Is it possible to rewrite a history, an
account of the banal and the mundane incidents of the lives of the
dispossessed, the wronged without “replicating the grammar of violence”? How
does narration or recreation of such histories define the limits of “the locus
of impossible speech”? Whom do we narrate to and with what critical purchase?
Is the act of narration its own end or can narration be generative to think
about the question of agency and reparative justice? Are acts of listening,
translation and transmutation fundamental to articulation of “counter-histories
of human” which in turn enable a practice of freedom? I use these questions as
an entry point to understand the tenuous relationship between narration, forms
of storytelling, silences and the trope of the archive in Hartman’s “A Venus in
Two Acts” and Snorton’s book Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans
identity intersects with the ephemeral
nature of performances(written, oral, aural, visual) in an act of knowledge
production, circulation and exchange. My objective is not to posit “archive”
and “performance” in binary opposition to each other but to unpack how the
operation of these two conceptual categories hangs precariously between the
material and the metaphor, such that it becomes difficult to locate where and
how power operates.
At the very outset
of her essay, Hartman chronicles the difficulty in articulating the identity or
to name someone as Venus because the name here is generic and a metonymy of
women violated on the ship-board and specific at the same time. This
indeterminacy of naming makes her present everywhere and therefore nowhere.
Therefore, her story or the possible camaraderie that she might have shared
with another girl on the board is an impossible act of narration. Her
existence, as a name, as a spectre and as a numerical figure is accessed by
Hartman through the ledgers, log-books of ships and autobiographical narratives
where she is only referred in passing. She encounters her only through her
death and therefore in such a scenario the archive becomes “…a death sentence,
a tomb, a display of the violated body…an asterisk in the grand narrative of
history.(2)”. The question is neither of mourning the dead or the ethics
involved in “giving” voice to them but that of utilizing the archive to tell a
speculative history which would also “amplify the impossibility of such a
telling”(11). Hartman calls such a method of writing, “critical fabulation”
which as she explains constitute the “rearranging the basic elements of the
story, by re-presenting the sequence of events in divergent stories and from
contested points of view, I have attempted to jeopardize the status of the
event, to displace the received or authorized account, and to imagine what
might have happened or might have been said or might have been done. By
throwing into crisis “what happened when” and by exploiting the “transparency
of sources” as fictions of history, I wanted to make visible the production of
disposable lives (in the Atlantic slave trade and, as well, in the discipline
of history), to describe “the resistance of the object,”(12). What is perhaps
subversive about such a form of writing is how the archive does not
necessarily dictate how the story is
being told. The concept of an originary order or point is in apposition and
contradistinction to the act of writing or what would be the performance of the
writer. Is “critical fabulation”, then an act of illusion or is it an act of
“parrhesia” in performance? More importantly,
in attempting to write a counter-history of the human, how is the notion
of the “human” expanded and recharted?
As
critical fabulation talks about recreating histories, another concept which is
helpful to think about the relationality between performance and archive is the
concept of biomythography, which as proposed by Snorton in the book blurs the
concept between fact, fiction, history and the archive. Although biomythography
has a specific genealogical history as a term, in the context of the book
chapter it is relevant to contest a situation in a movie where the raciality of
the character is almost erased, “Referring to the ethical and aesthetic
implications of DeVine’s erasure from the feature film, Jennifer Devere Brody
explains that “Boys Don’t Cry is
emblematic of the way in which the radical erasure of blackness makes queer
stories queerer” (178). Therefore, my question would also be the role of
critical fabulation and biomythography in thinking about intersectionality in
performances and the role of the market?
For the purpose of the interactive
element in the presentation(some of which are included in this post)I would show
you underwater sculptors by Jason deCaires Taylor and Ellen Gallagher’s Watery
Ecstatic to understand how archives and performance can be put into dialogues
for a revisionist and speculative historiography. I will provide more context
about these art-performances in my presentation:
Image 1: Jason deCaires Taylor
Image 2: Jason deCaires’ sculptor
Image 3: Jason deCaires’ sculptor
Image 4: Ellen Gallagher’s “Bird in
the Hand”
In the end, Hartman recognizes with regard to telling Venus’s story that: “The random collection of details of which I have made use are the same descriptions, verbatim quotes, and trial transcripts that consigned her to death and made murder ‘not much noticed,’ at least, according to the surgeon. The promiscuity of the archive begets a wide array of reading, but none that are capable of resuscitating the girl” (13). Hartman realizing her inability to give the girl a voice through the archive is a very important point. Often when we see performances that involve paying homage to the oppressed, they are described as giving those who never had a chance to speak a voice. However, many times I have wondered, how does this really give the voiceless a voice?; Is a performance with this goal really managing to overturn the archive? I think that after reading Hartman’s essay my answer would be no. However, Hartman’s observation—based on Michel de Certeau’s theories on how to make a place for the living and for the future through history’s archives—that telling stories like those of the forgotten Venuses can be a way of interrogating “the production of our knowledge about the past” is an extremely useful way to explore the blurring of history, fact, fiction, and archive (14).
ReplyDeleteIn fact, one might say that there is truly no division between the categories of history, fact, fiction, and the archive because all of them contain a certain notion of subjectivity that inevitably favors one point of view while excluding another, and thus automatically gives rise to multiple versions. As Hartman implies, looking at the archive one cannot find any real or true history, but rather the product of “the documents, statements and institutions that decide our knowledge of the past” (5). I think that it is here where we can imagine how performance and the archive communicate with each other in their common state of precariousness. One may decide to have their knowledge of the past sculpted by institutions, but once one dares to reach a certain level of consciousness about what we call “the past” in the first place, performance can be a tool to essentially interrogate the currently available versions of the past, explore how it helps us live today, and also help us conceive of new forms of humanity going forward.
Derrida wrote that “There would indeed be no archive desire without radical finitude, without the possibility of a forgetfulness,” (Archive Fever, 19), making the act of archive bound to futurity even while informed (and formed) by the past. With this in mind, we can (should) think about the ethics of the archive, not just why we remember but who and how we remember. Or as Sri asks, “Whom do we narrate and with what critical purchase?” It’s such an important question. I do think Hartman gives us an example and a methodology. If the archive determines itself, through its own selection and anxious collation, then it holds a power of narrative, reiterating and reifying meaning. Hartman writes, “The archive is inseparable from the play of power that murdered Venus and her shipmate and exonerated the captain” (10-11). That is, the archive was already working in that moment, informing and directing its actants.
ReplyDeleteRecently a professor of mine said that the archive is not just labor that preserves the past, but it perverts the present. I think this is a helpful way to think about the way we research, write, and make public our work. Hartman continues, “By playing with and rearranging the basic elements of the story, by re-presenting the sequence of events in divergent stories and from contested points of view, I have attempted to jeopardize the status of the event, to displace the received or authorized account, and to imagine what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done” (11). We see this methodology unfold again with Snorton’s fracturing of Brandon Teena’s story. Not only do they recoup crucial parts of the Teena archive—namely, reanimating Phillip Devine’s story—but they expose the implications of such an erasure. They show us the importance of looking at that which has been left out of the archive as much as that which has been included. “How does one access a language outside of and in contradistinction to the governing codes that currently determine human definition such that it gives rise to new meanings, forms of life, and genres of being” (183), they ask. Biomythology, as Sri helpfully points out, offers a way, as Hartman writes, to narrate “a history written with and against the archive” (12). Thanks for bringing up Biomythology, Sri, especially as it informs intersectionality and performance. I look forward to hearing more and discussing the utilities of biomythology in class!
Hartman writes, "the archive is inseparable from the play of power that murdered Venus and her shipmate and exonerated the captain. And this knowledge brings us no closer to an understanding of the lives of two captive girls or the violence that destroyed them and named the ruin: Venus" (10-11). I was moved and persuaded by this statement; although I agree with what others have suggested--that Hartman's piece in and of itself might not totally disrupt or destabilize the archive's "play of power"--I also was struck by the power, too, of this piece operating assuredly within an understanding: that history is not much more than a story, with its "requirements of narrative, the stuff of subjects and plots and ends" (10). I think it is powerful to suggest that even if a given archive is "stuck," so to speak--meaning there are no further documents or facts (or "facts") left to add to it, whatever is left out is now unknowable--it is important that we not think of these documents & pieces as immutable.
ReplyDeleteAs Sri points out in her quoted passages from Hartman, there is some important function of rearranging history--to free it from false notions of linearity--in order to amplify, rather than erase, an absence. If we cannot fill an absence, that is, we can at least talk at length about why, exactly, something is missing. In doing so, we do not absolve ourselves of dealing with and within the archive, and the essential problems of that--but we can begin to conceive of the archive as a type of performance rather than an absolute statement of fact.
Hi Sri,
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed re-visting this post in light of your presentation/performance yesterday. I think the way you draw out the connections between archive and performance in Hartman is particularly helpful, as I had not made that connection as clearly when reading. It fits particularly well with her discussion of the title, when she explains the "two acts" as her "need to revisit and revise my own earlier account of Venus's death" (5), and the way that relates to ideas of haunting that Christine described in her presentation/performance. If Lose Your Mother is a performance that communicates her relationship to the archive (and its necessary absences), while also navigating the complexity of neither recapitulating the grammar of violence nor continuing the erasure of these people's lives, then her second act is a performance that reveals further the performed Hartman in the original book. If we think through McMillan's notion of avatars, then we might say that "Venus in Two Acts" shows that Lose Your Mother's Hartman was distinctly a subject, as is clear from her central presence in the book's narrative of her experiences with the archive, but also one we never had direct or complete access to, a doubled Hartman rooted in her anxieties around romanticizing the story of Venus and her friend while also existing within the dictates of published books. That is to say, "Venus in Two Acts" shows the ways that particularly black women, as per McMillan, are always doubled, always in a complex relationship to subjectivity and objectification.
These thoughts are a bit less cohesive than I would like, but I have found the points your post and presentation/performance raises to be really useful in trying to connect some of the theoretical work we've engaged with over these past several weeks.
Your reflections on Hartman's notion of "critical fabulation" reminded me of the "Mammy Memory" chapter in McMillan's Embodied Avatars. Throughout his depiction of Joice Heth's performances, McMillan is, in Hartman's words, “rearranging the basic elements of the story, by re-presenting the sequence of events in divergent stories and from contested points of view" (12). While historical records and dominant cultural memory situate Heth as an object of nostalgia, or a "mammy" for white audiences, McMillan seeks to "reimagine the way we discuss" Heth's dehumanizing performances by refocusing on her agency as a "cultural actor" (26), an example of Hartman's emphasis on "resistance of the object" (12). Thus, McMillan's framing of Heth as an "astute actress and key antecedent to the twentieth century’s artful and often-cerebral black performance art" (26) serves as a peformance of critical fabulation to not only draw attention to the dehumanization of Heth but also her own agency and legacies.
ReplyDeleteTo address your question more directly, I am unsure if McMillan's critical fabulation presents an "illusion,"or even a narrative of resistance, as it perpetuates Heth's position as a spectacle, a key condition of her enslavement. Obviously Heth cannot consent or protest this characterization, but I think it is something to consider as we examine and craft the archive of Heth's work and early Black performance.
I’m grateful for this chance to further think through “Venus in Two Acts,” which I find very generative and poetically arresting. First off, in my reading [without having read any of Hartman’s work before], I was initially confused as to the Venus referent -- as potentially may have been intended by Hartman [for example, it was unclear in reading the abstract which interrupts the title and the first paragraph in the copy we have that Venus is referencing/marks a human person]. For better or for worse, in my mind [or, in my mind as it was prior to these readings and a subsequent dive into Lose Your Mother] the initial association with Venus is as the Roman goddess of love/beauty/sex/fertility, the planet [named after said goddess], and fifteenth century Italian painting Birth of Venus and its many iterations [such iterations have, at times, taken up non-white, non-representationalist, and less “demure” or “proper” femininities].
ReplyDeletehttps://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-botticellis-birth-venus-pop-culture
[This one links such pop culture icons as Lady Gaga and Beyonce to Birth of Venus iconography]
http://artweek.la/issue/october-28-2013/article/mary-heebner-the-venus-paintings
https://www.demilked.com/recreating-famous-paintings-elle-brazil/
[ELLE Brazil stages photoshoot of Lea T, trans model, to “push bounds of femininity” in recreation of “Birth of Venus”]
As Sri mentions out, the Venus Hartman discusses is both metonymy and particular -- that is, an aggregate of all women violated on the “ship-board” and a specific girl/woman -- a name, specter, and numerical figure [for example, see pg 2: “One cannot ask, ‘Who is Venus?’ because it would be impossible to answer such question. There are hundreds of thousands of other girls who share her circumstances and these circumstances have generated few stories. And these stories are not about them…”] However, “Venus” is not her name. It is the name given by the “they” of the ship “Recovery” [presumably the captain and/or trader, p 7-8]. I am hesitant to use to term “empty signifier here,” but I think it is something to wonder about and worry, regarding its applicability. Hartman is already making a point about how we cannot know Venus, but we especially cannot know the girl who know only exists, as an archival shred renamed, either as Venus or as “not that Negro girl but another one” by Hartman herself.
Hartman states: “The necessity of recounting Venus’s death is overshadowed by the inevitable failure of any attempt to represent her” (12), and I wonder if here is where haunting, doubles, and slippage may be productive. This could be seen as a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” scenario; as Hartman recounts on page 9 prior to The Reprise, “In the end, I could say nothing more about Venus than I had said about her friend...I could not change anything...So it was better to leave them as I had found them. Two girls, alone” (9). I think it seems to me that allowing for same type of “existence” or afterlife beyond condemnation, beyond the numerical and the beaten -- while imprecise, while a crisis of ontology (thinking back to Derrida, hauntology, and doubles) and methodology -- is something. A ghostly double merits an articulation [?], which of course will always-already be not the real life lived.
[PS - What is an Ägure? See Abstract].