See Francesca Woodman, Selected Video Works 1975–1978, © George and Betty Woodman. 3 The video works have drawn virtually no critical attention to date. See also Jennifer Blessing, ‘The Geometry of Time:  Some Notes on Francesca Woodman’s Video’, in Francesca Woodman, ed. Corey Keller, exhibition catalogue (New  York:  San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Salomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art, 2011), pp. 197–203. 4 Peggy Phelan, ‘Francesca Woodman’s Photography: Death and the Image One More Time,’ Signs 27/4 (2002), p. 987. 5 See the essay by Rosalind Krauss, ‘Francesca Woodman: Problem Sets,’ in Francesca Woodman: Photographic Work, ed. Ann Gabhart, exhibition catalogue (Wellesley: Wellesley College Museum, 1986). 6 Sloan Rankin, ‘Peach Mumble – Ideas Cooking,’ in Francesca Woodman, ed. Hervé Chandès, exhibition catalogue (Paris and Zurich: Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, 1998), p. 35. 7 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: BBC and Penguin, 1972), p. 47. 8 Arthur C. Danto, ‘Darkness Visible’, Nation, 15 November 2004, p. 38. 9 For an extensive discussion of the influence of surrealism in Woodman’s oeuvre, see Chris Townsend, ‘Scattered in Space and Time’, in Francesca Woodman: Scattered in Space and Time, ed. Townsend (London and New York: Phaidon, 2006). 10 See Ann Gabhart, ‘Francesca Woodman 1958–1981,’ in Francesca Woodman: Photographic Work, p. 54. 11 Isabella Pedicini, in her study Francesca Woodman. The Roman Years:  Between Flesh and Film (Rome: Contrasto, 2012), likewise points out the connections to Victorian photography. 12 See Abigail Solomon-Godeau, ‘Just Like a Woman’, in Francesca Woodman: Photographic Work, pp. 11–37. 13 See also Peggy Phelan, ‘Francesca Woodman’s Photography: Death and the Image One More Time’, Signs. 27/4 (2002), pp. 979–1003. 14 Abigail Solomon Godeau, ‘Just like a Woman’, in Francesca Woodman: Photographic Works, ed. A. Gabhart (Wellesley: Hunter College Art Gallery, New York/Wellesley College Museum, 1986), p. 31. 15 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’ [1892], in The Yellow WallPaper and other Writings, by Gilman (New York: Modern Library, 2000), p. 5. 16 Gilman: ‘Yellow Wall-Paper’, p. 9. 17 Gilman: ‘Yellow Wall-Paper’, p. 9f. 18 Gilman: ‘Yellow Wall-Paper’, p. 16. 19 Gilman: ‘Yellow Wall-Paper’, p. 20. 20 Mieke Bal, ‘Marcel & Me: Woodman through Proust’, in Francesca Woodman: Retrospectiva/Retrospective, ed. Isabel Tejeda, exhibition catalogue (Murcia: Espacio AV, 2009), pp. 114–41.

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Chapter 4: Pop Cinema: Hollywood’s Critical Engagement with America’s Culture of Consumption 1 Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (New York/London: Harcourt, 1975), p. 93. 2 C.L.R. James, American Civilization (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993), p. 36. 3 Umberto Eco makes that claim that pop art be thought of as a perpetual movement between high and low culture. If pop artists borrowed the visual language of mass media, popular entertainment, in turn, came to have recourse to the formal conventions as well as the tenors of pop art. Genre films, which are not necessarily considered to be art house cinema, can be understood as pop art, because, according to Eco, art and entertainment are not separate entities. Instead both are to be understood as meta-discourses within late capitalist society. See Katy Siegel, ‘Pop Art: An Overview’, in Michael Kelly (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Aesthetics, vol. 4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 39. One of the effects of this mutual exchange can be found in the growing importance of product placement in commercial films since the 1980s and the aesthetic innovation it has spurred. 4 Nancy Marker, ‘Pop Art in California’, in Lucy R.  Lippard (ed.), Pop Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1966), p. 148. 5 Quoted in Lippard: Pop Art, p. 87 6 Lippard: Pop Art, p. 78. 7 See Roland Barthes, ‘That Old Thing, Art …’, in Steven Henry Madoff (ed.), Pop Art: A Critical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 370–4. 8 Quoted by John Lahr, ‘The Ringmaster: The Garish and Giddy World of Baz Luhrmann’, New Yorker, 2 December 2002, p. 50. 9 See Lucy R. Lippard’s discussion of the works of Claes Oldenburg in Pop Art, p. 115. 10 Quoted in Lahr: ‘The Ringmaster’, p. 51.

Chapter 5: Hitler Goes Pop: Totalitarianism, Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Hollywood Entertainment 1 Susan Sontag, ‘Fascinating Fascism’, in Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992), p. 91. 2 See Robert Eikmeyer (ed.), Adolf Hitler:  Reden zur Kunst- und Kulturpolitik 1933–1939 (Frankfurt am Main: Revolver, 2004). All citations from Hitler’s speeches are from this edition. 3 See Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge/London: MIT Press, 2000), as well as Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Entfernte Verwandschaft:  Faschismus, Nationalsozialismus, New Deal 1933–1939 (Munich: Hanser, 2005).

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4 Friedrich Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral:  Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 5, eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (München: DTV, 1980). 5 Bazon Brock, ‘Kunst auf Befehl?’ in Kunst auf Befehl? Dreiunddreißig bis Fünfundvierzig, eds. Brock and Achim Preiß (Munich:  Klinkhardt and Biermann, 1990). 6 Matthew Arnold, ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,’ in Essays in Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), p. 18. 7 See Boris Groys, ‘Das Kunstwerk Rasse’ in Eikmeyer:  Adolf Hitler: Reden, pp. 25–39. 8 Adolf Hitler, ‘Die deutsche Kunst als stolzeste Verteidigung des deutschen Volkes’ in Eikmeyer: Adolf Hitler: Reden, p. 53. 9 Adolf Hitler, ‘Kunst verpflichtet sich zur Wahrhaftigkeit’, in Eikmeyer: Adolf Hitler: Reden, p. 77. 10 Groys, ‘Das Kunstwerk’, in Eikmeyer: Adolf Hitler: Reden, p. 27. 11 Adolf Hitler, ‘Kunst’, in Eikmeyer: Adolf Hitler: Reden, p. 77. 12 Groys, ‘Das Kunstwerk’, in Eikmeyer: Adolf Hitler: Reden, p. 33. 13 See Stephen Greenblatt (ed.), The Norton Shakespeare (New  York:  W.W. Norton, 1997), p. 1929. 14 Stéfani de Loppinot, ‘Hot Parades’, in Exploding:  Revue d’analyse de l’experimentation cinématographique 19 (July 2003), p. 33. 15 See Carsten Laqua, Wie Micky unter die Nazis fiel: Walt Disney und Deutschland (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1992), as well as Neil Gabler, Walt Disney: The Triumph of The American Imagination (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2006). 16 C.L.R. James, American Civilization (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).

Chapter 6: Simulations of the Real: Paul McCarthy’s Performance Disasters 1 Gore Vidal, Screening History (Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 2. 2 Mark Sanders, ‘Paul McCarthy’ Another Magazine (Autumn/Winter 2002), p. 404. 3 Stanley Cavell, ‘The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear’, in Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 344. 4 Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History [1920] (New York: Dover Publications, 1996), p. 37. 5 Adrian Searle, ‘Not Suitable for Children. Or Adults.’ Guardian, 4 November 2003, < https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2003/nov/04/1> (accessed 30 August 2016), pp. 12–13.

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Chapter 7: Wagner’s Isolde in Hollywood 1 The term in German means ‘consecrated to night’. 2 All translations of the German libretto are my own; ‘Am I the only one who hears this song, wonderful and quiet […] penetrating me?’ 3 ‘Drowning, descending – unconscious – highest desire. 4 ‘Do you not feel and see it? Am I the only one to hear this melody?’ 5 For a musicological analysis of this scene, see Marcia J. Citron, ‘ “Soll ich lauschen?”: Love-Death in Humoresque’, in Wagner & Cinema, ed. Jeongwon Joe and Sander L. Gilman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); pp. 167–85. 6 ‘In the surging torrent, in the sonic sound, in the wafting universe of the world’s breath – sinking, drowning – unconscious – highest lust’. 7 ‘Wonderful and soft, lamenting bliss, saying everything’. 8 See Stanley Cavell, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 9 ‘Eternal, endless, fervently glowing breast, highest love lust!’ 10 ‘How he shines, illuminated by stars, he rises up’.

Chapter 8: Shakespeare’s Wire 1 The Wire, ‘The Buys’ (season 1, episode 3), writ. David Simon, dir. Peter Medak (HBO, 2002). 2 For a discussion of this chess game as an allegorical mapping of the drug world, see Paul Allen Anderson, ‘The Game is the Game: Tautology and Allegory in The Wire’, in Liam Kennedy and Stephen Shapiro (eds), The Wire:  Race, Class, and Genre (Ann Arbor:  University of Michigan Press, 2012), pp. 84–109. 3 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1984), p. 22. 4 See David Simon, ‘Prologue’, in Rafael Alvarez, The Wire:  Truth be Told (New York: Grove, 2009), p. 11. 5 William Shakespeare, King Henry IV: Part 2, The Arden Shakespeare Second Series, ed. A. R. Humphreys (London: Routledge, 1967), 3.1.31; The Wire, ‘Reformation’ (season 3, episode 10), writ. Ed Burns, dir. Christine Moore (HBO, 2004). 6 See Lorrie Moore, ‘In the Life of The Wire’, New York Review of Books, 14 October 2010, pp. 23–5. 7 Tiffany Potter and C.W. Marshall, The Wire:  Urban Decay and American Television (New York: Continuum, 2009), p. 9. 8 See Alasdair McMillan, ‘Heroism, Institutions, and the Police Procedural’ in Potter and Marshall: Urban Decay and American Television, pp. 50–63. See also

372

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10

11

12 13 14

15

16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25

NOTES

Jason Mittell, ‘The Wire in the Context of American Television’ in Kennedy and Shapiro: Race, Class, and Genre, pp. 15–32. See Jason Reed, ‘Stringer Bell’s Lament:  Violence and Legitimacy in Contemporary Capitalism’ in Potter and Marshall: Urban Decay and American Television, pp. 122–34, although he is more concerned with a discussion of primitive accumulation and capitalism than power relations. See Patrick Jagoda’s reading of The Wire as an example for the way network aesthetics ‘attends to the systemic nature of human suffering in the early twenty-first-century America’; ‘Wired’, Critical Inquiry 38/1 (2011), p. 199. Marsha Kinder, ‘Rewriting Baltimore:  The Emotive Power of Systemics, Seriality, and the City’, in in Kennedy and Shapiro:  Race, Class, and Genre, p. 78. See Daniel Eschkötter, The Wire (Zürich: Diaphanes, 2012) for a discussion of the double perspective The Wire deploys as it incessantly moves between a systemic discussion of institutions of power and an empathetic discussion based on the position of the individual subjects in the drug game. Graham Holderness (ed), Shakespeare’s History Plays: Richard II to Henry V, New Casebooks (London: Macmillan Palgrave, 1992), p. 5. Holderness: History Plays, p. 12. See Frank Kelleter, Serial Agencies: The Wire and Its Readers (Alresford: Zero, 2014), for a discussion of this TV series as an example for American self-studies; p. 60. William Shakespeare, King Henry VI: Part 3, The Arden Shakespeare Second Series, ed. Andrew S.  Cairncross (London:  Routledge, 1964), 5.6.80 and 5.6.83. William Shakespeare, Richard III, The Arden Shakespeare Second Series, ed. Antony Hammond (London: Routledge, 1981), 4.4.70. Shakespeare: Richard III, 4.4. 115. Shakespeare: Richard III, 5.5. 28. Shakespeare: Richard III, 5.5.40–1. See Jason Read, in Potter and Marshall:  Urban Decay and American Television, p. 128. For a discussion of the actual wars The Wire implicitly makes reference to, see Eschkötter: Wire, pp. 54–5. The Wire, ‘Straight and True’ (season 3, episode 5), writ. Ed Burns, dir. Dan Attias (HBO, 2004). The Wire, ‘Homecoming’ (season 3, episode 6), writ. Rafael Alvarez, dir. Leslie Libman (HBO, 2004). The Wire, ‘Moral Midgetry’ (season 3, episode 8), writ. Richard Price, dir. Agnieszka Holland (HBO, 2004). Wire, ‘Reformation’. The Wire, ‘Middle Ground’ (season 3, episode 11), writ. George Pelecanos, dir. Joe Chappelle (HBO, 2004).

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26 Wire: ‘Middle Ground’. 27 The Wire, ‘Mission Accomplished’ (season 3, episode 12), writ. David Simon, dir. Ernest Dickerson (HBO, 2004). 28 Shakespeare: Richard III, 4.4.70. 29 When Marlo initially surfaces on the wiretap which Lt. Daniels’ special unit has installed in Season three, his street name is ‘Black’. 30 Shakespeare: Henry VI.3, 3.2.135–40. 31 Shakespeare: Henry VI.3, 5.6.83. 32 The Wire, ‘Late Editions’ (season 3, episode 12), writ. George Pelecanos, dir. Joe Chappelle (HBO, 2008). 33 William Shakespeare, As You Like It, The Arden Shakespeare Third Series, ed. Juliet Dusinberre (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), 2.7.138–41. 34 Michael Wood, ‘This is America, Man’. London Review of Books, 27 May 2010, p. 21. 35 William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Arden Shakespeare Second Series, ed. Harold Brooks (London: Routledge, 1979), Epilogue: 6.

Chapter 9: Queen of Chess: On Serial Reading 1 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), p. 80. 2 Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations, p. 81. 3 Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations, p. 81. 4 Ibid. 5 I am grateful to Benno Wirz for our discussion of the distinction between a social and a hermeneutic perspective on rules in Wittgenstein’s investigations. 6 For the interplay between distributional narrative elements and their progressive integration on the level of narration, see Roland Barthes, ‘Structural Analysis of Narratives’, in Image – Music – Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), pp. 79–124. 7 See Michel de Certeau, ‘Popular Cultures. Ordinary Language’, in The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 15–28. 8 Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of genre memory treats aesthetic texts as organs of memory that formalize experience and knowledge such that these can be transported from one generation to the next. Each subsequent text remembers and as such also recalls the prior formalization, at the same time applying a new layer of thematic, figural or rhetorical articulations to the already existing one based on genre definitions. 9 See Stanley Cavell, ‘The Importance of Importance’, in Pursuits of Happiness. The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 145.

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10 House of Cards, ‘Chapter 5’ (season 1, episode 5), writ. Sarah Treem, dir. Joel Schumacher (Netflix, 2013). 11 One of the advertisement posters for the first season of House of Cards shows Francis Underwood sitting on a throne, scornfully looking down, with blood dripping from his hands and staining the white marble. In the lower half of the image, we see one of his most famous quotes in white letters: ‘Congress is a game of chess, and you must never let your opponent see your pieces.’ 12 House of Cards, ‘Chapter 6’ (season 1, episode 6), writ. Sam Forman, dir. Joel Schumacher (Netflix, 2013). 13 As a crossmapping, the intimacy of this couple suggests a structural parallel to Macbeth. In William Shakespeare’s tragedy, the death of Lady Macbeth is what triggers the downfall of the tyrant, and Francis Underwood’s survival as a politician also depends on his ability to keep his queen by his side. The asides he speaks directly into the camera of course constitute a further parallel to Shakespearean theater. 14 House of Cards, ‘Chapter 10’ (season 1, episode 10), writ. Sarah Treem, dir. Carl Franklin (Netflix, 2013).

Chapter 10: The Horror of the Familiar: Freud’s Thoughts on Femininity and the Uncanny 1 Sigmund Freud, ‘The “Uncanny” ’ [1910], trans. James Strachey, in An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, Standard Edition, vol. 17, ed. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), p. 220. 2 Freud: ‘Uncanny’, p. 233. 3 Freud: ‘Uncanny’, p. 236. 4 Freud: ‘Uncanny’, p. 245. 5 Freud: ‘Uncanny’, p. 245. 6 Freud: ‘Uncanny’, p. 240. 7 Freud: ‘Uncanny’, p. 241. 8 Freud: ‘Uncanny’, p. 244. 9 Sigmund Freud, ‘Fetishism’ [1927], trans. James Strachey, in The Future of an Illusion, Civilisation and its Discontents, and Other Works, Standard Edition, vol. 21, ed. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), p. 155. 10 Freud: ‘Fetishism’, p. 157. 11 Sigmund Freud, ‘Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes’ [1925], trans. James Strachey, in The Ego and the Id and Other Works, Standard Edition, vol. 19, ed. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), p. 252. 12 Sigmund Freud, ‘Medusa’s Head’ [1940], trans. James Strachey, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works, Standard Edition, vol. 18, ed. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), p. 252.

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13 Freud: ‘Medusa’s Head’, p. 273. 14 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Theme of the Three Caskets’ [1913], trans. James Strachey, in The Case of Schreber, Papers on Technique and Other Works, Standard Edition, vol. 12, ed. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1958), p. 299. 15 Freud: ‘Three Caskets’, p. 299. 16 Freud: ‘Three Caskets’, p. 300. 17 Freud: ‘Fetishism’, p. 153. 18 Freud: ‘Fetishism’, p. 154. 19 Sigmund Freud, ‘Femininity’ [1933], trans. James Strachey, in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Standard Edition, vol. 12, ed. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), p. 116. 20 Freud: ‘Femininity’, p. 118. 21 Freud: ‘Femininity’, p. 125. 22 Freud: ‘Femininity’, p. 135. 23 Julia Kristeva, ‘Experiencing the Phallus as Extraneous, or Women’s Twofold Oedipus Complex’, Parallax 8 (1998). 24 Kristeva: ‘Experiencing the Phallus as Extraneous’. 25 Freud: ‘Psychical Consequences’, p. 257. 26 Freud: ‘Psychical Consequences’, p. 258. 27 Shoshana Felman, What Does a Woman Want? Reading and Sexual Difference (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1993). 28 Felman: What Does a Woman Want? 29 Whitney Chadwick, ‘An Infinite Play of Empty Mirrors:  Women, Surrealism, and Self-Representation’, in Mirror Women, Surrealism, and Images Self-Representation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), p. 41. 30 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).

Chapter 11: Gendering Curiosity: The Double Games of Siri Hustvedt, Paul Auster and Sophie Calle 1 Luc Sante, ‘Sophie Calle’s Uncertainty Principle’, in Parkett 36 (1993), p. 76f. 2 Siri Hustvedt, The Blindfold (New York/London: Picador, 1992), p. 22. 3 For an in-depth discussion of the allegorization of the feminine dead body, see my own study that appeared in the same year as the novels discussed:  Over Her Dead Body Death: Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester/ New York: Manchester University Press, 1992). 4 Hustvedt: Blindfold, p. 23. 5 Hustvedt: Blindfold, p. 36. 6 Hustvedt: Blindfold, p. 62. 7 Hustvedt: Blindfold, p. 63. 8 Hustvedt: Blindfold, p. 64.

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9 Hustvedt: Blindfold, p. 143. 10 Hustvedt: Blindfold, p. 166. 11 Hustvedt: Blindfold, p. 170. For a discussion of hysteria as a malady of representation where not only the boundary between reality and fiction but also the boundaries between gender differences comes to be blurred, see my own study The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and its Discontents (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). For an overview of the symptoms ascribed to hysteria, see also Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980 (New York: Pantheon, 1985); and Ilza Veith, Hysteria: The History of a Disease (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1965). 12 Hustvedt: Blindfold, p. 220. 13 Hustvedt: Blindfold, p. 221. 14 Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary of Proper Names Mentioned in Ancient Authors, 3rd edn, s.v. ‘Elpis’. See also The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd edn, s.v. ‘Elpis’. 15 Laura Mulvey, ‘Pandora’s Box: Topographies of Curiosity’, in Fetishism and Curiosity (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 1996), p.  55. For a discussion of the prevalent allegorization of the feminine body in our cultural image repertoire, see also Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985). 16 Mulvey’s theoretical point of reference are Sigmund Freud’s writings on femininity, notable his article on ‘Fetishism’ [1927], trans. James Strachey, in The Future of an Illusion, Civilisation and its Discontents, and Other Works, Standard Edition, vol. 21, ed. Strachey (London:  Hogarth Press, 1964), pp.  149–57 (orig. ‘Fetischismus’, in Almanach für das Jahr 1928, Vienna, 1927); the lecture on femininity in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Standard Edition, vol. 12, ed. Strachey (London:  Hogarth Press, 1964), pp. 112–35 (orig. Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse, Vienna, 1933), and the article ‘Medusa’s Head’ [1940], trans. James Strachey, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works, Standard Edition, vol. 18, ed. Strachey (London:  Hogarth Press, 1961), pp.  273–4 (orig. ‘Das Medusenhaupt’, in Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse and Imago 25 [1940]). 17 Mulvey: ‘Pandora’s Box’, p. 59. 18 Mulvey: ‘Pandora’s Box’, p. 63. 19 For a typology of writing couples at the beginning of the nineteenth century that includes complementarity, rivalry, transgendering as well as the enmeshment of textual genesis and family genesis and as such inspires the postmodern authorial triad under discussion, see Ina Schabert, ‘Schreibende Paare’, in Englische Literaturgeschichte aus der Sicht der Geschlechterforschung (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1997), pp. 421–44. 20 Mulvey: ‘Pandora’s Box’, p. 64.

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21 For a discussion of the psychic value contained in the traumatic encounter with radical Otherness, see both Jean Laplanche, Essays on Otherness (London/New York: Routledge, 1999), and Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). 22 Paul Auster, Leviathan (London: Viking, 1992), p. 2. 23 I want to thank Barbara Straumann for pointing out to me that Iris is an anagram for Siri, articulating not only Hustvedt’s self-conscious autobiographical gesture in giving her protagonist this name, but also Paul Auster’s. 24 Auster: Leviathan, p. 102. 25 Auster: Leviathan, p. 103. 26 Auster: Leviathan, p. 51. 27 Auster: Leviathan, p. 60. 28 Auster: Leviathan, p. 61. 29 Auster: Leviathan, p. 63. 30 Auster: Leviathan, p. 63. 31 Auster: Leviathan, p. 64. 32 See Roland Barthes, ‘Striptease’, in Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), pp. 84–7. 33 Auster: Leviathan, p. 102. 34 An oblique analogy to the casket of Pandora suggests itself in Freud’s discussion of this mythopoeic theme, given that according to the reading he proposes, the caskets also contain not only a secret message but for all of the suitors concerned a fateful one as well – either the fact that they have chosen incorrectly, or the fact that they have chosen the beautiful women, who comes to stand (in) for death. 35 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Theme of the Three Caskets’ [1913], trans. James Strachey, in The Case of Schreber, Papers on Technique and Other Works, Standard Edition, vol. 12, ed. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1958), p. 299 (orig. ‘Das Motiv der Kästchenwahl’, in Imago 2/3 [1913]). See also Mladen Dolar’s discussion of the translation of contingency into narratives of necessity ‘At First Sight’, in Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, ed. Renata Salecl and Slavoj Zizek, Sic 1 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 129–53. 36 Auster: Leviathan, p. 65. 37 Auster: Leviathan, p. 66. 38 Auster: Leviathan, p. 117. 39 Auster: Leviathan, p. 122. 40 Auster: Leviathan, p. 126. 41 Auster: Leviathan, p. 129. 42 Auster: Leviathan, p. 129. 43 Auster: Leviathan, p. 124. 44 Auster: Leviathan, p. 231.

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45 Auster: Leviathan, p. 232. 46 It is perhaps not unimportant that Paul Auster translated several of Maurice Blanchot’s texts. See The Station Hill Blanchot Reader: Fiction and Literary Essays, ed. George Quasha (Barrytown: Station Hill, 1999). 47 Sophie Calle, Double Game (London: Violette, 1999). I want to thank Marq Smith for drawing my attention to the work of Sophie Calle and for the conversations that helped me formulate my thoughts on her work. 48 Mulvey: ‘Pandora’s Box’, pp. 61–2. 49 Luc Sante, ‘Sophie Calle’s Uncertainty Principle’, in: Parkett 36 (1993), p.78. 50 Calle: Double Game, p. 192. 51 Auster: Leviathan, p. 160.

Chapter 12: The Other Self of the Imagination: Cindy Sherman’s Hysterical Performance 1 Andreas Kallfelz, ‘Cindy Sherman:  “Ich mache keine Selbstportraits” ’, Wolkenkratzer 4 (1984), p. 49. 2 Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New  York:  Hill and Wang, 1974), p. 71. 3 Thomas Kellein, ‘Wie schwierig sind Portraits? Wie schwierig sind die Menschen!’, in Cindy Sherman (Basle: Cantz, 1991), p. 9. 4 Carla Schulz-Hoffmann, (1991). ‘Cindy Sherman: Kommentare zur hehren Kunst und zum banalen Leben’, in Cindy Sherman, ed. Thomas Kellein (Basle: Cantz, 1991), p. 30. 5 Craig Owens, Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 183. 6 Norman Bryson, ‘The Ideal and the Abject:  Cindy Sherman’s Historical Portraits’, Parkett 29 (1991), p. 98. 7 Brothers Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmärchen [1819], 19th edn (Munich: Winkler, 1999). 8 Stavros Mentzos, Hysterie:  Zur Psychodynamik unbewusster Inszenierungen (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1980), p. 75. 9 Mentzos: Hysterie, p. 92. 10 Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer, ‘Studies on Hysteria’ [1895], trans. James Strachey, in A Case of Hysteria:  Three Essays on Sexuality and Other Works, Standard Edition, vol. 2, ed. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955). 11 Pierre Janet, L’Etat mental des hystériques: Etudes sur divers symptômes hystériques, 3rd edn (Paris: Alcan, 1931). 12 Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention de l’hystérie:  Charcot et l’iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière (Paris: Macula, 1982). 13 Laura Mulvey, ‘A Phantasmagoria of the Female Body: The Work of Cindy Sherman’. New Left Review 188 (1991), p. 142.

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14 J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac Books, 1988). 15 Kellein: Cindy Sherman, p. 10. 16 Schulz-Hoffmann: ‘Cindy Sherman’, p. 31. 17 Rosalind Krauss, Cindy Sherman: Arbeiten von 1975 bis 1993 (Munich: Schirmer/ Mosel, 1993), p. 32. 18 Marianne Stockebrand, Cindy Sherman: Photographien (Münster: Westfälischer Kunstverein, 1985), p. 11. 19 Mulvey: ‘Phantasmagoria’, p. 137. 20 Judith Williamson, ‘Images of “Woman”:  The Photographs of Cindy Sherman.’ Screen 23/6 (1983), p. 106. 21 Williamson: ‘Images of “Woman”, p. 102. 22 Arthur C. Danto, ‘Photography and Performance, Cindy Sherman’s Stills’, in Cindy Sherman: Untitled Film Stills (New York: Rizzoli, 1990), p. 14. 23 Mulvey: ‘Phantasmagoria’, p. 144. 24 Bryson: ‘The Ideal and the Abject’, p. 217.

Chapter 13: Eva Hesse’s Spectral Bride and her Uncanny Double 1 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 39. 2 See Helen A. Cooper, ‘Eva Hesse: Diaries and Notebooks,’ in Eva Hesse: A Retrospective, exhibition catalogue edited by Cooper (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 21–4. 3 A similar visual rhetoric can be found in the photographs of Francesca Woodman, discussed in chapter 3. 4 Sigmund Freud, ‘The “Uncanny” ’ [1919], trans. James Strachey, in Early Psycho-Analytic Publications, Standard Edition, vol. 17, ed. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), p. 234. 5 Griselda Pollock, ‘A Very Long Engagement: Singularity and Difference in the Critical Writing on Eva Hesse,’ Encountering Eva Hesse, ed. Pollock and Vanessa Corby (Munich: Prestel 2006), p. 53. 6 Cooper: ‘Diaries and Notebooks,’ p. 23.

Chapter 14: Wounds of Wonder: Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin, Nabuyoshi Araki 1 Plato, The Collected Dialogues:  Including the Letters, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), line 155d. 2 Der Kleine Pauly: Lexikon der Antike auf der Grundlage von Pauly’s Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, reprinted edn, s.v. ‘Thaumas’. 3 Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary of Proper Names Mentioned in Ancient Authors, 3rd edn, s. w. ‘harpies’.

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4 Patricia Bosworth, Diane Arbus: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1984), p. xi. 5 Doon Arbus and Marvin Israel (eds), Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph (New York: Aperture, 1972), p. 2. 6 Doon Arbus and Marvin Israel: Aperture Monograph, p. 2. 7 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New  York:  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), p. 36. 8 Sontag: On Photography, p. 45. 9 Doon Arbus and Marvin Israel: Aperture Monograph, p. 3. 10 Doon Arbus and Marvin Israel: Aperture Monograph, p. 3. 11 Doon Arbus and Marvin Israel: Aperture Monograph, p. 9. 12 Doon Arbus and Marvin Israel: Aperture Monograph, p. 12. 13 Doon Arbus and Marvin Israel: Aperture Monograph, p. 15. 14 Doon Arbus and Marvin Israel: Aperture Monograph, p. 15. 15 See Michel Foucault, ‘Andere Räume’, in Aisthesis:  Wahrnehmung heute oder Perspektiven einer anderen Ästhetik, Reclam-Bibliothek vol. 1352, ed. Karlheinz Barck et al. (Leipzig: Reclam, 1990. 16 See Doon Arbus, ‘Afterword’, in Diane Arbus: Untitled, ed. Doon Arbus and Yolanda Cuomo (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995). 17 Nicolas Abraham, Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel:  Renewals of Psychoanalysis, ed. and trans. Nicholas Rand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 171. 18 Nan Goldin, ‘Art of Darkness’, in Artforum 3 (November 1995), p. 14. 19 Nan Goldin, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (New York: Aperture, 1986), p. 6. 20 Peter Schjeldahl, ‘The Golden Age’, in Camera Austria 50 (1995), p. 27. 21 Schjeldahl: ‘Golden Age’, p. 29. 22 Goldin: Ballad, p. 6. 23 Goldin: Ballad, p. 7. 24 Goldin: Ballad, p. 6. 25 Goldin: Ballad, p. 6. 26 Marvin Heifermann, ‘Pictures of Life and Loss’, in Nan Goldin: I’ll Be Your Mirror, ed. Elisabeth Sussman and David Armstrong (New  York, Zurich and Berlin: Scalo, 1996), p. 282. 27 Elisabeth Sussman, ‘In/Of Her Time: Nan Goldin’s Photographs’, in Nan Goldin:  I’ll Be Your Mirror, ed. Elisabeth Sussman and David Armstrong (New York, Zurich and Berlin: Scalo, 1996), p. 25. 28 Goldin: Ballad, p. 7. 29 See Nan Goldin, ‘Cookie at Tin Pan Alley, New York City 1983,’ under the section ‘Wild Women Don’t Get the Blues’, in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, p. 29. In this catalogue, see. p. 28. 30 David Armstrong (ed.), The Other Side: Nan Goldin (Zurich, Berlin, New York: Scalo, 1993), p. 11.

NOTES

381

31 Armstrong, Other Side, p. 8. 32 Cragie Horsfield,’Unconscious Kitsch, in Galeries 61 (1995), p.  70–9 and 109. 33 Roland Hagenberg and Walter Vogl, ‘Photography is Murder’, in Camera Austria 45 (1993), pp. 14. 34 Hagenberg and Vogl, ‘Photography is Murder’, p. 15. 35 Hagenberg and Vogl, ‘Photography is Murder’, p. 15. 36 Hagenberg and Vogl, ‘Photography is Murder’, p. 15. 37 Hagenberg and Vogl, ‘Photography is Murder’, p. 15. 38 Hagenberg and Vogl, ‘Photography is Murder’, p. 14. 39 Hagenberg and Vogl, ‘Photography is Murder’, p. 16. 40 Hagenberg and Vogl, ‘Photography is Murder’, p. 16. 41 Jean-Christophe Ammann, Nobuyoshi Araki:  Shikijyo, ed. Ammann et  al., exhibition catalogue (Kilchberg and Zurich: Edition Stemmle, 1996).

Chapter 15: The Fragility of the Quotidian: Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s Work with Death 1 Sigmund Freud, ‘Civilization and its Discontents’ [1930], trans. James Strachey, in Future of an Illusion, Civilization and its Discontents, and Other Works, Standard Edition, vol. 21, ed. Strachey (London:  Hogarth Press, 1961), p. 77. 2 Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (New York: Knopf, 2007). 3 Maurice Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus and other Literary Essays, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown: Station Hill, 1981), p. 79. 4 Blanchot: Gaze of Orpheus, p. 84. 5 Blanchot: Gaze of Orpheus, p. 85.

Chapter 17: Contending with the Father: Louise Bourgeois and her Aesthetics of Reparation 1 Donald Kuspit, Bourgeois (New York: Elizabeth Avedon Editions/ Vintage Contemporary Artists, 1988), p. 25. 2 Sigmund Freud, ‘The “Uncanny” ’ [1919], trans. James Strachey, in An Infantile Neurosis, Standard Edition, vol. 17, ed. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), pp. 219–56. 3 Asked by Marie-Laure Bernadac about a drawing in which she claims to be eating a child whether this is comparable to Medea, Louise Bourgeois responds, “The only way of making them [children] disappear is to eat them, the way spies during the war used to get rid of evidence by swallowing it; see Marie-Laure Bernadac and Hans-Ulrich Obrist (eds.), Destruction of the Father, Reconstruction of the Father:  Writings and Interview 1923–1997 (London: Violette Editions, 1998), p. 296.

382

NOTES

4 Eleanor Munro, Originals:  American Women Artists (New  York:  Simon & Schuster, 1979). Quoted in Bernadac and Obrist: Destruction, p. 115 5 Louise Bourgeois, unpublished material from the archive at the Louise Bourgeois Studio, p. 315. 6 Bourgeois: unpublished archive material, p. 176. 7 In the interview with Donald Kuspit, she goes on to explain, “The Destruction of the Father deals with fear – ordinary, garden-variety fear, the actual, physical fear that I still feel today. What interests me is the conquering of the fear, the hiding, the running away from it, facing it, exorcizing it, being ashamed of it, and finally, being afraid of being afraid. That is the subject,” adding, “And after it was shown  – there it is  – I  felt like a different person” (Kusprit: Bourgeois, pp. 21, 24 passim). 8 See Christiane Meyer Thoss, Louise Bourgeois: Konstruktionen für den freien Fall (Zürich: Ammann, 1992), p. 136. 9 Bourgeois: unpublished archive material, p. 16. 10 Quoted in Bernadac and Obrist:  Destruction, p. 279. In a different version, Bourgeois takes on the position of the mother herself, claiming, ‘I was the spitting image of my father. That was my first piece of luck. It may be why he treated me like the son he always wanted. I was gifted enough to satisfy my father. That was my second piece of luck’ (Bernadac and Obrist: Destruction, p. 223). Regarding the fraught issue of descendent it is interesting to note that Louise Bourgeois was to give not the paternal name Goldwater, but her Christian name Bourgeois to her three sons. 11 On 12 May 1952 she notes, “I literally cannot live or function without the protection of a father.” 12 Sigmund Freud, ‘Civilization and its Discontents’ [1930], trans. James Strachey, in Future of an Illusion, Civilization and its Discontents, and Other Works, Standard Edition, vol. 21, ed. Strachey (London:  Hogarth Press, 1961), p. 123. On 20 March 1964, she astutely notes that her psychoanalyst Lowenfeld thinks the basic problem is that she is afraid of her aggression. 13 As Jerry Gorovoy recalls, when The Destruction of the Father was first exhibited, Louise Bourgeois had laying on the black drapery on the bottom of the installation a bronze piece entitled “Pierre.” This portrait of her brother was, however, only included in this one instance. 14 Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria [1893–5], trans. James Strachey, Standard Edition, vol. 2, ed. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955). 15 Bourgeois: unpublished archive material, p. 333. 16 Quoted in Bernadac and Obrist: Destruction, p. 285. 17 See Meyer-Thoss: Louise Bourgeois, p. 119. 18 Bourgeois: unpublished archive material, p. 569.

INDEX

9/11 177, 179, 193 abject 251, 265, 273, 281, 294, 378, 379 Abraham, Nicolas 305, 380 aesthetics 20, 112, 221, 284, 303, 366, 367, 369, 372 reparation, aesthetics of 347, 361, 381 totalitarian 112–16, 134, 136 aggression 142, 164, 337, 340–2, 349, 351, 359–62, 382 Ahtila, Eija-Lisa 325–9, 331–4, 381 Consolation Service 331, 332 Hour of Prayer, The 329–31 Missä On Missä? see Where is Where? Tänään see Today Today 326, 327 Where is Where? 333, 334 Alfredson, Tomas 198–200, 202, 206 Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy 198, 199, 200, 202, 204–6, 210, 211, 217, 218 allegory 27, 173, 276, 336–9, 345, 371, 376 alterity 11, 12, 28, 45, 46, 236, 243–5, 248, 279, 280, 295, 302, 309, 312

Altman, Robert 144 Amazons 336 Amdahl, Max 32 Amenábar, Alejandro 69, 81, 83 Others, The 69, 81, 82, 83 anxiety 2, 4, 11, 15, 21, 25, 42, 45, 211, 221, 227, 240, 244, 245, 257, 279, 284, 325, 347, 349 aporia 8, 12, 13, 27, 304, 309, 312, 327 appropriation 4–6, 21, 35, 88, 105, 110, 121, 135, 144, 146, 170, 184, 234, 236, 237, 255, 295, 298, 304, 321, 323, 328, 332, 344, 350 parodic 8 Araki, Nabuyoshi 293, 294, 315–23, 379, 381 Bokujukitan 323 Sentimental Journey, Winter Journey 317 Arbus, Diane 293, 294, 296–306, 309, 314–16, 319, 320, 379, 380 Boy with a Straw Hat Waiting to March in a Pro-War Parade 298 Burlesque Comedienne in her Dressing Room 299 Four People at a Gallery Opening, NYC 299

384

INDEX

Arbus, Diane (Cont.) Jungle Creep, The 297 Lady Bartender at Home with a Souvenir Dog 297 Puerto Rican Housewife, A 298 Sage of the Wilderness 297 Teenage Couple on Hudson Street, NYC 301 Two Girls in Matching Bathing Suits, Coney Island, NY 297 Uncle Sam 297 Young Man and His Girlfriend with Hot Dogs in the Park, A 297 Arbus, Doon 304, 380 archaeology 347 psychic 364 Armstrong, Carol 29, 367 Arnold, Matthew 115, 117, 370 disinterestedness 115, 117 ‘Function of Criticism at the Present Time, The’ 115, 370 Auster, Paul 238, 239, 244–52, 254–7, 375, 377, 378 Leviathan 246, 249, 253, 255–8, 377, 378 authority 22, 24, 25, 28, 43, 132, 152, 177, 181, 182, 184–6, 189, 191, 193, 233, 256, 358, 360, 362, 367 paternal 131, 133, 231, 279, 352, 358–60, 362, 364 avant-garde 10, 112, 113, 130, 134, 136, 369 Bacall, Lauren 105 Bal, Mieke 7, 13, 34, 72, 85, 365, 367, 368 preposterous history 7, 13, 72, 365 Balthus 35 Alice 35

Baring, Norah 159 baroque 10, 74 Barthes, Roland 9, 10, 12, 105, 249, 260, 307, 365, 369, 373, 377, 378 ‘Myth Today’ 9, 365 battle 81, 138, 144, 145, 174–9, 182, 187, 188, 205, 206, 210, 315, 317, 318, 336–8, 340, 345, 346, 350, 355, 360 Baudelaire, Charles 24, 366 Baxter, Anne 161 Bellona 336 Berger, John 25, 39–43, 56, 57, 336, 344, 367, 368 Ways of Seeing 56, 367, 368 Berkeley, Busby 90, 113–15, 124–30, 135 Dames 114, 123, 125, 126, 128, 135 Gang’s All Here, The 113 Bernhardt, Curtis 164–9 Interrupted Melody 164, 165, 167, 168, 169, 170 Best, Eve 210 Blanchot, Maurice 253, 333, 334, 378, 381 Blick, Hugo 206, 207, 209–11 Honourable Woman, The 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 217, 218 body 9, 12, 20–3, 25–9, 31, 32, 34–7, 39–61, 63, 65–71, 76, 77, 80, 84, 85, 99, 103, 104, 113–17, 120–30, 133, 135, 138, 140, 149, 191, 224, 227, 229, 231, 233–6, 240, 241, 244, 246, 248, 252–4, 256, 259, 261, 262, 264–9, 271–4, 277–84, 286, 287, 293, 296, 297, 300–2, 304, 305, 308, 312–15, 318–23, 325, 327, 337, 339,

INDEX

340, 342, 344, 345, 349, 351, 357, 367 dead 191, 239, 266–8, 289, 318, 331, 333, 334, 375 female 15, 37, 39, 53, 57, 58, 60, 241, 244, 245, 259, 265, 269, 341, 378 feminine 7, 8, 27, 31, 32, 34–7, 39, 41–6, 71, 72, 77, 125, 128, 227, 229, 233, 236, 239, 241, 244, 249, 250, 256, 267, 278, 281, 319, 321, 322, 337, 340, 345, 376 hysterical 73, 278 maternal 224, 225, 227, 228, 232, 339 sexualized 60 soma 35–7, 41, 42, 44, 47 staged 53, 59, 62 Borzage, Frank 150, 152, 153, 155, 157, 165 Farewell to Arms, A 150, 152, 153, 155, 157, 163, 169 Botticelli, Sandro 79 Birth of Venus, The 79 Nascita di Venere see Birth of Venus, The Bougeois, Louise 347–58, 360–4, 381, 382 ‘Catastrophic View, A’ 355 Destruction of the Father, The 347, 348, 350, 352–5, 359, 360, 361, 363, 364, 381, 382 ‘Insomnia’ 361, 364 Repas du Soir, Le see Destruction of the Father, The bourgeois 20, 23, 151, 270, 316, 354 Victorian 362 Breuer, Josef 270, 378 Studies on Hysteria see Freud, Sigmund Broadway 89, 90, 92, 123, 124, 128, 129, 135

385

Brock, Bazon 115, 370 Bryson, Norman 280, 378, 379 Buck-Morss, Susan 114, 369 Buss, Raymond 161 Butler, Judith 8, 236, 365, 375, 377 Gender Trouble 8, 365, 375 Cahn, Claude 236 Caillebotte, Gustave 36 Nude on a Couch 36 Calle, Sophie 238, 239, 245–51, 253, 255, 257, 258, 375, 378 Address Book, The 250, 258 Birthday Ceremony, The 257 Detective, The 251 Double Game 255–8, 378 Hotel, The 238 Liberation 250, 258 Sleepers, The 238 To Follow 257 Venetian Suite, The 238 Wardrobe, The 257 camera 50–2, 54, 56, 71, 81, 84, 85, 99, 100, 102, 107, 112, 118–21, 127, 128, 139, 149– 52, 155–7, 159, 168, 169, 172, 176, 182, 183, 192, 194, 208, 216, 275, 300, 303, 304, 306, 309, 311, 315, 316, 318–20, 323, 332, 374, 380, 381 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi 38, 39, 365 Head of the Medusa 38, 39 Testa di Medusa see Head of the Medusa Carrington, Leonora 236 cartography 2 Castoriadis, Cornelius 11, 365 capacité imaginaire 11–13, 16, 73–5, 365 Cavell, Stanley 5, 6, 46, 47, 141, 165, 211, 365, 367, 370, 371, 373

386

INDEX

celebrity 93, 105, 143 Certeau, Michel de 173, 205, 371, 373 Clark, Kenneth 9, 40–3, 365, 367 Clark, Larry 315 Clift, Montgomery 99 Cocteau, Jean 328 cognitive space 1–5, 10, 11, 13, 75, 78 Cold War 200, 205, 210, 212, 218 conceptualization 7, 8, 10, 13, 14, 146 confession 155, 162, 164, 185, 203, 239, 251, 254, 329–32, 351, 361 consciousness 1, 14, 83, 271, 300, 353, 362 Conte, Richard 161 contingency 9, 193, 226, 236, 246, 249–54, 258, 279, 281, 294, 295, 299, 301, 306, 316, 377 Coppola, Francis Ford 193 Apocalypse Now 193 corpse 149, 151, 152, 154, 157, 158, 160, 161, 166, 168, 191–3, 239, 246, 253, 262, 267, 284, 288–90, 312, 318, 326, 327, 329, 331, 334 Courbet, Gustave 288–90 Toilette de la Mariée, La 288, 289 Cranach the Elder, Lucas 32–4 Venus 32, 33, 34 Crawford, Joan 153 crime 140, 158, 159, 161–5, 183, 185, 191, 193, 342, 349, 350, 353–5 domestic 347, 364 critical metaphors 3, 13, 69 crossmapping 1–6, 8, 69, 70, 80, 81, 114, 130, 147, 174–7, 198, 205, 218, 246, 374 cubism see Picasso, Pablo

Cukor, George 5, 6 culture 1–3, 5, 7, 8, 10, 14, 22, 23, 56, 74, 86–8, 92, 93, 95, 97, 99, 103, 105, 106, 110, 113, 114, 116–18, 120, 123, 130, 134–6, 138–40, 144, 145, 177, 193, 205, 210, 218, 233, 234, 259, 260, 265, 269, 270–3, 280–2, 291, 295, 311, 314, 321, 322, 325, 369, 373, 376, 378 consumer 86, 93, 101 cultural afterlife 1, 3, 5, 6, 10, 109, 147 cultural effect 2, 118, 130, 237 cultural imaginary 1, 3, 8, 13, 69, 129, 137, 138, 140, 145; see also Castoriadis, Cornelius cultural inheritance 2, 8 cultural memory 4, 175, 206 cultural survival 3, 13, 116, 117, 135, 146, 158, 170 kulturelles Nachleben see cultural afterlife mass 87–9, 97, 101, 105, 114 Philadelphia Story, The 5, 6 Cumberbatch, Benedict 199 curiosity 15, 37, 46, 51, 71, 238–46, 248, 249, 251, 252, 255, 257, 265, 366, 367, 375, 376 feminine 15, 243, 245, 249, 251, 254–6, 258 Danes, Claire 109 Danto, Arthur C. 61, 276, 277, 368, 379 daughter 73, 267, 273, 293, 294, 326, 336, 349, 350, 351, 354, 356, 357, 360–2 debt 145, 246, 336, 352, 361, 363 indebtedness 249, 341, 364

INDEX

Degas, Edgar 19–29, 366, 367 Anglaise, L’ 23 Duchessa du Montejasi Cicerale 24 Elena Primicile Carafa di Montejasi Cicerale, Portrait of 20 Mélancholie, La 23 Portrait of a Woman 22 Rose Caron (Femme assise tirant son gant) see Rose Caron, Portrait of Rose Caron, Portrait of 25 Woman in Black 22 Young Woman 22 DeLillo, Don 246 demon 25, 70, 222, 235, 266, 271, 352, 362 Dencik, David 199 Denkfigur see figure of thought Denkraum see cognitive space depression 73, 240, 252, 290, 356, 359, 360 desire 4, 5, 7, 11, 13–15, 21, 22, 27, 34, 39, 42, 44, 46, 47, 58, 71, 95, 124, 137, 138, 140, 146, 149, 153, 157–9, 164, 165, 222, 223, 229, 232, 235, 239, 241, 243–6, 248–51, 254–6, 261, 264, 272–4, 277, 279, 285, 294, 300, 308, 309, 319, 322, 323, 325, 331, 341, 345, 246, 352, 353, 355–9, 361, 371 feminine 46, 274 masculine 264, 320 destruction 69, 77, 85, 94, 95, 110, 130, 139, 142, 144, 145, 253, 254, 268, 300, 307, 315, 325, 335, 338, 339, 342, 343, 347–56, 358–61, 363, 364, 381, 382 DiCaprio, Leonardo 109

387

Didi-Huberman, Georges 12, 35, 37, 47, 271, 365, 367, 378 Didion, Joan 9, 330, 365, 381 difference 315 disempowerment 22, 30, 345 disfiguration 12, 27, 29, 37, 42, 44, 45, 48, 111, 191, 224, 227, 228, 236, 241, 246, 278 Disney, Walt 112–14, 130, 132, 133, 135, 138, 139, 370 Bambi 114, 130, 132, 133, 134 Fantasia 113 Führer’s Face, The 130 Peter Pan 139 Disneyland 139, 140 Disneyworld 139 displacement 9, 14, 138, 268, 275, 278, 282, 335 dialectic of 22, 24 Donen, Stanley 98, 99, 102, 103 Singin’ in the Rain 99, 101, 102, 103 Donner, George 143 Donner party, the 143 Doppelgänger see double double 10, 25, 51, 53, 76, 78, 222, 223, 225–7, 283, 285, 289, 291, 292, 296, 314, 320, 323, 334, 343, 379 dream 1, 4, 5, 6, 14, 81, 83, 89, 95–102, 104, 124, 138, 140–2, 145, 153, 181, 183–5, 187, 188, 194, 195, 224, 235, 241, 268, 274, 279, 284, 292, 297, 323, 329, 333, 343, 345, 353, 354, 356, 357, 369, 373 American Dream 93, 95–7, 99, 101–3, 111, 141, 142, 174, 181, 185 day-dream 14, 62, 98, 99, 176, 242, 270–2, 279, 323, 343 language 14, 130, 140

388

INDEX

dream (Cont.) work 14, 138 condensation 14, 16, 138 consideration of representationability 14 displacement 14, 138 secondary processes 14 Dreiser, Theodore 100 American Tragedy, An 100 Duchamps, Marcel 97 duplicity 10–15, 27, 69, 70, 76, 200, 211, 243, 296–9, 306, 308, 315, 320, 322, 353 effect, cultural 2, 118, 130, 237 Eikmeyer, Robert 113, 369, 370 Eisner, Lotte 70 demonic screen 70 Electra 293 emotion 1–4, 6, 9, 10–12, 39, 74–7, 83, 84, 92, 93, 98, 99, 103, 104, 148, 151, 153, 170, 177, 185, 193, 217, 222, 224, 228, 234, 235, 269, 275, 285, 326, 328, 338, 341, 344, 351, 354–8, 362, 363 empowerment 8, 21, 232, 313, 340, 361 Enright, Ray 114, 123, 125, 126 Dames see Berkeley, Busby Erinys 342 exaggeration 63, 98, 139, 140, 315, 335, 336, 339, 340, 346, 362 excess 63, 74, 98, 138, 140, 145, 168, 188, 228, 256, 261, 281, 287, 301, 308, 316, 318, 323, 326, 339, 350, 362 exorcism 352, 362, 364, 382 family 21, 22, 24, 82, 100, 143, 153, 185, 208, 210, 211, 260, 261,

270, 290, 296, 305, 307, 309, 326, 331, 348, 350, 355, 356, 359, 362, 363, 376 family romance see Freud, Sigmund filial revenge 363 fantasy 2, 11, 14, 15, 19, 26, 35, 45, 47, 73, 75, 80, 83, 93, 99–101, 124, 137, 138, 145, 146, 148, 149, 154, 157–9, 161, 165, 167, 222–7, 229–32, 235, 236, 240, 241, 244, 251, 252, 254, 256, 260–6, 268, 270–4, 277, 279, 280, 282, 284, 326, 331, 337, 339, 341, 343, 347–54, 356, 357, 359, 360–4 primal 347, 352 private 13, 98, 100, 103 work 14, 15, 47, 71–3, 223, 288 fascism 112, 113, 117, 118, 129, 130, 134, 336, 341, 369 aesthetics 112, 114, 130 art 112, 129 dramaturgy 112 father 104, 131, 132, 134, 145, 150, 188, 207, 231, 251, 252, 267, 293, 310, 326, 347–64, 381, 382 paternal authority 131, 133, 231, 279, 352, 358–60, 362, 364 paternal language 363 paternal position 364 Felman, Shoshana 234, 375 femininity 7, 8, 26, 42, 54, 221–4, 227, 230–6, 244, 246, 255, 260, 263–5, 269, 271, 273–8, 280, 281, 291, 315, 374–6 femme fatale 93–5, 235, 250, 339 fetishism 15, 46, 227, 235, 236, 239, 240, 244–6, 248, 251, 255–7, 356, 366, 367, 374–6 figuration 12, 29

INDEX

figurability 12, 36 sema 12, 36, 37, 41, 42, 44, 47 figure of thought 2, 4–6, 8, 13, 14, 45, 72, 84, 223, 231, 233, 235 film noir 88, 93, 94, 96, 98, 110, 147, 158, 162, 164, 170, 259, 273 Firth, Colin 199 Ford, Glen 165 Ford, John 144 Forge, Andrew 22, 366 formalization 1, 3, 6, 10, 14, 41, 42, 54, 66, 104, 129, 373 aesthetic 1–3, 5, 6, 9–13, 16, 34–6, 41–3, 48, 140, 141, 327 artistic 9, 11, 12, 41, 364 Foucault, Michel 302–4, 308, 345, 380 heterotopia 302–4, 306, 308, 313– 15, 319, 320, 322, 323 fragility 10, 12, 30, 37, 46, 49, 50, 52, 53, 68, 71, 72, 76, 141, 142, 145, 173–5, 233, 236, 292, 294, 298, 303, 325, 328, 342, 345, 381 fragmentation 60, 125, 128, 264, 266, 267, 278, 279, 339, 340 Frank, Robert 315 Freud, Sigmund 13–16, 45, 49, 53, 126, 137, 138, 140, 221–36, 249, 268, 270, 271, 273, 275, 281, 288, 289, 291, 300, 325, 331, 349, 351–3, 360–2, 366, 367, 374–9, 381, 382 castration 15, 45, 223, 226–8, 230, 231, 244, 281 Civilization and its Discontents 360, 381, 382 day-dream 14, 62, 98, 99, 176, 242, 270–2, 279, 323, 343 death drive 167 dream work see dream

389

familiar 24, 221, 224–7, 230, 232, 233, 237, 274, 281, 297–9, 308, 374 family romance 355, 359, 363 fantasy work see fantasy ‘Femininity’ 231, 375, 376 fetish 8, 15, 37, 40, 44–6, 227, 230, 240, 245, 249, 254, 255, 281 fetishist 15, 45, 71, 230, 231, 233, 240–2, 248–50, 256–8, 320 heimlich see uncanny ‘Medusa’s Head’ 227–9, 374–6 melancholia 23, 169 narcissism 222, 223, 225–7, 229–31, 236 neurosis 15, 300, 366, 374, 381 ‘On Transience’ 49, 367 protective fiction 14, 15, 75, 137, 144, 228, 233, 235, 295, 299 Schutzdichtung see protective fiction ‘Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between Sexes’ 227, 234, 374 Studies on Hysteria 270, 361, 378, 382 suffering 270, 272, 273, 325 ‘Theme of the Three Caskets, The’ 228, 249, 375, 377 unheimlich see uncanny uncanny, the 3, 16, 60, 68–76, 79, 81–3, 88, 97, 105, 114, 124, 127, 135, 219, 221–36, 245, 248, 274, 277, 283–5, 288, 289, 291, 296, 297, 308, 314, 320, 321, 323, 334, 349, 353, 366, 374, 379, 381 fugacity 12, 49, 52, 53, 61, 68, 70, 74, 77, 128, 136 Gabhart, Ann 61, 368 Garfield, John 153

390

INDEX

gaze 9–12, 15, 20, 21, 23, 25–8, 31, 32, 34–7, 39, 40, 42–5, 47, 48, 50, 52, 56–8, 60, 61, 65, 68, 71, 72, 80, 82, 84, 89, 96, 99, 124, 127, 131, 151, 155–8, 168–70, 186, 194, 200, 203, 213, 217, 244, 245, 249, 263, 278, 279, 296, 299, 304, 311, 314, 319–21, 339, 342, 343, 353, 377, 381 aversion of 15, 16, 32, 70, 71, 285, 287, 295, 339, 342 double 56, 57 female/woman’s 48, 52, 56–8, 65, 68, 71, 96, 249 male/masculine 8, 42, 56, 57, 58, 249, 321, 322 oblique 8, 10, 11, 74, 290; see also looking awry genre cinema 98, 99, 139 Gérôme, Jean-Léon 37, 39 Phryne before the Aerophagus 37, 38, 39 Phryné devant l’Aréopage see Phryne before the Aerophagus Gesamtkunstwerk see totalized artwork ghost see phantom Gill, Michel 212 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 69, 70, 72, 73, 76–81, 368 ‘Yellow Wall-paper, The’ 69, 70, 72, 75, 79–81, 368 Goebbels, Joseph 122 Goldin, Nan 293, 294, 305–17, 319, 321, 379, 380 Ballad of Sexual Dependency, The 307, 309–11, 380 Cookie and Vittorio’s Living Room, NYC 312 Cookie at Vittorio’s Casket, NYC 311 Cookie Being X-Rayed, NYC 312 Cookie in her Casket, NYC 312

Cookie Portfolio, The 311 ‘Last Letter, A’ 311 Other Side, The 313, 380, 381 ‘Visual Diary’ 305 Gordon, Robert 22, 366 Goya, Francisco de 336 Desastres de la guerra, Los see Disasters of War, The Disasters of War, The 336 Greenblatt, Stephen 3, 4, 13, 365, 370 cultural energies see energia energia 3, 4, 11, 13, 117 Griffith, D.W. 193 Birth of a Nation, The 193 Groys, Boris 116, 118, 123, 370 Gwen, John 48 Nude Girl 48 Gyllenhall, Maggie 207 Hades 326, 331 hallucination 12, 35, 36, 47, 48, 73–6, 240, 242, 300, 326, 327, 331–3, 350 hallucinatory 75–8, 81, 234, 331, 349 Harbison, Robert 28, 336, 367 Hawarden, Lady Clementina 62–5 Clementina Maude 63, 64 Hazabal, Lubna 207 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 20, 366 Aesthetics 20, 366 Heiferman, Marvin 309, 380 heritage see inheritance Herrmann, Bernhard 147–9 Hesse, Eva 283–8, 290–2, 379 No title 286 heterotopia 302–4, 306, 308, 313–15, 319, 320, 322, 323; see also Foucault, Michel Hinds, Ciarán 199

INDEX

Hitchcock, Alfred 146–50, 153, 157–62, 164, 165 Murder! 146, 150, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 169 Vertigo 146, 147, 148, 149, 153, 157, 164, 169 Hitler, Adolf 112–18, 121, 123, 129–31, 135, 339, 369, 370 Speeches on Art and Cultural Politics 113, 115, 369 Hoch, Hannah 236 Hoffmann, E.T.A. 222 ‘Sandman, The’ 222 Holbein the Younger, Hans 10 Ambassadors, The 10 Holderness, Graham 177, 372 Hollywood 5, 86–9, 92–4, 98, 99, 103, 107, 110, 112–14, 125, 129, 131, 134, 137–40, 143–7, 150, 158, 165, 169, 170, 273, 365, 369, 371, 373 home 61, 67, 70–3, 76, 81, 82, 90, 92, 105, 155, 167, 182, 194, 195, 213, 224, 225, 227, 231, 234, 235, 252, 258, 267, 282, 297, 300, 302, 326, 330–2, 341, 347, 359, 361 Horsfield, Craigie 315, 316 house 60, 66–73, 76, 81–3, 153, 154, 157, 183, 186, 192, 212, 250, 252, 266, 267, 284, 330, 333, 351, 359 Hurt, John 199 Hustvedt, Siri 238, 239, 242–7, 255, 375–7 Blindfold, The 238–40, 242, 243, 245, 247, 375, 376 hysteria 268–72, 274, 275, 279, 280, 361, 376, 378, 382

391

identity 191, 208, 232, 235, 236, 238, 239, 252, 253, 264, 265, 268, 270, 272, 275–7, 279, 288, 290, 291, 301, 321, 334, 375 position 8, 279, 291, 342 image 1–3, 6–14, 16, 21, 22, 24–9, 34–7, 39, 43–5, 47, 48, 50–61, 63, 65, 67–72, 74–83, 85, 87, 90, 95, 97–101, 103, 105–7, 109–12, 118, 120–2, 124–9, 131, 135, 136, 138, 140, 145, 148, 151–3, 155–7, 172, 194, 207, 210, 211, 225, 228, 232, 236, 240, 241, 243, 244, 257, 258, 260– 70, 272–81, 283, 284, 288, 290, 294–301, 303–23, 326– 34, 336–9, 341, 343, 344, 356, 366, 368, 373–5, 379, 382 formula 1–9, 11–14, 17, 70, 71, 74, 76–9, 82–4 repertoire 8, 14, 37, 58, 97, 98, 105, 110, 145, 235, 261–5, 268, 272, 273, 275, 282, 285, 288, 302, 305, 327, 376 traditional 8, 54, 263 Western 7, 280 implenitude 12, 15, 45, 46, 50, 77, 223, 226, 227, 230, 236, 295, 299, 302, 303 impotence 145, 346 inheritance 2, 6, 8, 62, 116, 132, 234, 357 cultural 2, 8 intensity, emotional 99, 151, 363 inter-subjectivity 30 Iris 293, 295, 301, 307, 310, 319 Jaffrey, Sakina 212 James, C.L.R. 87, 88, 106, 134, 369, 370 Jameson, Frederic 13, 366

392

INDEX

Janet, Pierre 270, 378 maladie par representation see malady of representation malady of representation 270, 376 jazz 87, 134 Jeanniot, George 19, 366 Jones, Toby 199 Juno 293, 294 Kahlo, Frida 236 Kallfelz, Andreas 259, 264, 378 Keeler, Ruby 124, 125, 127, 128, 135 Kelly, Gene 102, 103 Kinder, Marsha 177, 372 Koller Pinell, Broncia 48 Sitter 48 Sitzende (Marietta) see Sitter Krauss, Rosalind 275, 278, 368, 379 Kristeva, Julia 233, 234, 375 Kubrick, Stanley 113 2001: A Space Odyssey 113 Lang, Fritz 158, 161–5 Blue Gardenia 158, 161, 162, 163, 164, 169 Le Carré, John 198 Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy 198 Lichtenstein, Roy 98, 99 likeness 20, 22, 25, 53, 59, 85, 356, 358, 361, 364 Lippard, Lucy 93, 94, 369 looking awry as a hermeneutic tool 10; see also gaze, oblique Loppinot, Stéfani de 129, 370 Luhrmann, Baz 105–10, 369 Romeo + Juliet 106, 107, 108 Maar, Dora 336, 337 Malevich, Kazimir 130 Man, Paul de 27, 367

Marmer, Nancy 88 Mars 336 Marschall, Herbert 159 Marshall, C.W. 175, 371, 372 Masaccio 40 espulsione di Adamo ed Eva dal Giardino dell’Eden, L’ see Expulsion of Adam and Eve, The Expulsion of Adam and Eve, The 40 masquerade 140, 236, 261, 262, 264, 268, 273, 275, 281, 297, 309, 314, 315 McCarthy, Paul 137–41, 143–5, 370 Pirate Party 139 McTeer, Janet 210 Medusa 38, 39, 227–9, 232, 337, 340, 374–6 melodrama 61–5, 88, 93, 98, 99, 103, 110, 147, 151, 153, 164, 165, 167, 169, 170, 259, 351, 353, 363, 371 memento mori 10 Mentzos, Stavros 269, 270, 378 mirror 26, 39, 41, 46, 55, 57–60, 62, 104, 128, 159, 160, 234, 236, 246, 260, 264, 299, 301, 319, 343, 344, 375, 380 mise en abyme 83, 90, 93, 101, 283, 313 mise-en-scène 36, 104, 110, 149, 150, 154, 156, 183, 201, 275, 300, 319, 322, 352, 353 modernity 3, 12, 24 avant-garde 136 urban 23 Monroe, Marilyn 110 monster 75, 261, 262, 284 montage 56, 61, 118–23, 129, 151–3, 194, 195, 199, 206, 208, 329 mother 73, 74, 82, 90, 133, 176, 178, 207, 211, 217, 224, 225, 228,

INDEX

230, 231, 247, 260, 273, 284, 287, 290, 293, 304, 347, 349–51, 355–9, 363, 382 maternal body see body maternal restraint 363 maternal silence 363 mourning 49, 165, 311, 327, 329, 330–2 MTV 106, 107, 109, 110 Mueller, Cookie 311–13, 317 Mulvey, Laura 15, 46, 243–5, 254, 255, 273, 276, 278, 366, 367, 376, 378, 379 ‘Pandora: Topographies of the Mask and Curiosity’ 243 muse 26, 250, 252, 336, 344 musical 88–90, 92, 93, 98, 99, 102, 103, 110, 113, 114, 123, 125, 127–9, 135 mythology 342, 336 mythopoesis 293 Nash, Steven A 335, 341 navel 35, 44, 47, 69, 76, 84, 266 Nead, Lynda 41–3, 367 necrophilia 149 Negulesco, Jean 153–9 Humoresque 153, 154, 155, 156, 157–9, 161, 371 Nietzsche, Friedrich 4, 8, 114, 365, 370 nostalgia 94, 184, 190, 194, 309 Novak, Kim 146, 147 nude 34, 36, 39, 41, 42, 44–8, 54, 58, 61, 288, 289, 335, 339, 340, 343, 344, 365, 367 female 31, 32, 34–7, 39, 41–4, 46, 47, 61, 335, 338, 367 reclining 44, 47, 342 vs nakedness 9, 40, 41, 44, 48

393

Oldenburg, Claes 98, 369 Oldman, Gary 199 Oppenheim, Meret 236 ordinary 20, 60, 74, 75, 83, 99, 115, 146, 147, 149, 153, 166, 194, 236, 326–8, 332, 341, 373, 382 gaze 10 life 9 Orff, Carl 109 Carmina Burana 109 Owens, Craig 264, 378 pain 298, 305, 307, 325, 336–8, 358 psychic 356, 362 Pallas Athena 242, 336, 337 Palma il Giovane, Jacopo 336, 337, 339, 340, 345 Allegory of War and Peace 336, 337, 345 Pandora 15, 46, 238, 241–5, 249, 250, 255, 256, 258, 366, 376–8 Paris 39, 40 Parker, Eleanor 164 pathos 1, 2, 11, 63, 64, 66, 98, 104, 144, 146, 150, 151, 166, 169, 170, 183, 185 pathos formula 2–7, 10, 37, 82, 99, 103 pathos gesture 1, 2, 8, 14, 82, 93, 98, 101, 103, 135, 330, 337 Pathosgeste see pathos gesture peace 151–3, 179, 180, 184, 188, 208, 336, 337, 339, 341, 345 fantasies of 337 Peckinpah, Sam 144 perfectionism 363 performative 53, 141, 189, 203, 206, 212, 217, 261, 265, 268, 271, 272, 282

394

INDEX

peripeteia 159, 162, 167, 186 personification 27, 336, 337 phallus 231, 233, 234, 375 phantasmagorical 149, 225, 233, 236, 294, 340, 378, 379 phantom 59, 68, 70, 75, 77, 120, 283, 285, 287–92, 305, 326, 328, 332, 348, 350, 354, 361, 362 Phelan, Peggy 52, 53, 368 Picasso, Pablo 335–46 Aubade, L’ see Aubade, The Aubade, The 342, 343 baiser, Le see Kiss, The cubist phase 339, 340 Demoiselles d’Avignon, Les see Ladies of d’Avignon, The Deux femmes see Interior with a Girl Drawing Deux têtes de femmes see Two Heads of Women femme à l’artichaut, La see Woman with Artichoke Femme au chapeau, assise dans un fauteuil see Woman with Hat Seated in an Armchair Femme aux cheveux jaunes see Woman with Yellow Hair Femme en pleurs see Weeping Woman Femme se coiffant see Woman Dressing her Hair Girl before a Mirror 343 Grande baigneuse see Large Bather Guernica 336, 337 Interior with a Girl Drawing 343, 344 Jeune fille devant un miroir see Girl before a Mirror Kiss, The 345 Ladies of d’Avignon, The 339, 340 Large Bather 339, 340 Two Heads of Women 345

war women 335, 336, 337, 338, 340, 341, 342, 343 Weeping Woman 337 Woman with Artichoke 341 Woman with Hat Seated in an Armchair 342 Woman with Yellow Hair 343 Women Dressing her Hair 338, 340 political 5, 8, 13, 41, 113–15, 132–4, 137, 138, 173, 175–8, 180, 184, 186, 206–18, 236, 255, 257, 338, 340, 341, 366 Pollock, Griselda 21, 26, 291, 366, 367, 379 pop 88, 89, 92, 95, 98, 104–6, 109, 111, 112, 114, 369 art 86–9, 92–5, 97–9, 101, 105–7, 110, 369 cinema 86, 111, 369 recycling 87 portrait 19–22, 24–9, 50, 54–6, 61, 64, 85, 93, 176, 177, 185, 193, 199, 201, 206, 250, 259–65, 268, 272, 276, 282, 289, 298, 318, 335, 338, 341, 343, 344, 356, 359, 364, 366, 378, 382 double portrait 52, 85, 285, 287, 290, 291, 318, 336, 337, 364 as epistemological tool 24 portraiture 19, 22, 24–30, 54 postmodernity 82, 88, 106, 107, 110, 176, 238, 246, 249, 262–4, 272, 277, 280, 376 Potter, H.C 89, 91 Hellzapoppin’ 89, 90, 91, 92 Potter, Tiffany 175, 371, 372 Pound, Ezra 117 Powell, Dick 123 power 3, 4, 11, 22, 24–8, 31, 36, 39, 53, 75, 84, 96, 106, 125, 128,

INDEX

132, 134, 137, 167, 173–82, 184, 186–90, 194, 200, 201, 205, 206, 208, 211, 212, 214, 217, 218, 226, 228–30, 233, 242, 266, 281, 285, 295, 296, 301, 306, 316, 318, 320, 328, 340–2, 350, 352, 354, 355, 360, 361, 363, 366, 372, 377, 378 military 338 theatricalization of 188, 189, 192, 193 will to 4, 118 propaganda 113, 114, 128, 130 prosopopoeia see personification psychoanalysis 3, 13, 69, 137, 235, 270, 300, 352, 356, 362, 363, 375, 376, 379, 380; see also Freud, Sigmund Puritans 141 Rea, Stephen 207 recycling of signs/images 7, 86, 87, 89, 92, 109, 110, 145, 161, 164, 170 refiguration 4, 6, 7, 14, 15, 35, 41, 61, 67, 107, 128, 133, 145, 146, 148, 153, 154, 161, 170, 176, 198, 242, 243, 247, 254, 285, 290, 292, 348 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste 43 Nymph by a Stream, A 43 repetition 177, 201, 218, 225, 270, 280, 318, 340 repetition compulsion 146, 225, 226, 350 representation 8, 13–15, 22, 25, 26, 28, 29, 31, 32, 34, 35, 42, 43, 52, 88, 89, 100, 102, 103, 105, 110, 138, 140, 145, 153, 199,

395

241, 244, 245, 253, 262–8, 270–8, 280–2, 284, 295–300, 303, 305, 308, 312, 315, 316, 320–2, 327, 328, 335, 336, 339, 340, 344, 353, 363, 366, 376, 378 mimetic 35, 90, 97, 327 photographic 301, 313, 318 self-representation 25, 259–62, 268, 269, 271–5, 277, 280, 375 repression 14, 81, 82, 145, 224–6, 231–5, 243, 270, 283 resilience 101, 118, 143, 285 Reynolds, Debbie 101, 102, 103 Riefenstahl, Leni 112–15, 118–24, 128–30, 135 Olympia 114, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 135 romance 89, 90, 98, 102, 103, 158, 169, 258, 259, 315, 355, 359, 363 Rosenquist, James 99 Sanders, Mark 139, 370 Sante, Luc 238, 257, 375, 378 Sarne, Michael 200 satisfaction 14, 15, 138, 179, 362 Schjeldahl, Peter 306, 380 Schulz-Hoffmann, Carla 275, 378, 379 Scorsese, Martin 94 Personal Journey through American Movies 94 screen 7, 12, 15, 46, 51, 70, 76, 77, 81–3, 89, 90, 92, 93, 97, 98, 101, 102, 106, 107, 109–11, 115, 121, 127, 128, 133, 134, 136, 138, 155, 157, 159, 163, 192, 195, 213, 214, 222, 235, 245, 251, 277, 278, 280, 284, 329, 331, 332

396

INDEX

sculpture 116, 119, 121, 135, 139, 351, 355, 360, 362, 363 Searle, Adrian 145, 370 self-creation 70, 73, 78–81 feminine 81 self-expression 13, 48, 66, 80, 270, 275, 350 feminine 41 masculine 7 self-portraiture see portrait self-reflexivity 16, 32, 35, 81, 89, 90, 101, 110, 115, 130, 192, 193, 278, 283, 312, 313, 319 sema see figuration semiotics 3, 316, 318 seriality 53, 58, 197, 201, 372 Shakespeare, William 3, 5, 6, 106–10, 128, 171, 174–84, 186–91, 193, 195, 229, 351, 370–4 Henry IV 171, 371 Merchant of Venice, The 229 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 5, 6, 195, 373 Richard III 171, 179, 184, 188, 372, 373 Romeo and Juliet 106, 107, 110 ‘Sonnet 18’ 128 Titus Andronicus 351 Shelley, Mary 284, 285, 379 Frankenstein 284, 379 Sherman, Cindy 259–68, 271–82, 378, 379 Centerfolds 265, 277–80 Color Tests 280 Disaster Pictures 265 Fairy Tales 265, 278–80 Fashion 265, 277, 278, 280 ‘History Portraits’ 259 Rear-Screen Projection 277, 278, 280 Sex Pictures 265, 278, 279, 281

Specimens 265, 281 ‘Untitled’ 272, 281 Untitled Film Stills 273, 379 Simon, David 171–7, 184, 185, 191, 193, 195, 371, 373 Corner, The 176 Homicide 176 Wire, The 171, 172, 173, 174–7, 179, 180, 184–91, 193–5, 371–3 simultaneity 327 Sirk, Douglas 98, 103–5 Written on the Wind 103, 104 site, cognitive see cognitive space social body 113, 114 Socrates 293 Solomon-Godeau, Abigail 67, 70, 368 soma see body, soma Sontag, Susan 112, 114, 297, 298, 369, 380 ‘Fascinating Fascism’ 112, 369 Spacey, Kevin 212 spectre see phantom Spies, Werner 345 Stack, Robert 104 stereotype 98, 103, 138, 145, 205, 264, 269, 277, 280 Stevens, George 99–102 Place in the Sun, A  99, 100, 101, 102, 103 Stewart, James 146 Stokes, Mark 260, 282 Strong, Mark 199 subjectivity 11, 30, 32, 36, 80, 223, 241, 265, 300, 319, 344 feminine 7, 72, 273 Other, subjectivity of the 27, 29 subversion 8, 237, 375 surrealism 235–37, 241, 368, 375 Sussman, Elisabeth 309, 380 Sydenham, Thomas 270

INDEX

symptom 167, 191, 243, 269–72, 276, 281, 300, 362, 376 cultural 14, 138, 167 psychic 14, 269–72, 300, 362 tableaux vivants 49, 53, 61, 367 Taylor, Elizabeth 101 Taylor-Wood, Sam 11 Sustaining the Antagonism 11 Thaumas 293, 294, 379 Theaetetus 293 theatricality 188, 190, 193 theatricalization 177, 192, 193; see also performativity thought figure see figure of thought Titian 71 Venus with an Organist and Cupid 71 totalitarianism 112, 115, 369 totalized artwork 130 Toussaint, Helen 288 transference 2, 3, 8–11, 14, 53, 204, 343 translation 9, 12, 14, 32, 37, 44, 50, 53, 56, 106, 116, 198, 200, 201, 204, 331, 363, 377 transvestism 297, 300, 306, 313–15 trauma 82, 145, 227, 245, 251, 257, 261, 265, 267, 270–3, 277, 278, 281, 282, 295, 299–303, 305, 307, 308, 315, 318, 331, 353, 377 matrix of 300 traumatic past 271, 290, 352, 355, 364 Turner, Frederick Jackson 143, 370 uncanny, the 3, 16, 60, 68–76, 79, 81–3, 88, 97, 105, 114, 124, 127, 135, 219, 221–36, 245, 248, 274, 277, 283–5, 288,

397

289, 291, 296, 297, 308, 314, 320, 321, 323, 334, 349, 353, 366, 374, 379, 381; see also Freud, Sigmund feminine 235 unfinished business 7 Vallotton, Felix 44–7 Nu à l’echarpe verte see Reclining Nude with Green Silk Scarf Reclining Nude with Green Silk Scarf 44 van Dyck, Anthonis 37, 39 Susanna and the Elders 37, 38, 39 vanitas 59, 339 Vasilieva, Katrina 204 Velazquez, Diego Rodriguez de Silva y 37, 39 Toilet of Venus, The (‘Rockeby-Venus’) 37, 38, 39 Vidal, Gore 137, 370 violence 107, 109, 110, 140, 141, 144, 145, 176, 177, 184, 185, 190, 193, 207, 208, 211, 215, 239, 245, 250, 260, 265, 267, 282, 305, 307, 309, 310, 322, 337, 338, 342, 345, 347, 349, 363, 372 domestic 175, 177, 179, 347, 350, 354, 364 visibility 24, 26, 28, 56, 72, 193 vision 7, 20, 26, 28, 31, 50, 53, 57, 61, 72, 73, 75, 80, 104, 114, 142, 144, 181, 182, 184, 188, 190, 194, 195, 235, 278, 283–5, 287, 292, 295, 301, 307, 316, 333, 338, 344, 353, 366, 367 diurnal 341 double 10, 67, 74, 193, 339, 341, 354 subjective 23, 24

398

INDEX

visual culture 1–3, 7, 8, 10, 114 modern 7 voice 7, 27, 82, 102, 107, 108, 128, 138, 151, 153–5, 158, 161, 163–6, 200, 212, 217, 232, 233, 235, 254, 283, 308, 313, 327, 329, 331, 333, 341, 349, 353, 357, 377 disembodied 329 Volkskörper see social body Wagner, Richard 146–54, 157–61, 164–6, 169, 170, 193, 371 Liebestod 146–8, 150–4, 156–9, 161–5, 167–70 Nachtgeweihte 146, 149, 166, 170 ‘Ritt der Walküren’ 193 Tristan und Isolde 147, 153, 154, 158, 159, 161–3, 166, 167 Walter, Marie-Thérèse 336 war 107, 109, 112, 130, 157, 165, 167, 174–6, 178–92, 200, 205, 206, 210, 212, 215, 218, 298, 311, 333, 335–8, 340–5, 350, 355, 372, 381 First World War 49, 97, 129, 150, 152, 340 Second World War 94, 96, 97, 112, 114, 133, 130, 151, 153, 167, 273, 291, 336, 344, 345, 346 War on Drugs 175, 177, 184, 193 war women see Picasso, Pablo Wars of the Roses 174, 175, 176, 184 Warburg, Aby 1–4, 9–11, 13, 365 Bildformel see image formula Ergreifung 1 Ergriffenheit 1 Mnemosyne Atlas 1, 365

Warhol, Andy 86–8, 90, 96, 97, 105, 106, 110, 369 Philosophy of Andy Warhol, The 86, 369 Watteau, Jean-Antoine 39, 40 Judgement of Paris, The 39, 40 Jugement de Pâris, Le see Judgement of Paris, The Weltanschauung 115 Wesselmann, Tom 99 Wilde, Oscar 313 Wilder, Billy 94–7 Double Indemnity 94, 96, 97 Williamson, Judith 276, 379 Willimon, Beau 212–16 House of Cards 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 374 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 196, 197, 373 woman 7, 8, 15, 19, 21–9, 31, 32, 34–7, 39–42, 45–8, 56–9, 61, 67, 70–3, 75–8, 80, 81, 85, 99–103, 106, 108, 122, 124, 127, 147, 149, 150, 156–61, 163, 206–11, 217, 218, 222, 225, 227–35, 239, 241–4, 247, 249, 252, 259, 260, 261, 263, 264, 267–77, 281, 287, 288, 294, 300, 308, 311–14, 317, 323, 336–9, 341–6, 358, 364, 368, 371, 375, 379 artist 7, 8, 237, 283, 382 dead 27, 79, 81, 146–8, 312 Wood, Michael 194, 373 Woodman, Francesca 49–63, 65–73, 76–81, 84, 85, 367, 368, 379 And I had forgotten how to read music 63, 65 house #3 68, 76 house #4 67

INDEX

I could no longer play by instinct 63, 66 it must be time for lunch now 61 my house 60 polka dots 62 Self portrait talking to vince 55 Self portrait at thirteen 56 Self-deceit 59 Self-deceit #5–6 59

399

space2 69, 77 Untitled 55 Untitled 62 Untitled 67 Untitled 78 woman: a mirror; a woman is a mirror for a man, A 57 Wright, Robin 212, 218