Gender, I’m in Trouble - Antonio Cataldo
Studying the genealogy and historicity of gender should be a mandatory step for scholars and students, of any age, who are convinced that the first task on humanity’s agenda is emancipation from and finding alternatives to a capitalist society. Such claims were prominent among Marxist intellectuals in the 1960s and ’70s as they sought to uncover untouched ground of exploitation and resistance, by revising claims of why and how gender categories had become valuable to the political economy, and what these categories had really been directed towards. Why shit, the anus, perversion and polymorphism related to the body and sexuality – elements not serving reproduction, which under capitalism means not serving reproduction of the labour force for the market – were secluded and hidden, together with death, in the reign of moral evil. In order to rethink the ethics of social change leading to different congregations of communities or societies, one cannot but discuss the body as the primary site leading to such a change. That is to say, one cannot underestimate the influence that a motivated notion of “normal” sexuality, with its stereotyped gender impositions and divisions, has had on specific forms of economic governance and the consequent imparting of regulatory frameworks upon bodies under customs of educational systems supported by alleged scientific claims.
When I met Harald & Louis in October 2019, they had only recently graduated from the academy, and they were genuinely worried about gender stereotypes continuing to be cast upon the students’ body (an individualisation working both on the student body as a whole and on the singular body of each individual student). They claimed that there was no reason in dance, for instance, for the body to be gendered, for enduring the imposition of such biological divisions, coming from the Enlightenment and continuing on into the everyday lives of students today, not only in the way their bodies were trained, modelled, but also in the way their bodies were thought, in order to almost and literally fulfil a representational task of society that they thought they would have escaped by entering a free space of appearance such as that of academia – a space for research which should not be monist or unitarian. The “space of appearance,” a term coined by philosopher Hannah Arendt, is, according to her, created anew wherever individuals gather together politically. It is the space of the polis, where political decisions are being made by an encounter among equals.[1]Not all social spaces can be classified as spaces of appearance. One could argue that in certain corners of the internet and among certain sexual subcultures, invisibility shapes subjectivity and enables various forms of power; some forms of power depend mostly on inequalities in the distribution of certain resources rather than on the visibility of those who either exercise power or are subjected to it. Still, appearance occurs in a great number of the spaces where the activity we normally call “politics” takes place – for example, within state institutions, at workplaces and behind street barricades. As this space of appearance is highly fragile and exists only when actualised through the performance of deeds or the utterance of words, wherever people assemble, it’s potentially always there, Arendt argues. Gender theorist Judith Butler later questioned and complexified such a claim about the space of appearance – that is, being democratic and sufficient to create equality – through introducing the idea of the right to appear, because Arendt’s formulation assumes that such space is always there and publicly accessible, meaning everyone is already equal. Not everyone has equal rights, especially when it comes to the right to appear (one could think about citizenship as the most obvious example). Butler argues that, instead, our current systems determine how certain lives are deemed worth living, while others are not; such mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion from such a space are not “natural,” as we are made to believe, but rather they are determined by a lack of applicability of rights, by a lack of proper systemic recognition of a right to have rights which is universal and not contextual. She shows us the other side of the coin to reveal how it is the very system of public accessibility that denies the equality of positions. Such a system of unrecognition is equally gender based, and makes it so that certain lives are more vulnerable than others – precarious lives that at times encounter precarious genders.[2]If the academy is a space whose function is to generate a community of memory, both to open up and to preserve the words and deeds of a polis, of its citizens, from oblivion and the ravages of time, to leave a testament for future generations, isn’t its task also to create the utopic – what we long for but have not yet reached – to aspire, to create the structures to serve equal rights, including the right to the image? Why, then, are some bodies encapsulated within a “male” label, Harald & Louis pondered, and why do they remain a structural support for a labelled “female” body – one presupposed to be strong, the other delicate, one masculine, the other feminine, one strong and virile, the other vulnerable – without the possibility for the two to be confounded or simply intertangled, instead associated with evolutionist organic principles and biological claims, which, forcibly marked on a student card (similar to a passport in replicating structures of surveillance and power), stand as an economic and governance determination as to which subjectivity one can be? The frustration and violence they felt in submitting their bodies to these ongoing labels, replicated through an educational system promising a free space for thought, and their uncertainty about what possibilities existed to remove the gendered body from such a constitution of the self, was still one of the main ongoing struggles they had with academia, which, in turn, they thought – with great fear – they were likely to bring into the outside world as professional choreographers and dancers. Shouldn’t instead such change start from the academy, as the space of the thinkable and possible (which in turn means a space where one can think the unthinkable and the impossible, the utopic, the equal)? And that’s what this text is perhaps about: Should we not further analyse the institutions we create, their borders and thresholds, and how they belong not only to the sphere of thought but also to the sphere of politics, effecting deeds and actions, the right to look, the right to the image and to image, the sphere of aesthetics – in short, a world of perception heavily affecting in turn the space of appearance, “where I appear to others as others appear to me,” not merely like other living or inanimate things, but, in the words of Arendt, explicitly?[3]
As a cultural producer not specialised in dance, I was quite surprised to be called into such a conversation by Harald & Louis. I came to understand only later their silent claim. Dance certainly exacerbates something that perhaps is liquefied in other visual art forms (most often such an aspect is cast in a higher degree of invisibility, in the work itself; thus, in fields other than dance, one’s body does not immediately encounter gendered prejudice when it enters through the academy’s institutional doors). The effect of this liquification is that, in most visual arts fields, we can’t claim gender divisions as something immediately visible and discriminatory (or incriminatory: accusing, charging, calling to account with regard to a cause), as the site of ideological thinking about which we are not immediately conscious – yet not meaning that it’s in fact less present or less normalised. A residue in the space of academia Harald & Louis identify is that, though one doesn’t need to discuss it every time one enters a room, one is immediately divided and identified for how one will biologically perform (yes, for the possible, in the future tense) based on one’s immediate biological appearance – not a reclaimed presence (“explicitly,” for Arendt) but rather a prejudicial narrative. I don’t come together with others in an act of speech and action to gain a subjectivity. I’m not performing. I’m being choreographed. This is an act of interpellation which is at once incriminatory and discriminatory, because it expresses something more formal and more grave: it conveys a destination or a goal of motion determined not by one’s will to perform, not by a coming as an equal into a space of appearance, but rather by someone else who has decided a priori not only who am I and what I represent, but also my future – that is, how my subjectivity will perform – based solely on how my body is read. (In following such a formulation, one could go as far as to say “my body” is considered, in such an instance, a public property, in the sense of “publicly labelled for a publicly determined use.”) There is no construction of a subject if I’m not shaping the perception of myself as an equal with others.
In the extended art field, we have been taught to look at the work first, to its aesthetic claim, separated from the artist that is the producer of its meaning (Immanuel Kant).[4]The artwork, the oeuvre, should speak for itself, have an end in itself. What surrounds the oeuvre, if the oeuvre is not autonomous, is considered at times not only superfluous but a failure of the work itself. It is in this separation between the artist (the human) and the artwork (the object), in this ideological make-believe independent life of one from the other, that a false pretence is built for the work to appear genderless and classless, universal; yet in this assumption and reprojection onto the word, there is an intrinsic impediment to raising a critique on gender politics. It is in this purported abstraction that gender makes its utmost incriminatory and unconscious mark. As philosopher Michel Foucault has remarked, “geometry alone must be taught in oligarchies, since it demonstrates the proportions within inequality.”[5]Because if we were to rethink such a claim from education, such a division within the oeuvre’s autonomy (including from the artist), upon seeking and establishing its situated perspective (the one coming from the producer), would cause us to unveil and oblige us to uncover a whole biography behind the work itself: the genealogy of its author(s) as a constitutive part of the work that is, on many levels and at the same time in its particular and universal claims, situatedness. At once we would understand that no separation really exists between the two, the oeuvre and the producer, one being a higher reflection of the other and their common will, only to create further degrees of readability and transcendentality, but grounding us in a somewhere, where that somewhere, that particular view, is a constitutive part of what I’m looking at: at how someone is looking at the world, and at what is being claimed, that is, speech and action in the space of appearance. We would gain some form of equality because I would have a consciousness of the other’s perspective. The work is the centre of such a politically motivated gathering, and of struggles for equality. This has also been an important struggle of feminist strategies in reclaiming a different materiality and autonomy outside and within the art world, to address how gender politics risk being frozen in universalist claims within the white cube’s predicament, granting a past tense to the artwork and its current validity, and at the same time legitimising struggles in the past while preventing the recognition of inequity as a condition in the present.[6]Impeding the ability to continue to reflect on why and how the artwork arrives into a container, to project within it a popularised and universal life – the structures of power behind which are ongoing sites of negotiation. Why are some artworks brought inside a space and provided time and context for reflection, while others are cut out, abandoned to a more precarious life? These may seem to be minor issues if one thinks about such positions not affecting other spaces of appearance, the polis. That is, if one doesn’t see such a space of representation as having real effects outside the space of the academy or the particular educational institution. And it is for this reason one should ask: Is such a space of appearance only possible for non-living beings (the object) or for the temporarily performed, or are certain bodies (material and immaterial) entering and being granted citizenship as an indelible right – some artefacts gaining the right to speak and the right to appear – while others remain precarious bodies, becoming lives which are notgrievable? For Butler, the right to have rights is one that depends on no existing particular political organisation or institution. Its legitimacy is exercised every time people come together. Such a right predates and precedes any political institution that might codify or seek to guarantee that right, and at the same time it is derived from no natural set of laws. That right comes into being when it is exerted by those who act in concert, in alliance.[7]Those who are excluded from existing political polities, who belong to no nation state or other contemporary state formation, may be deemed unreal only by those who seek to monopolise the terms of reality. And yet even after the public sphere has been defined through their exclusion, they act whether they are banned to precarity or left out through systemic negligence. Doesn’t this representational space, the right to have rights, start from here, from the very place where we learn about the thinkable and the possible (and with it the unthinkable and the impossible, the utopia of equality, of education), from the container, from the educational structure that should provide an idea of the right to have rights, independently from citizenship, implied in the concerted action of acting together? If one looks at academia through these lenses, one can easily see how gender roles are a constitutive part of the very institutional choreography of education, in the humanities as much as in the scientific fields, because before one even learns about form, one is captured by its divisive container, whereas behaviour is segregated and propagated as departing from biological constrictions reinforced by contended Darwinian truths of evolutionary reproducibility (the arts have their own Darwinian truths). Representation continues to be dual and polarised at best, if not simply the assumption of one single dominating gaze and point of view – unitarian and totalitarian, biologically determined.
I’m not speaking in this context as an expert of dance, but as a witness of the societal partitions built around a gendered identity and body normativity that foster ideas of function constructed around, in my case, a penis, as an allegedly active reproductive machine, interconnected to a shame for its malfunctioning if it does not fulfil its ultimate evolutionist credo – whose only aspiration in the age of capital is the systematic breeding of a nuclear family: the one and only accepted, smallest working atom of a Westernised view of a globalised world and society. Under the idea of a global condition, we are made to believe there is one world, one paradigm and one systemic law. Shame, in my educational world, as apprehended from the age of four, when I moved to the south of Italy with its heavily patriarchal and immovable divisions casting inescapable shadows – a feeling reinforced through religious injunctions – made it clear that no escapades were ever going to be possible, not even regarding ideas of an afterlife, and especially not in a small society whose centuries of exploitative powers reproduced no other but the pauperism of the poverty of experience (guided by a domineering middle class). Such a ruling petite bourgeoisie didn’t necessarily take down or open up existing barriers following the feudalist reach that came from the city aristocrats in the post-war period, but only cemented its structures by delaying a future redistribution of the wealth of experience – something that could be achieved only by following the unrooting of ancient practices and traditions, including the final eradication of the world of magic with its witches and warlocks under the imperative to modernise (meaning “normalise”), through reproductive machines regulated by the new impending state apparatus, centralised in the north and slowly de-plebeicising the south by deeming it retrograde (read: “unindustrialised”).
Gendering has been therefore key in projecting, reproducing and maintaining such a class system, and has operated as a functional machine whereby social mobility is to be sought or achieved only if fitting the new standards of the family nucleus, with smaller and larger loans and so on and so forth, in a series of policies reinforcing one ideology and assimilations – of language, habits, traditions and even memories (or memorabilia, the arts). Education served primarily such molecular systems; it was firstly instrumental in creating an idea of a nation. These are the historical processes whose formation one only suddenly understands, but where antagonism in the face of them is still not always thinkable as a social demand or right, but only as an individual choice at best, or at the cost of exile – meaning leaving your immediate society behind – at worst. The latter is not only my migratory choice, but a more widespread phenomenon proved by the depopulation of small- and medium-sized towns, not only in the south of Italy but just as much as in the non-urban centres of the rest of continental Europe. The role of reproduction work in demarcating gendered social spheres (public and private: such a division is still at work), together with the economic definitions of productivity and unproductivity transferred to biological conditions, as such valued as market forms according to biological assignations institutionalised under the state’s control, is part of banning the desiring body. The biologically based criminalisation of our bodies is part of a hidden social contract, part of the untold. Focus on your penis and not your anus. Don’t have sex, or otherwise maintain high sexual desire for the sole purpose of reproduction; be virile and monogamous; refuse other forms of sexuality; don’t masturbate; don’t acknowledge other forms of desire; don’t go against the reproductive self of “nature,” of what’s “natural” (the unnatural belonging to the realm of the laughable, most often presented as the monstrous). As if nature’s only purpose is reproducing itself; as if nature, which we have learned to separate from culture, is aimed only at self-preservation through simple reproduction. This still remains to a certain extent the belief of an ideological scientific view. Such is the setting around a body treated as public property, turning it into a commodity serving the interest of a higher aim – that is, to succumb to the capitalist modes of production. The body can’t be used for anything other than an alleged origin reconductedto a presumed Mother Nature. In fact, we have learned that there are only families, and families constituted by fathers and mothers, and nothing else in between. The in-betweenness is unfit, a remainder, that which does not fit into what’s supposed to be productive.
Drawing from Karl Marx, feminist scholar Silvia Federici has spoken about a fundamental rule allowing such a gendered exploitation to be possible – that is, primitive accumulation – upon which capitalism designed a violent division of bodies according to their gendered assignations. Federici reconducts the formation of capital from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries as being gendered on a central axis of social organisation and control, demonstrating how violence against women, for instance, is congenital to capitalism’s formulation. A return of the most violent aspects of primitive accumulation – which has accompanied every phase of capitalist globalisation, including the present one – demonstrates that the degradation of gender is a necessary condition for the existence of capitalism in all times.[8]
Something is unavoidably missing: bodies coming together in alliance; bodies that have nothing to share except being together. When bodies come together, they bring alliance beyond representation, beyond politics, beyond other forms of determined aggregation, simply demanding space for a different mode of being, a different kind of society – a society less based on segregated structures, one standing for love, solidarity – and to occupy space and time outside any immanent need, citizenship without the constriction of land. The question is, therefore, how can we reach a space of equality under these given conditions? How can we move from repressive technologies of power to recognising more mobile forms of interdependency connecting varied bodies and their reciprocal need for subsistence, maintenance and life in general? How might it be possible to formulate equality on the basis of such relations that define our enduring social existence as living creatures? How can we make a collective claim on society through which we could image freedom and justice? How might it be possible to reclaim a different presence for bodies and objects that supports a space of appearance, a space for not assimilating, not being subsumed, not being consumed and discarded before our bodies awaken a conscious subjectivity?
I think that’s the question behind Harald & Louis’s piece Shine Utopians, which was presented, following our initial discussions, in November 2019 at Dansens Hus in Oslo, where they gathered a number of bodies in a place, to possibly gain a space of appearance, literally, by coming together and becoming visible. The stripped-down theatre revealed its maintenance structure in full, whereby windows regained their role as transparent membranes to the outside; the stage returned to being a floor; and no distinction was made between the audience, the performers or the people charged with the theatre’s upkeep and providing food and beverage to performers and audience alike. Finally, a branching platform invited the display of the body of the audience as a living object, as the central act on stage equal to the act itself. Initially Harald & Louis had not wanted to schedule a time for the performance but rather to simply take over the theatre space for the overall period allotted to them, a month or so, and for the performance to be ongoing, open to constant visitation, so that there would be no rehearsal and no show, but instead the piece, the oeuvre, would be in a sort of perennial preparation, inviting over and over, or over and again, bodies to come in, to congregate, to join a molecular movement, in an attempt to find both synergy as well as forms of aggression and antagonism.
Upon entering Shining Utopians, one found that the usually dark cube of the ready-for-the-magic-to-happen theatre space was stripped bare to its reverse: pure light. Imaging is not created in darkness, but by the persistence of movement on the retina; an aggregation of colour produced by body movement. Your untrained body lays down, stands, sits. Nothing is about to come; everything is already there. You are part of an aggregation from beginning to end. You are intertangled into the conjoinedness, within which you need to recognise that you are performing, that you have an active role, even if simply standing still or sitting. You become aware of your own potentiality, because usually you’re simply called in to testify, in darkness, to the event that is about to happen. Such is the role of the spectator. Standing in a grey zone. I’m here, but I’m not participating. Here, as performers shape themselves into different aggregations, as they push themselves to find new forms of being together without exhausting themselves; you’re not the object, but you are a participating subject. You are a body in an entangled multispecies future. I figured, during the performance, that if I ever were to have witnessed paradise by following the Christian tenets imposed on me – one of the unfortunate utopias of equality – I would have seen something similar. Pure light, subtle and unexpected movements; nothing happening, yet something constantly changing; as in Dante’s vision, one follows an arresting light, and one moves together with other bodies though standing still, equidistant.
When I started looking into the history of dance, and the formation of its institutions, I found, unsurprisingly, that its dictates come from Louis XIV. The Sun King established the Académie Royale de Danse in Paris in March 1661, the first of many royal academies later founded throughout Europe, in order to “improve” artistic standards. The story goes that thirteen experts met regularly to deliberate, to be emulated and to test and teach skills, while being encouraged to invent a notation system that codified positions of feet, arms and the body. Penalties were introduced if procedures were not followed, and fines were given to practitioners to prevent attempts at deviations from the academy’s professional standards. The thirteen academicians were the legislators as well as the adjudicators of their own system. The king required that they pass aesthetic judgment upon every weekly choreographed dance, both social and theatrical, before it could be either taught or performed in Paris or in the suburbs. This extraordinary provision, apparently unique in the history of dance, would appear to reflect an attempted censorship – not necessarily of content, but of form alone, leading theoreticians to read into these encoded questions a control over pleasure, representation and accessibility.[9]By studying this period during the seventeen and eighteen centuries, we can also learn that few states were as obsessed as France with the body, to the point that body metaphors entered the general language and the political discourse. “Corporation,” “body,” “head” and “member” all came to be prolifically used in legislation, public speeches and more. Dance similarly occupied a large role at Versailles. Everyone danced. This was part of a “technique of power,” attests Foucault, one of the scholars of the period, as part of, in his words, “discipling bodies.” What’s more obscure, apparently, is Louis XIV’s reasoning for performing regularly between 1651 and 1668 as an androgynous figure. As dance represented order, as well as power over representation, the body of the king stood for its terrain and divine duality, with the individual and society merging together within such a figure, where the prosperity of the person reflected the prosperity of the nation and, correspondingly, “his” and its fertility. Dance and its high performativity should not be considered a marginal space of entertainment but clearly a space of politics, where politics are played, in the space of representation. For representation to work as power, the visible should be readable and should, reciprocally, be read as an image.[10]
Paraphrasing Mark Franko, a “war” of positions was at stake with the establishment of the Académie Royale de Danse. Franko is concerned with the intrinsic royal ostracism of burlesque ballets, a form of dance in court ballet popular in the 1620s that was openly political and disruptive of traditions. Here bodies did not move geometrically according to patterns and proportions or follow symbols of social stability and political harmony; instead, they engaged in play, were open to chance. Whereas choreography is a plan, performance is unpredictable. Franko addresses how burlesque ballets contested – even put at stake – monarchical power by questioning its ordered representation. For him, the letters patent coming to dictate the newly established academy of dance addressed how people should be trained and how they should move. This educational diktat was, for Franko, a measure meant to prevent the unsettling return of burlesque performance. It is both aesthetic and ideological power.[11]Power exists only as a representation. Cross-dressing was a regular feature of burlesque ballets. They were self-conscious, structurally open ended and politically allusive and, as such, disrupted prior court ballet traditions, all of which had been characterised by composite spectacle. Yet the burlesque moment was short lived. At the time of Louis XIV, there were no longer any obviously burlesque ballets. So, one could speculate that even when Louis XIV performed a cross-dressed role, he may have done so at the intersection of several appropriations. He was not subverting stereotypes but, in reality, only emphasising the self-sufficiency of the king’s body, its absolutism. There is an enormous difference in cross-dressing as a way of examining gender constructs as a result of religious and moral teachings, versus cross-dressing in sharp contraposition to defined attributes assigned to gender conformation based on the contemporaneous medical knowledge and understanding of physiology, versus cross-dressing based on transgressing codes of food consumption that conform to the societal prescriptions of the masculine and the feminine paradigms studied elsewhere.[12]Here the body politics impersonated by the king are still reproductive. He stands on his own, unabashedly, unapologetically self-sufficient, as if he doesn’t need any other, as if he never depended upon parents or any familial relations or upon social institutions in order to survive and grow, to have sex, to have food, or upon any of the other innumerable material and immaterial structures supporting his very possibility of having a liveable life. As if that individual has, from birth, already been casting an agenda, but not via a social assignment, but rather as a self-sufficient individual outside the world, without the need of a material existence. Such is the fiction we have been taught through the sphere of representation.
Of course, we have also come to know that the revolutionary republicans despised these monarchical rites and abolished them, though they created new rituals in which bodies played just as important as a role. How state power inscribed itself onto the body of the new national subjects through performance, ritual and text forms and gives shape to a genealogy and legacy of our contemporary body politics, in which such mechanisms continue to still be at play. Within the arts, ideas of the public sphere converge in such an unresolved category. Accessibility to the arts for all is today thought to be a given, at times because institutions are publicly funded, or self-define themselves as public, or because entry is given in exchange for a small fee. However, in the arts, as in the sphere of politics, the public sphere can emerge only under certain conditions. For Arendt, there is no space for freedom if we do not create the democratic conditions for experiencing freedom. Freedom of the mind is an illusion for her, revealing a totalitarian state unleashing itself over bodies. That space of freedom needs to be built.[13]If, as we have seen, dance functioned, and still continues to do so, as part of the organisation of a public sphere of representation, we should be able to analyse how it can open and make space, and structure support for what’s cut out, what’s unacknowledged. Exclusion from such a public sphere is justified and “naturalised” through a social space of representation presented as a substantial unity that must be protected from conflict. This was the take of Louis XIV, which continues to arrive diluted in our own times. Performance, as Harald & Louis demonstrate, is more intrinsically “burlesque” in the sense of tactical confrontation, approximation and irony towards “naturalised” choreography. As does urban space, choreography still pursues a spatial organisation presented as the naturalproduct of the biological, social or technological order of an apparently “organic” (though unitary) society. It is exactly these concepts of natural, biological, social and evolutionary modernities that are in need of being deconstructed as affecting our understanding of individuals – only functional to produce a marginality, of what does not fit into these constructed categories, where some lives become grievable and some others remain ungrievable. The asymmetry and proliferation of differences in advanced industrial societies magnifies a surplus of meaning of the social – that there exists something more in such a pretended unity – thus making it difficult to attempt to
In presenting a theatrical space stripped of its spectacular constructions,Shine Utopiansopens up the possibility of beginning to think again of institutions as a bare space, a space of potential, a space where we can deal with the unknown, more than cement the known. A space for learning new tactics for training – to untrain more than to train the body. This is why, in Harald & Louis’s piece, simple gestures repeated over and again find new concatenations of meaning. They hint at the potential of our bodies as molecular transitions of form, meaning and encounter, in constant movement, pushing determined boundaries. A cultural determination is broken apart, by re-engaging these bodies in collective and individual movements. By performing collective movements, the trained body provokes the untrained body, the educated body demands a negotiation. Antagonism. Uneasiness. They invite us to rethink the ethics of gestures through constantly reidentifying the borders of the body. Not only is the body of the dancer put in question, but also the body of the institution. The dancer’s body as well as the institutional body is in its potentiality, that is, in its inoperative mode; it doesn’t long to reach the perfect gesture alone, but instead it shows what gestures in an assembly can lead to. A revolutionary potential is embedded in these orgiastic bodies, whose lustful demands are together put forward for an audience ready to participate. Then a question arises effortlessly: Can freedom and equality be taught?
Proof reader - Jacklyn Arndt
[1]See: Hannah Arendt(1958),The HumanCondition,Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
[2]Judith Butler (2020). The Force of Non-Violence. An ethico-political bind. Verso: London & New York, NY.
[3]Hannah Arendt(1958).The Human Condition.Op. Cit.pp.198-199.
[4]The autonomy of art has entered the common art vocabulary as a view on works of art that are devoid of any practical function and thus devoid of instrumental value. This view is traditionally traced back to Kant’s Critique of Judgement. See: Immanuel Kant (1914). Critique of Judgement. London: Macmillan.
[5]Michel Foucault (1971). “The Order of Discourse,” In: RobertYoung (ed.) Untying the TextA Post-Structuralist Reader, London: Routledge,p.55.
[6]Angela Dimitrakaki & Lara Perry (2013), “How to Be Seen: An Introduction To Feminist Politics, Exhibition Cultures In Curatorial Transgressions,” In: Ib.(eds.), Politics in a Glass Case. Feminism, Exhibition Cultures and Curatorial Transgressions, pp.1–21.
[7]Judith Butler(2011), “Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street,” transversal textshttps://transversal.at/transversal/1011/butler/en(accessed 5 February 2021)
[8]See: Silvia Federici (2004). Caliban and the Witch. New York: Autonomedia.
[9]Georgia J. Cowart (2008), The Triumph of Pleasure: Louis XIV and the Politics of Spectacle. Chicago, IL & London: University of Chicago Press, pp.47–48.
[10]See: Louis Marin (1988), Portrait of the King,Minneapolis, IL: University of Minnesota Press.
[11]Mark Franko, “Double Bodies: Androgyny and Power in the Performances of Louis XIV,” The Drama Review, Winter, 1994, Vol. 38, No. 4, pp. 71-82.
[12]See: Sylvie Steinberg(2001), La confusion des sexes: Le travestissement de la Renaissance à la Révolution, Paris: Fayard.
[13]Hannah Arendt, “What is Freedom?” (1968). In: Ib. Between past and future; eight exercises in political thought, New York, NY, Viking Press, pp.143–171
Studying the genealogy and historicity of gender should be a mandatory step for scholars and students, of any age, who are convinced that the first task on humanity’s agenda is emancipation from and finding alternatives to a capitalist society. Such claims were prominent among Marxist intellectuals in the 1960s and ’70s as they sought to uncover untouched ground of exploitation and resistance, by revising claims of why and how gender categories had become valuable to the political economy, and what these categories had really been directed towards. Why shit, the anus, perversion and polymorphism related to the body and sexuality – elements not serving reproduction, which under capitalism means not serving reproduction of the labour force for the market – were secluded and hidden, together with death, in the reign of moral evil. In order to rethink the ethics of social change leading to different congregations of communities or societies, one cannot but discuss the body as the primary site leading to such a change. That is to say, one cannot underestimate the influence that a motivated notion of “normal” sexuality, with its stereotyped gender impositions and divisions, has had on specific forms of economic governance and the consequent imparting of regulatory frameworks upon bodies under customs of educational systems supported by alleged scientific claims.
When I met Harald & Louis in October 2019, they had only recently graduated from the academy, and they were genuinely worried about gender stereotypes continuing to be cast upon the students’ body (an individualisation working both on the student body as a whole and on the singular body of each individual student). They claimed that there was no reason in dance, for instance, for the body to be gendered, for enduring the imposition of such biological divisions, coming from the Enlightenment and continuing on into the everyday lives of students today, not only in the way their bodies were trained, modelled, but also in the way their bodies were thought, in order to almost and literally fulfil a representational task of society that they thought they would have escaped by entering a free space of appearance such as that of academia – a space for research which should not be monist or unitarian. The “space of appearance,” a term coined by philosopher Hannah Arendt, is, according to her, created anew wherever individuals gather together politically. It is the space of the polis, where political decisions are being made by an encounter among equals.[1]Not all social spaces can be classified as spaces of appearance. One could argue that in certain corners of the internet and among certain sexual subcultures, invisibility shapes subjectivity and enables various forms of power; some forms of power depend mostly on inequalities in the distribution of certain resources rather than on the visibility of those who either exercise power or are subjected to it. Still, appearance occurs in a great number of the spaces where the activity we normally call “politics” takes place – for example, within state institutions, at workplaces and behind street barricades. As this space of appearance is highly fragile and exists only when actualised through the performance of deeds or the utterance of words, wherever people assemble, it’s potentially always there, Arendt argues. Gender theorist Judith Butler later questioned and complexified such a claim about the space of appearance – that is, being democratic and sufficient to create equality – through introducing the idea of the right to appear, because Arendt’s formulation assumes that such space is always there and publicly accessible, meaning everyone is already equal. Not everyone has equal rights, especially when it comes to the right to appear (one could think about citizenship as the most obvious example). Butler argues that, instead, our current systems determine how certain lives are deemed worth living, while others are not; such mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion from such a space are not “natural,” as we are made to believe, but rather they are determined by a lack of applicability of rights, by a lack of proper systemic recognition of a right to have rights which is universal and not contextual. She shows us the other side of the coin to reveal how it is the very system of public accessibility that denies the equality of positions. Such a system of unrecognition is equally gender based, and makes it so that certain lives are more vulnerable than others – precarious lives that at times encounter precarious genders.[2]If the academy is a space whose function is to generate a community of memory, both to open up and to preserve the words and deeds of a polis, of its citizens, from oblivion and the ravages of time, to leave a testament for future generations, isn’t its task also to create the utopic – what we long for but have not yet reached – to aspire, to create the structures to serve equal rights, including the right to the image? Why, then, are some bodies encapsulated within a “male” label, Harald & Louis pondered, and why do they remain a structural support for a labelled “female” body – one presupposed to be strong, the other delicate, one masculine, the other feminine, one strong and virile, the other vulnerable – without the possibility for the two to be confounded or simply intertangled, instead associated with evolutionist organic principles and biological claims, which, forcibly marked on a student card (similar to a passport in replicating structures of surveillance and power), stand as an economic and governance determination as to which subjectivity one can be? The frustration and violence they felt in submitting their bodies to these ongoing labels, replicated through an educational system promising a free space for thought, and their uncertainty about what possibilities existed to remove the gendered body from such a constitution of the self, was still one of the main ongoing struggles they had with academia, which, in turn, they thought – with great fear – they were likely to bring into the outside world as professional choreographers and dancers. Shouldn’t instead such change start from the academy, as the space of the thinkable and possible (which in turn means a space where one can think the unthinkable and the impossible, the utopic, the equal)? And that’s what this text is perhaps about: Should we not further analyse the institutions we create, their borders and thresholds, and how they belong not only to the sphere of thought but also to the sphere of politics, effecting deeds and actions, the right to look, the right to the image and to image, the sphere of aesthetics – in short, a world of perception heavily affecting in turn the space of appearance, “where I appear to others as others appear to me,” not merely like other living or inanimate things, but, in the words of Arendt, explicitly?[3]
As a cultural producer not specialised in dance, I was quite surprised to be called into such a conversation by Harald & Louis. I came to understand only later their silent claim. Dance certainly exacerbates something that perhaps is liquefied in other visual art forms (most often such an aspect is cast in a higher degree of invisibility, in the work itself; thus, in fields other than dance, one’s body does not immediately encounter gendered prejudice when it enters through the academy’s institutional doors). The effect of this liquification is that, in most visual arts fields, we can’t claim gender divisions as something immediately visible and discriminatory (or incriminatory: accusing, charging, calling to account with regard to a cause), as the site of ideological thinking about which we are not immediately conscious – yet not meaning that it’s in fact less present or less normalised. A residue in the space of academia Harald & Louis identify is that, though one doesn’t need to discuss it every time one enters a room, one is immediately divided and identified for how one will biologically perform (yes, for the possible, in the future tense) based on one’s immediate biological appearance – not a reclaimed presence (“explicitly,” for Arendt) but rather a prejudicial narrative. I don’t come together with others in an act of speech and action to gain a subjectivity. I’m not performing. I’m being choreographed. This is an act of interpellation which is at once incriminatory and discriminatory, because it expresses something more formal and more grave: it conveys a destination or a goal of motion determined not by one’s will to perform, not by a coming as an equal into a space of appearance, but rather by someone else who has decided a priori not only who am I and what I represent, but also my future – that is, how my subjectivity will perform – based solely on how my body is read. (In following such a formulation, one could go as far as to say “my body” is considered, in such an instance, a public property, in the sense of “publicly labelled for a publicly determined use.”) There is no construction of a subject if I’m not shaping the perception of myself as an equal with others.
In the extended art field, we have been taught to look at the work first, to its aesthetic claim, separated from the artist that is the producer of its meaning (Immanuel Kant).[4]The artwork, the oeuvre, should speak for itself, have an end in itself. What surrounds the oeuvre, if the oeuvre is not autonomous, is considered at times not only superfluous but a failure of the work itself. It is in this separation between the artist (the human) and the artwork (the object), in this ideological make-believe independent life of one from the other, that a false pretence is built for the work to appear genderless and classless, universal; yet in this assumption and reprojection onto the word, there is an intrinsic impediment to raising a critique on gender politics. It is in this purported abstraction that gender makes its utmost incriminatory and unconscious mark. As philosopher Michel Foucault has remarked, “geometry alone must be taught in oligarchies, since it demonstrates the proportions within inequality.”[5]Because if we were to rethink such a claim from education, such a division within the oeuvre’s autonomy (including from the artist), upon seeking and establishing its situated perspective (the one coming from the producer), would cause us to unveil and oblige us to uncover a whole biography behind the work itself: the genealogy of its author(s) as a constitutive part of the work that is, on many levels and at the same time in its particular and universal claims, situatedness. At once we would understand that no separation really exists between the two, the oeuvre and the producer, one being a higher reflection of the other and their common will, only to create further degrees of readability and transcendentality, but grounding us in a somewhere, where that somewhere, that particular view, is a constitutive part of what I’m looking at: at how someone is looking at the world, and at what is being claimed, that is, speech and action in the space of appearance. We would gain some form of equality because I would have a consciousness of the other’s perspective. The work is the centre of such a politically motivated gathering, and of struggles for equality. This has also been an important struggle of feminist strategies in reclaiming a different materiality and autonomy outside and within the art world, to address how gender politics risk being frozen in universalist claims within the white cube’s predicament, granting a past tense to the artwork and its current validity, and at the same time legitimising struggles in the past while preventing the recognition of inequity as a condition in the present.[6]Impeding the ability to continue to reflect on why and how the artwork arrives into a container, to project within it a popularised and universal life – the structures of power behind which are ongoing sites of negotiation. Why are some artworks brought inside a space and provided time and context for reflection, while others are cut out, abandoned to a more precarious life? These may seem to be minor issues if one thinks about such positions not affecting other spaces of appearance, the polis. That is, if one doesn’t see such a space of representation as having real effects outside the space of the academy or the particular educational institution. And it is for this reason one should ask: Is such a space of appearance only possible for non-living beings (the object) or for the temporarily performed, or are certain bodies (material and immaterial) entering and being granted citizenship as an indelible right – some artefacts gaining the right to speak and the right to appear – while others remain precarious bodies, becoming lives which are notgrievable? For Butler, the right to have rights is one that depends on no existing particular political organisation or institution. Its legitimacy is exercised every time people come together. Such a right predates and precedes any political institution that might codify or seek to guarantee that right, and at the same time it is derived from no natural set of laws. That right comes into being when it is exerted by those who act in concert, in alliance.[7]Those who are excluded from existing political polities, who belong to no nation state or other contemporary state formation, may be deemed unreal only by those who seek to monopolise the terms of reality. And yet even after the public sphere has been defined through their exclusion, they act whether they are banned to precarity or left out through systemic negligence. Doesn’t this representational space, the right to have rights, start from here, from the very place where we learn about the thinkable and the possible (and with it the unthinkable and the impossible, the utopia of equality, of education), from the container, from the educational structure that should provide an idea of the right to have rights, independently from citizenship, implied in the concerted action of acting together? If one looks at academia through these lenses, one can easily see how gender roles are a constitutive part of the very institutional choreography of education, in the humanities as much as in the scientific fields, because before one even learns about form, one is captured by its divisive container, whereas behaviour is segregated and propagated as departing from biological constrictions reinforced by contended Darwinian truths of evolutionary reproducibility (the arts have their own Darwinian truths). Representation continues to be dual and polarised at best, if not simply the assumption of one single dominating gaze and point of view – unitarian and totalitarian, biologically determined.
I’m not speaking in this context as an expert of dance, but as a witness of the societal partitions built around a gendered identity and body normativity that foster ideas of function constructed around, in my case, a penis, as an allegedly active reproductive machine, interconnected to a shame for its malfunctioning if it does not fulfil its ultimate evolutionist credo – whose only aspiration in the age of capital is the systematic breeding of a nuclear family: the one and only accepted, smallest working atom of a Westernised view of a globalised world and society. Under the idea of a global condition, we are made to believe there is one world, one paradigm and one systemic law. Shame, in my educational world, as apprehended from the age of four, when I moved to the south of Italy with its heavily patriarchal and immovable divisions casting inescapable shadows – a feeling reinforced through religious injunctions – made it clear that no escapades were ever going to be possible, not even regarding ideas of an afterlife, and especially not in a small society whose centuries of exploitative powers reproduced no other but the pauperism of the poverty of experience (guided by a domineering middle class). Such a ruling petite bourgeoisie didn’t necessarily take down or open up existing barriers following the feudalist reach that came from the city aristocrats in the post-war period, but only cemented its structures by delaying a future redistribution of the wealth of experience – something that could be achieved only by following the unrooting of ancient practices and traditions, including the final eradication of the world of magic with its witches and warlocks under the imperative to modernise (meaning “normalise”), through reproductive machines regulated by the new impending state apparatus, centralised in the north and slowly de-plebeicising the south by deeming it retrograde (read: “unindustrialised”).
Gendering has been therefore key in projecting, reproducing and maintaining such a class system, and has operated as a functional machine whereby social mobility is to be sought or achieved only if fitting the new standards of the family nucleus, with smaller and larger loans and so on and so forth, in a series of policies reinforcing one ideology and assimilations – of language, habits, traditions and even memories (or memorabilia, the arts). Education served primarily such molecular systems; it was firstly instrumental in creating an idea of a nation. These are the historical processes whose formation one only suddenly understands, but where antagonism in the face of them is still not always thinkable as a social demand or right, but only as an individual choice at best, or at the cost of exile – meaning leaving your immediate society behind – at worst. The latter is not only my migratory choice, but a more widespread phenomenon proved by the depopulation of small- and medium-sized towns, not only in the south of Italy but just as much as in the non-urban centres of the rest of continental Europe. The role of reproduction work in demarcating gendered social spheres (public and private: such a division is still at work), together with the economic definitions of productivity and unproductivity transferred to biological conditions, as such valued as market forms according to biological assignations institutionalised under the state’s control, is part of banning the desiring body. The biologically based criminalisation of our bodies is part of a hidden social contract, part of the untold. Focus on your penis and not your anus. Don’t have sex, or otherwise maintain high sexual desire for the sole purpose of reproduction; be virile and monogamous; refuse other forms of sexuality; don’t masturbate; don’t acknowledge other forms of desire; don’t go against the reproductive self of “nature,” of what’s “natural” (the unnatural belonging to the realm of the laughable, most often presented as the monstrous). As if nature’s only purpose is reproducing itself; as if nature, which we have learned to separate from culture, is aimed only at self-preservation through simple reproduction. This still remains to a certain extent the belief of an ideological scientific view. Such is the setting around a body treated as public property, turning it into a commodity serving the interest of a higher aim – that is, to succumb to the capitalist modes of production. The body can’t be used for anything other than an alleged origin reconductedto a presumed Mother Nature. In fact, we have learned that there are only families, and families constituted by fathers and mothers, and nothing else in between. The in-betweenness is unfit, a remainder, that which does not fit into what’s supposed to be productive.
Drawing from Karl Marx, feminist scholar Silvia Federici has spoken about a fundamental rule allowing such a gendered exploitation to be possible – that is, primitive accumulation – upon which capitalism designed a violent division of bodies according to their gendered assignations. Federici reconducts the formation of capital from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries as being gendered on a central axis of social organisation and control, demonstrating how violence against women, for instance, is congenital to capitalism’s formulation. A return of the most violent aspects of primitive accumulation – which has accompanied every phase of capitalist globalisation, including the present one – demonstrates that the degradation of gender is a necessary condition for the existence of capitalism in all times.[8]
Something is unavoidably missing: bodies coming together in alliance; bodies that have nothing to share except being together. When bodies come together, they bring alliance beyond representation, beyond politics, beyond other forms of determined aggregation, simply demanding space for a different mode of being, a different kind of society – a society less based on segregated structures, one standing for love, solidarity – and to occupy space and time outside any immanent need, citizenship without the constriction of land. The question is, therefore, how can we reach a space of equality under these given conditions? How can we move from repressive technologies of power to recognising more mobile forms of interdependency connecting varied bodies and their reciprocal need for subsistence, maintenance and life in general? How might it be possible to formulate equality on the basis of such relations that define our enduring social existence as living creatures? How can we make a collective claim on society through which we could image freedom and justice? How might it be possible to reclaim a different presence for bodies and objects that supports a space of appearance, a space for not assimilating, not being subsumed, not being consumed and discarded before our bodies awaken a conscious subjectivity?
I think that’s the question behind Harald & Louis’s piece Shine Utopians, which was presented, following our initial discussions, in November 2019 at Dansens Hus in Oslo, where they gathered a number of bodies in a place, to possibly gain a space of appearance, literally, by coming together and becoming visible. The stripped-down theatre revealed its maintenance structure in full, whereby windows regained their role as transparent membranes to the outside; the stage returned to being a floor; and no distinction was made between the audience, the performers or the people charged with the theatre’s upkeep and providing food and beverage to performers and audience alike. Finally, a branching platform invited the display of the body of the audience as a living object, as the central act on stage equal to the act itself. Initially Harald & Louis had not wanted to schedule a time for the performance but rather to simply take over the theatre space for the overall period allotted to them, a month or so, and for the performance to be ongoing, open to constant visitation, so that there would be no rehearsal and no show, but instead the piece, the oeuvre, would be in a sort of perennial preparation, inviting over and over, or over and again, bodies to come in, to congregate, to join a molecular movement, in an attempt to find both synergy as well as forms of aggression and antagonism.
Upon entering Shining Utopians, one found that the usually dark cube of the ready-for-the-magic-to-happen theatre space was stripped bare to its reverse: pure light. Imaging is not created in darkness, but by the persistence of movement on the retina; an aggregation of colour produced by body movement. Your untrained body lays down, stands, sits. Nothing is about to come; everything is already there. You are part of an aggregation from beginning to end. You are intertangled into the conjoinedness, within which you need to recognise that you are performing, that you have an active role, even if simply standing still or sitting. You become aware of your own potentiality, because usually you’re simply called in to testify, in darkness, to the event that is about to happen. Such is the role of the spectator. Standing in a grey zone. I’m here, but I’m not participating. Here, as performers shape themselves into different aggregations, as they push themselves to find new forms of being together without exhausting themselves; you’re not the object, but you are a participating subject. You are a body in an entangled multispecies future. I figured, during the performance, that if I ever were to have witnessed paradise by following the Christian tenets imposed on me – one of the unfortunate utopias of equality – I would have seen something similar. Pure light, subtle and unexpected movements; nothing happening, yet something constantly changing; as in Dante’s vision, one follows an arresting light, and one moves together with other bodies though standing still, equidistant.
When I started looking into the history of dance, and the formation of its institutions, I found, unsurprisingly, that its dictates come from Louis XIV. The Sun King established the Académie Royale de Danse in Paris in March 1661, the first of many royal academies later founded throughout Europe, in order to “improve” artistic standards. The story goes that thirteen experts met regularly to deliberate, to be emulated and to test and teach skills, while being encouraged to invent a notation system that codified positions of feet, arms and the body. Penalties were introduced if procedures were not followed, and fines were given to practitioners to prevent attempts at deviations from the academy’s professional standards. The thirteen academicians were the legislators as well as the adjudicators of their own system. The king required that they pass aesthetic judgment upon every weekly choreographed dance, both social and theatrical, before it could be either taught or performed in Paris or in the suburbs. This extraordinary provision, apparently unique in the history of dance, would appear to reflect an attempted censorship – not necessarily of content, but of form alone, leading theoreticians to read into these encoded questions a control over pleasure, representation and accessibility.[9]By studying this period during the seventeen and eighteen centuries, we can also learn that few states were as obsessed as France with the body, to the point that body metaphors entered the general language and the political discourse. “Corporation,” “body,” “head” and “member” all came to be prolifically used in legislation, public speeches and more. Dance similarly occupied a large role at Versailles. Everyone danced. This was part of a “technique of power,” attests Foucault, one of the scholars of the period, as part of, in his words, “discipling bodies.” What’s more obscure, apparently, is Louis XIV’s reasoning for performing regularly between 1651 and 1668 as an androgynous figure. As dance represented order, as well as power over representation, the body of the king stood for its terrain and divine duality, with the individual and society merging together within such a figure, where the prosperity of the person reflected the prosperity of the nation and, correspondingly, “his” and its fertility. Dance and its high performativity should not be considered a marginal space of entertainment but clearly a space of politics, where politics are played, in the space of representation. For representation to work as power, the visible should be readable and should, reciprocally, be read as an image.[10]
Paraphrasing Mark Franko, a “war” of positions was at stake with the establishment of the Académie Royale de Danse. Franko is concerned with the intrinsic royal ostracism of burlesque ballets, a form of dance in court ballet popular in the 1620s that was openly political and disruptive of traditions. Here bodies did not move geometrically according to patterns and proportions or follow symbols of social stability and political harmony; instead, they engaged in play, were open to chance. Whereas choreography is a plan, performance is unpredictable. Franko addresses how burlesque ballets contested – even put at stake – monarchical power by questioning its ordered representation. For him, the letters patent coming to dictate the newly established academy of dance addressed how people should be trained and how they should move. This educational diktat was, for Franko, a measure meant to prevent the unsettling return of burlesque performance. It is both aesthetic and ideological power.[11]Power exists only as a representation. Cross-dressing was a regular feature of burlesque ballets. They were self-conscious, structurally open ended and politically allusive and, as such, disrupted prior court ballet traditions, all of which had been characterised by composite spectacle. Yet the burlesque moment was short lived. At the time of Louis XIV, there were no longer any obviously burlesque ballets. So, one could speculate that even when Louis XIV performed a cross-dressed role, he may have done so at the intersection of several appropriations. He was not subverting stereotypes but, in reality, only emphasising the self-sufficiency of the king’s body, its absolutism. There is an enormous difference in cross-dressing as a way of examining gender constructs as a result of religious and moral teachings, versus cross-dressing in sharp contraposition to defined attributes assigned to gender conformation based on the contemporaneous medical knowledge and understanding of physiology, versus cross-dressing based on transgressing codes of food consumption that conform to the societal prescriptions of the masculine and the feminine paradigms studied elsewhere.[12]Here the body politics impersonated by the king are still reproductive. He stands on his own, unabashedly, unapologetically self-sufficient, as if he doesn’t need any other, as if he never depended upon parents or any familial relations or upon social institutions in order to survive and grow, to have sex, to have food, or upon any of the other innumerable material and immaterial structures supporting his very possibility of having a liveable life. As if that individual has, from birth, already been casting an agenda, but not via a social assignment, but rather as a self-sufficient individual outside the world, without the need of a material existence. Such is the fiction we have been taught through the sphere of representation.
Of course, we have also come to know that the revolutionary republicans despised these monarchical rites and abolished them, though they created new rituals in which bodies played just as important as a role. How state power inscribed itself onto the body of the new national subjects through performance, ritual and text forms and gives shape to a genealogy and legacy of our contemporary body politics, in which such mechanisms continue to still be at play. Within the arts, ideas of the public sphere converge in such an unresolved category. Accessibility to the arts for all is today thought to be a given, at times because institutions are publicly funded, or self-define themselves as public, or because entry is given in exchange for a small fee. However, in the arts, as in the sphere of politics, the public sphere can emerge only under certain conditions. For Arendt, there is no space for freedom if we do not create the democratic conditions for experiencing freedom. Freedom of the mind is an illusion for her, revealing a totalitarian state unleashing itself over bodies. That space of freedom needs to be built.[13]If, as we have seen, dance functioned, and still continues to do so, as part of the organisation of a public sphere of representation, we should be able to analyse how it can open and make space, and structure support for what’s cut out, what’s unacknowledged. Exclusion from such a public sphere is justified and “naturalised” through a social space of representation presented as a substantial unity that must be protected from conflict. This was the take of Louis XIV, which continues to arrive diluted in our own times. Performance, as Harald & Louis demonstrate, is more intrinsically “burlesque” in the sense of tactical confrontation, approximation and irony towards “naturalised” choreography. As does urban space, choreography still pursues a spatial organisation presented as the naturalproduct of the biological, social or technological order of an apparently “organic” (though unitary) society. It is exactly these concepts of natural, biological, social and evolutionary modernities that are in need of being deconstructed as affecting our understanding of individuals – only functional to produce a marginality, of what does not fit into these constructed categories, where some lives become grievable and some others remain ungrievable. The asymmetry and proliferation of differences in advanced industrial societies magnifies a surplus of meaning of the social – that there exists something more in such a pretended unity – thus making it difficult to attempt to
In presenting a theatrical space stripped of its spectacular constructions,Shine Utopiansopens up the possibility of beginning to think again of institutions as a bare space, a space of potential, a space where we can deal with the unknown, more than cement the known. A space for learning new tactics for training – to untrain more than to train the body. This is why, in Harald & Louis’s piece, simple gestures repeated over and again find new concatenations of meaning. They hint at the potential of our bodies as molecular transitions of form, meaning and encounter, in constant movement, pushing determined boundaries. A cultural determination is broken apart, by re-engaging these bodies in collective and individual movements. By performing collective movements, the trained body provokes the untrained body, the educated body demands a negotiation. Antagonism. Uneasiness. They invite us to rethink the ethics of gestures through constantly reidentifying the borders of the body. Not only is the body of the dancer put in question, but also the body of the institution. The dancer’s body as well as the institutional body is in its potentiality, that is, in its inoperative mode; it doesn’t long to reach the perfect gesture alone, but instead it shows what gestures in an assembly can lead to. A revolutionary potential is embedded in these orgiastic bodies, whose lustful demands are together put forward for an audience ready to participate. Then a question arises effortlessly: Can freedom and equality be taught?
Proof reader - Jacklyn Arndt
[1]See: Hannah Arendt(1958),The HumanCondition,Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
[2]Judith Butler (2020). The Force of Non-Violence. An ethico-political bind. Verso: London & New York, NY.
[3]Hannah Arendt(1958).The Human Condition.Op. Cit.pp.198-199.
[4]The autonomy of art has entered the common art vocabulary as a view on works of art that are devoid of any practical function and thus devoid of instrumental value. This view is traditionally traced back to Kant’s Critique of Judgement. See: Immanuel Kant (1914). Critique of Judgement. London: Macmillan.
[5]Michel Foucault (1971). “The Order of Discourse,” In: RobertYoung (ed.) Untying the TextA Post-Structuralist Reader, London: Routledge,p.55.
[6]Angela Dimitrakaki & Lara Perry (2013), “How to Be Seen: An Introduction To Feminist Politics, Exhibition Cultures In Curatorial Transgressions,” In: Ib.(eds.), Politics in a Glass Case. Feminism, Exhibition Cultures and Curatorial Transgressions, pp.1–21.
[7]Judith Butler(2011), “Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street,” transversal textshttps://transversal.at/transversal/1011/butler/en(accessed 5 February 2021)
[8]See: Silvia Federici (2004). Caliban and the Witch. New York: Autonomedia.
[9]Georgia J. Cowart (2008), The Triumph of Pleasure: Louis XIV and the Politics of Spectacle. Chicago, IL & London: University of Chicago Press, pp.47–48.
[10]See: Louis Marin (1988), Portrait of the King,Minneapolis, IL: University of Minnesota Press.
[11]Mark Franko, “Double Bodies: Androgyny and Power in the Performances of Louis XIV,” The Drama Review, Winter, 1994, Vol. 38, No. 4, pp. 71-82.
[12]See: Sylvie Steinberg(2001), La confusion des sexes: Le travestissement de la Renaissance à la Révolution, Paris: Fayard.
[13]Hannah Arendt, “What is Freedom?” (1968). In: Ib. Between past and future; eight exercises in political thought, New York, NY, Viking Press, pp.143–171