Palimpsestuous Palimpsest

MATERIALIZING PALIMPSEST Interrogation into palimpsestuousness as a queer enactment in artistic research PALIMPSESTUOUS PALIMPSEST Palimpsestuous Palimpsest Queer methodology 3 - 13 Subjugated knowledges 14 - 40 Provinces of Palimpsestuousness 41 - 56 2 QUEER METHODOLOGY In this piece of writing I will discuss how contemporary queer theory and practice can be approached as an artistic methodology. To do that, I will navigate the history of the term ‘queer’ as to deliver its meaning as seen through this research, which will allow me to analyse and produce a critical enquiry into three performance works created during my research and further the notion of palimpsestuousness as a form of queer synthesis of matter and meaning. According to Annamarie Jagose, queer theory emerged from the entanglement of the post-structuralism, feminism theory and Lesbian and Gay Studies in the 1980s and 1990s. Its critical body of inquiry was delivered through the AIDS crisis in Western society and the political activism that followed.1 Jagose in her text Queer Theory: An Introduction, argues that through the rise of the gay liberation movement, feminism and the re - appropriation of the terminology of ‘queer’, queer theory allows us to question concepts of gender, sexual identity and normativity. Jagose writes: Broadly speaking queer describes those gestures or analytical models which dramatize incoherencies in the allegedly stable relations between chromosomal sex, gender and sexual desire...queer locates and exploits the incoherencies in those three terms which stabilise heterosexuality.2 This ‘broad’ definition directly speaks to most common contemporary understanding of the term queer that functions as an ‘umbrella’ that incorporates LGBT identities and culture. As such, even though relevant, this definition of queer needs a destabilisation in order, and here my task as a researcher becomes less clear, to describe it as used in this research. Where focus should remain is in the fact that Jagose recognises and develops 1 Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 2004), p. 93 – 95. 2 Ibid, p. 3. 3 critical and analytical functioning of the term. It is how I deploy queer – not necessarily as a strategy that challenges socio-political standing of normativity, but as a methodology that allows us to rethink how we practice art and with it how we practice knowledge. This potential is further picked up by David Halperin, who places queer in whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant3. To place queer studies and theory as a way of thinking and being that is at odds with the normal means to allow it not only to question the stability of supposed normativity, but also, and this comes from the normalisation of this term within the academic community, and community at large, to allow it its own system that does not require constant positioning in antinormativity. This is visible in later Halperin essay titled Normalisation of Queer Theory. In this text, he is responding to growing academic usage of queer theory and the fact that it functions as a substitute to the post-structural methodology of deconstruction introduced by Jacques Derrida. Halperin writes: Those working in English, history, classics, anthropology, sociology, or religion would now have the option of using queer theory, as they had previously used Deconstruction, to advance the practice of their disciplines by “queering” them. The outcome of those three moves was to make queer theory a game the whole family could play. This has resulted in a paradoxical situation: as queer theory becomes more widely diffused throughout the disciplines, it becomes harder to figure out what’s so very queer about it.4 Being at odds suggests that the meaning and matter that emerges from queer theory not only escapes normative coherence, or as I refer to it earlier – causality – in both living experiences and in academic research, but also is removed and dismissed as inadequate and not rigorous. Halperin in his writing navigates queer theory not as a method that 3 David Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1997), p. 79. 4 David Halperin, “The Normalization of Queer Theory” in Journal of Homosexuality, 45 (2-3,2003), p. 342. 4 allows for deconstruction of knowledges, but rather as a discipline – a system of knowledge itself that deregulates and actively does not look for approval by the thing that it is at odds with. Noreen Giffney refers to a state of queer that doesn’t rely on normativity and does not position itself in oppositional relation to make sense as an excess. She writes: There is an unremitting emphasis in queer theoretical work on fluidity, ű berinclusivity, indeterminacy, indefinability, unknowability, the preposterous, impossibility, unthinkability, unintelligibility, meaninglessness and that which is unrepresentable or uncommunicable. This theoretical emphasis points to the excess which cannot be categorized, that which is not or cannot be expressed through language; the queer remainder.5 Giffney’s work allows us to clarify the notion of queer not as an approach to knowledge, which passes the structural critique of normative assessment and judgment, but as a world with its own power and gravity – constantly changed and re-shaped by its own instability. Queer in my work functions as such reference. It points at the direction and spatial, methodological and sexual orientation, which does not fit-in, yet at the same time embodies a field of knowledge that, similarly to artistic research and methodologies, focuses on the praxis-as-practice. This is very much presented in William Haver’s essay, Queer Research; or, How to practice Invention to the Brink of Intelligibility. In here he develops a queer form of methodology that questions the model of the exchange of knowledge as commodity but also reminds us that ‘queer’ is a type of interruption that forces one to experience instability. 6 7 5 Noreen Giffney, “Introduction: The ‘q’ Word” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Queer Theory, ed. N. Giffney and M. O’Rourke, (Farham: Ashgate, 2009), p. 8. 6 By ‘normative research practices’ I refer to the spectrum of attitudes in establishing validity and way of production of meanings and matters, by what Foucault would refer to as confessional practices, that try to reveal, or exhort the form of quantifiable truth and through that reinforce the idea that ‘truth’ is a priori existence that needs to be made visible. 7 Jean Genet’s work became quite prominent in my own research. William Haver describes him as “least dishonest political thinker”, through which he attributes him with the critical and intellectual 5 The practices of interruptions, or as earlier referred to as methods of ‘sliding off’, disjoint the emerging practices and offer us an opportunity for questioning and creating original forms of knowledges. For Haver ‘interruption’ as a means of challenging normative research practices, draws on the work of the French writer, philosopher and literary theorist, Maurice Blanchot, in which he develops the idea of three types of distinguished interruptions in speech. Blanchot writes: A change such that to speak (to write) is to cease thinking solely with a view of unity, and make the relations of words an essentially dissymmetrical field governed by discontinuity; as though, having renounced the uninterrupted force of coherent discourse, it were a matter of drawing out a level of language where one might gain the power not only to express oneself in an intermittent manner, but also to allow intermittence itself to speak: (…) a non-pontificating speech capable of clearing the two shores separated by the abyss, but without filling in the abyss or reuniting its shores: a speech without reference to unity.8 For both Blanchot and Haver, interruption allows for a dis-causality of meaning to occur, allowing for something else to occur. The unpredictability of this ‘else’ is similarly what Halperin ask for at the end of his essay. If queer theory is going to have the sort of future worth cherishing, we will have to find ways of renewing its radical potential and by that I mean not devising some new and more avant-garde theoretical formulation of it but, quite concretely, reinventing its capacity to startle, to surprise, to help us think what has not yet been thought. 9 We can approach a move from a layered palimpsestic surface into palimpsestuousness in a similar way. It cannot be denied that palimpsest is an entity made from layers, and the attitude to reveal and to de-layer the elements of this surface, and here I mean both in material and in a conceptual sense, allows to us to experience the linearity of history. prominence. For me Genet’s work clarifies the experience of discontinuity and general, and purposeful, disregard for dichotomy based narratives of thought. Genet’s work allowed me to designate the experience of palimpsestuousness as that of home (At home). 8 Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson, (New York: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), p. 77 – 78 9 David Halperin, “The Normalization of Queer Theory” in Journal of Homosexuality, 45 (2-3,2003), p. 343 6 On the other hand, palimpsestuousness is a foreign and unfamiliar term, that focuses our attention to the specific type of, as discussed earlier in this text, sexual and erotic intimacy that holds those layers together. To study and to practice palimpsestuousness means to develop strategies that function outside of the modes of revealing and delayering. It means to not to recover the narrative of causality, but instead experience a queer hiccup that forms a body of methodology, where one is confronted with something that is irreducible, yet multiple and complex. Instead of devouring and tearing off its layers, through my art practices, especially photography and digital image manipulation, I can experience a sense of space created by the interruptions.10 Haver describes this mode of production as queer research. He writes: (Queer Research) is less a knowledge or the production of knowledge than it is a pragmatics, an interruption in the production of knowledge, then we might begin to think the praxis of its poesies as an interruption in the formation of cultural subjects, the identities form in and through the production of knowledge as subjects who are supposed to know. 11 His statement on the state of queer research can be read directly in relation to the form of practice-led research as discussed by Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt, two contemporary thinkers and practitioners of artistic research. In their book Practice as research – Approaches to creative arts enquiry, they evaluate the issue of a constant need for the constant renegotiation and reinterpretation of what can be constituted as methods for artistic research, and how those methods inform the strategies of methodologies. They write: 10 As such I task myself with production of a material model of methodology called Model of palimpsestuousness v.2.0. This production emerged from interdisciplinary approach in connecting history of palimpsest and usage of this term in archeological research, and artistic attempts on making sense through rigorous practice. 11 William Haver, “Queer Research; or, how to practice invention to the brick of illegibility” in The Eight Technologies of Otherness, ed. Sue Golding, (London, New York: Routledge, 1997) p. 277 – 292. 7 Methodologies in artistic research are necessarily emergent and subject to repeated adjustment, rather than remaining fixed throughout the process of enquiry12. What becomes clear is the similarities between queer and practice-led research enquires. What Haver, Halperin, Barrett, and Bolt bring to attention is that each new artistic and queer research needs an emergent creation. It is not just a re-purposing of existing methods, but a way of producing matter and meaning that at its core cares and rises responsibility13 to praxis and practice – meaning life and art as intertwined and not separate entities, but rather a province and dimension of palimpsestuousness. In artistic research and queer research the core of the project is always in need of reshuffling and renegotiating, which sets up an assumed researcher on a certain type of wondering. This wondering allows for the research to create its own structure, which in turns feeds back into research itself. Similarly, it is the task of palimpsestuousness as a dimension of research to exhibit a self-made structure of its own meaning, that cannot be reduced primarily to the causality of history of its emergence as a conceptual entity. Instead, palimpsestuousness is a sexual and erotic reflection of a certain economy of praxis/practice. Praxis and practice become not separate entities – but rather ways of making - both in relation to ethics of living and in relation of making art. This notion is very much captured by Elizabeth Price, who through her practice-led PhD research focused on creating a reflexive writing around her continuous practice of creating a sculpture. The piece Boulder (1996), emerged as a large-scale sphere, created from a 12E. Barret, B. Bolt (ed),Practice As Research – Approaches To Creative Arts Enquiry, London: I.B. Tauris, 2007, p. 6 13 By responsibility I mean a critical ability to respond. This, as I will discuss further, understanding allows us to develop a form of friendship and belonging, that exists in encounter with an object/subject of art. 8 repetitive usage of brown packing tape. Price writes continuously on her experience in making this piece: I unwind packing tape from the roll upon which it is commercially distributed. As I unwind it from the roll, I rewind it again, but not onto a roll, only onto itself… this sphere is quite big now. I get confused exactly how big it is. 14 Price reflects on her rigorous undoing and doing, as to set up a critical narrative of her practice. In a way, her piece cannot exist outside of this reflection as both continuously interact with each-other, stabilising, realising and communicating the synthesis of matter and meaning. At the same time, it opens what Amelia Jones – performance artist and theorist - calls a process of meaning production.15 My task in developing a queer methodology lies directly in processes that open the meaning production through transgressions. In her text Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Other, Sarah Ahmed deals with the experience of disorientation as a queer methodology of practice that provides us with a form of understanding transgressions and ‘sliding offs’ that I discussed before. Ahmed uses disorientation by analysing orientation from terminology of ‘sexual orientation’ as to give sense to the processes of facing of the phenomena of the queer object. As she writes: (…) queer objects support proximity between those who are supposed to live on parallel lines, as points that should not meet. A queer object makes contact possible. Or, to be more precise, a queer object would have a surface that supports such contact. The contact is bodily, and it unsettles that line that divides spaces as worlds, thereby creating other kinds of connections where unexpected things can happen.16 14 Elizebeth Price, Excerpts from sidekick, Journal of Visual Art Practice, Vol.2, No. 1-2, July 2002, p.108 – 112 A. Jones, A. Stephenson (ed.), Performing the Body, Performing the Text, London: Routledge, 1999, p.2. Part of my practice-led research deals with the performance of forms of textuality (starting with the performance Fatima in 2015). This will be discussed further in relation to temporality and the experience of spatiality through performance and performance-led practice in the following text. 16 Sarah Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, London: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 169 15 9 The connections that Ahmed speaks of are very much in line with the development of palimpsestuousness presented by Dillon. It is through the type of those connections that Dillon starts her enquiry into palimpsestuousness, and it is because of them that my research developed into the study of the character and experience of those connections, which bind not only layers in the palimpsest, but also can create a ‘moment in space’. As already mentioned in the (Another) Introduction to palimpsest, Dillon calls palimpsestuous relationality (palimpsestuousness) an intimacy that is branded as illegitimate17 by referring to it as incestuous in character. I argue that because of the incestuous branding of the palimpsestuousness, one not only can approach it through queer theory, but in fact the palimpsestuousness, which does not seek to reveal the layers, is an emergent methodology of queer theory in artistic research. This is further discusses in other submitted texts, for now I want to develop further the difference between incestuous palimpsestuousness as described by Dillon and palimpsestuousness that emerges from a sense of queer theory and practice. Sarah Dillon reads incestuous palimpsestuousness through her approach to Philipe Lejeune relationship to his typewriter. I argue that, his typewriter becomes a fetish as understood in the contemporary discourse of sexuality. As he gives Barthes recognition to the development of this term he writes: I amused myself by attributing to [Barthes] this type of portmanteau word that I took pleasure in – in development inspired by my own relationship with my typewriter, and, perhaps also with incest!’ 18 17 Sarah Dillon, The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2007), p. 5 18 Philipe Lejeune, correspondence with Sarah Dillon in The Palimpsest, Literature, Criticism, Theory, p.129. 10 I understand his relation to his typewriter as perverse and illegitimate, and erotic and sexual in its matter and meaning. It very much might be that we can refer to Lejeune’s typewriter as a queer object that Ahmed speaks of. In the case of Lejeune, his erotic attitude towards the object of his typewriter becomes than a temporal interruption of the pre-supposed identity and function of both typewriter and him as a writer/reader/maker. It is because of that interruption that a new type of intimate space of knowledge opens, and it is in that space that subject and objects become familiar with each-other.19 Dillon and Lejeune suggest need for reconfiguration of palimpsestuousness by attributing it with the sense of spatiality and temporality. This sense is what I refer to throughout this thesis as ‘moment in space’. As presented in (Another) Introduction to palimpsest, and picked up in here the neologism of palimpsestuous as an adjective that characterises a space and time of a bond that holds the layers of the palimpsest together. Arguably, such a space is a queer space of sensual, sexual and erotic logic, that depends on, and is created by the tension of the slantwise connections that operate as illegitimate when seen through traditional narratives of causality. The amusement that Lejeune speaks of functions as a surplus and unexpected disorientation in his establishing palimpsestuous as an adjective. This amusement and certain feeling of embarrassment continues at every step of writing research in taboo subject of incest, not only by me, but also as stated by Dillon. The usage of the term incest in relation to palimpsestuousness makes this work hard to read/listed. My many readings of Sarah Dillon’s work in relation to the palimpsestuous and the transgression it provokes can help us to understand how such destabilising amusement continues. In 19 The type of irreducibility described here will be further explored with Karen Barad concept of intraaction as described in her book Meeting the Universe Halfway. For now the critical point is to reshape the palimpsestuousness as a type of space and type of time that is an interruptive in nature. 11 her work Dillon recalls her intellectual relationship with her father Michael Dillon, author of Politics of Security: Towards a Political Philosophy of Continental Thought, and how it shaped her understanding of palimpsestuousness. In one of the footnotes she writes: It is a delightful coincidence that the text I have found most useful in my elaboration of the concept of palimpsestuousness here was written by my father.20 What becomes even further a delight and amusement, for me, is the fact that in my own reading of her text I could not easily distinguish between the Dillon(s). It is in that disorientation that I intellectually merged them as one synthesis. What she proposes through her delight is that the type of palimpsestuous/incestuous spatiality that refers to a type of intimacy, not only makes critical perversities possible, but also allows for the objects that inhabit this space to become familiar with each other. Her concept of palimpsestuousness deals precisely with the critical space of intimacy that allows for the drawing of connections between beings that could not, or rather should not, be seen as critically important to one another. Yet through sexual and erotic (perverse) practice of reading, that creates an experience of amusement and delight, one allows for this spatial existence to become critical and at the same time reconstruct the traditional layering of the palimpsestic page. Palimpsestuousness is a character of such spatiality. Dillon’s expression of a sense of spatiality when dealing with a history of the palimpsest allows her to refer to it 20 Sarah Dillon, The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2007), p. 129 – This is a footnote comment by Dillon, it becomes especially interesting in studying the way that exchange of knowledge happens and how through that a certain ambiguous, or rather pleasurable entity/feeling escapes the form of what is supposed to be the accepted. The work of Michael Dillon deals with the intimate relationship between security and insecurity and is developed through reading of Martin Heidegger’s work. As such he does not mention the palimpsestuous in his work, but as Sarah Dillon notices he does deal with subjugated types of economies that exist within the world. 12 as province of knowledges. By framing palimpsestuousness as a province, Dillon immediately recognises the difference and otherness of this critical spaciality. My research directly deals with the erotic and sexual understanding of this type of dimension, which I discuss in the text titled At home, and how one can practice research/art in economy of sexual and erotic difference that gives meaning and ground to such experience of a ‘moment in space’. To practice queer and art as that, which becomes a strategy and a field of knowledge at the same time, for me means to engage in the pleasure that emerges from erotic and sexual praxis, which binds and create a palimpsestuous ‘moment in space’. I will discuss the character of this spatiality later in this thesis – for now I want to focus on another aspect of the palimpsestic surface – as to bring closure to the understanding of a queer slantwise move that this research performs. Through next part of this piece of writing I will argue that in Foucault develops understanding of queer theory through his concept of subjugated knowledges, and later I will show how by performance art practice one can embody such knowledges to challenge the palimpsest and its layered structure. 13 SUBJUGATED KNOWLEDGES As this is a practice-led thesis, throughout this research some of my own work, will come into play as to inform and expand upon the theory that I am engaging with. This text functions as such – it informs my reading of palimpsestuousness as a queer enactment by engaging with the philosophical concept of Foucault and my own performance art practice. However, I will not be delivering specific enquiry into performance art overall. Instead I will engage with the sense and experience of the concept of time and space (‘moment in space’) that they provoke. Before I do that, I want to deliver a case study of artwork by Henri Jacobi who is a contemporary artist working with the concept of the palimpsest. Through it I want to show how my performance art practice allows me to inhabit palimpsestuousness that emerges from the interruptive field of queer theory, rather than from a historical inquiry into the palimpsest and its linear conceptualisation. This will conclude with the understanding of Foucault’s notion of subjugated knowledges as presented in his lectures published under title Society Must be Defended and how for today’s reader this concept directly resonates with epistemological validity of queer theory.21 In the case of my art work this requires me to engage with the discussion on how incestuous connections that create a critical and non-layered moment in time and space (palimpsestuousness) becomes a synthesis of meaning and matter. It is exactly through transgressions of queer enactment that palimpsestuousness takes shape in the sensual, sexual and erotic praxis. 22 21 Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures At The College De France, 1975 – 1976. Ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana. Trans. David Macey, (New Yourk: Picador,2003). 22 In the other submitted writings, I will be discussing my first attempts on exactly that - to model and to create an enactment of rules on its structure. 14 As demonstrated in this writing palimpsestuousness is an emerging synthesis of matter and meaning that speaks about an interruptive ‘moment in space’. As such it can be viewed as a subject of queer theory. On the other hand, palaeographic palimpsest is a materiality constructed out of multiple layered surfaces, each continuously erased and superimposed. One of the most current and practice-led research into palaeographic palimpsest comes in the form of works by Henri Jacobi (FIG. 1). His work produced during a residency at Gerri Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, focused on dealing with the changing aspects of a surface through the constant movements of erasure and superimposition. In his artistic research, he produces images that are composed of geometrical shapes that somehow are reminiscent of the cartography of letters that he carves into the white acrylic surface. Even though his work seems often textual in nature, the point of producing those lines and shapes lies in the thickness of the surface that he carves. In some way, it is through his actions that he removes the possibility of legibility from the letter-like geometry of his carvings.23 23 Henri Jacobs, Surface research, 2009, http://vimeo.com/12073279 - in this video Jacobs shows the way he produces his images by tools of erasure and imposition of geometric lines. The surface as he produces it seems to speak about a type of material infinity, a somewhat never ending possibility of those tools, that can be constantly changed and through that never arrive at the finish line. 15 16 FIG.1 - Henri Jacobs, Stills from the video Surface Research, 2009. 17 Jacobs consciously develops his practice so as to incorporate the elements of the ‘making’ of the palimpsest and test the aesthetic effects it has on the surface he is exploring. As mentioned before, part of the matter of the palimpsest is in its making – in the erasures, superimpositions and expositions. In his research Jacobs follows the rules of those actions to produce new images and surfaces. His palimpsest reinvents the surface as to develop a study of constant movements. It is through those movements of erasure and superimposition, that his artworks develop and it is because of those movements that his works represent the linearity of the palimpsestic surface. Even though his practice does not question the palimpsest as a structure, Jacobs form of practice allows us a deeper understanding of the thickness of the matter of the layered palimpsest. Yet it seems that the conceptual meaning of this type of matter still relies on the existence of layers and on the meaning that the multi-folds of practices that produce those layers give to it. His practice not only stabilises the palimpsest as a layered structure, but because of the fascination that he presents with the continuous movements of erasure and superimposition, it creates a performative practice that could also be referred to as layered. Jacobs does not try to reveal and extort the truth of the underwriting instead he finds the technology of making in the continuity of reproducing the actions that made the palimpsest possible. As such this methodological approach in his artistic research does not build up on the intimacy and sensuality of the thickness of layers – rather it ‘dries’ this thickness, making it exposed, and visible. This furthers the need for a different way of orientating palimpsestuousness. Through the understanding of my own practice as a form of expanded performance that produces ‘matter’ in the form of film, photography and digital collages, I seek to investigate the possibility of dis-placing layers to the extent of them becoming not 18 important. Palimpsestuousness as a perverted plurality that can be seen as a version of the palimpsest, if looked at from the role that palimpsest plays in relation to layering and de-layering, but it is also a perverted plurality that through the intimacy and illegibility of its phonetic (incestuous) origins, creating an experience of a ‘moment in space’ that interrupts even its own chrononormativity. 24 As discussed before the stability of a typical palimpsest depends on its erased and superimposed layered structure. This erased underwriting is also a space that I want to challenge both with my performance practice and with the understanding of Michel Foucault notion of subjugated knowledges. The underwriting or, scriptio inferior, is a part of the palimpsestic manuscript that was erased, rubbed off in order to provide a space for the new piece of text. It does not have any legible connection to the layer on top of it, other than a form in which it is produced. In the case of The Archimedes Palimpsest, as discussed in (Another) Introduction to palimpsest, the underwriting was an actual treaty on mathematics and geometry scribed by Archimedes himself. There was no reason for this text to be erased in the first place other than the economic value of paper (velum) at the time of reinscription. The existence of the other timely ghostly presence of the scriptio inferior in the materiality of the palimpsest is a marker that obligates methods and methodology to focus on its recovery, especially when confronted with a valuable archaeological find. When applied to the conceptual palimpsest that develops in 20th century, this scriptio inferior, becomes understood as a marker of priori truth that needs to be extracted and collected as to create an acceptable and legible version of knowledge. We can conclude, 24 Chrononormativity is a concept set up by Elizabeth Freeman. It deals with the assessment of day-to-day life as that, which is imposed by relationship between productivity and temporality. 19 that because of the rise in west of sexual science as explained by Foucault, the ground of a valid epistemological system depends on the existence of a marker of hidden priori cause. In this scenario palimpsest becomes a metaphor of causality. As discussed already in this text, palimpsestuousness as an emergent critical space, needs a renegotiation of the scriptio inferior, and its function. When the palimpsest becomes a palimpsestuous ‘moment in space’ the interrogation of it displaces the scriptio inferior from the nook of ‘underneath’ and places it at the level of visible surface. Its parameters cause palimpsestuousness to simultaneously become illegible, abstract and to revoke its meaning from the necessity of possessing layers. For the researchers of The Archimedes Palimpsest recovering the scriptio inferior was and still is a main objective of the work undertaken on this layered surface. At the same time, and in a similar way to the production of Illumig of My Library video, my focus was on understanding the movements that Henri Jacobs deals with in his research. Yet when we approach palimpsestuousness described above, layers become less and less significant. It is because palimpsestuousness is incestuous in character that scriptio inferior needs to be queered. To do that I will elaborate on how scriptio inferior becomes a marker of a social and historical subjugation. One way to understand the logic of such an appropriation comes from a deeper investigation of subjugated knowledges as presented in the series of lectures by Foucault titled Society Must Be Defended. He writes: …a whole series of knowledges that have been disqualified as non-conceptual knowledges, as insufficiently elaborated knowledges: naïve knowledges, hierarchically inferior knowledges, knowledges that are below the required level of erudition or scientificity. And it is thanks to the reappearance of those knowledges from below (…), reappearance of what people know at a local level, of those disqualified knowledges, that made the critique possible. 25 25 Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College De France 1975-76, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Nacey, (New York: Picador, 2003) p.7-8. 20 For Foucault, the rise of the institutionalised discursive position of producing science/knowledge, removes and discards the local and marginalised ways of making sense. It is through their reappearance that the social and political power of normalisation and subjugation become visible, and can be a subject to further scrutiny. By drawing a parallel between scriptio inferior and subjugated knowledges we discover that layering as a scientific strategy of making sense becomes limited - but such limits can be transgressed through local, sexual and erotic engagement. It is through the practices of pleasure and the knowing of pleasure that new methods of making sense can be developed. Subjugated knowledges as described by Foucault are in fact queer knowledges: particular ways of knowing that emerge through the sexual practices of hidden, figural socio-political subjugation. They are the knowledges that operate within the economies of the dirty, marginalised, visceral praxis of self and of community (friendship), knowledges that operate by embodying the ars erotica, and become embodied through the clash of this system with scienta sexualis. What becomes apparent is the way that these modes of making sense do not function in a normative binary structure, but rather they emerge from and with the practice itself, without a goal and without the need of a confessional extortion of truth. They are in constant and consistent moulding, operating at their own pace. To talk about them as in need of rediscovering would re-produce their classification as supposed ‘truths’. Instead in the sensual hands of an erotic researcher, they continuously allow for change in meaning and the possible futurity of knowledge. This way of thinking/making is not new, rather it is a radical reminder that reenables one to challenge the normative effects of the layered quality of knowledge 21 (palimpsestic) and act upon it in an innovative, queer and artistic way. The palimpsestuous palimpsest (a matter of relations) becomes an object of transgressions, not only does it challenge its own materiality, but also enables one to produce meaning through the sensual, sexual and erotic economy of praxis. It is arguably through such moves that a different form of scriptio inferior emerges, not necessarily subjugated but rather as an embodiment of a form of subjugation. To refer to something as subjugated, one needs to realise that in some respect, and in some spaces and at some times, a subjugated community does not necessary remain hidden. I will use the example of open secret in the relation to the early 20th century art practice and how it remained subjugated yet very much visible. The function of the open secret in early 20th century art in Europe allowed for the new forms of work/practice to emerge from the often-unheard voices of the social body. Through such practices one can speak of both the excitement of new forms of making and about the socio-political relation of privilege. What I mean here is to establish a connection between the matter of the secret (palimpsestuous scriptio inferior) and a matter of subjugation (palimpsestic scriptio inferior). Historically viewers have often found themselves at the loss of understanding as the formal ways of representation and of recognition proved wasteful in relation to rising phenomena of the freedom of 20th century art and culture. 26Avant-Garde practices that in themselves call for the breaking and transgressing of functioning forms and norms create a certain amount of separation through which the viewer or receiver re-embodies his position as that which, even though a witness to, is not a part or the actual making of the work. The viewers detach themselves from the ‘thing’ in front of 26 Christopher Reed, Art and Homosexuality: A history of Ideas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 69-104. 22 them because they believe (as that was the only method available) that the understanding of what they are witness to, needs to possess a deeper, more elaborate, hidden structure than they themselves are not part of. 27 In a similar way Foucault describes the obsession with secrets and sex in relation to Modern society. Per him, the possession of a reveal-able form of secret creates an understandable form of ‘making sense’ and through that reinforces strategies of creating systems of knowledge and power (or rather normative knowledge and normative power if looked at from a queer perspective), through the systematic oppressions of sexuality. As he writes: What is peculiar to modern societies, in fact, is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret. 28 The structure of logic created around secret and extraction of it, ravished in the scientific discourses created from the constantly expanding; assumed to be necessary, practice of confession. It is because of this confession/revealing method of making sense, that the social and political notions of identity (such as homosexuality) become known in the form that exists today - as a type of assigned logic and a way of being. To see an open secret, as a type of queer scriptio inferior is to understand it as a form of enactment of interruption. It then becomes an underwriting that exposes itself, creating an uncontainable and ungraspable embodiment; it sets a difference through 27Christopher Reed, Art and Homosexuality: A history of Ideas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 136-48 – It is always a difficult move to imagine queer without the necessity or rather as something else than the LGBT identity politic discourses. Reed’s deep investigation of the relationship between discourses in art history and often unspoken stories of the history of homosexuality is an attempt to reevaluate the normative narrations as to produce a certain series of markers and interruptions, which in turn allow for the queer modes of art to set up a body of practice. It is also important at this point that when dealing with the audience/spectator gaze in relation to Modernism and Avant-Garde there is an assumption of a certain identity (usually white male) as that, which can provide – and because of that identity – has an ability to make judgment. Hence I am referring to the audience of that period as ‘he’. 28 Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality Volume 1: The Will To Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin Books, 1998), p. 35 23 allowing us to question layered structures and instead focus on the relational position of palimpsestuousness. In a similar way Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in her book Epistemology of the Closet, reads an open secret as a system, which challenges the system of secrets by deregulating the binary positionality of private/public.29 She refers to open secret (a homosexual secret) as a glass closet, an abstract space that one inhabits that allows for one to be both visible and hidden at the same time. This contradiction invokes a collapse of the binary and with it, an emergence of a different way of knowing. By analysing the literary text of Oscar Wild’s The Picture of Darian Gray, with the analysis of the arising public (negative) opinion on male homosexuality in early 20th century, she both criticises his modernist writing and attributes him to perform an alibi of abstraction.30 What she means by it is the way that homosexuality (identity) as performed in the text of his book, is there only for those who see and for those who know; for those who are in on the secret.31 But it is the metaphor of a glass closet in relation to male homosexuality, that intrigues me even further. The designation of a space of knowledge that is not ‘for everyone’ and that actively plays on the presupposed narratives, by rubbing its transgressions in the visible sphere, speak directly to the way one can see palimpsestuousness as emerging from queer theory rather than from historical linearity. It also directly refers to Foucault’s subjugated knowledge – and by that it changes the way one can approach and understand scriptio inferior. 29 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), p. 67-90. 30 Ibid., p.164. 31 Ibid., p, 169 - I do not deal necessary with social politics of gay male identity, but at the same time the metaphor of a glass closet encapsulates the experience of palimpsestuousness. 24 Work in performance allows for us to inhabit and to experience such type of space. Here I will write about three performance works that I developed while renegotiating and attempting to realise a queered form of scriptio inferior. Fatima (FIG. 2) was originally conceived of as a form of embodiment of underwriting as to form a subjugated knowledge. It was my first attempt to analyse the role that performance art plays in challenging the normative ways of approaching scriptio inferior and it subsequent re-innovation as subjugated knowledge. Fatima was developed over first two years of my research, it began with a purchase of a simple, black, cotton dress and the wearing of it as to challenge the visibility of my own body in relation to its gendered appearance. In that sense, it was Fatima’s task to produce an illegible, barely visible, interruptive instance that would challenge the homogeneity of gender and provide me with a temporality to invoke erotic aberrations of my practices. 25 26 FIG.2 - Jakub Ceglarz, photographs of performance: Fatima – Do Laseczka // To the Forest, Curtsey of Richard Short (Centrala Gallery in Birmingham), 2015. 27 This performance was full of misconducts, mismatches of gender and action and the flux of supposed becoming. Sky Gilbert, a notable LGBT playwright who often performs as Drag Queen Jane, questioned this performance as a form of gender play by asking during our tutorial: Why do young queens need to deconstruct everything? But my task was not to directly challenge the continuity of gender and of identity, instead I wanted to deal a direct blow to the supposed normativity of layers as described by palimpsestic adjective. Peggy Phelan, a notable feminist writer on performance art, places performance art in relation to its in-reproducibility. As she writes: Performance implicates the real through the presence of living bodies. In performance art spectatorship there is an element of consumption: there are no left-overs, the gazing spectator must try to take everything in. Without a copy, live performance plunges into visibility—in a maniacally charged present—and disappears into memory, into the realm of invisibility and the unconscious where it eludes regulation and control. Performance resists the balanced circulations of finance. It saves nothing; it only spends.32 Phelan’s definition of performance is necessary in pointing at the irreducibility of live art to become anything else than a temporal phenomenon. Fatima takes this notion and gives its audiences continuous mishaps, mistakes and glitches. As she wears a dress – she is not completely assuming a role of gender, as she sings a Polish folk song, she is confusing the audience with the foreign language – as she plays a trumpet she only can make a screech of sound. There is no music, no clear rhythm of performance, instead there is constant and overwhelming sense of destabilisation. The notion of inability was central to the performance as none of the actions and movements that were performed achieved a supposed level of success. Instead by 32 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 149. 28 focusing on Fatima as a role of subjugated knowledge and as a state of becoming that doesn’t arrive at the desired finitude, I wanted to question the factuality of layers. This performance allowed me to bypassed the layers and instead focus on the spatiality and temporality that palimpsestuous bonding can create. Through that performance the conceptual palimpsest changed, it becomes dependent on actions, movements, mistakes and multiplicity which in turn produces a sense of excess, a queer excess that transgresses and at the same time is not dependable in logic on the supposed normativity, yet as per Phelan, this excess is present at the time of performance, and then becomes removed and forgotten. It is because of that sense of confusion, generated by Fatima, that we can see that palimpsestuousness is always responsible for Sedgwick’s alibi of abstraction. It is similarly picked up by Henry Rogers who writes about similar uncertainty, which he refers to as error, or rather ‘written error’ when he engages with the artworks of Matias Faldbakken. He writes: We are invited again and again to shift from one form of engagement to another, or rather, in many instances the shifting demanded is so fleeting that we hardly notice what is happening at all. 33 This invitation and demand puts one in a position of deliberate ‘not understanding’ and asks one to embrace a ‘moment in space’. It disorientates, to use Ahmed’s term, which means that there is a need for art research and practice to make sense in and through its transgressions. These processes of shifting and struggle involved in this attempt to 33 Henry Rogers, “The Words I Thought I Saw” in I see what you’re saying: The Materialization of words in contemporary art, ed. Henry Rogers (Birmingham: IKON, 2013), p.7-17 - Rogers through his text expands on the notions of multiplicity of reading and approaches in creating textuality through manifolds of relations of Michael Foucault in his text This is Not A Pipe, which in turns deals with the enactment on textuality of the painting The Treachery of Images (1928-29) by Rene Magritte. 29 understand the conditioning of the space and time, inform the way in which the palimpsestuousness becomes a matter of methodology of making art/sense. In 2015 I developed a new piece of performance that narrated the struggle of binary epistemology in relation to Sedgwick’s writing and notion of open secret. For Sedgwick, the binary modes of making sense are a chronic, now endemic crisis 34 of modern Western culture. Scriptio inferior when in relation to the superimposed layers of palimpsest, does not create a binary model. However, reading it as a marker of hidden truth that needs to be exhumed, provides us with a normalisation of its meaning. As Sedgwick calls into question the obsession with creating meaning out of the binary oppositional rationale, I engage in delivering a performative transgression that emerges from the sexual and erotic gay praxis. In a performance Becoming Cock-y (2016), I sit with a mask covering my face in front of the public. Behind me there is a projection of a piece of digital work from my Cock-y Series (2015) that reads ‘LOVE’ written by imposition of the images of the dildo cast from my own penis (FIG. 3). In front of me there is a floor sculpture produce out of unrolled condoms and beige cloth that covers them. The piece I refer to as Bulges (2016) (FIG. 4) creates a distance between me and the audience, and enables me to occupy a different temporality then that of an audience. As I sit on a chair I start to read stories of experiences of glory hole sex posted on internet forums (FIG. 5). 34 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), p. 1. 30 FIG. 3 – Jakub Ceglarz, Cock-y Love, digital print, 2016. 31 FIG. 4 – Jakub Ceglarz, Bulges, floor sculpture, 2016. 32 33 FIG. 5 – Jakub Ceglarz, Becoming Cock-y, performance. 2016. I mean here not to reveal the sexual practices of individuals, rather (and that comes from the fact that this performance was a production made for an academic conference), I want to transform the space that I occupied as to hold the audience into 34 an incestuous secret keeping space. The space of this performance becomes an inhabitable, mouldable glass closet, bringing the audience on a secret, yet keeping them at distance by the presence of the beige, bulged cloth. Through creating this perverted experience of spatiality, the palimpsest changes and with that change meaning of the scriptio inferior becomes affected. The ability to change a binary understanding of the space, especially in relation to private/public can be read in Don Anderson’s essay on philosophy of glory hole practice. In this essay Anderson writes about the relationship between the glory hole sex and concept of “body without organs” (BwO) created by Giles Deleuze35 and later expanded by him and Felix Guattari.36 Anderson argues that the act of performing glory hole sex generates forms of becoming, without a priori identity, which function as the body without organs. As he writes: Further, the wall separating the two individuals reduces each to a partial object: the mouth and the penis. The hole facilitates a machinic connection between these two objects. A sex act operating through partial objects, that specifically emphasizes the machinic connection between mouth and penis, and in which the anonymity of the organized body behind the wall functions as a key component in the sex act itself, naturally resists the concept of sex as an activity between two complete individuals whose anthropomorphism and molarity traps desire in a male body. Further, glory hole sex dis-organ-izes the individuals and forces them to take on the role of a machine: a desiring-machine composed of partial objects. The wall completely disengages any interaction between the bodies for which these machines are part. 37 Becoming Cock-y, similarly to the hole between walls, disorganises the bodies in the space, both mine and the audience, creating a multi-voiceness, that is not hierarchal 35 Giles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantine V. Boundas trans. Mark LesterDeleuze, (London: The Athlone Press, 1990), p.188. 36 G. Deleuze, F. Guattari, A thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (London, New York: Continuum, 2004),p. 21. 37 Don L. Anderson, “The Force that Through the Wall Drives the Penis: The Becomings and DesiringMachines of Glory Hole Sex” in Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, ed. Michael O’Rourke, Issue 11/12, 2005/06, http://rhizomes.net/issue11/anderson/index.html, accessed on 12.10.2016. 35 and oppositional, but rather that inhabits a different understanding of a ‘moment in space’. This multi-voiceness tempted me to start to write as Fatima, and allow for this written component of my thesis to inhabit such a multiplicity too. However, I write about this in more details in Model of Palimpsestuousness (v.2.0) text, Fatima’s meaning in my performances, and meaning of that body that performs, comes from the simple notion of wearing; of changing the appearance and through it changing the parameters of body to the extent of it not being able to return to its priori state. 38 The notion of wearing as an action that produces palimpsestuous experience became very much inhabited and embodied in my most recent performance. Shaky (2017) performed at Centrala Gallery in Birmingham, deals with wearing as a production of non-layered multiplicity (FIG.6). In this performance, again I wear a mask with the word ‘BOOM’ shimmering on its surface. The t-shirt printed with the word ‘CUM’ in a font of a recognizable brand, places the viewer directly at the experience of sexual and erotic praxis. My body repeats the lifting of weights producing screeching sounds. Those sounds come from the contact microphone hidden under my shirt. This microphone picks up movement of the shirt against the skin and feeds it to the room. In the breaks between ‘exercise’ I play my humorous songs that I reordered earlier. One of those songs repeats the phrase ‘I DO PERFORMANCE’, others are a result of drunken free flowing speech. It is not the lyrics that bring the meaning to the whole production – it is the contrast achieved by physically struggling body with the lyrical humour of the songs. 38 This is also visible in my practices of photography. As in case of Landscape of Leather, that I discussed in (Another) Introduction to palimpsest, the relationship between my body and a camera is incestuous and through it the meaning arises in this relationship. It also means that object ‘me’ and object ‘camera’ disband their individualisation to give space to a new and temporal synthesis of matter and meaning. 36 37 FIG.6 – Jakub Ceglarz, Shaky, performance, Centrala Gallery, Birmingham, 2017. 38 This time multi-voiceness becomes even further expanded on. The slurring speech of the songs, heavy breathing of the body that struggles with the continuous movements and the contrast of the words on the mask and on the t-shirt, creates an experience of illegibility. This illegibility is constantly expanding and makes the air/atmosphere in the space almost palpable. This space is a sensual type of materiality that, when followed through the changes that this research offers to the meaning of the palimpsestuousness, creates an intimacy; holding/bonding things together’ even, or maybe especially, when those things could, or should not be together to begin with. Anderson reads the praxis of glory hole sex as a form of glass closet that creates body without organs (BwO). In my Shaky performance, I try to achieve a similar notion. Giles Deleuze in his Logic of Sense establishes sense of the dis-jointed body, a type of flesh which operates at the temporal difference – the unrecognizable and unrepresentable body that functions as that which does not order itself into the priori knowing but rather takes its meaning and function in its plasticity.39 This Body without Organs is a creature and a monstrous spatiality. It keeps on transgressing through the constancy of actions. It changes and challenges the notion of layered surface, so familiar to Western society. It creates a ‘moment in space’ that is at odds, but not a binary opposition. It is a queer enactment and perversion of making and thinking in palimpsestuousness; a term that refers to a certain type of character of spatiality, that does not produce palimpsestic layers. Instead is finds pleasure of knowledge in the moulded, messy, sexy and wet nooks of praxis and practice. Those three performances become an investigation into subjugated knowledges, and at the same time they challenge the concept of its supposed meaning. Through 39 Giles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantine V. Boundas trans. Mark LesterDeleuze, (London: The Athlone Press, 1990). 39 them, one can realise the non-binary, yet subjugated way of making sense, that it turns informs and challenges the layered palimpsest, and transform it into a new inhabitable space. In the next part, I will look at three examples of conceptual spaces that also can be characterised as palimpsestuous. 40 PROVINCES OF PALIMPSESTUOUSNESS Loving each other like two young boxers, who before separating, tear off each other’s shirt, and, when they are naked, astounded at their beauty, think they are seeing themselves in a mirror, stand there open-mouthed, shake (with rage of being caught) their tangled hair, smile a damp smile and grip each other like two wrestlers (in Greco-Roman wrestling), interlock their muscles in the precise connections offered by the other, and drop to the mat until their warm sperm spurts high and maps out the sky a milky way where other constellations that I can read take shape. (…) Thus, a new map of Heavens is outlined on the wall…40 As established through my performance work, palimpsestuousness is a type of conceptual and actual space, which allows for sexual and erotic praxis to produce a synthesis of meaning and matter. Joanna Frueh, performance artist and theorist, in her book Erotic Faculties understands the importance of the sexual and erotic praxis in establishing new meaning. She writes: Erotic Faculties emphasizes art, sex, and pleasure, especially as they grow out of and affect women’s lives. As these subjects intertwine a densely layered picture of ways in which beauty, aging, woman’s bodies, and sexual practice and experience can influence making, interpreting, analysing, and theorizing about contemporary art. 41 Her methodology strongly depends on the sexed female body and the sexuality of pleasure that it can obtain and through her work she sees pleasure as that which appears on the other side of privilege. 42 Frueh calls into question the established and dry system of creating meaning and tries to bring into research the necessity of a wet, erotic, 40 Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers, trans. Bernard Frechtman, (Paris: The Olympia Press, 2004), p.19. Joanna Frueh, Erotic Faculties (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), p. 13 – In her book, Frueh attempts to bring together often hidden erotic desires with the way that the performing body renegotiates the epistemology it can produce. The text itself very often plays and intertwines these binaries as to set up different rules for rigor in research. Fatima was an attempt on those kinds of logics that does not produce a hierarchy but rather is based on pleasure of the sexed body within the space. 42 Ibid – p .87 – The phrase: “the other side of privilege” is a quote that Frueh takes from Luce Irigaray whose work I will be discussing in further investigation of practices of revealing and the matter of secret. The work of both writers is based on feminist theory concerned with producing a difference in knowing. The dry system refers to masculine patriarchy whilst the wet refers to feminist discourses on sexuality and female body. I will develop this later in this thesis by enquiring into the ways that the palimpsest (as layered) is developing a special bond between the surfaces. 41 41 multi-sensual, feminist and performative system of knowledge by incorporating the poetic, personal and academic writing. Her book is sliced and composed of the multitude of voices that she develops in the plurality of her practice. This way she challenges the ‘supposed’ narratives of making sense. It is the same way that I approach multi-voiceness as mentioned above. As this thesis progresses the interruptive behaviour of palimpsestuousness starts to appear more frequently. It is not, as per Frueh, an intertwined poetics of self-reflection, rather it is present in the structure that I present. This work occasionally jumps and mis-directs its reader, sometimes moving in few directions at once, then repeats itself. This is because I am also trying not to detangle the convoluted and sometimes multiple meaning of palimpsestuousness. My focus in here is to develop its synthesis of matter and meaning through characterising it as incestuous. It is also, and this will be shown in this part of my writing, to develop its behaviour and character. In the previous writing, I directed my attention towards the rise of the conceptual connotations of palimpsestuousness, and how, through queer theory, we can refer to it as a non-binary and non-phallocentric notion of ‘moment in space’. Through those renegotiations palimpsestuous space emerges as that which materialises through the bonds that hold layers together, and it is in study of similar bonds that the further enquiry into their incestuousness can produce an unexpected and somewhat muddled way of its environment and economy. The quote that I used in the beginning of this text 43 tells us that it is through the sexual and erotic praxis a new map of Heavens can take shape. It takes it matter from the flesh and logics of desire. The two wrestlers lose their ‘wrestling’ status – instead 43 Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers, trans. Bernard Frechtman, (Paris: The Olympia Press, 2004), p.19. 42 becoming an entangled with each other. They produce a new, sexual, erotic and incestuous bond - refined by the pleasure. It is not the only time that Genet deals with this sort of enactment. His novels full of homoerotic intimacy and sexual praxis recreates the world around to generate a different version of reality. He does not aim to create a connection with the normative, rather he finds beauty and pleasure in the sexual methods of producing meaning, often in those that are perverse and profound to the heteronormative, modern eye. In his book Querelle of Breast (1947) he tells a story of George Querelle, a bisexual sailor, prostitute and murderer, who arrives at the port city of Brest. In 1982 the story was adapted as a movie directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The city of Brest, as presented by Fassbinder is filled with phallic symbols and because of the constancy of a continuous sunset, it seems to be deprived of time. The city, filled with men in notoriously and continuously engaged in homoerotic gazes, actions and repetitions of images. In one of the scenes in Fassbinder’s film, Querelle: A Film based on Jean Genet Novel (FIG. 7) Querelle meets his brother and the two brothers perform dance/fight with each other. In deeper analysis of their relationship, similarly to my mis-reading of Sarah Dillon and her father Michel Dillon, one starts to see that this brotherhood is a perverse relation. Yet it is not exactly a clearly homosexual desire that binds them. By looking at the film, one starts to think if Querelle and his brother are actually one and the same person. If so, this relationship is clearly incestuous, and through it – as mentioned already above - it disintegrates the notion of selfhood. Selfhood here is an example of a layered (palimpsestic) structure. Incestuous relation between brothers challenges this form and creates a new density of relationship between those two characters. 43 44 FIG.7 – R.W. Fassbinder, stills from Querelle: A Film based on Jean Genet Novel, 1982. The fight scene as directed by Fassbinder becomes less of a ‘one’ versus ‘the other’ as in usual understanding of conflict, it functions as a foreplay – a tensor – that similarly to the Bulges sculpture as used in my performance establishes a sense of incestuous distance and with it an experience of palimpsestuousness. You can almost smell it in the air between these characters. In this air, you realize that both entities, both familiar bodies create an entangled unity of sorts, a sense of sameness produced by sexual and 45 erotic tension, which desynchronizes the need of comprehending the deeper understanding of such actions and instead creates a matter of such AIR. 44 Genet’s poetry through Fassbinder’s lens, not only portrays homoerotic sexuality and marginalized identities but it is also transgressing it. Engulfed in this AIR are not only characters in the film – it is us as well. By proxy, we are also swept of our ground and we start feel the sensuality of the incestuous AIR. Because of how Fassbinder shows us the city of Brest and develops the incestuous relationship between brothers, the viewer gets a glimpse of a queer space of sexual and erotic praxis. Sedgwick would refer to it as a space of homosocial praxis.45 As she acknowledges the social science ‘clean’ version of homosocial that usually refers to the systems of male bonding, but wants to return this neologism back to its sexual and erotic connotations. As she writes: (homosocial) is a neologism, obviously formed by analogy with “homosexual”, and just as obviously meant to be distinguished from “homosexual” (…). To draw the “homosocial” back into the orbit of “desire”, of the potentially erotic, then, is to hypothesize the potential unbrokenness of a continuum between homosocial and homosexual – a continuum whose visibility, for man, in our society, is radically disrupted.46 Brest as presented in Fassbinder’s film, can be seen as a space of homosocial continuum. Through the constant homoerotic imaginary, it continuously reminds the viewers that what they see is another sense of space, which is guided by erotic and sexual praxis and logic (economy) it produces. Yet it is in the AIR that is most sensual in the scenes between brothers that something else takes place. This AIR brings them together and makes their incestuous relationship a type of conversation. As the camera dances with 44 I deliberately capitalise the word AIR. It is to gravitate on the emerging meaning of spatiality of palimpsestuousness and translucent quality it posseses. 45 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Homosocial Desire, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 12. 46Ibid., p. 96. 46 the characters, that already, in one of the first scenes of the movie, fight/hug one another, establishing an odd ground between them, the difference and narrative that transgresses the binary logic becomes established. Those scenes mark out the territory and binds and entangles characters and the audience, and through this entanglement a new sensual matter of AIR emerges. This sensual translucent AIR becomes a form of material palimpsestuousness; matter that is ungraspable, un-comodifiable - like performance art per Peggy Phelan – matter that is constantly changing.47 For Phelan this matter is in the un-reproducibility of performance art, for Sedgwick it is in fills the knowledge of the glass closet, for Genet as per Fassbinder the matter of palimpsestuousness is based on homoerotic deviations and transgressions, and as mentioned when discussing Foucault’s concept of subjugated knowledges, it is a renegotiation of sexuality, truth and pleasure. Those sensual translucent experiences of space and temporality, speak directly to the way that I am navigating palimpsestuousness as emerging from queer theory. Deleuze and Guattari call for a similar consistency via concept of a plane of immanence by which they mean a type of metaphysical ontological surface, which does not in itself possess any form of ‘outside’, as it is always at the present, always moulding and moving.48 They write: It was over. Only later on would all this take on concrete meaning. The doublearticulated mask had come undone, and so had the gloves and the tunic, from which liquids escaped. As they streamed away they seemed to eat at the strata of the lecture hall, which was filled with fumes of olibanum and “hung with strangely figured arms.” Disarticulated, deterritorialized, Challenger muttered that he was taking the earth with him, that he was leaving for the mysterious world, his poison garden (…). No one had heard the summary, and no one tried to keep Challenger from leaving. Challenger, or what remained of him, slowly 47 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 150. G. Deleuze, F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (London, New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 1-26. 48 47 hurried toward the plane of consistency, following a bizarre trajectory with nothing relative left about it. (…)49 This plane suggests that the consistency of AIR always is at the point of the event, and as such one can never realize the substance of this poisonous garden with the outside gaze, as one can never be outside. The political and social material translucency of palimpsestuousness as discussed in this writing is always at the present, always in the encounter and through that removes one’s sense of needing the stability of ground. It wants to be disorientated, erotic and sexual. This erotic and sexual AIR is particularly sensible in the practice of artistic duo Lovett/Codagnone who use fetish and leather gay culture to produce a deviant meaning of the concepts associated with domesticity and family. Lovett/Codagnone (FIG. 8) play the intensive game of moving their relationship and their sexual practices into the sphere of almost heteronormative spatiality. Through that they do not necessary provoke the feeling of shock and hardness of their appropriation of the bondage and sado-masochistic practices, but rather, I would argue, realise the sense of such practices as part of what I refer to as sensual translucency. This sense emerges out of material existence that is generated by the inclusion and even favouritism of the practices associated with the sexual and erotic play of S/M. 49 G. Deleuze, F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (London, New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 84-85. 48 FIG. 8 –Lovett/Codagnone, After Eight, C-print, 1997. 49 It is especially visible in their photographs, in which they, while wearing the full S/M gear, participate in the formal family landscape. By bringing S/M into the ‘family housing’ the structure of the economy changes, suddenly S/M practice becomes familiar, and recognizable as a binding mechanism of the sexual practices especially in relation to the gay male fetish scene. The difference in the experience and production of palimpsestuousness between Lovett/Codagnone and AIR as written about earlier, comes from the notion of exposure. Brest as a city presented by Fassbinder is a dimension that developed without the breaking of the continuum of the development of homosocial desire as presented by Sedgwick – Lovett/Codagnone on the other hand directly involve the strangeness and a provoking nature in their work and erotic praxis, as to challenge the homophobic breakage of homosocial. 50 What we are left with is the new dynamic production of research, that doesn’t relay or reproduce the internal workings of the subject/object relation, but instead finds and makes the matter of trembling erotic and sexual praxis. S/M (gay) sex requires participants to engage in performance and performative practices that play on the economies of normative power relations (master/slave). Lovett/Codagnone in their photographs use this challenging visual enactments as to of provide participants with a new sensual and yet strict ways of communicating that in fact develops into a sense of community. Lia Ganginto in her essay Do not become enamored of power writes about the power relation in Lovett/Codagnone works: Love and power have preoccupied Lovett/Codagnone’s performance-based works in photography, video, and installation, in which their relationship, families, and physical limits have been systematically renegotiated through use of cultural filters ranging from S/M, role-playing to popular love songs, iconic cinematic and literary tropes. Their transgression of understood hierarchies (…) 50 Sedgwick call social and political homophobia an agent that created a discontinuity in relation to homosocial experience, by removing the erotic component of this praxis. 50 strives toward different kind of wilful bonding, whose potential can subvert dynamics of power. 51 It becomes clear that when dealing with the ‘moment in space’ in performance-based works of Lovett/Codagnone we can not only see that the bonding (both about S/M practice and about the tensions of homosocial experience) is in fact a reference to palimpsestuousness. Lovett/Codagnone find their relationship to become a form of enactment of incestuous relations, not only on the workings of art itself, but also on the workings of bondage and S/M culture. 51 Lia Gantimo, “Do not become enamored of power” in Lovett/Codagnone, ed. Octavia, Z, (Italy: Edizioni Charta Srl, 2006), p. 80. 51 52 FIG. 9 –Lovett/Codagnone, Obliquities, Performance at Vox Populi Gallery, 2011. In their work (FIG. 9) the over-extended strain jacket holds their bodies at a distance from one other. The performers look in opposite directions at mirrors that reflect the image of the other. Those mirrors multiply space and their own gaze. It allows them to see each other in otherwise ‘impossible’ physical conditions of contact. They behave as though are two entangled particles – both not only physically bonded through the strain jacket, but also bonded to the extent of the impossibility of their unbonding. Their performance-based work, I argue, create an experience of incestuous palimpsestuousness, a non-layered dimension created from the intimacy of sexual and erotic praxis. Their transgression does not only challenge dynamics of power, as per Gantimo, they also challenge the strategy of performing a form of ‘selfhood’. Foucault talks about the such ‘selfhood’ in his lecture The Culture of Self (1983). He says: People think that what we have to do is to disclose, to liberate, to excavate the hidden realities of The Self. But The Self, I think, has to be considered not as a reality, which can be hidden. I think that The Self has to be considered as a 53 correlation of technologies built and developed through the history. The problem is not to liberate, not to free The Self, but to consider how it could be possible to elaborate new types, new kinds relationships to ourselves. 52 The Self in Foucault’s work points to the direct confrontation with the conceptualization of subjectivity as commonly represented through the 20th century rise in psychiatry and psychology studies. What Foucault asks his students to do is to realise the possibility of a different type of selfhood, that is not a permanent and hidden consistency of priori individuality, but rather a delicate and constantly changing organism that becomes a type of matter through the dealings with the constant interactions. By looking at the relationship between Querelle and his brother (or rather himself) and Lovett/Codagnone’s continuous performance of bonding, what we can see is that in fact the incestuous relation can be also envisioned as a relationship to oneself. This relation to oneself can be further discussed when approached by the method of wearing, which challenges the visible self and at the same time, as discussed before is a permanent method of my own performance-based practice. 53 In The History of Sexuality vol.3: The Care of The Self, Foucault tries to renegotiate the way that pleasure, desire and sexuality change the apparatus of self into an object of knowledge through the notion of care. For Foucault, this care, this sexual attention to the self is delivered from the non-dialectical position, by which I mean a type of entanglement based on movement and the plasticity of the pleasures. Such understanding deeply resonates with Deleuze and Guattari notion of desire-machine, by which they understand a form of production that is not a representative but rather a 52 Michel Foucault, “The Culture of Self”, Lectures Series at UC Barkley, California, 12.04.1983 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4QvSUYeEBQ, accessed on 12.02.2016 – this is a transcript of the lecture as heard through the uploaded video. 53 In the later book, I will be discussing the role that movement of slicing as a method of practice allows us to create a sense of intimacy without necessity of causality that leads to it. I want to observe at this point that Lovett/Codagnone are (even in name) a materiality of such intimacy. 54 force of mattering in the bigger constructs of interlocked mechanic making. As they describe it in relation to the concept of BwO: (…) desiring-machines are fundamental category of the economy of desire; they produce a body without organs all by themselves, and make no distinction between the agents and their own parts, or between the relations of production and their own production, or between the social order and technology.54 In this way one can see a method of a relation of wearing as a form of extending of body. As discussed earlier in Anderson’s reading of the concept of the BwO in relation to glory hole sex – the desire-machine removes the Oedipal simplification of the self and instead allows for the new form of the relation to become a non-binary synthesis of matter and meaning. This especially becomes important in dealing with art practice, that per Deleuze and Guattari takes advantage out of the fact that desiring-machines: (…) run only when they are not functioning properly: the product is always an offshoot of production, implanting itself upon it like a graft, and at the same time the parts of the machine are the fuel that makes it run. (Art) interfere with the reproductive function of technical machines by introducing the element of dysfunction. 55 At the beginning of this text I introduced a notion that a methodology of artistic research and queer methodology both have similar a function. This function is to interrupt, transgress and produce a sense of disorientation and illegibility. Rather than producing a meaning that creates an exchangeable commodity, artistic and queer research form a dimension of incestually entangled elements. This incestuous entanglement is a form of translucent palimpsestuousness – non-binary, non-hierarchal and very much embedded in sexual and erotic performance-based practices. The 54Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, (London, New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), p.46. 55 Ibid, p.45. – This understanding of art, as a product and influence on the workings of the desiremachine connects directly to the earlier enquiry into queer phenomenology as described by Sara Ahmed, as well as to the need to give matter to the notion of interruption in research by Lucina Parisi. 55 structure of palimpsestuousness develops only through the body(s) engagement with praxis of the sexual, sensual and erotic, that in turn transgresses the normative notions of selfhood. 56