Email: ct2994@nyu.edu

I am interested in embodied images, and their transformative ‘abolitionist praxis.’ I see this economy as opposed to the disembodied reformist ‘diversity’ of a modernist arts sector. I define an embodied image as a relational image in which knowledge is produced in medium without distance. Knowledge and aesthetics are indistinguishable. Knowledge is not prior to aesthetics and not appropriated but figuratively integrated.

This half of terms themes performance, trauma and memory have given ways to thinking though embodiment. What has been very convincing across, I would say, all the reading is that the body holds experiences. Often this memory is not conscious, and I would argue limited by disembodied languages/economies that do not integrate or address these experiences. In Fraud, Boal, Hirsch, Caruth and Van Der Kolk in particularly I believe we seen techniques for connecting to these experiences in the body. I would argue that they give us conditions to create languages that connect to lived experences.

Theatre of the Oppressed explicitly deals with language.  It started as part of a literacy campaign called ‘Operacion Alfabetizacion’ in which the government in Peru aimed to ‘eradicate illiteracy with the span of four years’ (p.120). To create a poetics of the oppressed the ‘spectator’ must be turned into a ‘subjects’ or ‘actors’ (p.122). Boal distinguishes this method from Aristotle and Brecht’s poetics with the assertion this is not catharsis or critical consciousness but action itself where ‘the liberated spectator, as a whole person, launches into action’(p.122) . What is key to this method for me is that it is creating dialogue, language, and expression that is embodied by giving the ‘means of production’ (p.122) to the people, letting them start from what they already know and use language built on that, to better understand their stories, and what they already know. It is in the process of making language that knowledge is realised.  Meaning is demonstration-like, a staged act of speaking and reading rather than the effect of emotional peaks and troughs or mimesis.

Performance

Theatre of the Oppressed is theatre in the broadest sense, a stage within a stage and to the world. It’s been used in films such as Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One by William Greaves, or Yes, I hear you by Sonia Boyce.  Which is different to performance as I understand it in How Societies Remember in which Connerton separates the image and the bodily ritual of remembering. For Connerton ‘bodily practice’ is necessarily related to presents. He calls this ‘incorporated practice’ stating ‘thus a smile or a handshake or words spoken in the presence of someone we address, are all messages that a sender or senders impart by means of their own current bodily activity, the transmission occurring only during the time that their bodies are present to sustain that particular activity’ (p.72). He distinguishes this ‘inscribing practice’ which he defines as ‘modern devices for storing and retrieving information’ that ‘traps and holds information, long after the human organism has stopped informing’ (p73).   Inscription is mostly intentional where incorporated practice for Connerton can be intentional or unconventional.

Could a stone not then perform. Or could it only perform if someone where there. (I think I need to give Connerton’s text more time and I don’t think I can define Performance yet).

Trauma

What I have found most concerning in learning about trauma is how it can function as life limiting condition. Often trauma seems to be coursed by issues of power of voice and its effects seem to draw out this event often leaving victims with paralysis, in a world of silence.

Trauma for Lauran Berlant was not an event but an ongoing which challenges Judith Hermen, Bessel Van Der Kolk’s method of getting to safety as the first step to healing.

Judith Hermen, who seems to have done some very important work around the domestic space and violence, seems to see the answer to this problem as working out how to be heard. I believe this still relys on the notion that we live in a mostly justice society which I do believe is a myth. Speaking truth to power courses some of the most violent silencing. This is something I hope to look into more before the end of this course.

Three ways I am interested in moving with the topic of trauma are to look at collective healing, which Bessel Van Der Kolk starts to open thought movement and rhythm. Writing that builds, strange and unpredictable worlds. Trauma is a world, and it comes into being as it is sensed. Lastly, I am booked into to the resilience tool kit…. https://theresiliencetoolkit.co/

Examine how trauma unsettles and forces us to rethink our notions of experience.

Memory

Habit runs across the work of both Connerton and Freud as something that we do are mostly unconsciously. Where we have seen in Theatre of the Oppressed the creation of language for experience with Freud on the other the therapeutic space seems to suspend or slowdown space/time and allow people to become conscious of their body’s actions/habits. Fraud says he allows the patient to act out until they become aware of their own symptoms. ‘Next, when the hypnosis had been given up, the task became one of discovering from the patients’ free associations’ (p.147).

Freud not as attempting to place trauma inside as a neurotic distortion or outside the psyche but allowing it to live outside of boundaries of any singular place or time.

In Hirsch’s The Generation of Post Memory (chapter 1) Hirsch makes a strong case for the second generation of trauma survivors, and the ‘lived connection’ (p33) they hold being able to reanimate the past without appropriating it.

Both Freud’s ‘free associations’ and Hirsch’s ‘lived connection’ open up possibilities for embodied images that animate without appropriating. I would love to explore this more.

Myth is a subject that has also come up in a context I wish I had more time to explore here.

I’m also very interested in dreaming and would like to get time to look at the book Dreaming and historical consciousness by Charles Stewart.

‘This Romeic-influenced historical consciousness is timeless and disordered like the Freudian unconscious. Freud had initially conceived psychoanalysis to be perfectly analogous to archaeology, where the analyst delved into deeper and deeper stratigraphic layers of the unconscious…The diabolical thing about the unconscious; he decided, was that it jumbled all periods of the past together—an ancient Rome, for example, where temples to Jupiter, churches of the Virgin, and Renaissance villas were all present simultaneously and juxtaposed…Rational historicism would consider this situation intolerable and set about separating earlier from later. Romeic historical consciousness, however, does not in the least oppose this sort of temporal juxtaposition, and dreaming delivered it perfectly’ (P. 193).

I also can’t wait to read spiral time when its out.

‘Art is what you do to benefit the whole collective’.  Leda Martins.

 

Bibliography

Augusto Boal, A Charles, Maria-Odilia Leal Mcbride, and Emily Fryer. Theatre of the Oppressed. 1979. Reprint, London: Pluto Press, 2019.

Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. Cambridge Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007.

Freud, Sigmund. The Collected Works of Sigmund Freud. Library of Alexandria, n.d.

Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory : Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust. New York, N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 2012.

Judith Lewis Herman. Truth and Repair. Basic Books, 2023.

Kolk, Bessel van der. The Body Keeps the Score: Mind, Brain and Body in the Transformation of Trauma. London: Penguin Books, 2014.

Stewart, Charles. Dreaming and Historical Consciousness in Island Greece. Chicago ; London: The University Of Chicago Press, 2017.