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The Insufficiency of the Performative: Video Art at the Turn of the Millennium
Art Journal, Spring, 2001 by Christine Ross
In her "Cyborg Manifesto," initially published in 1985, Donna Haraway sees the conflation of body and technology as constitutive of the cyborg--a hybrid of machine and organism in which technologies of communication and biotechnologies articulate the polymorphous recrafting of bodies. [1] The productivity of Haraway's theory lies in its postulation that the cyborg, as a creature without origins that forms itself through the confusion of boundaries (between the human and the animal, the natural and the artificial, the body and mind), is a fiction that nevertheless maps "our social and corporeal reality" and allows us to imagine beneficial couplings which undo identity in terms of mutability. [2] This proposition is concomitant with Judith Butler's postulation of corporeality as performativity, an act of imitation, identification, or melancholic subjection to social norms which is always a reenactment of norms. Like the cyborg, the performative body "has no ontological status apart from the various acts which c onstitute its reality," [3] and its fluidity of identities "suggests an openness to resignification and recontextualization." [4] One decade later, the question I wish to raise is the following: is it possible to think polymorphous identities with the mutability and the fallibility of the body? The fast-expanding integration of technologies of information into everyday life, the corollary blurring of work and nonwork, [5] the perfecting of eco- and biotechnologies that increasingly confuse the human and the nonhuman (such as genetic engineering, robotics, reproduction technologies, pharmacology, plastic surgery, and body fitness), and the underlying problematic belief in our ability to predict, control, conquer, and improve nature via technology (what Lucien Sfez has designated as "l'utopie de la sur-nature" [6]): all of these turn-of-the-millennium developments confirm the body as a materialization open to incessant reconfiguration, yet they also reveal how the incitement to reconfigure is at once creative a nd normative, fluid and normalized.
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In light of these technological developments, it is interesting to note how recent media art is preoccupied not so much with the celebration of fluidity as with insufficiency--fallibility, limits, inhibition, dependency, the need to think fluidity and persistency together, the critical requirement to relate performativity to new entrepreneurial norms of socialization based on performance. [7] This is not to say that Haraway and Butler exclude those aspects in their theorization of contemporary subjectivity--Haraway speaks both of the pleasure and the responsibility involved in the transgression of boundaries, [8] and Butler defines agency as the set of necessary failures implied in the injunction to be a norm "that bodies are compelled to approximate, but never can." [9] Rather, performativity characterizes post- 1960s subjectivity in what Slavoj Zizek has called the "decline of Oedipus," a period characterized by the passage from a subject in conflict between the prohibited and the permitted (defined through the Law of the Father) to a subject in cleavage between the possible and the nonpossible (defined through the decline of paternal authority and the rise of entrepreneurial norms of performance). [10] If the Freudian pathology par excellence was neurosis, the main pathology of the current performative subject, who has become the sole player responsible for his or her own subjectivity, is depression. Depression--designated by sociologist Alain
Ehrenberg as the disease that "discloses the mutations of individuality at the end of the 20th century" [11]--derives from fatigue due to feelings of insufficiency in the face of overwhelming responsibilities, a fact completely erased by Butler's reiterated recommendation to "promote the proliferation of representations" and to "affirm identity categories as a site of inevitable rifting." [12]
At issue here is the integration of insufficiency in the materiality of the electronic image, as an aesthetic strategy that addresses the performative yet tired, responsible yet anaesthetized, enjoying yet compelled to enjoy [13] viewing subject. Aesthetic insufficiency could well be a means to acknowledge and question a society where "no moral law, no tradition shows from the outside who we have to be and how to conduct ourselves." [14] Depressive processes may sound negative, but I would like to see how they can be developed as potentially critical.
Recent video art plays a major role in such a rearticulation of the cyborg insofar as it considers the multiform ways in which video has shaped contemporary visual culture, not only as the main image technology of television and computer culture, but also as the privileged post-1980s disseminator of film (through the emergence of the VCR). I am thinking here more precisely--and this is not an exclusive set of examples--of the work of Douglas Gordon, Rosemarie Trockel, and Diana Thater. Gordon's 24 Hour Psycho (1993) is a first case in point. A mute video projection in extreme slow motion of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) on a free-standing translucent screen, the installation stretches the narrative to an impossible twenty-four-hour narrative, dissolving diegesis to the extent that, more often than not, there is nothing to see. [15] Temporal expansion here corresponds to a depression of the image: it activates, in the viewer, perceptual and memory dysfunction, staging not so much the original film as memor y struggle, the reliance on daydreaming and fantasy to fill the blanks, and inhibitory processes of perception such as inattentional blindness and inattentional amnesia. [16] Yet image depression is critically productive, It slows down a film which has been crucial for the representation of the loss of the authoritarian paternal figure at the heart of contemporary polymorphous subjectivity. This loss becomes perceptible through the decrease in perceptibility generated by the extreme slow motion: as the viewer struggles with memory and identity formation, she or he enacts the loss of the paternal and, with this, a mode of perception more porous to imaginary constructions.
