Broken Symmetries

A summary: Phelan P. () Unmarked: the politics of performance

>>>p.1

image: representation of the real —> partially phantasmatic

doubting the authenticity of the image one perccieves: 1) doubting who makes and describes it

2) doubting the subjectivity of the seeing “I”

Jacques Lacan: doubt is a defense against the real

>>> p.2

“In framing more and more images of the hitherto uder-represented other, contemporary culture inds a way to name, and thus to arrest and fix, the image of that other.”

representation: 1) it always conveys more than it intends —> “excess” meaning creates a supplement that maes multiple and resistant readings possible.

2) it is never totalizing: representation produces raptures and gaps; it fails to reproduce the real exactly

represetation 1 + 2 —> cann produce psychic resistance and political change

Progressives and conservatives believe that representations can be treated as “real truths” and that greater visibility of the underrepresented leads to enhanced political power. Insufficient understanding of the relationship between visibility, power, identity, and liberation has led both groups to mistake the relation between the real and the representional.

Judith Buttler: real – representation – real —> representetion becomes a moment of the reproduction and consolation of the real.

“Each representation relies on and reproduces a specific logic of the real; this real promotes its own representation.”

p. 3

Each field of science foregrounds its concept of real and thinks of it as the Real-real the most fundamental route to establishing or unsettling the stability of the real.

Representation reproduces the Other as the Same. Performance: representatio without reproduction —> the reproduction of the Other as the Same is not assured.

The realtionship between real and representation, looker and the given to be seen, self and other.

p. 5

Binaries of Western metaphysics create distinctions and evaluations across two terms.

one term: he, marked, value, norm, unremarked, unremarkable, mars the other term

other term: the Other, she, unmarked, lacing measured value and meaning, is re-marked, he marks her

“The reproduction of the cultural unconscious proceeds, as Lacan has argued, by taking two terms and forming one: the one they become is gendered male. Seual difference in this way remains hidden and cultural (re)production remains hommo-sexual. Unable to bear (sexual) difference, the psychic subject transforms this difference into the Same [].”

“This fetishization of the image is the risk of representional visibility for women”.

“women are seen always as Other; The Woman cannot be seen. Yet, like a ubiquitous ghost, she cotinious to haunt the images we believe in, the ones we remember seeing and loving.”

Eye/I; Seeing

p. 13

“Identity cannot, then reside in the name you can say or the body you can see […] Identity emerges in the ailure o the ody to express being fully and the ailure of the signifier to convey meaning exactly. Identity is perceptible only through a relation to an other […] In that declaration of identity and identification, there is always loss, the loss o not-being the other and yet remaining dependenton that other or self-seeing, self-being.”

p. 14

“learning to see is training careful blindness”

Representional technologies as well as the human eye dictate visual apprehension to accord with a consturcted notion of the real.

The human eye is an organ with limitations. It is unable to see fully. In the same way, consciousness may be unable to fully absorb psychic data —> “after-image”, a shadow of an image that remains on the retina briefly; “trace” of a psychic event that remains in the unconscious. Things in the past determine how we experience the present; the visible is defined by the invisible or “The power of the visible/ is the invisible”.

p. 15

(Lacan) position of the looker <—> position of the image seen. The positions are known in relation to each other. The looker gazes at the object and the object views the looker. This way the looker discovers and continually reaffirms that hum is the one who looks.

• sight is imagistic and discoursive
• language expresses the position of the I as it sees the image
• in apprehending the image the subject suffers the same mark of all Symbolic exchanges, castration
• one needs the eye o the other to to recognize (and name) oneself; the gaze quarantees the failure of self-seeing —> that propelsss the sesire to see the other.

p. 16

Seeing is an exchangeof gazes between a mirrror ( the image seen which reflects the looker looking) and a screen ( the laws of the Symbolic which deine subject and object positions within language). […] the desire to see the self through the image of the other which all Western representation exploits.

p. 17

One sees oneself i terms of the other and vice versa. This proposition is differently marked according for men and women + + + The image of the woman is made to submit to the phallic function and is re-marked and revised as that which belongs to him.

Example of phallic function: theatre of drag (different approach that Buttler’s) A man imitates an image of a woman in ordeer to confirm that she belongs to him. Performing the image of what he is not allows him to dramatize himself as “all”.

p. 18

Because the gaze is “not all” empathy and Symbolic identificatio are possible. […] To take the humility and lidness insccribed within the gaze seriously, one must accept the radial impotency of the gaze. This impotency underscores the broen and incomplete symmetry between the self and the image of the other.

The desire to see is a manifestatio of the desire to be seen in live performance as well as in the spectator’s relation to inanimate representation.

p. 19

” Seeing the real is materially impossible: eyes fail. Yet it’s through ths very impossibilitythat the givento be seen holds onto the real.” Possibly, through the impossibility of saying a wholly material truth, we might see what the possibility of the immaterial is […] I am calling this immaterialy unmared; it shows itself through the negative and through dissapearance.

Active vanishing: a deliberate and conscious refusal to tae the payoff of visibility. The Guerilla Girls continue to remain anonymous. By refusing to participate in the visibility-is-currency economy, they resist the fetishization of their arguement, they mar the failure of the gaze to possess, and arrest, teir work.

p. 25-26

Represetation is almost always on the side of the one who looks and almost never on the side of the one who is seen. […} The image of the womandisplays not the subjetivity of the woman who is seen, but rather the constituent forces of desire of the man who wants to see her.

[…] To overturn these economies the ailure of the inward gaze to produce selfseeing needs to be acnowledged. If oe could confront the internal/external other as always already lost one would not have to rely so heavily on the image of the external other to produce wht the looker lacks.