This is Not My Body

182 Pages·2014·1.65 MB·English

by  Anne Carter

This is Not My Body:
Alienated Corporeality and Brechtian Critical Theatre Practices
A Dissertation
SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
BY
Ashley Majzels
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Michal Kobialka, Professor of Theatre Arts and Dance, Adviser
December 2014
© Ashley Majzels, 2014
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Acknowledgments
Writing my dissertation would not have been possible without the support and
encouragement of many. For his patience and attention I would like to thank my adviser,
Michal Kobialka. For their guidance and feedback, I would like to thank my outside
examiner Keya Ganguly, as well as Sonja Kuftinec, Ananya Chatterjea, and Margaret
Werry. Additionally, I have to thank Ginni Arons for her extensive help in navigating the
Grad School's requirements while I was completing the dissertation in Canada. I would
also like to thank Megan Lewis, Branislav Jakovljevic and Aleksandra Wolska for their
advice and tutelage during my time at the University of Minnesota. A special thanks to
Freya Olafson for her time as well as graciously providing access to her archival
materials.
For their personal support and feedback during the writing process, my thanks and
apologies go out to Claudine Majzels, Eve Majzels, Praba Pilar, Per Brask, and Noah
Decter-Jackson.
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Dedication
My dissertation is dedicated to my family: C, E, F, and S.
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Abstract
My dissertation advances a historical materialist understanding of alienated corporeality
meant to inform Brechtian critical theatre practices. In the first half of my project, I draw
on Marx's account of commodity fetishism and industrial labour to frame a discussion of
Brecht's Mann ist Mann. In the second half, I revise my account of alienated corporeality
in the light of Guy Debord's account of spectacular society. I then use this spectacular
corporeality as a means to address Canadian inter-media artist Freya Olafson's recent
works, AVATAR and HYPER_, as well as her critical engagement with social media as
labour, consumption, and ontology.
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Table of Contents
List of Figures:...............................................................................................v
Introduction:...................................................................................................1
Chapter One: Corporeality under Commodity ..............................................20
Chapter Two: Mann ist Mann and Corporeality............................................39
Chapter Three: Brechtian Realism and Debord's Spectacle..........................87
Chapter Four: Broadcast Bodies: Freya Olafson's Avatar and Hyper_.........133
Conclusion:....................................................................................................157
Illustrations:...................................................................................................159
Bibliography:.................................................................................................167
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List of Figures
Figure 1 – AVATAR, 4m06s...........................................................................159
Figure 2 – AVATAR, 16m01s.........................................................................159
Figure 3 – AVATAR, 22m58s.........................................................................160
Figure 4 – AVATAR, 45m53s.........................................................................160
Figure 5 – AVATAR, Promotional Photo.......................................................161
Figure 6 – AVATAR, 2m14s...........................................................................161
Figure 7 – AVATAR, 2m18s...........................................................................162
Figure 8 – AVATAR, 2m19s...........................................................................162
Figure 9 – AVATAR, 38m34s.........................................................................163
Figure 10 – AVATAR, 38m52s.......................................................................163
Figure 11 – HYPER_, “RGB”, 26m57s.........................................................164
Figure 12 – HYPER_, “Hyperbolic Doubt”, 34m33s....................................164
Figure 13 – HYPER_, “Above”, 43m34s.......................................................165
Figure 14 – HYPER_, “Above”, Promotional Photo.....................................165
Figure 15 – HYPER_, “Object Oriented Ontology”, 51m24s........................166
Figure 16 – HYPER_, “Object Oriented Ontology”, 52m47s........................166
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Introduction
My dissertation takes a historical materialist approach to bodies under capital in
order to address bodies in Brechtian critical theatre practices. I provide an alternative
theorization of embodiment suited to such practices, motivated by my difficulties and
dissatisfaction with psychological and semiotic approaches. My intervention is doubled
sided, in that I address lacunae in the treatment of alienated corporeality in both historical
materialism and critical accounts of theatrical representation.
Recent interventions in theatre and performance studies have identified and
problematized bodies in a number of ways. Feminist accounts of performance and
performativity, which are of particular importance in these fields, frequently present
bodies as products of social relations as well as the sites in which to reveal and contest
those same relations of power. For example, Rebecca Schneider, in her 1997 The Explicit
Body in Performance, finds “[t]he body made explicit has become the mise en scene for a
variety of feminist artists” whose performance art involves “[u]nfolding the body, as if
pulling back velvet curtains to expose a stage.” (2) As Schneider positions these artists
exposing “the sedimented layers of signification,” her notion of 'explicit body' provides
the venue in which to critically engage with “ghosts of historical meaning, markings
delineating social hierarchies of privilege and disprivilege.” (2)
In his Theatre, Body and Pleasure from 2006, Simon Shepherd credits feminism
with having “made the body into a key topic, politically and theoretically” and draws a
range of tightly connected themes from body art into his predominantly
phenomenological approach (2). He presents theatre as “a practice in which societies
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negotiate around what the body is and means,” a negotiation whose significance arises
“because many ideas about what is good, right, natural and possible are grounded in
assumptions about what the body is, what it needs, how it works.” (1) Bringing both “the
art of bodies” and “physical responses to that art” (9) into this negotiation, Shepherd
argues for theatre as “an art of bodily possibility, an event where the limits of body are
negotiated, fetishised, imagined somehow else.” (10)
In contrast, Yoshiki Tajiri's 2007 Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Body: The
Organs and Sense in Modernity locates the significance of bodies in the intersection of
two sources. The first is 'body' as implicated in a tradition of “deconstructive thought” in
“the field of critical theory,” one that aims to “unsettle the integrity of self (identity) by
introducing the other (difference).” (1) His account of prosthesis, “indeterminately
between body and technology,” emerges from the deconstructive subversion of “binary
oppositions such as mind/body.” (1) This is then joined to “the empirical reality of
contemporary culture,” where “[t]he clear-cut distinction between the body (considered
internal and organic) and technology (considered external and inorganic) is being
rendered obsolete.” (2) Because of this constitutive role in both the indeterminacy of
deconstructive practice and its threatened obsolescence in present circumstances, Tajiri
foregrounds the importance of his notion of 'the prosthetic body' in registering how
“Beckett's work is indelibly marked by the modernist involvement with technologies in
the early twentieth century.” (5)
While I engage with some of these themes, I find there is a present need to
address theatrical corporeality in terms of capitalist society and labour, especially where
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conditions resembling those of Guy Debord's spectacle take hold. As technologies of
image creation, transmission, and reception become endemic under capital, these
conditions not only foreground the significance and difficulty of representing
corporeality, but also threaten to foreclose the possibility of critical theatrical
representation. My investigation of Brechtian theatre practices and historical materialist
corporeality takes the possibilities and limitations of critical representation of bodies as a
central concern. This commitment necessitates the other half of my intervention: where
corporeality has appeared in recent historical materialist thought, it has done so without
consideration of critical theatrical representation. Nevertheless, my account of
corporeality draws on the Marxist understanding of productive dexterities and
capabilities, and is closely related to a society's dominant form of alienated labour.
Hence, my dissertation's research project asks how alienated corporeality and its
representations are configured by capitalist labour processes and commodity fetishism, as
found in Marx, and then again in Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle.
I look to Brecht's critical representations of alienated life in large part because of
its compatibility with and attention to these concerns. Similarly, Freya Olafson's
performance works AVATAR and HYPER_ offer a critical approach to the emerging
forms of labour (and their disguise as consumption) occasioned by social media. For
these reasons, I investigate the critical representation of corporeality stemming from
industrialized labour, a corporeality that takes form as the appendage of a machine, in
Brecht's Mann ist Mann. Similarly, Freya Olafson's AVATAR and HYPER_ form the basis
for examining spectacle through the practices of social media, and the production of a