Performativity Challenged? Creativity and the Return of Interiority

Within feminist theory theory, as well as in other areas of thought, certain terms, hitherto rejected, bracketed or even forbidden are being reassessed and reanimated anew. ‘Ontology’, ‘materiality’, ‘evolution’ are being reasserted with an enthusiasm seeming contradiction with radical perspectives of the recent past. Of course, with such complex terms at stake, these reassessments are not all of the same ilk; nevertheless, it is remarkable that one now finds some of the most eminent feminist theorists engaged in explorations that would have been unthinkable fifteen years ago, even though much of the theoretical literature employed is much older than this, as the recent explorations of the work of Henri Bergson in the context of feminist theory testify (Grosz, 2004; 2005). What gives this literature its newness is how it reads now now, and, I would argue, , not least in a context where it is presented as a critique of the concept of performativity as it has come to be understood in feminist and cultural theory formativity theory. This is the intriguing dynamic I wish to explore here. How does this work bear upon feminist theory’s espousal of performativity? How do materiality, creativity and ‘life’ come to be posited as an exposure of performativity’s analytic fallacy? And what is the importance of acknowledging the context – or ‘environment’ – where the debate becomes ‘localized’ or territorialized (for example, within feminist theory)? (Excerpt, opening paragraph)

The Vigilant(e) Parent and the Paedophile: The News of the World Campaign 2000 and the Contemporary Governmentality of Child Sexual Abuse

Between 1821 and 1824 Theodore Gericault (1791-1824) attempted to capture on canvas the faces of various '��monomanias'��, including a portrait of a '�"man with the '��monomania'�� of child kidnapping"(1822-3) which was recently exhibited in London as part of the Spectacular Bodies exhibition (Hayward Gallery, 2000). The exhibition traced, inter alia, the development of the aestheticisation of insanity through technologies of knowledge production. To the modern eye there is nothing especially significant or noteworthy about this monomaniac'��s appearance beyond looking rather miserable and forlorn, but the series of portraits, instigated by Dr Etienne-Jean Georget of the asylum at Ivry, were explicitly attempting to present certain typical features. In this instance, â��the haunted, sideways glance, asymmetrical sag of the mouth and hollow cheeksâ�� were indicative of his type, the child abductor (Kemp and Wallace, 2000:126). As the exhibition illustrated, photography soon took the place of painting, and the nineteenth century saw the development of this practice of depicting madness, with Jean-Martin Charcot famously building his career on the production of such representations, establishing his photographic unit at the hospital of the Salpatriere in Paris, and writing and lecturing on the "��visual iconography of the insane"��. In Britain Francis Galton studied photographic portraits of criminals from the Home Office and, arguing that â��natural classesâ�� of individuals appeared, produced his composite photographs that purported to illustrate the typical face of each grouping - one of which were sexual offenders. In Italy, Cesaire Lombroso combined a reading of evolutionary theory with his studies of the human skull and his use of photographic portraits to present his notorious argument that criminals were atavistic, throwbacks from an earlier period, whose status as such was betrayed by their physiognomy. Presented here in London 2000 for their historical curiosity, his photographic tables showing the faces of Italian and German criminals were initially presented in 1889 under the title '��the Anthropology of the Criminal'�� with the criminalâ�'s name printed underneath each of the sixty eight portraits. (Excerpt, opening paragraph)

‘Always another breath in my breath’: on Denise Riley, the polyvocality of the subject and poetry

This article explores Denise Riley’s argument in Words of Selves (2000), that the self is multiply constituted, since many speak through and ‘as’ us. This polyvocality means that there is ‘always another breath in my breath’, she argues, citing Deleuze who is, in turn, citing Pierre Klossowski. Here, I trace the quotation back through Deleuze’s (1969) Logic of Sense to Klossowski’s peculiar Roberte Ce Soir (1953). In that work Klossowski elaborates the notion of the simulacra, a discussion which for him is intertwined with the exploration of how affect repeatedly attempts, and repeatedly fails, to produce adequate representations in the world. His exploration of inhabiting a world of simulacra, however, takes place on a terrain that is problematic for a feminist reading, not to say with an ‘aggression of thought’, to use Deleuze’s phase. Returning to Denise Riley’s work, the article finds a preferable – and very beautiful – exploration of the notion of the multiply refracted self through Riley’s extraordinary poem ‘A Part Song’ and her Time Lived Without its Flow (2012)

The Scenography of Suicide: Terror, Politics and the Humiliated Witness

It is argued here that the politics of suicide bombings can be seen to operate through the aesthetic responses they produce, insofar as these responses are provoked and in that they necessarily mobilise further responses. The article considers the scene of devastation created by a Chechen suicide bomber in Moscow in 2003. Drawing upon a reading of the political theory of Hannah Arendt that ties her to the tradition of thinking the sublime, it suggests that the 'aesthetic' impact of the scene dislocates the witness as well as simultaneously locating her/him in this world, a world in which such things happen. This location is a prompting to consider the world-in-common, the movements of the world, in a parallel sense to that in which the notion of the sublime has been employed to describe how the particular can have the ability to usher forth a feeling that there may be a super-sensible purposiveness to nature. At this prompting, the subject is humiliated and limited, since s/he becomes aware of the impossibility of adequately answering such questions, while 'ethically' her/his task is to nevertheless attempt some articulation of the connections so prompted. The article considers various ways in which that articulation might take place in relation to the Moscow bombing, and argues that these contested articulations constitute the 'political' level prompted in response to a scene of horror whose impact operates on the level of sensibility

Documenting Dictatorship: Writing and Resistance in Chile's Vicaría de la Solidaridad

In Documentality (2013), Maurizio Ferraris argues that documents are at the heart of social institutions. Taking this notion as a cue, this piece considers a key organisation in the resistance to state violence and Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile, the Vicaria de la Solidaridad, and focuses on the remarkable document where the desperate stories of people detained, disappeared and murdered following the coup in 1973 were recorded. This process of registration adopted an overtly rational, administrative response akin to the ‘bio-political’ modes of governing life that Foucault described. As such, it was also built upon a refusal to allow the lives of a section of the population to be cast as without value. Moreover, it ‘deferred’ to a future, in which such documentation would be an invaluable record of injustice. Its legacy is not confined to legal forums, however; academic work and Nicola´s Franco’s artwork La Sabana (The Sheet, 2017) have also emerged

"Appearance: Thinking Difference in the Political Realm with Hannah Arendt"

"Hannah Arendt’s relationship to feminist theory is one that has recently received much belated attention, focussing mainly on her declared non-allegiance to a politics which displayed facets of the forms of collective demand that she rallied against from her oftentimes controversial perspectives. One of her objections concerned the place of ‘the body’ and ‘identity’ in the political realm, since so-called ‘life’ issues, Arendt insisted, had no place in the realm of proper political debate; feminism constituted just the sort of assertion of a collective identity that signalled both a lack of engagement in political issues and an abuse of the possibility of true political debate. However, as Honig (1995) has commented, the feminism of the late twentieth century is one that is markedly different from that which Arendt dismissed so vehemently, and is one that concerns itself more with the issues that Arendt herself devoted much thought. In this chapter, however, the intention is less to find the utility of Arendt’s thought for feminism, but to consider the constellation of issues that Arendt addressed in her explorations of the notion of ‘the political’." (Excerpt, opening paragraph)

The Phone, the Father and Other Becomings: On Households (and Theories) that no longer Hold

"Preamble: Modes of engagement The reader may engage with this article in several different modes. It could be approached in straightforward, if quirky, sociological mode as an exploration of the idea that the literature on post-divorce arrangements and step-families, and especially literature that attends to children’s contact with their non-resident fathers, can be re-read in order to consider the issue of contact via communication technologies (predominantly the telephone but also other forms of communication), a form of parent-child contact not captured in the ways that ‘contact’ is measured in present studies. Of interest in itself, perhaps, this point of entrance opens up onto further questions about the management of human affect, and how rearrangements in lines of affect have reverberations beyond those captured by an Oedipal model, insofar as they are not about contact and severance but are various kinds of displacement for all involved. In particular, I am concerned here with the rearrangement of affect for the fathers as their role becomes dispersed, shared and intermittent, a set of problematics that also includes the various ways in which the very body of the mother is removed or circumvented. On a second level the article speaks to a different literature, in that it is an elaboration of the notion of the network as a dispersed hybrid that entails both human and non-human entities, within which any absolute distinction between human and non-human is to be problematised but, I wish to argue, without losing the specificity of human interaction, that is, the questions of human emotion, human desire and human ethics. This elaboration moves toward a critique of the very ubiquity and endless utility of the network idea through the suggestion that its appeal may conceal moments and movements where more unexpected effects are taking place. Indeed, I suggest that there may be some twists in the familial dynamics of ‘households that no longer hold’, where some selected thoughts from a reading of Deleuze and Guattari, specifically around the notion of ‘becoming’, may lead one to read other stories than that proffered through the master trope of the network, ones that are maybe closer to some of the original impulses behind actor-network theory. And thirdly, the article may be engaged as a reflection on contemporary ways in which familial life is governed in contemporary Britain. The family as both a site of economic arrangements and a site of the arrangement of human affect-sexuality-reproduction, are held together and in tension through forms of contemporary government of the family. Contemporary rationalities of familial morality seek to make its members responsible parents without intervening to the extent that they would seek to make them responsible spouses , seen here in the implication that fathers' economic responsibilities for children are not co-extensive with their emotional connections to women. As opposed to any other familial figure – such as the pater familias or the mother of Donzelot’s thesis – who may have been the link between family and government, it is through the promotion of the figure of the child that familial life is presently and predominantly governed. It is my contention here that it is through the promise of non-government that a notion of an ethical parent (it is predominantly the non-resident father who is being targeted here) is promoted, whose duties to his children and his nation-state should mean that the former should not need to be dependent upon the latter. Alongside other policies that seek to simultaneously promote familial life and paid work-life through the notion of the ethical citizen, and the attendant judgements of those dependent on welfare state provision (see Rose, 1999), contemporary policies surrounding the household that no longer holds expose the various and contradictory modes by which families are ‘made up’ within contemporary regimes." (Excerpt, opening paragraph)

On Fernando's Photograph: The Biopolitics of Aparicion in Contemporary Argentina

This article concerns the striking photograph of a young man, Fernando Brodsky, taken shortly after he was kidnapped in Argentina in 1979. Brodsky was detained in the notorious Escuela de la Armada (ESMA) in Buenos Aires, and remains disappeared. The negative of the photograph was smuggled out of ESMA and the image became part of a bundle of photographic evidence submitted by families of the disappeared during the trials of the military after the return to democracy in 1983. This article seeks to under- stand the vitality of the photograph, the different courses it takes, the archives it joins and leaves, asking: ‘What sort of life can the photograph have? What sort of desire? What sort of politics?’ The article proposes that we might consider the role of such images ‘biopolitically’, which is to say in the context of the relations established through the attempts to govern populations in times of military rule and in times of transitional democracy. The re-appearance of Fernando in the photograph is part of post-dictator- ship politics in which the demand ‘aparición’ resounds. Fernando, an absolute witness who does not, who cannot, speak nevertheless re-appears in the law courts and in art exhibitions. The article considers the difference between the photograph’s appearance as evidence and its reappearance in the art galleries, arguing that its ‘desires’ can be imagined differently in each. The article argues that while the photograph does not escape archives tout court, in raising the question of how it should be filed, it prompts reflec- tion on the biopolitical present, with its inequitable distribution of life and security among populations. This is a politics of the present, more than it is a politics of memory

On Graciela Sacco

A talk presented in September 2022 on the occasion of an exhibition of Graciela Sacco's works curated by her daughter Clara Garavelli and gallery director Patricia Bossio. Alessio Antoniolli (Gasworks & Triangle Network),also spoke at the event. Graciela Sacco was an Argentine visual artist. She passed away, too early, in 2017. She was one of the artists I had written about in my book The Art of Post-Dictatorship, and through my research, we had developed a friendship. I visited her at her home in Rosario and in Spain, she visited me at mine in London, we met in Europe with our families, and we kept in touch across distances. So of course, when her daughter Clara asked me to speak today I was more than happy to honour my friend and to speak about her work

The Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes: On Agamben

With the bombings in London on 7th July last year and the attempted bombings that followed soon afterwards (on 21st July and the arrest of the young men in connection with these), the figure of the terrorist altered or expanded from that which it had recently become to include not a threat to the nation from outside but also the fear of the ‘terrorist within’. The Anti Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 and The Terrorism Act 2000 before it had mainly worked with an image of the ‘foreign threat’; but the impact of these events (like the British shoe-bombers and the suicide bombers in Tel Aviv) was such that this image already altering, was firmly established in the public imagination. Our ‘own’ ‘home grown’ terrorists are not only those who joined attacks elsewhere, but are prepared to stage attacks on British soil. The language of the home-grown terrorist who has undergone rapid ‘radicalisation’ is used in the recently published Intelligence and Security Committee’s Report into the London Terrorist Attacks on 7 July 2005’ (May 2006) The Terrorism Act 2006, which the Home Office is keen to point out was already being planned and is not to be seen as a response to the July attacks (see government website www.ukresilience.info), attempts to address this through the criminalisation of encouragement, glorification and involvement in the preparation of terrorist activity. (Excerpt, opening paragraph)