Rethinking about feeling historical

"The structure of an affect has, therefore, no inevitable relation to the emotions that may cluster in the wake of its activity, nor should it."
-Lauren Berlant, "Thinking about Feeling Historical, in Political Emotions

"Life can no longer be lived even phantasmagorically as a melodrama, as Aristotelian tragedy spread to ordinary people, as a predictable arc that is shaped by acts, facts, or fates."
-Berlant

http://bayterracecafe.wordpress.com

While I am convinced by parts of Berlant's argument, such as the first quote where she argues that any number of emotions can legitimately proceed from a spectator's reaction to an event, I am not sure that most people do not perceive these emotions as part of a melodramatic, tragedic, or otherwise generic arc. It reminded me of my previous post on the course blog (http://writingperformance.blogspot.com/2012/09/911-response-andrea.html) where I talked about my childhood reaction to September 11. Berlant may be right that human responses to any given event are of infinite variety, but we most often interpret using the models that are nearest to hand.

Phelan: The Ephemerality of Performance

"To the degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology."
-Peggy Phelan, "The Ontology of Performance," in Unmarked: The Politics of Performance

"Performance approaches the Real through resisting the metaphorical reduction of the two into one."
-Phelan

"'What history cannot assimilate, Felman argues, 'is the implicitly analytical dimension of all radical or fecund thoughts, of all new theories: the "force" of their "performance" (always somewhat subversive) and their "residual smile" (always somewhat self-subversive).'"
-qtd. in Phelan


from Ursula Le Guin's short story, "The Kerastion," printed in A Fisherman of the Inland Sea:

"Even while they watched, the wind destroyed Kwatewa's sculpture. Soon there was only a shapeless lump and a feathering of white sand blown across the proving ground. Beauty had gone back to the Mother. That the sculpture had been destroyed so soon and so utterly was a great honor to the maker."

"His death was no shame, since there had been nothing for him to do but die. There was no fine, no ablution, no purification, for what he had done. Shepherds had found the cave where he had kept the stones, great marble pieces from the cave walls, carved into copies of his own sandsculptures, his own sacred work for the Solstice and the Hariba: sculptures of stone, abominable, durable, desecrations of the body of the Mother."

The Stage Life of a Prop

"This cumulative absorption of meaning is augmented by moments at which the handkerchief metonymically invokes its medeival predecessors."

-Andrew Sofer, The Stage Life of Props

How about a different prop?

https://www.theatrefolk.com/spotlights/the-greek-theatre

http://blog.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/blog/posts/music-mondays-mummers-mumming/

http://www.thebookofdays.com/months/dec/24a.htm

http://waldorfcampusconnection.blogspot.com/2010/04/shakespeare-masquerade-ball-saturday.html

http://www.philipcoppens.com/vforvendetta.html

http://wakingideas.com/blog/2012/07/tdkr-top-10-accurate-spoilers-from-the-dark-knight-rises/

http://www.calhounchronicle.com/

Palimsests

"An object is never of a singular moment but instead combines ingredients from several times."
-Jonathan Gil Harris, "Palimpsested Time: Towards a Theory of Untimely Matter"

Cicero Palimsest http://www.skypoint.com/members/waltzmn/ShortDefs.html

Archimeded Palimsest
http://www.computus.org/journal/?p=1079 

http://www.postmodernpalimpsest.com

http://www.flickriver.com/photos/christianmontone/4000690499/

My cat, Ramona

Fractious Relatives: Image and Caption

"What captioning protocols might we devise that, while acknowledging how image, caption, and text are a tripod of meaning, would accord the image a more privileged status?"
-Barbara Hodgdon, "Photography, Theater, Mnemonics: Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Still"

Via Goodreads.com

There are several unforgivable flaws in this book cover, and they have to do with the relationship of the image to the text of the book itself. First, the character depicted, Ged, is supposed to have brown skin and dark hair. This type of alteration is a chronic problem with visual adaptations of Le Guin's work, and it proves the point she was trying to make with the physical descriptions of her characters in the first place. Also, at no point in the book does Ged shoot lightning bolts out of his fingertips, as he appears to do here. This image is subject to its title, in elegant and somewhat foreign-looking font, and the author's name, which is featured prominently above the title in all caps. The smaller-font recommendation at the top also mitigates our understanding of the image.

kids.aol.com

For reasons that I have never really thought through until now, I despise book covers that are based on the movie. Part of it is a snobby, hipsterish desire to let people know that I liked this book before everybody saw it onscreen. But a larger part of it, probably, is that this image is subverting the primacy of the book even while it tries to sell the book. The title uses the script and colors of the movie posters, Prince Caspian appears in a obligatory 'epic' pose that differs greatly from his younger and more frightened image on the 1970 edition that I own. Everything about this implies the supremacy of the movie version, down to the bottom caption, "The Original Novels by C.S. Lewis," as if a movie-goer might stumble onto this book cover and be surprised to learn that their favorite new movie also has its own book.

http://screeninsight.blogspot.com/2011/10/star-wars-episode-iv-new-hope-george.html

This is a deservedly famous movie poster, and this example is interesting for the way the 'informational' text is sharply divided from the image and its accompanying text. The only thing that bridges these two elements is the title, which is appropriately half text and half image itself. It is text in that the title is made up of words, but the lettering is shaped and colored in a signature way that makes it more a logo than a text, and the words have a perspective that reminds the viewer of the prologue effect that Lucas uses at the beginning of each Star Wars film. 

Reflections on Photographs

In her article, "Seeing Sentiment: Photography, Race, and the Innocent Eye," Laura Wexler argues that cultural theory has refused to read photographs, instead preferring to accept them as factual testaments. The notable exception is feminist theory, but Wexler adds:

"...it has been relatively silent about the internal dynamics of objectification within its own ranks, woman over woman, and about the ways in which women themselves have gained and lost from the racial and class power differentials among men." (163)

For me, this was the most thought-provoking quote in Wexler's article because it its far-reaching implications for women's studies. I recently heard an excellent lecture from Penelope Anderson on her new book, Friendship's Shadows: Women's Friendships and the Politics of Betrayal in England, 1640-1705, and I think the study of women's friendship is one field in which these "internal dynamics of objectification" should be explored.

Thing Theory and Awkward Family Photos

I was very interested in Bernstein's description of thing theory in her article, "Dances with Things," and I've been looking for a way to apply it to my ideas about medievalism that have been fermenting these past several weeks. Bernstein's use of photos led me to a favorite site of mine, Awkward Family Photos, and I found several examples of medieval-themed awkwardness. Like the  cosplay and reenactment photos I posted earlier, these pictures all involve props and costumes, and I'd like to look at a few of them with thing theory in mind.

Bernstein explains the theory briefly in her article: "Things, but not objects, script actions. Martin Heidegger and more recent scholars of 'thing theory' define an object as a chunk of matter that one looks through or beyond to understand something human. A thing, in contrast, asserts itself within a field of matter . . . The difference between objects and things, then, is not essential but situational and subjective . . . An object becomes a thing when it invites a person to dance." (69-70)

In this photo, the obvious and awkward 'thing' is the chain mail. The family has responded to the thing's invitation to dance with great enthusiasm, but the different ways they have employed it speak to their separate reactions to the thing. The man wears the chain mail in a very typical way, a way that medieval soldiers might have actually worn it. The woman, however, wears hers like a metal bikini. In fact, it immediately reminded me of Princess Leia's infamous metal bikini in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. The baby's chain mail shows that the parents are interested in their child one day responding to the thing as they have. 

I'll call this photo medieval because it seems from the tags on the website that the people in the photo considered it to be so. The things in this picture include costumes, props, and set. The costumes are notably gendered, just as in the chain mail photo, with the man wearing a 'period' costume and the girls wearing sexualized costumes of dubious historical origin. The woman in the back seems to be wearing a 'barmaid' kind of outfit that is slightly more historical-ish than the girls' clothes. The props they are holding also invite this kind of gendered performance--the man holds a sword and the girls hold tamborines.

This photo is my favorite. I don't know the circumstances in which it was taken, but I'm tempted to guess that it took place at a gathering like the Society for Creative Anachronism. It has a specific date and location, indicating some kind of public social event, and the title "Friends of the Realm" sounds very like the kind of language the SCA uses. I would also guess that the picture was taken in front of a screen and the background was added afterward. Thus the key things here are the costumes and the prop weapons. Here the costumes are both fairly appropriate to their use in medieval period, unlike the chain mail bikini and the harem girl costumes. The woman's outfit doesn't veer toward the overtly sexualized, and the weapons also invite her to depart from a traditionally gendered role. I wonder how the girls in the photo above would have posed if they had been handed battle axes instead of tamborines.

What I notice most in these pictures is the way that costumes and props from the medieval era tend to script gender. While the men in these pictures are performing fairly literal roles from what they imagine to be the Middle Ages, the women are often adopting highly sexualized and anachronistic roles. The medieval era simply has more to offer male performers, and the women are creating their performances based on an assumption of a male world. This could also be said of race--I didn't find any photos of awkward black families posing in chain mail. In these photos, scriptive things form an essential part of the performance of medievalism, and these things tend to imply a white male performer.