Haunting : “Siluetas,” La Prieta, & More
I am interesting in thinking through haunting as a rife hermeneutic for performances and performances studies, particularly the notion of the afterlife of a performance. As Alvarado says of Mendieta’s Rape Scene specifically, “How does a piece like that end? … “We are meant to ruminate on the immediate reception of the performance but also on the encounter beyond the immediate scene. Mendieta’s abject presentation is routed through the formally unbounded, through sublime limitlessness” (42). [This language of “routed through” prompts me to question the mediation of the abject [and object],of the performance, and whether this mediation is contributing to its haunting nature.]
Without theoretically engaging the term, Alvarado utilizes “haunts” once each in Chapters 1, 2, and 3, to discuss different works of art :
1) “As an installation without end, Rape Scene haunts me beyond the writing of this chapter…” (45)
2) “I first encountered Asshole Mural in C. Ondine Chavoya’s essay ‘Internal Exiles: The interventionist Public and Performance Art of Asco...The spectral quality of the image -- at that point a photocopy of a photocopy, blurred, it seemed, by rumor and suggestion -- inspired the direction of this inquiry. I am drawn by the way this phantom document haunts the official image…” (59)
3) “Farah’s ‘weird mysterious piece is alluring with its racialized ‘ritualistic’ elements, in addition to its promise of black violence - a promise that haunts the presence of the young black artist and against which his success is measured” (128)
As such, (in the second quote) we see “spectral” deployed in terms of an image at, or almost beyond, remove, a simulacra nearing its fault lines, somehow suggestively “unofficial” -- a double. Meanwhile, in her conclusion, [Alvarado] discusses the world in progress Untitled (skins) (2015-2016) of Xanda Ibarra and Sophia Wang [See Cover Art], as offering a glimpse of the “ghosts of historical meaning” (Rebecca Schneider), which “encircle, indeed haunt, those uneasy feelings around the successes of national incorporation or easy assimilation, and, ultimately, wail against respectability politics: (Alvarado, 163). This “wail[ing]” [of the ghosts of meaning] calls up the sonics of dissent not only as discussed by McMillan (see next), but also by Fred Moten in In the Break : The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (who cites the (in)famous wails of Frederick Douglass’ Aunt Hester, 1845, among many other examples.
Last week, McMillan similarly peppered his texts with notions of haunting: that “Ellen Crafts’ doings...haunt the image, even if they are not immediately visible” (66) and, in references to Joice Heth’s sonic of dissent, Elizabeth Alexander’s words: ‘Hearing, too, is central to witnessing. Heard images haunt the mind as much as visual ones” (170). Moreover, to an arguably limited degree he centralized haunting in his introduction methodology. Firstly, he understands “the concept of avatar production...limns [to draw or paint on a surface; to outline in clear sharp detail; delineate] how experiments in ontological play create haunting resonances in words and images” (13). Secondly, he justifies his organizational traveling “back” to the United States and across as century in order to, in part, “highlight how, in spite of these temporal diverges, traces of coercion and subjugation haunt more recent black female performance art” (19). [Despite ostensibly theoretically centralizing haunting, this doesn’t particularly seem to play out in the rest of the text?]
While Alvarado makes a point not to centralize Mendieta’s Silueta Series (1973-1980), that for which she is most recognized, I do want to take a moment to look at some of those images, and to think them in relation to haunting, hauntology, and the following terms: silhouette, absence, presence, vacant, vacated, contours, impression, depression, relic, ritual, iconography, hagiography, hieroglyphic, entombed, enwombed, invaginated [?], enworlded [?], anism, sears, scars, haunts (ie., n) -- herida abierta, open wound.
1976
1976
1977
1980
1985
While I haven’t read the source text (Spectres of Marx), I recently came across Derrida’s articulation of hauntology. As David Rudd states in his unpacking of the Freudian Uncanny (as pertinent to Neil Gaiman’s Coraline), “The double, of course, undermines our sense of individuality, and is often seen to augur death: ontology, as Derrida punningly puts it, becomes upset by ‘hauntology.’” Perhaps rather than understanding the very understanding of the nature of being as one upset by haunting [or sites, sounds, images, figures which haunt], perhaps we can understanding being and ourselves as always already haunted, with ontology asymptotically approached through intra-actions with the spectral, with temporality [and thereby performance] never “done” but always lingering? [As stated in Diane Taylor’s Performance, “Theorists such as Peggy Phelan have posited that performance “disappears” even as it comes into being...It cannot be saved, she argues, or recorded or documented. What that happens, she maintains, it ceases to be performance and becomes something else” (10) -- Do we agree?]
[Footnote: In Translating Time : Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique, Bliss Cua Lim mobilizes the fantastic (primarily fantastic cinema) to critique homogenous time [she references also Barthes’ notion of “noise of Time”] -- or rather [/simultaneously], posits the Fantastic itself (as a genre) as temporal translation. In the chapter “The Ghostliness of Genre : Global Hollywood Remakes the ‘Asian Horror Film,’” Lim both analyzes the function of ghosts within what have been lumped together as “Asian Horror Films” and the haunting, (nearly-)iterative temporality of remakes (and, she argues, genre itself) She states: “Repetition is the engine of genre. But, given Bergeson’s reminder that ceaseless change makes exact repetition impossible, I would add that generic repetition inevitably encodes difference difference or novelty. Generic repetition is always inexact, never a precise iteration (193)...The genre film is cannibalistic: ‘implicitly, each new film ingests every previous film.’ The centralist of intertextual repetition in genre films is particularly pronounced in the cannibalism of a remake, which even more emphatically ‘ingests’ its precursors [remake, sequel, allusion, rip off, steal, copy]...Faced with such dismissal, it is helpful to bear in mind that the remake, which has also be productively defined as an intensified, hypervisible form of intertextuality ‘problematizes the notion of originality.’ For instance, the supposed inferiority of the imitative text in relation to a prior original is a difficult accusation to sustain in the wake of concentric influences that are transhistorical as well as transcultural” (195)...So perhaps remakes and sequels are not only afterward but also a refusal of the time of afterward...the remake becomes the ground for the reception of the precursor text, introducing instability into the very terms original, copy, precursor, remake, and sequel -- in short, to questions of priority and cultural value in genre studies (221).” While I understand this make seem tangential in terms of the rest of the texts/performances featured this week (hence locating it in a footnote), I am interested in these questions of priority (i.e. a priori, originary, originary moment, “birthing”), mediation, similitude and the uncanny [the slightest “off” in the iterative], and how we may or may not understand cinema and cinematic remakes in terms of the performance theory we are reading.]
Furthermore, in her introduction, Alvarado states: “The deployment of abjection as an irreverent aesthetic strategy unites the artists, performers, and cultural producers profiled in Abject Performances, as does their challenge to a bounded understanding of Latinidad...Collectively, they depict the structures of feeling of a contrapuntal affective terrain that demarcates a complex periphery of political projects as well as the incoherence and instability of interpellativate inditariain categories...Latinidad merges here as a performative utterance that gestures at once to an affective site shared by a diverse community of individuals of Latin American dissent and the challenges of finite denotation” (4-5). That said, does haunting/hauntology do anything to further or upset Alvarado’s goals in Abject Performances of the goals, as she articulates them, of the artists featured therein?
La herida abierta:
Alvarado seems to understand Anzaldúa as codifying/heralding a New Mestica who is “hailed by either side of an artificial U.S./Mexico border...operated in a pluralistic mode that sustains contradictions [and generates] a new consciousness”, while implying Anzaldúa’s sway in Latino Studies to be/to have been problematic (40) [I would love to discuss this further]. References from to Anzaldúa’s theories on this page are from Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) rather than Bridge Called my Back (1981), from which La Prieta (recommended reading) is excerpted. In Borderlands/La Frontera, Anzaldúa states:
This is my home
this this edge of
barbwire.
...The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country - a border culture. Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us and them. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants...the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half-breed, the half dead... (25)
While not dismissing the relevance of the U.S.-Mexican border in particularly of the specificity of [her] racial experience [nor willnilly pathologizing racial or queer experiences], Anzaldúa also understands la frontera and la herida abierta to pertain to multiple sites [one may say intersectional] of liminality and confrontation, including her experiences with trauma. I am interested utilizing the iconography of the Siluetas Series (as above), the notion of haunting, and the notion of la herida abierta to think through each other and performance writ large.
In/upon the first pages of La Prieta, Anzaldúa expresses a tension amongst herself and her mother and her Mamágrande Locha, a seeming simultaneous desire for distancing (verguenza/shame, pg. 224)and honor/affinity. In one fashion, racial haunting bore down generationally through Mamágrande Locha and Mamá upon the body and soul of young Glorita (220). [I would be intrigued to discuss the proposed “racial haunting” more].** Mired in haunting, Anzaldúa at times claims and rejects (particularly her family; we can consider whether this qualified as Muñoz’ disidentification), her autopoiesis both compositional (abrazar/aceptar/aprovechar?) and destructive (rechazar), both inherited and chosen. Regarding the latter:
…Last March my fibroids conspired with an intestinal tract infection and spawned watermelons in my uterus. The doctor played with his knife. La Chingada ripped open, raped with the white man’s wand. My soul in one corner of the hospital ceiling, getting thinner and thinner telling me to clean up my shit, to release the fears and garbage from the past that are hanging me up. So I take La Muerte’s scythe and cut away my arrogance and pride, the emotional depressions I indulge in, the head trips I do on myself and other people. With her scythe I cut the umbilical cord shackling me to the path and to friends and attitudes that drag me down. Strip away -- all the way to the bond. My myself utterly vulnerable…
Additionally, a sharp and stunning line I’d love to give a nod to: “Once again it’s faggot hunting and queer-baiting time in the city” (229).
**See also the poetry of Nicolás Guillén (Cuban, 1902-1989, namely “Abuelo”) or Orlando Ricardo Menes (“Hair”)
https://www.poemas-del-alma.com/nicolas-guillen-el-abuelo.htm
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/hair
Curtain Call : The Tale [Content Warning - Rape and Sexual Assault, Age Range of Survivor- Tween/Teen]
While I’m not going to discuss this further on the blog post (and I won’t be discussing everything from this post overtly in class), I wanted to give a head’s up on the following. In class, I will be showing this trailer (or a similar trailer) and a short clip from the film The Tale (2018). No images of assault or near-assault will be shown. The child actress was not involved in the sex scenes during filming. While I cannot speak to anyone’s experience, personally (as a survivor) the biggest potential trigger is that this tale contends with reliability of memory and the role of narrativization in processing. In my presentation, we will be discussion questions/themes as presented above in the blog post for about the first 10 minutes, and there will be a natural break before transition to The Tale, so if anyone would like to excuse themselves for any reasons, no questions asked. Also, if you’d like more information or to chat, please reach out to me. My email is cbc52@pitt.edu and my cell is 208-585-7552.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Af6VbPT5O4k
Thanks for this post, Christine. In relationship to haunting I would like to propose another connection--poet/essayist Nathaniel Mackey's theorizations of the "phantom limb" as a formal aesthetic of present/absence in black performance culture (see his marvelous essay "Limbo, Dislocation, Phantom Limb: Wilson Harris and the Caribbean Occasion" in Discrepant Engagement) As Mackey phrases it, the phantom limb is "a feeling for what is not there that reaches beyond as it calls into question what is."(235)The phantom limb signals loss (here contextualized within a history of racialized violence, erasure and dispersion) but also "a wholeness to which [the imagined limb] can only refer, the cosmic fulfillment we at once intuit and are 'cut off' from." (176) I find myself wondering about the relationship between Mackey's poetics, Alvarado's theorization of "sublime limitlessness" in performance, and finally, Muñoz's experiments in utopian longing (Cruising Utopia, 2009) What alternate ways of knowing might these distinct variations of haunting open up?
ReplyDeletesee also Lagapa, Negative Theology and Utopian Thought in Contemporary American Poetry.
I am persuaded by Alvarado’s investments in abject performance and politics. Employing the concept as a means to subvert (neoliberal) codification and/or commodification of identity while still paying witness to positionality, I am similarly persuaded by a hauntological hermeneutic and the lens it can provide in abject and negative affect theory, offered here by Christine. Alvarado writes in her introduction that her archival work “about abjection across different sites . . . decenters the organization of Latino studies focused on a particular U.S. national coast, border, or national grouping and resists a teleological progress narrative” (17, emphasis mine). If teleological coherence is a crucial mechanism in the management of racialized bodies, and I think it is, then Alvarado’s turn to abjection and Christine’s interest in hauntology critically undermine such hegemonic delineation of bodies.
ReplyDeleteIn Cruising Utopia (not a text for this week but tangential to the recommended readings!) José Muñoz invests in the ephemeral, particularly as it manifests through dance performance. “All these [trainings/practices] are only a preparation for an event that disappears in the very act of materializing.” And, significantly, “No other art is so hard to catch, so impossible” (81). I think “catch” here can be synonymized with acquired or consumed; the caught thing, whether a material or epistemological object, resists. Muñoz continues, “It is meant to be hard to catch—it is supposed to slip through the fingers and comprehension of those who would use knowledge against us.” The performance, with its gestures and hauntings, is political.
In her exploration of Mendieta’s Siluetas, Alvarado writes, “Mendieta gives us neither object nor subject through her physical absence. Instead, we encounter dissolving ephemeral traces and, significantly, the marked contours that reveal the abjected as shaped by social and political conditions that facilitate its emergence” (50). And again, Muñoz reminds us that the ghost of a performance is not to be underestimated; its nonteleological tendrils exceed the moment, always. “After the gesture expires, its materialitiy has transformed into ephemera that are utterly necessary” (81).
Thinking about haunting helps me think about another kind of haunting (or shape it) as it plays out in Alvarado's work, especially vis-a-vis Mendieta. On the one hand, I'm interested in this chapter's commitment to thinking about Mendieta while acknowledging her problematic or appropriative gestures. I was familiar with the Silueta series and some limited biographical information, but I found the description of Mendieta's life as it played out in connection with her early art really rich and fascinating—Alvarado says she's not interested in "hagiography" but the work in that mode in this chapter was some of the most compelling to me!
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, I found the claim that Mendieta "undo[oes] dualistic thinking" and extends her Latinidad in relation to Chicanidad, Blackness, and Indigeneity less compelling (40). A frame of "haunting" is useful because it seems like blackness "haunts" Mendieta's work here, and perhaps Mendieta. Although Indigenous peoples come up in the chapter's discussions of Mexico and holy sites, Alvarado doesn't argue that Indigeneity appears in the same kind of fraught category in Mendieta's work that Blackness does. I'm still working through this, but I'm interested in the way that the chapter/Mendieta summon blackness because Mendieta and her sister "were abject creatures against whom white subjects forged their Americanness," without indicating (or perhaps being able to indicate?) the different circumstances different people within category of abject (29). That is, Alvarado posits (I think!) that Mendieta explores a visual continuum with Blackness because she is told that she is somehow near Blackness. So I'm curious about the historical location of the "racially coded symbolic labor" Alvarado discusses and its relationship to Blackness in this period (40). Another way of thinking this is that the chapter in various ways seems to believe what people say—when blackness is "invoked" in relationship to Mendieta, she then ventriloquizes (maybe a different verb would be useful here) that gaze in the portrait of her mother, say, working through a possibility of a literally variable vision of skin color. (We could also think about the curatorial statement at the end of the chapter.) But if Mendieta was "othered through a punitive invocation of black bodies," what about the actual black people whose bodies were invoked? Does her work destabilize this continuum?
Although Alvarado does not explicitly theorize her use of “hauntological” language, I see this diction as an extension of her application of the sublime. Perhaps to some extent, the connection between “haunting” and the sublime is not easily explained in language—just a sense that I have within me when I read about the sublime, but this is inherent to the elusive, ethereal nature of both the sublime and the notion of “haunting.” After a quick Google Scholar search, I found that “haunting” language is frequently invoked in scholarly literature on the sublime. In American Sublime: The Genealogy of a Poetic Genre (of which I have not read very thoroughly), Rob Wilson argues that the sublime “haunt[s] and inhabit[s]” one’s “imagination” (308). This echoing of elusive concepts from the Alvarado reading like “haunting” and “imagination” within the sublime sparked by interest in the possible connection between the two. Alvarado describes the sublime as “the emotive site that frustrates reason—it is at once pleasurable and repulsive” (15). Although one may not associate such amplified language like “pleasurable” or “repulsive” with “haunting,” it is this positive-negative dichotomy, coupled with the “unbounded” and “limitless” nature of the sublime that enables a “haunting” response to a performance (15).
ReplyDeleteOf course, Alvarado could have more explicitly made this connection, but I think that her descriptions of the lasting effects of the performance as “haunting” stem from her theoretical grounding in the sublime, which has been understood as “boundless” in definition. In his writings “On the Sublime,” Longinus argues that “it cannot really be the true sublime, if its effect does not outlast the moment of utterance” (179), which undoubtedly echoes Taylor’s reflection on the lasting nature of a performance, in that even when it “ceases to be performance,” it “becomes something else” (10), or as Addison put it, “always lingering.” Alvarado’s response to the performance mirrors Longinus’s construction of the audience response to the sublime; in her words, she details that the “Rape Scene haunts me beyond the writing of this chapter, but it is in its sublime limitlessness…that I uncomfortably see Mendieta’s reach to provoke a transformative social response to power” (44). Not only does Alvarado experience this lasting impact of the performance but also ties it to her perception of its “sublime limitlessness” (44).
In addition to boundless temporality, another key overlap between the sublime and “haunting” language appears to be its ethereal and contradictory emotive effects on the audience. Longinus conceives of the sublime’s “effect of genius” is not “to persuade the audience but rather to transport them out of themselves” (163). The ghostly affect of this phrase reflects Alvarado’s own haunted experiences. Thus, Mendieta’s Rape Scene triggers a similar, disembodied effect in Alvarado. Longinus further describes that the sublime “inspires wonder” yet “shatters everything like a bolt of lightning” (163), which alludes to the dichotomous, often contradictory response to a sublime performance that Alvarado describes (15). Perhaps it is just me, but I feel this dichotomous emotional response when I consider what it means to be “haunted.” There is undoubtedly a negative feeling but I can’t deny the small existence of pleasure that coexists in that feeling.
I like that you brought in the uncanny here because I do feel like it fits nicely with the ideas already circulating within Alvarado’s text. I wanted to ruminate on that here, thinking about how the hauntology of the uncanny is different from the hauntology of the abject. Stay with me for a moment as I digress into childhood themes (but promise to return to this week’s texts). There is a film based on Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland that I really love by Czech director Jan Svankmajer. His version, simply called Alice, gives a surreal, abject version of the classic tale with sharp objects, grating sounds, and a white rabbit that is constantly losing his stuffing and “eating” himself to keep it all together. In a lot of ways, this film literalized the abject, specifically through the white rabbit. Alvarado, in reference to Kristeva’s understanding of the abject, writes,
ReplyDeleteThe abject coheres the subject through its exclusion as an in-¬between, ambiguous, and composite intermediary entity, yet threatens the constitution of the subject who is invested in the myth of wholeness and completeness lest he acknowledge the process by which he becomes subject. (7)
In this sense, the white rabbit, who must constantly reconstitute their own body, is dealing with the “composite intermediary entity” (e.g. their own stuffing) that threatens to reveal the “myth of wholeness and completeness” (e.g. their body as constituted subject). This seems markedly different from the uncanny of Coraline that you briefly refer to in the text (an article which I love).
With this in mind, I’m wondering where the line is between the abject and the uncanny as they are not equivalent, but not completely different. In some ways, they are both threatening to the idea of a whole and complete subject, the single subject. However, the abject might offer more political viability through performance in a way that Alvarado seems drawn to—a simultaneous repulsion yet attraction. For me, these hauntings are quite different or at least allow for different actions or attentions.
When I think of Mendieta’s Rape Scene and the way in which Alvarado writes about it, as an almost violent and intrusive haunting, slipping to the surface when you least expect it. In your third example, drawn from the chapter on Bustamante’s work, it seems as if the haunting influences the art and performance itself, existing prior to the moment of making/doing. In this way, haunting seems to exist at several levels in Alvarado’s text that potentially further her theories of the abject as political strategy. Haunting seems to simultaneously come prior to and after the act of making art, come from the artist and from outside the artist, apply to the piece and the person. I guess I want to end by saying, the haunting that Rudd refers to in his piece and the work at the uncanny can do seems markedly different than the work that the haunting of abjection can do. But I am wondering if you see the uncanny being able to do similar work in specific situations or if the hauntology there remains different always. Put another way, what does the conversation of uncanny hauntology add to our potential understanding of abjection or disidentification—I think there may be something there, particularly with ties to the latter.
Some white rabbit for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxAA22CqQxc
Christine,
ReplyDeleteReading your comments about the haunting properties of performances left me thinking about how to articulate its connection to abjection. In //Performance//, Diana Taylor talks about duration, “again-ness,” and indexation in performance (24-26), which I think are helpful concepts to start threading. When she talks about las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, she discusses how these women use their bodies to “summon” the disappeared as they perform their ritualistic walk daily in public. The women who participate in this political demonstration “channel” those who are no longer with them (side comment: apropos haunting, this idea of channeling reminded me of the work of the //ghost//writer, a different kind of (dis)appearing act). This is a performance that flickers between presence and absence, past and present. It is an indexical performance, and it is a haunting performance. I would argue that it is also an abject performance, as these women insist in materializing a haunting moment in Argentinian history, refusing to satisfy the national dream of healing, reconciliation, and progress. In her book, Alvarado seems to suggest that she is interested in situating Mendieta’s Silueta Series in this intersection (indexical, haunting, abject) when she attempts to put the images in conversation with Mendieta’s earlier works in which she is grappling with her own relationship to blackness. Alvarado interprets them as a continuation of her oftentimes problematic explorations of her own relative and constantly shifting positionalities. However, to spectators, it is unclear what these indexes are pointing towards. This has kept me thinking about the plasticity of the concept of the abject in performance, which I’d be interested in continuing discussing in class.