On the day of July 23, 1926, a strange case passed before Judge Harry Trelawney Eve. On the surface, it seemed like a pretty straightforward matter of copyright in which one Geraldine Cummins was contesting the rights of one Frederick Bligh Bond to a work called The Chronicle of Cleophas. The thing is: Geraldine Cummins was not claiming that she had authored the work instead of Bond; she was saying she was the medium through which the work had been channelled.

The Chronicle of Cleophas, asserted Cummins, had been received incommunicado with the spirit world through the interface of a Ouija board, over a period of about a year or so, and usually in response to questions she had been hired to answer by clients as a paid medium. As for the defendant, Frederick Bligh Bond was employed by Cummins as an assistant and had acted as amanuensis to the various Ouija board messages being received by the medium; in the words of Jeffrey Kahan, “for each of Cummins’s Spiritual communiqués, he [Bond] ‘transcribed it, punctuated it, and arranged it in paragraphs, and returned a copy of it so arranged to the plaintiff [Cummins].’ He further stated, and Cummins did not contradict his statement, that he, Bond, ‘annotated the script, and added historical and explanatory notes’” (92). If you’re confused at this point, you’re not the only one.

We have here a literary shell game, in which authorship is shuffled about until the client is utterly baffled. The difference is that, in a shell game, the client (or “mark”) understands who is doing the shuffling. In the case of a séance no one seems to be the creative center . . . The multiple hands recording the Spirits creates the impression that the creative center is not physically present (Kahan 91).

Who, then, did Judge Eve decide in favour of in 1926 — the medium who channelled the work, or the scribe who wrote it down, arranged, and edited it? And why should we care?

“Walk through a museum. Look around a city. Almost all the artifacts that we value as a society were made by or at the order of men. But behind every one is an invisible infrastructure of labor — primarily caregiving, in its various aspects — that is mostly performed by women.” In her 2015 article “Why I Am Not a Maker,” Debbie Chachra challenges a cultural attitude that privileges the act of making over the more invisible acts behind it, particularly the gendered acts of caregiving and educating. Walk through a text. Look around at the letters and words and margins and paper. It was the mediums of mid-19^th-century Spiritualism — an almost across-the-board female labour force — who presented a challenge to one very highly traditional order of men, namely, the order of the author.

What finally materialized in a court of law in 1926 was a practice that had in fact been a booming industry since the Fox sisters started charging admission to rappings on tables in 1848 and mediums started channelling under the moniker of Spiritualist and publishing under the monikers of spirits, which was, according to Bette London, “for some the only way to put themselves forward as authors” (152). This is a practice that literalizes Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar’s statement that “[a] wealth of invisible skills underpin material inscription” (245). The case of Cummins v. Bond is not so much a case that brings to the fore the act of making, nor does it propose a refusal to be a “maker” as Chachra puts it, but rather the act of unmaking.

For the purpose of this probe these themes will remain a little superficial, but the surface is the best place to start here. The title The Chronicle of Cleophas, throughout discussions of Cummins v. Bond, remains just that, a title without a content — the book is rarely considered in its own right and finding a copy of it leads to a ghost town of an Amazon.ca page where The Scripts of Cleophas is (hauntedly) housed. This is exemplary of research into automatic writing, the products of which are sometimes so illegible they cannot even be read, as in the invented language of medium Hélène Smith, who called her script “Martian.” Automatic writing, also called psychography or spirit writing, offers a process of writing in lieu of a product (the continuous verb writing rather than its gerund), and furthermore a process of writing in which the produced work is secondary if not tertiary to the act of creating it; a “transitional object” that connects the “sensory body knowledge of a learner to more abstract understandings” (Ratto 254, emphasis his own).

“No image available”: screenshot from Amazon.ca; Martian writing of Hélène Smith

In his 2011 paper, Matt Ratto outlines his experiments in “critical making,” which address a “disconnect between conceptual understandings of technological objects and our material experiences with them” (253). I was struck by how closely the drawbot, which Ratto had his participants construct in one of his workshops, resembles the planchette that automatic writers used during séances in the 19^th century. Whereas the drawbot moves across the paper by a process of mechanization via a small motor, the planchette moves across the Ouija board or piece of paper by a process of automaticity via the participant’s hand, part of what the Spiritualists called channelling, or what a cognitive scientist may call ideomotor action. My main question here is, how could the Spiritualist practice of automatic writing be revived and refigured as a model of critical making — where critical making combines critical thinking, a less goal-oriented form of “making,” and conceptual exploration (Ratto 253)? What would this look like and what are the “wicked problems” it could address?

In my last probe, I explored how sleep could be an interesting object of exploration for a Media Lab; automatic writing by contrast offers a methodology rather than an object — not so much the axis around which questions can be posed, but a way to create the questions in the first place. As sleep unmakes waking and any easy notions around consciousness, automatic writing unmakes the author-function and any easy notions about what it is to write.

The real difficulty is who or what is “Cleophas.” If it be assumed (which nobody can prove) that “Cleophas” has a personal identity of his own and could have been the author of the writing, his evidence would be material. “Cleophas” might be sworn and cross-examined by the process of automatic writing. Instead of being difficult, this might be no trouble at all. Once “Cleophas” is accepted as a real person, the problem of communication involved in swearing him and examining and cross-examining him very likely would not be as difficult . . . (Blewett 24).

Who or what is “Cleophas”? What is automatic writing? How does it work? Is it a shell game, as Kahan suggests? An experiment? A literary device? The fact that the above quote comes not from literary criticism, but The Virginia Law Review, 1926 edition, is indicative of the ripples Cummins v. Bond was causing in terms of conceptions around authorship, marked not least by the quotation marks unrelentingly hovered around the Cleophas in question. “Cleophas,” we could say, is an assemblage, as is, we could also say, any “writer,” as is any piece of “writing.” In “What Is an Author,” Foucault discusses how the 19^th century saw the rise of a figure who was not just an author of a text, but an entire discourse, such as “Freud”; “Marx” (228); at the same time, the practice of mediumship that cropped up with automatic writing composed the other side of the spectrum of this canon, folded it back, threw a mirror up to it, but one that hardly anyone was able to see. In the case of Cummins v. Bond, it was the medium Geraldine Cummins who came out victorious, and not Frederick Bligh Bond who’d physically held the pen to record the text. But what is not recognized in either the resolution of this case or the Amazon.ca screenshot above is that on the title page of The Scripts of Cleophas, Geraldine Cummins credits herself as “recorder,” not as “author.” Though she won the case, she was still not granted the right to self-representation. According to Jeffrey Sconce,

Long before our contemporary fascination with the beautific possibilities of cyberspace, feminine mediums led the Spiritualist movement as wholly realized cybernetic beings—electromagnetic devices bridging flesh and spirit, body and machine, material reality and electronic space (27).

It’s a seductive notion, but, really? The mediums of 19^th-century Spiritualism often published under the male names of the spirits they were channelling and thus, as London pointed out above, were able to publish at all, and furthermore earn a living for themselves in a position of power as mediums. The history of automatic writing, in contrast to Kahan’s statement, is physically present. These days, our automatic writers are quite literally transitional objects, drawbots: in 2014 alone, one billion stories were generated by Automated Insights’ Wordsmith program (Podolny), which uses NLG algorithms to “write” articles, while tamed automata are often gendered female, such as Siri, Archillect, “Her.” The embodiment of work and working is changing, and so are the questions surrounding it. How could a writing process that is seen as plural from the get-go change discussions around copyright? What does automatic writing say about fanfic, for example, or creativity, labour, or the ways in which these categories are parsed out according to gender? Finally, if the question, as Bernhard Siegert proposes, is no longer “how did we become posthuman? But, how was the human always already historically mixed with the non-human?” (53), then maybe we can also ask: is there any writing, has there ever been, that is not automatic?

Works cited

Blewett, Lee. “Copyright of Automatic Writing.” Virginia Law Review 13.1 (November 1926): 22–26.

Chachra, Debbie. “Why I Am Not a Maker.” The Atlantic, January 23, 2015.

Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” [1969]. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault. Ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977: 113–38.

Kahan, Jeffrey. Shakespearitualism: Shakespeare and the Occult, 1850–1950. New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1979.

London, Bette. Writing Double: Women’s Literary Partnerships. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999.

Podolny, Shelley. “If an Algorithm Wrote This, How Would You Even Know?” The New York Times, March 7, 2015.

Ratto, Matt. “Critical Making: Conceptual and Material Studies in Technology and Social Life.” The Information Society 27 (2011): 252–260.

Sconce, Jeffrey. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2000.

Siegert, Bernhard. “Cultural Techniques: Or the End of the Intellectual Postwar Era in German Media Theory.” Theory, Culture & Society 30.6 (November 2013): 48–65.

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I am a dramaturg.

…

(what does that mean?)

…

In their book Dramaturgy and Performance Cathy Turner and Synne K. Behrndt explain that, “the more precise and concise one tries to be [in defining dramaturgy], the more one invites the response ‘Yes, but…’. Although dictionaries and encyclopedias offer apparently clear explanations, these are insufficient to address the multiple and complex uses of the word, which has, in contemporary theory and practice, become an altogether flexible, fluid, encompassing and expanded term.”[1] Our ability to flex and adapt to the work that is required on each production (as it is different) makes it feel that there is a certain amount of wizardry going on, some magically transformation taking place where we are one moment a dialect coach, the next a translator, the next a historian, and the next a technician.

Dramaturg Eleonora Fabião explains that when working as a dramaturg she “had the opportunity to emphasize a connection between artistic practice and theoretical thinking; through the dramaturge’s viewpoint, practice and theory are emphatically experienced as complementary references, as different appearances of a unique matter. However, it is important to stress that the dramaturge is alchemically combining these references to make the scene richer in terms of dynamics and meaning…”[2] This alchemy combining practice and theory, the idea that the dramaturg makes meaning through the assemblage of contextual, historical, physical, linguistic, and mechanical articulations that arise from the rehearsal space, is not all that far removed from the work of the scientist as described by Bruno Latour in his book Laboratory Life.

This is particularly true in the devised theatre process.

…

(what does that mean?)

The traditional model of theatre creation is a “top down” model. The playwright creates a script on their own (or with one other person if they are co-writing). The director reads the script and develops a vision. The designers create the world of the play in accordance with the director’s vision and the actors develop their characters in the same fashion. We call this the blueprint model of theatre creation. All elements of the production are based on the text (the blueprint) and are overseen by the director (the foreman, perhaps).

In devised theatre, we don’t start with a script; instead we start with an idea, theme, concept, or argument. Let me use an example to illustrate how this works. Famed theatre director and creator Mary Zimmerman developed Metamorphoses in 1996 (as Six Myths) at the Theatre and Interpretation Center of Northwestern University. The play opened on Broadway at Circle in the Square in 2002, and this production earned Zimmerman a Tony for Best Direction (a little ironic considering what I am about to tell you). The play script, in this case the adaptation of the Ovid’s Metamorphoses, provided the basis for the production. It was the main idea behind the work, like the broth in a soup. Then each person involved in the show, the directors, designers and actors each brought something to the rehearsal room – like ingredients – and the production came together through the process. In the beginning, the play is like a cauldron of unlimited possibilities. And as things get added to the pot and taste tested, the possibilities become fewer and fewer until you end up with a completed production. This process is what we call devised theatre.

The devised theatre practice began in the 19th century with formidable artist-inventors, such as Artaud and Grotowski. Dr. David Williams explains that dramaturgy is “about the rhythmed assemblage of settings, people, texts and things. It is concerned with the composing and orchestration of events for and in particular contexts, tracking the implications of and connective relations between materials, and shaping them to find effective forms.”^[3] The dramaturg is placed inside the process and is an active creative member of the team, and yet they simultaneously remain on the outskirts as they are required to put the pieces (or articulations) together. Turner and Behrndt explain that in devised theatre “the performance text is, to put it simply, ‘written’ not before but as a consequence of the process.”^[4] The dramaturg is responsible for shaping the narrative, responding to the process as it happens.

Does this sound familiar?

Theatre has the same problem as the sciences: everyone thinks they know what they are all about. The sciences are objective, fact-based, academic, intellectual, and logical. Theatre is subjective, entertaining, imaginary, and emotional. But there’s more to both of these fields. Latour articulates the relationship between object and context in terms of fact creation in the sciences. He explains that fact-creation is not devoid of cultural signs, ethnographic subjectivities, and historical implications.

So what if we were to think of the dramaturg as a scientist? What if we were to look at the devised theatre process as an experiment? The dramaturg is the scientist overseeing the experiment with their colleague the director. The actors are agents, along with the technical machinery of the laboratory, which in this case is the rehearsal hall. The results are the performances.

So let’s start by looking at the culture created in the rehearsal hall. At the beginning of every rehearsal, the director discusses a plan of action for the day with the dramaturg. It is usually done over coffee (or tea in my case since I don’t drink coffee). They decide what content building activities they are going to perform with the actors that day, such as free writing exercises, image searches, and improvisation games. They decide what their goals or objectives are for that session, for example defining character relations, determining the beginning and end of a specific scene, or clarifying the trajectory of the story. The technicians arrive and turn on the equipment. The actors warm up their bodies as the lights brighten. They usually do this as a group, changing up who leads the warm up each day. Each individual has their personal favourite of the exercises, so this gives them all a chance to do their favourite one. The director sometimes participates in the warm up, but the dramaturg usually does not. They sit in the audience observing the activity in the room. They create a rubric or a notation system for the activities to come. They decide if they want to take photographs throughout, record the session, or take notes by hand. The rehearsal begins with questions. The director and dramaturg ask questions of the actors: how they are feeling, what they are thinking about, what they want to accomplish. And then the experiment begins.

It is important to note that the culture changes depending on the players in the room, not just the live people, but also the technical components (the lights, sound equipment, etc.). Not only that, these elements change the possibilities that a devised theatre production can take, in the same way that scientists from different backgrounds and schools of thought and different laboratory equipment will affect the directions that experiments will go. Latour explains that in order to look at an object, we must look at it’s meaning and significance in relation to its context. He says, “Even a well-established fact loses its meaning when divorced from its context”.[5] The facticity of an object is relative to its network, or assemblage. If that is the case, and the laboratory culture is part of that network, then facts are necessarily linked to their cultural context. Similarly, actors with different training, technical equipment with different capabilities, and directors with different aesthetics will develop very different assemblages even with the same object, or objective. For example, a troupe from England, a troupe from Indian, and a troupe from Canada are all devising performances on the subject of colonialism. The British actor training system is very regimented, requiring them to learn Stanislavsky and Meyerhold techniques. Indian actor training is based on the Natyasastra and Katakhali theatre. Canadian theatre actors learn a variety of techniques, but there is no one training method nationwide. Canada was colonized by the British through settlement. This is not to say there was not the forceful ‘dehoming’ and killing of aboriginal peoples, simply that it was not a military expedition. The colonization of Indian, on the other hand, was a military invasion. And the British, well, it was their empire that was colonizing. Even within these countries there are different narratives relating to the experience of colonization. So these three troupes would end up with very different performances based on the same series of historical events.

These different ethnographic and artistic positions create different experiences in the laboratory, or as Latour would put it, different microprocesses. Latour explains that in the lab he was observing TRF was a “thoroughly social construction”.[6] The object that was composed through the series of negotiations between the agents in the room. This object-fact is inscribed with the cultural circumstances that created it; it cannot escape them. Back in the rehearsal room, the dramaturg records the negotiations between the actors and the director, the different backgrounds, the different media and technical components, to develop an object called the play. The dramaturg inscribes the play not only with their own subjectivity, but with the positionality of the laboratory and all of its articulations.

If both objects are the result of complex negotiations and are seen as assemblages of various agents and cultural contexts, then can we not conclude that plays are also facts? Or at the very least, can they not contain some element of facticity?  Latour argues that the scientific process can be creative, saying, “Our use of creative does not refer to the special abilities of certain individuals to obtain greater access to a body of previously unrevealed truths; rather it reflects our premise that scientific activity is just one social arena in which knowledge is constructed.”[7] So if the scientific process can be creative, then why can’t the artistic process be scientific.

Why is this important? In much the same why that Latour explains that scientists are looking for credibility, dramaturgs are looking for it as well. It’s not credit we want. It’s credibility for our work. We no longer want to be seen as the know-it-all in the back of the room (a common view of dramaturgs even with the theatre, and popularized by the TV show Smash). We want to be seen as integral members of the creative team, and more so, we want the objects, the plays, that are created to be viewed as more valuable than simply entertainment. The need for credibility relates to our funding, our ability to get jobs, and our ability to continue to produce meaningful work that audiences want to see. Theatre scholar Alan Filewod explains that “nations are performances; the nation exists insofar as it is enacted and embodied in the processes of representation”.[8] Theatre is a space for rehearsing nationhood; it is a space for demonstrating possibility. The dramaturg can be the scientist that helps to piece together the assemblage that results in another possibility, in the same way as a scientist in the lab can write a report that shows the importance of a drug or an experiment result. Both of these articulations are equally a part of the assemblage of knowledge. The question remains: how do we get those outside of the Academy, those who are not part of the technical culture of theatre, to understand that? Do we need a Latour book of our own? And will this seeming levelling of the playing field help us in the long run?

Endnotes

[1] Cathy Turner and Synne K. Behrndt, Dramaturgy and Performance, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 17.

[2] Turner, 149.

^[3] David Williams, “Geographies of Requiredness: Notes on the Dramaturg in Collaborative Devising”, Contemporary Theatre Review Vol 20(2) [2010], 197-198.

^[4] Turner, 170.

[5] Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1986), 110.

[6] Latour, 152.

[7] Latour, 31.

[8] Alan Filewod, “Actors Acting Not-Acting”, La Création Biographique, ed. Marta Dvorak, (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes), 53.

Works Cited

Filewod, Alan, “Actors Acting Not-Acting”, La Création Biographique, ed. Marta Dvorak, (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes), 51-58.

Latour, Bruno and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1986).

Turner, Cathy and Synne K. Behrndt, Dramaturgy and Performance, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

Williams, David, “Geographies of Requiredness: Notes on the Dramaturg in Collaborative Devising”, Contemporary Theatre Review Vol 20(2) [2010], 197-202.

*Featured image from: http://decaymyfriend.deviantart.com/art/All-the-World-s-a-Stage-364568006

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Halloween is a scary time (for those outside the dominant ideology, for those on the unfortunate side of power dynamics). I (We? No, too many variants in that we. Only common in our antagonist …and even I am only implicated indirectly) spend the days leading up to the 31^st much the way my cousin taught me to behave while passing a graveyard – by holding my breath.

Halloween in contemporary culture is deeply entrenched in capitalism. Halloween itself seems to be historically rooted in the celtic practices on the day preceding the festival Samhain. It was believed that on the day preceding Samhain, the deceased returned (as ghosts). Because of this, people would leave food and wine on their doorsteps and, if they left their houses, they would don masks so that they would also be mistaken as ghosts. There are other similar practices that have also contributed to our contemporary iterations of Halloween, but this one is what stuck to the dominant ideological formation and found itself being articulated and transformed throughout the middle ages – such as the interruption of the church, transforming the celtic festival into All Saints Day and the evolution from leaving out food and wine to ‘souling,’ a practice in which peasants would beg for food and would pray for people’s dead relatives in exchange. According to what history tells us, these traditions were revived by celtic immigrants in the 19^th century. However, it wasn’t until the 1950s that Halloween became a family affair and an occasion for elaborate costuming and candy-giving. Since this time, though, Halloween seems to have continued on this path, becoming the second most profitable holiday after Christmas.

What does it mean then to have a business model based around the concept of dressing up? What sorts of costumes get made? What are “the characteristics of the […] ideal user” (Latour 301)? Perhaps, more importantly for me, what happens for the non-ideal users?

The types of Halloween costumes that people buy (or create) tend to “come in three categories: scary, funny, or fantastical” (Wade). Halloween costumes, if one only looks around, also seem to be an exercise in exaggeration. The superhero costume, for example, falls quite firmly into the realm of the fantastical [though some certainly have aspects of the scary, where villains are concerned, or funny where certain characters (Deadpool?) are concerned]. The superhero is, themself, an exaggerated human possessing super strength, abilities, physique, wit. What does it mean then that these costumes (often with built-in abs) are prevalent? Perhaps this type of costume (and the figure of superhero in pop culture) speaks to the sorts of iterations of self that are to be aspired to in accordance to the discourse of the dominant ideology. What is to be desired, what is desired by the majority and then reinterpreted back into what is to be desired, is this physical exaggeration of self, is the “pinnacle” of human evolution. But then whose pinnacle? According to whom? What is the presence of built-in abs on a costume teaching a child to feel about their body? The ideal user of this costume isn’t meant to ask these questions, though; the ideal user subscribes and “accept[s] or happily acquiesce[s] to their lot” (Latour 307).

So what happens when you aren’t the ideal user? What happens when you are not in the position intended for articulation, not the intended “cab” for the “trailer,” as Stuart Hall describes it (in terms of an articulated lorry) (53)?

Well, from the perspective of the insider, from the perspective of the person on the inside of the dominant ideology, it is the job of the user to become ideal and anything outside of that is a failure on the user’s part. When we speak, for example, of “historical” and “cultural” costumes, it is clear from the articulations of the costumes themselves (the intended facsimile versus the materials used versus the “liberties” taken in design) that they are not intended for those who have knowledge of such things, not intended for those who can see their breakages. Even the pictured models betray this point. For good measure, here are a few popular examples of costumes on a costume website:

(complete with confederate flag on the hat!)

“What’s the big deal?” the insider asks. “It’s just a costume. It’s funny,” he says.

And yes, he does say this. In response to the recent attention a BC Halloween store received for its costumes’ trivializing of Indigenous cultures, the owner Tony Hudgens response was: “It is not our intention to offend any race or creed. We would like to stress that as some Halloween costumes might come across as controversial, our intention at Halloween Alley is to celebrate life (Halloween Style!), and have fun with our friends and families during Halloween festivities.”

But oh, Tony. Tony Tony Tony… Gentle, innocent, Insider Tony…

Your intention (if we are to take you at your word) and the costumes are not isolated things. As with what Hall claims of Baudrillard’s argument about the implosion of meaning, your desire to have this simplistic fun also “rest[s] upon an assumption of the sheer facticity of things: things are just what is seen on the surface” (49). To you, dear Tony, your bottom line and the use by the dominant culture is more important than those who are harmed by these iterations and by the intended articulation of the dominant subject donning such a costume.

Have you even listened to the voices of those who you are attempting to clumsily represent? Look, Tony…

You see, the costume may have certain properties that grant it certain agencies on its own, but it exists, as with all things, “in a particular formation […] in relation to a number of different forces” (Grossberg 54) . Even if the costume has “no necessary, intrinsic” belonging, it still has a meaning (it exists within the systems of ideology and language …from which nothing can entirely escape) and this meaning “comes precisely from its position within a formation” (54). You see, you cannot simply have a costume of an indigenous dress, intended for the dominant (thus white settler) consumption void of its existence in relation to the genocide of indigenous and first nations people in Canada or the erasure of indigenous and first nations languages and cultures in the name of assimilation. In the same vein, it is not okay for Miley Cyrus to continue sporting dreads and it is not okay that I used to have my ears spaced to 00g. The narrative of activism around cultural appropriation works in direct relation to the theory of articulation and assemblage. Tony, Miley, if you were to accept that “contingent relations among practices, representations, and experiences […] make up the world” and that these articulations have a “structured and affective nature,” (Slack 126), I’m certain that you would start to see how the things you do are harmful and, maybe, how you could make them better.

With these issues in mind, I’d like to return to a different sort of ‘funny’ (offensive) costume. For now, let’s call these the ‘drag as joke’ costumes. These are the costumes, usually intended for cis d00ds, that involve over-accentuated breasts, a wig, and some sort of mock-sexy get-up.

note the description here…

Unlike drag (which I’ll admit has some of its own problems in its contemporary manifestation), it is not a parody of traditional gender roles and presentation, it is not a social commentary, it is not connected to a history of activism and oppression in its own right, and it doesn’t attempt any sort of artistry. Simply put, it is not trying to be part of that conversation. These costumes, as actants, are not seeking these assemblages – but they can’t entirely escape them, either. As such, the person donning these costumes is presented with a contest of “the different regimes of truth in the social formation” (Grossberg 48). In order to assert the power of the dominant ideology, the actor exaggerates the drag to obscene and ‘comical’ levels. They perform a parody – both of drag itself and of the traditionally-gendered female subject – in order to reassert the power of the dominant ideology of the m/f binary, constructed around and constructing our arbitrary ideas regarding genitalia and gender. In making this performance a joke, they also make femininity, drag, and transgressive gender performances/identities a joke, thus reasserting the power dynamic within those articulations.

I believe that this sort of costume and the ideas around it play a significant role in this year’s ‘hit’ costume. It’s received a good amount of backlash yet it’s still one of the top selling costumes and has sold out in many stores…

To the Insider, this costume probably doesn’t seem that different to the ones depicted earlier… and in a sense, that’s true, because those earlier costumes are still contributing harmful ideas to this cultural assemblage. At the same time, however, it is drastically different.

For those of you out of the loop, Caitlyn Jenner came out this past year as a trans woman. Now, of course, there have been plenty of (ok, not even close to plenty, but definitely ‘some’) trans women in the media (srsly, mom, have you never heard of Laverne Cox?) recently who could have easily ‘represented’ the trans community, but Caitlyn’s class status, whiteness, and age all worked together to create maximum visibility. This visibility, however, also made her the easy target of the dominant ideology’s ‘jokes.’ We see this manifesting here in the creation of a costume marketed primarily to cis men. Now, what does that do? Well, in the first place, by making it into a costume, it delegitimizes trans identities, it converses with the discourse that asserts that ‘gender’ is what is assigned at birth and that there are no deviations (this also erases intersex identities and discounts the extensive variation in hormones and genitalia that actually exist). Further, by marketing the product to cis men, by treating cis men as the ideal user, it undermines the process of self-identification for trans folks and asserts, in line with the dominant ideology and narrative of ‘trans deceit,’ that trans women aren’t really women and that, consequently, trans folks of all sorts aren’t really what they say they are.

It is for this reason that, at Halloween, I hold my breath. Now, if you’ve made the unfortunate mistake of interpellating me according to the articulations presented by the dominant ideology, you probably don’t get it. So I’ll just say this: clothing (‘costumes,’ if you will), behaviours, assigned genders at birth, sexual attraction/orientation, hair style/length, and names are all singular elements within assemblages. None have the inherent agency to gender anyone or anything – they only do so when articulated within the dominant ideology. If a self-identified man wears makeup, it does not change his gender – that makeup is merely the “trailer” to a different “cab” than what you were expecting. In the same way, those who – insofar as gender is concerned – have no “cab,” can pull at any “trailer” without it needing anything more – they “need not necessarily be connected to one another” (53).

The difference though, I think, is that it is up to the person affected by the assemblage and made an Outsider by the dominant ideology to choose when these things are ok (for themselves alone).

Works Cited

“‘Racist’ Halloween costumes should be pulled from shelves, says B.C. man.” CBC News. CBC/Radio-Canada, October 27 2015. Web.

Grossberg, Lawrence. “On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10 (1986): 45-60.

Johnson, Jim [Bruno Latour]. “Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together: The Sociology of a Door-Closer.” Social Problems 35 (1988): 298-310.

Slack, Jennifer Daryl, and J. Macgregor Wise. “Articulation and Assemblage.” Culture + Technology: A Primer. New York: Peter Lang, 2005. 125-133.

Wade, Lisa. “Racist Halloween Costumes.” The Society Pages: Sociological Images. W. W. Norton & Company, October 29 2009. Web.

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It has been a challenge for me to imagine how I might put the concepts we’ve encountered in this class together with the project I’m working on, which is currently focused on Thomas De Quincey’s autobiographical project. I’ve found myself repeatedly linking the readings with the titular piece of technology in De Quincey’s final major autobiographical contribution, The English Mail-Coach, an essay published in two installments in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1849.

The mail-coach itself, already obsolete technology in 1849, the year of The English Mail-Coach‘s publication.

In use decades before the adoption of the electric telegraph, the mail-coach was the fastest available means of sending messages over long distances. Messages and people and technology travelled at the same pace and also in the same space. This spatial and temporal contiguity between passenger and mail, horse and coachman, wheel and road make visible the network of articulations that make up what De Quincey calls “mail-coach society” (237).

Andrew Franta, along with many other scholars, makes a link between social relations within the coach and English society in general: “Mail-coach society, like English society, has its classes, politics, fads and fashions, love affairs, comedies and tragedies; it is, in short, a microcosm.” But he also correctly notes that this “microcosm” is “organised around the mail and in accordance with its architecture, schedules, and routines” (326-7). In this unique society—almost, but not quite, the same as English society—the mail-coach system serves as a mediator in the sense explained by Slack and Wise (117). It simultaneously stands between, brings together, and actively transforms the human and non-human members of the assemblage it represents.

The mail-coach, a common feature in nostalgic representations of a simpler past.

In the above picture, observe the visible seating arrangement. In front, on the driver’s box, is the coachman. Beside him is a passenger, and behind him sit two more. The solitary seat to the rear of the coach is reserved for the guard, a liveried official who carries a horn to alert travellers of the coach’s approach and also a blunderbuss and two pistols to discourage bandits. On top of the coach, under a protective cover, is the mail. Inside the coach are four passengers we can’t see. These four, “the illustrious quaternion,” were members of the wealthy and privileged class, evidenced by their ability to pay for the expensive interior seats. They are thus socially far above the “trinity of Pariahs” (234) in the “cheap seats”—or at least, the less expensive seats (the poor are not actors in the mail-coach assemblage unless they are too slow removing themselves from the coach’s path, in which case they might be briefly articulated at the end of the coachman’s whip).

De Quincey describes how these seat-based class assumptions, “an old tradition of all public carriages from the reign of Charles II.” (234), become re-articulated within mail-coach society. De Quincey recalls how he and his fellow Oxford students, “the most aristocratic of people,” preferring “the air, the freedom of prospect, the proximity to the horses, the elevation of seat” afforded by the cheaper seats, “instituted a searching inquiry into the true quality and valuation of the different apartments about the mail”:

We conducted this inquiry on metaphysical principles; and it was ascertained satisfactorily, that the roof of the coach, which some had affected to call the attics, and some the garrets, was really the drawing-room, and the [driver’s] box was the chief ottoman or sofa in that drawing room; whilst it appeared that the inside, which had been traditionally regarded as the only room tenantable by gentleman, was, in fact, the coal-cellar in disguise. (235-6)

This “perfect French revolution” (237)—the leveling, or inversion, of social class distinctions—is contingent on the Oxfordians’ brash youthfulness, on their sympathy with the egalitarian ideals behind the events in France, and, above all, on the mediation of the coach’s architecture. The moment the passengers leave the coach, the traditional hierarchies of English society reassert themselves. De Quincey describes occasions when the mail-coach stops at an inn for a meal break and the exterior passengers attempt to sit at the same table as the interior passengers, a breach of protocol so ludicrous that an old gentleman dismisses the act as “a case of lunacy (or delirium tremens) rather than of treason” (234).

I mentioned non-human actors earlier. The agency of things is a central assumption in De Quincey’s analysis of the mail-coach system, which “recalled some mighty orchestra, where a thousand instruments, all disregarding each other, and so far in danger of discord, yet all obedient slaves to the supreme baton of some great leader, terminate in a perfection of harmony like that of heart, veins, and arteries, in a healthy animal organisation” (232). In this description of the perfectly functioning mail, De Quincey invokes not people but tools—instruments and the guiding baton—as well as the parts of an animal’s body. There’s nothing unusual about comparing the perfection of an institution to the organic unity of a healthy animal, but there is reason to think that De Quincey regarded the linkages between the instruments as something similar to Stuart Hall’s idea of articulation: “the form of the connection that can make a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions . . . the so-called ‘unity’ of a discourse is really the articuation of different, distinct elements which can be rearticulated in different ways because they have no necessary ‘belongingness'” (53). The unity De Quincey identifies is highly contingent, and the object of his essay is “to analyze the logic of mediation – not in idealized abstraction but in particular instances and with particular attention to the material agencies of transmission” (Franta 325). I am tempted, almost, to interpret De Quincey’s objectives in The English Mail-Coach as similar to those of a sociologist, one using tools that anticipate the work of Hall and Latour.

The mail-coach system was a relatively stable network, reliably delivering mail and transporting passengers from 1784 to the mid-eigtheenth century, when it was phased out to be replaced by the new rail system. De Quincey’s mail-coach, the “spiritualised and glorified object” (233), was very specifically the mail-coach of his youth, and its special status derived from the awesome significance of its cargo, “the heart-shaking news of Trafalgar, of Salamanca, of Vittoria, of Waterloo,” English victories in the Napoleonic Wars, which formed a powerful articulation with De Quincey’s own “impassioned heart” (233).

“To this hour Mr. Palmer’s mail-coach system tyrannises by terror and terrific beauty over my dreams” (232).

The vital importance of the letters bundled on top of the coach invests those who ride with the mail with a sense of mission and shared glory. De Quincey delights in the awe and terror that causes gates to fly open at the mail-coach’s approach and carters to precipitously remove their carts from the path. He fancies himself and the other exterior passengers to share this authority: “We, on our parts, (we, the collective mail, I mean,) did our utmost to exalt the idea of our privileges by the insolence with which we wielded them” (240). Even the horses are made to understand the nature and importance of their mission, communicated through the “inter-agencies . . . between the horse and his master,” which “spread the earthquake of the battle into the eyeball of the horse” (244). Here the complex assemblage of articulations—from the horses to the reins and whip to the coachman to the bundled papers to the inscribed messages to the distant battles, all mediated through and articulated to the mail-coach, the mail-coach system, and the nationalist spirit of the times—achieves a sublime unity, but a unity that cannot last if even a single element is removed or rearticulated.

In the second installment of his essay, De Quincey relates an incident which illustrates the contingency of the mail’s supposed unity. Two or three years after the Battle of Waterloo, a time of relative peace after three decades of conflict, De Quincey arrives at the Manchester post-office. He is late for the mail-coach, but the mail-coach, very unusually, is running late as well due to “a large extra accumulation of foreign mails” (266). The cargo being of no particular importance, no one’s in any hurry to leave, and soon after their departure, the coachman, the guard, and De Quincey, the sole passenger, fall asleep. De Quincey later awakens in time to witness, but not stop, the collision of the mail-coach with a small cart carrying two young lovers. The young woman is almost certainly killed by the impact. The mail, which Quincey earlier praises as seeming to possess “a central intellect, that, in the midst of vast distances, of storms, of darkness, of night, overruled all obstacles into one steady co-operation” (232), has failed utterly. The “inter-agencies” linking horse to coachman collapse with the man’s inattention. The entire assemblage disintegrates because the mail is no longer articulated to a nationalist mission, a circumstance which leads first to delay and then to disaster.

Many other questions occur to me now, not least De Quincey’s mediating role as autobiographer and the personal, economic, and ideological concerns articulated to, and through, the cultural product he published in Blackwood’s. These are issues I may return to in my doctoral work, but they are thankfully beyond the scope of the present probe.

Works Cited

De Quincey, Thomas. “The English Mail-Coach.” Confessions of an English Opium Eater. Ed. Joel Faflak. Peterborough: Broadview, 2009. Print.

Grossberg, Lawrence. “On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10 (1986): 45–60. SAGE. Web. 31 Aug. 2008.

Franta, Andrew. “Publication and Mediation in ‘The English Mail-Coach.'” European Romantic Review 22.3 (2011): 323-330. JSTOR. Web. 9 Oct. 2015.

Slack, Jennifer Darryl, and J. Macgregor Wise. Culture + Technology: A Primer. New York: Peter Lang, 2005. Print.

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The photos above are connected, not by geographical location or photographer, but rather by hashtag: #liveauthentic. A quick Google search will yield endless images tagged as such, most of them highly-curated and (ironically) inauthentic in their likenesses. The spare, wholesome, outdoorsy aesthetic seen in these photos has had an influence on numerous aspects of commodity culture and design. It can be seen in the DIY hipster trends made popular by stores such as Anthropologie and Urban Outfitters and publications like Kinfolk, a magazine devoted to “small gatherings” and slow living. Inherent to the movement, which I will call the “neopastoral,” is a particular combination of North American nationalism, nostalgia for a pre-capitalist past (as iterated by and through present-day consumer culture) and a yearning for direct “contact” with nature.

The neopastoral aesthetic has by now become popular enough to be the subject of satire, having been critiqued by projects like Summer Allen’s Kinspiracy Tumblr and Instagram’s “Socality Barbie.” The parody account, which features a Barbie doll – the ultimate commodity symbol – posing against various wilderness backdrops, was started in June of this year and has now reached 1.3 million followers. The anonymous Portland-based wedding photographer who runs the account shoots her pictures in real locations and makes much of Barbie’s wardrobe by hand, but she also relies upon Photoshop to achieve the kind of “seamless” authenticity that she satirizes. She tells Wired, “People were all taking the same pictures in the same places and using the same captions […] I couldn’t tell any of their pictures apart so I thought, ‘What better way to make my point than with a mass-produced doll?’”

Instagram seems to be the perfect technology for this type of satire, given that it is a primarily visual platform which operates on a model of plurality and reiteration, while also capitalizing on nostalgia for old media such as the polaroid camera.

Many of the qualities of postmodernism that Fredric Jameson identifies in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism can be detected in the neopastoral: the weakening of historicity (or an unrealistic, nostalgic depiction of history such as the romanticization of homesteading activities); a breakdown of the distinction between “high” and “low” culture (seen in Instagram as host of both photography as art and photography as window to popular culture); a “depthlessness” (manifest in the superficiality that the aesthetic propogates); a proliferation of images and a world of “screens”; the “waning” or “flattening” of “affect” (emphasized in the uncanny similarity between the images that propel the neopastoral trend); and a set of new technologies (such as Instagram and Tumblr) concerned with “reproduction of images” rather than “industrial production of material goods” (Jameson).

Likewise, Stuart Hall explains:

“In so-called postmodern society, we feel overwhelmed by the diversity, the plurality, of surfaces which it is possible to produce, and we have to recognize the rich technological bases of modern cultural production which enable us endlessly to simulate, reproduce, reiterate and recapitulate” (Hall 49).

The neopastoral is especially well-mobilized by technologies like Instagram that enable this kind of endless simulation and reproduction. There are other factors, though, that help to influence and formulate the popularity of the trend. Hall’s model of “articulation” and Jennifer Daryl Slack and J. Macgregor Wise’s notes on “assemblage” can help to further analyze the various components that converge in such cultural movements. The qualities that Jameson attributes to postmodernism are just a few of the many “articulations” that comprise the neopastoral trend as “assemblage.” Jameson’s notorious pessimism regarding postmodernism foreshadows the kind of techno-phobia at play in “kids these days” arguments by baby boomers and the like. Slack and Wise write against the tendency to identify the “problem” solely in “technology and its effects,” as this is a “mechanistic” and “technologically deterministic” approach that does not account for why these technologies were developed in the first place, nor for their ubiquity in today’s world (126).

Therefore, though it’s tempting to blame the negative effects of the neopastoral on the IOS or on social media technologies, Slack and Wise advise us to avoid this tendency. Sure, Instagram can bring out the most superficial and inauthentic qualities in the best of us, but it alone cannot be held responsible for the symptoms of a cultural phenomenon.

“Articulation can be understood as the contingent connection of different elements that, when connected in a particular way, form a specific unity” […] “Elements, understood as articulations, can be made of words, concepts, institutions, practices and affects, as well as material things”  (Slack and Wise 127).

Socality Barbie, for example, may not be a technology in its own right, but it is an articulation, a “unit” that “connects many elements” including social media technologies, photography, the iPhone, the desire for community, advertising, in-jokes, parody, commodity culture, etc.

In no particular order, here’s a list of some elements that “articulate” or assemble themselves via “contingent connections” in the formation (or assemblage) of the neopastoral as satirized by Socality Barbie:

• The privileging of images over text in magazines like Kinfolk.
• The lack of racial diversity in magazines like Kinfolk and websites like FOLKlifestyle.
• A desire for an authentic experience and the verisimilitude (as seen in hashtags like #nofilter) that drives particular modes of self-expression on social media sites like Instagram
• Upper-middle class boredom/fetishization of “leisure” activities like camping, picnicking, canoeing, etc.
• North American heteronormative ideals and expectations
• Instagram as a medium capable of editing, photoshopping, photo-sharing and photo-rating via “likes”
• The hashtag as a “community-forming” device
• The impulse towards community, as facilitated by social media.
• The fact that the iPhone is always at hand (for those who own them)
• The growing force of advertising on Instagram, which has become inundated with subtle product placements which are meant to “feel organic” to users’ feeds.
• Disenchantment with consumer culture, yet a feeling of powerlessness to escape it.
• Millenial nostalgia for pre-capitalism (as stemming from that powerlessness, but also as an independent articulation), evidenced in a return to projects such as grass roots co-ops, handmade artisanal products and other previously anti-consumer categories. This tendency can also be seen in the use of hand-crafted Mexican blankets and rustic backpacks as props on Socality Barbie.
• Back to Nature fantasies: the idea of a “pure” nature is more a fantasy now than ever before, due to widespread environmental devastation brought about by urban sprawl, pollution, and the possible exhaustion of key natural resources. Hall’s note about Marxists believing that “something is ultimately only real when you can put your hands on it in Nature” can perhaps also be applied here (57).
• Hipster Christianity: Another trend that Socality Barbie satirizes is right there in the name itself. The Socality Movement is a group that, since 2014, has been committed to the evangelism of communal Christian values. They aim to “bring the heartbeat of God to humanity” via social media platforms. That the neopastoral is driven by movements like Socality supports Hall’s observations about “the extraordinary cultural and ideological vitality which religion has given to certain popular social movements” (54). He writes that “no political movement in society can become popular without negotiating the religious terrain. Social movements have to transform it, buy into it, inflect it, develop it…they must engage with it” (54).
  
• Nationalism, and especially Americana (on display in countless #liveauthentic Instagram posts that use the American flag as backdrop)
• Mason jars
• 3rd wave coffee
• Mountains
• Wood: as prop, texture, and symbol

In order to avoid mapping this cultural phenomenon as a kind of teleological “accumulation,” I have created a mind map to more accurately represent the always-moving impermanence of these kinds of articulations, in a kind of “constellation”:

text2mindmap (1)

What is fascinating to me about the concept of technology as assemblage is that it is both ephemeral  and yet also has some kind of affective power:

“It is important to remember that a technological assemblage is not a simple accumulation of a bunch of articulations on top of one another, but a particular concrete constellation of articulations that assemble a territory that exhibits tenacity and effectivity” (Slack and Wise 130).

In a year or so, the neopastoral will likely have been usurped by another cultural movement. Socality Barbie’s already becoming residual. But the fact that the neopastoral movement does have power right now is evident in its influence on consumer culture (it makes us (ME) buy stuff) and also in its ability to be satirized (via Socality Barbie). Linda Hutcheon has argued that postmodernism operates via parody, and that postmodernism’s “initial concern is to de-naturalize some of the dominant features of our way of life; to point out that those entities that we unthinkingly experience as “natural” (they might even include capitalism, patriarchy, liberal humanism) are in fact “cultural”; made by us, not given to us” (Hutcheon 1-2).

So what role does parody play in today’s post-postmodern culture? Is Socality Barbie a successful satire or does it only succeed in reinforcing (and not critiquing) the neopastoral aesthetic? If, in post-postmodernism, we have already accepted and internalized the fact that nothing is “natural,” why do we still earnestly pine for the natural and the authentic? Why do we create elaborate personal identities (brands, even) based on this longing? What has happened to postmodernism’s sardonic approach and is there still a place for irony in cultural critique?

Works Cited

Grossberg, Lawrence. “On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10 (1986): 45–60.

Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1989.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.

Slack, Jennifer Darryl, and J. Macgregor Wise. “Agency”, “Articulation and Assemblage.” Culture + Technology: A Primer. New York: Peter Lang, 2005. 115–33

Su, John J. Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

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Distant Reading Probe.  Presenting on Oct 10th. 

When I tell people in North America that I research Chinese shadow puppetry, 99.5% of the time I get one of three reactions:

60% of them say, “You mean like the Jim Henson’s, the Muppets?

27.5% of them say, “You mean like Being John Malkovich?”

12% of them say, “You mean you research this (gesturing)?”

And the rarest of all reactions: .05% of them say, “I’ve heard of Indonesian shadow puppetry, but…”*

 *Pardon the rough guesstimate of percentages here.

Chinese shadow puppetry is literally on no one’s radar.

Chinese shadow puppetry is China’s widest spread folk art form and for a country roughly the size of America with a population of around 1.3 billion people, that’s saying something.

Its origins are too old and its documentation too nonexistent to corroborate, although the best educated guess places its genesis somewhere around the Tang Dynasty (618 AD).  The art form has bravely ridden a tumultuous path through dynastic changes, ideological shifts, repression and other such fun with incredible resilience until the 1900s where Japanese occupation, civil war, and both the Communist and Cultural Revolution laid deadening blows.  After China opened up in the late 1970s, it’s been limping along ever since and fading steadily over the last 15 years.   My work involves traditional apprenticeship with the last remaining practitioners of the form (the puppet makers) who are almost all over the age of 60, male and living deep in the rural Chinese countryside.

Needless to say, there’s a lot to unpack.

Our first week of class introduced me to Circulation and Actor-Network theory and encouraged me to begin to “foreground the social life of the form rather than off of it.” (Gaonkar and Povinelli 2003, 387) Our second week readings about mess put me at ease in my research’s methodological uncleanliness: “It needs to be messy and heterogeneous, because that is the way it, research, actually is.”(Law, 3)  Last week’s reading on interpretation steered me away from “theories and discourses that are inhabited by such totalitarian specters as causality, philosophy of history, and the transcendental subject.”(Gumbrecht 1994, 402)   Foucault has me focusing on relative beginnings.  But, still, I am having a hard time Drawing It All Together with my own work.  I understand the examples with handguns and computers, but what does that have to do with puppets – these performative artifacts.  Old puppets.  Old Chinese puppets.

In this week’s reading, Bruno Latour takes us through a reimagining of the existing ‘due process’ that scientists and moralists have been abiding by for some time now.  Instead of the dichotomous ‘fact vs. values’ binary, Latour sets up an elegant map to show us a new process that takes any potential appellants through a more fluid, democratic round of inquiry and assessment by a unified collective.

…Laid end to end, the four imperatives (perplexity, consultation, hierarchy, institution) require that we not bring an end to perplexity too abruptly, that we not unduly accelerate the consultation, that we not forget to look for compatibility with established propositions, and finally that we not register new states of the world without an explicit motivation.  

(Latour 2004, 119)

Latour only mentions ‘articulations’ once in his chapter, but his thinking runs parallel to Slack and Wise’s in that they are both rejecting the old fossilized modes of discourse based on mechanistic causality.  Less of ‘guns kill people’ and more of an understanding that guns are ‘made up of myriad articulations that make some things possible, others not.’ (Slack & Wise 2005, 112)  They’re both advocating we acknowledge the inherent impossibility of keeping to our perfectly made categories, stagnant answers and the deceptive knowability in a fact or object.

After a few delicious chapters taking us through the finer points of causality and agency (filled with fabulously illustrative examples), Slack and Wise gently encourage us to move towards Articulation and Assemblage, which is not unlike the Actor-Network theory.

Articulation draws attention to the contingent relations among practices, representations, and experiences that make up the world.  Assemblage draws attention to the structured and affective nature and work of these articulations. 

(Slack and Wise 2005, 126) 

As I begin looking for tools to help me wield some sort of comprehensibility from my subject, I’m drawn to these ideas as a practitioner.  There’s tangibility in relationships, connections and articulations that can be spun into a web of assemblage that I can make sense of.  Now, where and how do I make this work with the Old Chinese puppets.

For the sake of our sanity and the storage limits of the wordpress server, I’m going to limit this probe’s examination to a simple case study of the same assemblage pre-1930s (when shadow puppetry was still enjoying a heydey) and one in 2013.  As every ‘element is itself an articulated identity’, let’s start with a Chinese shadow puppet.

I started compiling a long list of articulations and distilled them down to those with particular ‘tendential force’ (Hall).  Pre 1930s, this shadow puppet is animal hide (particular to any given region), it is the craft of a master or novice, an aesthetic which is attributed to an ‘ideology’ of a given region, it represents heritage, ritual and ceremony, it is oral history embodied, it is a voice of the masses, the escape of entertainment, the delight of magic, the promise of a good harvest next spring, the enigma and wonderment that is shadow play.   It is important to note that while this puppet assemblage circulated heavily within the peasant communities, it remained outside the interests of the upper class through most of its evolution, and especially in the 1930s.

Chinese Shadow Puppet Sunlit Show in the hills of Bazhong, Sichuan Province Video

Interesting articulations at work between the troupe and their audience.  This is a troupe that has been performing within their village for over 30 years.   My subjectivity is painfully obvious as I watch this now; the only foreigner with a camera, editing a ‘highlights’ compilation.  

Take this assemblage today: the puppet is animal hide and it is the craft of a maker and aesthetic of a region, but ideas of both craft and aesthetic have drastically changed in an exploding factory economy.  Instead of representing an unbroken oral history, it represents an outdated way of life and the obsolete ‘feudalistic’ times.  It is no longer that enigma of shadow and light, but more often thought of as a low-brow folk art form, or a pre-cursor to film.  And though the class system has been significantly reworked in the last 80 years, there isn’t enough of a general interest to matter much.  The puppet today is articulated now by its relationship to tourist trade more than to village life, to CCTV (China’s state television broadcaster) Chinese Heritage specials rather than the center of community celebrations.

CCTV “Shadow Puppetry Revived” Video

Multiple layers of assemblage here: government funded station covering a government funded state troupe which is ‘reimagining’ shadow puppetry.  The short clip of shadow puppetry that is actually shown is from a show developed in 1952 as the first ever governmentally disseminated ‘National’ shadow play.  

“Perhaps the crucial thing to understand about articulation is the assertion that culture is made up of articulations (or connections) that are contingent.  Contingency implies that these articulations or connections are not necessary, and it is possible that they could connect otherwise.” (Slack & Wise 2005, 127)  We can see how contingent they were in the previous examples.  As I move further in my own research, I’d like to also examine the tendential force between these articulations through time to ascertain better what kind of change renders what kind of reaction in the articulation (i.e. small changes in cultural ideology change weaker connections and larger changes can disarticulate stronger ones).  “If you want to imagine or contribute to change, look more closely at the particular articulations that account for the particular constellation of the assemblage.  Where are there lines of tendential force, those articulations that you may not be able to disarticulate?…consider where there might be lines, connections, relationships, and articulations that could be altered.” (Slack & Wise 2005, 132)

I’ll most likely continue with this exercise and take the puppet assemblage map to the north and south of China, to urban and rural spaces as I plot it along the timeline.  And, each time they help identify areas of greatest change, articulations with the most tendential force and a broader understanding of how assemblages have shifted over time and geography.

My initial examples in this probe, of reactions to my professed passion, expose some of the ways in which the existing networks and assemblages effect the proximity of the form to the North American public.  You can surmise, from the examples, that people in North America are deriving most of their knowledge of puppet forms (let alone Chinese shadow) from television, film and the internet.  (You can also tell that the Muppets are still enjoying puppet domination in North America, and with good reason.) A Chinese shadow puppet assemblage in North America, currently, has few articulations.

Because the majority of North Americans will most likely never experience a live performance in situ, I am forced to re-examine not only the articulations and assemblages that make up their possible relationship or lack thereof to Chinese shadow puppetry but more importantly, perhaps, their likely materialities of communications with the form if and when they do meet it.  What materialities are possible for this form to reach an overseas audience?  Initially, I was hesitant to attempt re-presenting Chinese shadow puppetry to a western audience, as the issues of documenting and re-presenting (representing) live performance are plentiful.  It’s a friggin’ black hole.  “Live performance betrays its ontological roots as far as it allows itself to be documented.” (Phelan)  But what are my options?  Isn’t anything other than bringing the classroom to a mountain village in Gansu province to see a show a compromise?  Through the internet, I can reach more people, but in what way.  What’s the impact of an image versus a video?  What will be understood from it?  Is the connection enough to garner a like, a comment, a share, or an actual investment?  Is it tendential?  Can we use these theories to not only look at existing articulations but also to consider articulations we’d like to make?

These are just the beginnings of my thoughts, a bit tidier than they were six weeks ago, but still at the beginning of the process.  And while I missed talking about everything, I’ve hopefully starting talking about something.  Is there a better way to articulate or assemble these parts?  Are there other ways to look at this issue of materiality and live performance?  Looking forward to hearing yours thoughts and questions as well and perhaps we’ll be able to Draw It All Together, together.

Works Cited

Chen, Fan. Chinese shadow theatre history, popular religion, and women warriors. Montreal [Que.: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007. Print.

Jiang, Yuxiang. Zhongguo ying xi. Di 1 ban. ed. Chengdu: Sichuan ren min chu ban she :, 19911992. Print.

Latour, Bruno. Politics of nature: how to bring the sciences into democracy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. Print.

Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked the politics of performance. London: Routledge, 1993. Print.

Slack, Jennifer Daryl, and J. Macgregor Wise. Culture + technology: a primer. New York: Peter Lang, 2005. Print.

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