On Repetition: Writing, Performance and Art

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Contents

Persisting Forever: Introducing Repetition

Eirini Kartsaki

Chapter 1: Of Secret Signals, Absent Masters and the Trembling of the Contours: Walter Benjamin, Yvonne Rainer and the Repeatability of Gesture

Swen Steinhäuser

Chapter 2: All the Home’s a Stage: Uncanny Encounters Between Auditorium and Oikos

Alan Read

Chapter 3: Repetition as Technology of the Numinous in Performance: The Artist Is Present by Marina Abramović

Silvia Battista

Chapter 4: When Is a Joke not a Joke? Reading (and Re-reading) Stewart Lee’s ‘The Rap Singers’

Emma Bennett

Chapter 5: The Crying Channel

Claire Hind and Gary Winters

Chapter 6: The Cyclical Pleasures and Deaths of Symbolization: How to Become a Cupcake/The Famous’ Adaptation of Frankenstein

Lauren Barri Holstein

Chapter 7: A Pointless Pastime? Early Nineteenth-Century Pin-Prick Imagery

Alice Barnaby

Chapter 8: Repeated Acts of Intimacy and Harm in Andrea Brady’s Mutability: Scripts for Infancy

Gareth Farmer

Chapter 9: ‘I Was Not HEARD’: Trauma and Articulation in the Poetry of Geraldine Monk

Linda Kemp

Chapter 10: Déjà-vu , Doubles and Dread: The Uncanny and Christopher Smith’s Triangle

Ruth McPhee

Chapter 11: Farewell to Farewell: Impossible Endings and Unfinished Finitudes

Eirini Kartsaki

Afterword: Repetition or Recognition?

Clare Foster

Notes on Contributors

Index

Persisting Forever: Introducing Repetition

Eirini Kartsaki

In his 1985 essay ‘Innovation and Repetition: Between Modern and Post-modern Aesthetics’, Umberto Eco suggests that the modern criterion for artistic value is novelty, whereas the repetition of an already-known pattern is synonymous with a lack of originality, and considered typical of crafts and industry, but not art (1985: 14). However, twentieth-century fine art gives rise to a paradox: the avant-garde artist enacts originality in the form of repetition; artists such as Piet Mondrian, Josef Kelly and Sol LeWitt enact their originality through the form of the grid:

Structurally, logically, axiomatically, the grid can only be repeated. And with an act of repetition or replication as the ‘original’ occasion of its usage within the experience of a given artist, the extended life of the grid in the unfolding progression of his work will be one of still more repetition.

(Krauss 1996: 160)

The use of the grid in the early twentieth century reveals a shift in the way in which repetition is used; it starts to be thought of not as the discredited other half of the couple originality/repetition, but as an important element at work. It is in response to this shift that American art critic Rosalind Krauss poses an important question: ‘What would it look like not to repress the concept of the copy? What would it look like to produce a work that acted out the discourse of reproduction without originals?’ (1996: 168).

Steven Connor extends Krauss’ argument to think more specifically about the relationship between repetition and originality, drawing on Jacques Derrida:

Repetition is at one and the same time that which stabilizes and guarantees the Platonic model of origin and copy and that which threatens to undermine it. Repetition must always repeat originality, must always depend on some thing or idea, which is by definition pre-existing, autonomous and self-identical. Repetition is therefore subordinated to the idea of the original, as something secondary and inessential. For this reason, repetition is conventionally condemned in Western culture as parasitic, threatening and negative. But if repetition is dependent upon a pre-existing originality, it is also possible to turn this round and argue that originality is also dependent upon repetition. […] The question ‘How can you have a repetition without an original?’ brings with it the less obvious question ‘How can you have an original which it would be impossible to represent or duplicate?’

(Connor 1988: 3)

Repetition here confirms the value and existence of the original; although considered as ‘parasitic, threatening and negative’, it has in the wake of modernism, but also significantly even before that, acquired a different role: it is not only the necessary condition for originality, but is also appreciated in its own right. Samuel Beckett’s literary work, for example, takes into account modernism’s obsessive search for originality and contradicts it. Repetition here performs two key functions: it gives rise to ‘some real novelty amid the nothing new’ or to sameness, which ‘always inhabits or inhibits what may initially present itself as novelty’ (Connor 1988: 1). Repetition thus becomes generative of new ways of thinking and writing and is considered as the place ‘where certain radical instabilities in these operations reveal themselves’ (Connor 1988: 1). Artists such as Andy Warhol, the Judson Dance Theatre, John Cage and Yvonne Rainer, among others, draw attention towards similarity and invite the spectators to engage with repetition in innovative ways; as such, they mark an emphatic departure from modern modes of work.

Repetition has been discussed by key theoreticians such as Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. In his Difference and Repetition, Deleuze identifies two different types of repetition: the first type is a mechanical, ‘naked’ or ‘bare’ repetition, or a repetition of the same, which simply reproduces its original. The second type includes difference; it is a dynamic repetition, evolving through time (Deleuze 2004: 27). The differences emerging from repetition may be experienced imperceptibly, like a circle that is traced twice: ‘the same line is no longer exactly the same, the ring no longer has the same center’, Derrida argues (1978: 296). And, he continues, ‘once the circle turns, once the volume rolls itself up, once the book is repeated, its identification with itself gathers an imperceptible difference which permits us efficaciously, rigorously, that is, discreetly, to exit from closure’ (1978: 295). The exit from closure, as Derrida describes it, allows repetition to keep going and may stimulate a desire concerned with a sense of satisfaction. This sense of satisfaction is central to the experience of repetition. Derrida captures what seems to be one of the functions of repetition: ‘the book has lived on this lure: to have given us to believe that passion, having originally been impassioned by something, could in the end be appeased by return of that something’ (1978: 295). Repetition gives the impression that it will satisfy its promise and it is precisely on the grounds of that promise that repetition is able to keep going.

Performance Returns

Certain encounters with artworks may seem elusive, difficult to describe or hard to talk about. These may seem to escape from us, or disappear immediately after they take place. The use of repetition – in movement, language, gesture – although seemingly offering a technology of recollection, may in fact render these encounters even more elusive. Repetition as an element at work may accentuate the difficulty to experience and represent the encounter. Such works seem to contain an imperative: that of return. This book argues that works that use repetition in the above ways seem to demand a return to them in order to unpack their complexity, work through the difficulty that lies within repetition and unveil their radical instabilities. Such a return has been discussed by writer and curator Adrian Heathfield in his account of choreographer Pina Bausch’s repetitive gestures: ‘The use of gestural repetition and difference, cyclical events and relations, creates suspensions and returns in our experience’ (2006: 92–93). Repetition seems to demand a return to it in memory and in this writing. In doing so, one reproduces the work, creating at the same time an archive; such a movement of return backwards, which reproduces the work forward in time resembles Kierkegaard’s category of repetition, which is a recollection forward (1964: 131). The process of returning has an additional function: it documents the differences that take place in the encounter and re-encounter with the work, opening a dialogue with it, which is about the present context of the encounter. And the question arises: ‘What is it, fundamentally, I am returning to in this particular case? What is it I want to see again?’ (Clark 2006: 5–8). Something happens, art historian T. J. Clark tells us, ‘which cannot effectively be represented except by chronicling it as it happen[s]’ (2006: 8).

Returning to certain works seems to emerge as a function of repetition; the process of returning recognizes that repetition influences the representation of our experience. Going back to a performance, a painting, a comedy act, a film, again and again, is constitutive of repetition and the key argument of this book. Repetition in this case ‘persists in recurrence, it remains unresolved, haunting our memories, documents and critical frameworks’ (Heathfield 2000: 106).

On Repetition: Writing, Performance & Art considers repetition as a constitutive element of art and writing in the West. The book offers a collection of essays on twentieth and early twenty-first century performance, dance, poetry, film and visual art, and directs our attention towards the areas of overlap that such an approach makes possible. It explores repetition in relation to desire, trauma, labour, the archive, interruption and citation, and opens a dialogue about the functions of repetition in Western culture.

Drawing on psychoanalysis, philosophy, phenomenology, linguistics and performance studies, the collection offers a new approach to works that use repetitive structures and methodologies. Repetition here is considered as an important element at play. The book proposes a new vocabulary with which to unpack repetition’s complexities. The collection’s underlying thesis concerns a study of practices that consider repetition as a notion or practice that is not subordinated to the idea of the original, but is rather appreciated in its own right. What emerges through the volume is the urge to experience repetition and discover what Michel Foucault terms the ‘sudden illumination of multiplicity’ within it (1997: 232).

Not Enough: Repetition and Inadequate Satisfaction

In Marco Berrettini’s production of iFeel2 presented in the Festival D’Automne, Paris, 2014, two dancers are on stage. Naked from the waist up, they are looking at each other and trying out a number of variations on a six-step routine for the length of an hour. Berrettini’s work makes use of repetition structurally, aesthetically, in movement and music. In my experience of the performance, what becomes obvious is a sense of pleasure that this type of work makes possible, as well as a perpetual dissatisfaction with the impossibility of closure or relief: I want this repetition to stop, while at the same time I am fearful of such an ending; this is a difficult repetition, a repetition of jouissance, which I find myself struggling with. Throughout this performance, I experience a simultaneous excess and lack of desire; I desire too much and too little; I take pleasure and yet experience discomfort. My desire is excessive, yet inadequate.¹ Such a duality of repetition is also identified by Lauren Barri Holstein in her chapter ‘The Cyclical Pleasures and Deaths of Symbolization: How to Become a Cupcake/The Famous’ Adaptation of Frankenstein’ (Chapter 6). In this, Holstein argues that ‘inherent in the repetitive disruption of the show, and in repetition itself, is both a pleasure and a disappointment, as we watch the show, and its cupcake woman, repeatedly destroy itself, only to return again’. Holstein re-visits her own practice to identify theatre’s constitutive failure in the realm of the symbolic and ‘the real’, an oscillation between representation and the unreachable. Repetition, she argues, could be described as ‘an attempt to bring into representation that which is unrepresentable, over and over again, resulting in a constant shuttling between the void and the symbolic’. A desire to succeed keeps repetition going, while failure ensures the fuelling of the drive to keep repeating. Holstein discusses a process of successive disruptions of her show at the Arnolfini, Bristol, in 2013, which gave rise to the show’s destruction and its return. Drawing on Lacan and Butler, Holstein explores the feminist potential of such a space.

Claire Hind and Gary Winters also think about desire and the process of return in ‘The Crying Channel’ (Chapter 5). They use the work of Roy Orbison as a starting point to discuss their performance practice in relation to Lacanian and Freudian desire. Hind and Winters discuss the tension between wanting something and allowing ourselves to take pleasure in wanting, which appears as a struggle we perpetually return to. Bringing together pop culture, cinema and performance, they turn to Orbison’s affective archives, interrupting the text to offer, again and again, detailed descriptions of Orbison singing his infamous ‘Crying’. Hind and Winters also consider David Lynch’s desire to appropriate Orbison’s archive, which manifests itself as a death drive in the work of the film-maker. Lynch, they argue, re-visits the archive compulsively in a nostalgic gesture of desiring to return to the origin. As such, the chapter returns to Orbison’s work over and over again, forming a repetitive cycle of interruptions, which constitutes part of the authors’ conceptual frameworks and informs their interdisciplinary practice.

Returning to a performance again and again takes place in Alan Read’s exciting account of Kierkegaard’s intricate little book Repetition, in which Constantine Constantius attempts to sustain repetition by re-staging a trip to Berlin in all its detail. In his chapter ‘All The Home’s A Stage: Uncanny Encounters Between Auditorium and Oikos’ (Chapter 2), Read focuses on Constantius’ return from the theatre and argues that

it is the repetition of this return, coming home from theatre on a second, third then fourth occasion, that draws our attention once again to that recurring economy of the everyday […] which would appear to be at odds with the theatre, where repetition is, precisely […] quite impossible to secure despite all recurring signs to the contrary.

Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s term oikonomia, Read discusses the slippage between the domestic ‘house’ and the ‘full house’ that is the theatre. In his analysis of Kierkegaard’s text, Read considers works such as Elmgreen and Dragset’s Tomorrow, Michael Landy’s Semi-Detached, Gregor Schneider’s Totes Haus u r as well as Die Familie Schneider. In doing so, the author thinks of the urban interior as a theatre of its own kind. He argues:

Performance might for some time now have already and everywhere ‘come home’, been brought home in some way, as in an architecturally footloose, aesthetically domesticated takeaway, hinted at in the sharing of the word ‘house’ for both auditoria and oikos. The ceremonial of performance lasts for long enough to be somehow reheated at and through home.

Despite Constantius’ best attempts to stay the same and therefore experience repetition (or constancy), which is the only happy love, he has to return back home.

Archive Fever

The desire to go back and repeat an experience has perhaps to do with a desire to preserve it, to counter its ephemerality, to perpetuate the experience and refuse its ending. It may also have to do with homesickness, ‘a desire to return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement’, Derrida tells us in Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1995: 91). Yet, the trouble ‘de l’archive’, he suggests, ‘stems from a mal d’archive. We are en mal d’archive: in need of archives […] [which] is to burn with a passion. It is never to rest, interminably, from searching for the archive right where it slips away’ (Derrida 1995: 57). The archive fever, the nostalgic desire to go back, emerges in certain cases when dealing with works that use repetition in their content or structure. Works like that seem to have the ability to create their own archive. This may be thought of as an ‘affective archive’, a term I came across for the first time through the Affective Archives, a cluster of the Performance Studies International Conference that took place in Vercelli, Italy, 2010. Repetition has the capacity to create such an archive, as its affective memory demands a re-visiting and re-exploring as well as an interrogation of ‘the logic of documentation with respect to the affective charge embedded in the gesture of keeping and recovering traces of the past’ (Affective Archives 2010). Affective memory of the event seems to prompt in certain cases creative recollections in the future.

Such an affective archive is created by Emma Bennett in her visiting and re-visiting of Stewart Lee’s joke ‘The Rap Singers’. In her chapter ‘When Is a Joke not a Joke? Reading (and Re-reading) Stewart Lee’s The Rap Singers’ (Chapter 4), Bennett discusses her encounter with the joke, which seems to invite a return to it again and again in memory and writing. The joke exists in the now, and then it disappears but also remains through ‘messy and eruptive reappearance’ (Schneider 2001: 103). Lee’s joke, which prompted 300,000 people to switch off before the punchline, becomes a means to discuss the linguistic structure of a joke and the temporal dynamics of its performance. It reappears again and again, in Bennett’s writing, creating its own affective archive. Drawing on Kant and Critchley, Bennett argues:

Lee’s comedy could be thought of as an extended exploration of the ‘particular experience of duration’ […], one that stretches the elastic band to its very limits. Or maybe he refutes the elasticity itself. He lets it go limp. Or somehow makes the snap, the ‘heightened experience of the instant’, go on for minutes on end.

In her work, Bennett addresses this instance as process, theory, allegory and embodiment. The joke, she suggests, does not resist explanation; it invites it and invites it and invites it.

The linguistic dynamic of repetition is also Gareth Farmer’s focus in his chapter ‘Repeated Acts of Intimacy and Harm in Andrea Brady’s Mutability: Scripts for Infancy’ (Chapter 8). Farmer examines the contemporary poet Andrea Brady, who attends to repetition’s duality: ‘repetition is calming, is edifying, is cheerful’, yet repeated acts can also be estranging and may lead to despair and competition. Farmer explores intimacy and harm through repetition and argues that ‘repeated acts, here, produce the conditions for calm and for learning; they imply safety and intimacy and are reassuring. Such repeated acts are part of the echo chamber in Brady’s memory; their transcription is an act of monumentalization’. Brady’s Mutability: Scripts for Infancy reveals the complexities of representing in a fluid and faithful manner the poet’s relationship with her daughter. Using repetition to think about intimacy, the poet also addresses the harm that such repeated acts may cause through writing. Mutability: Scripts for Infancy, Farmer argues, offers an ‘occasion for a philosophical and formal worry about the veracity and place of poetry and writing itself’.

The discussion of repetition in poetry is extended by Linda Kemp, who discusses the work of poet Geraldine Monk in her chapter ‘I Was Not HEARD: Trauma and Articulation in the Poetry of Geraldine Monk’ (Chapter 9). Kemp identifies in the poet’s work an attempt to enact a Freudian compulsion to repeat, in order to relive trauma. She suggests that ‘through the representation of trauma, Monk’s poetry talks around trauma by adopting the voices of the abused. The repetition inherent in the traumatic compulsion to repeat is enacted through thematic and sonic repetition’. Kemp explores poems from Monk’s collections Interregnum (1994), Escafeld Hangings (2005) and Ghost & Other Sonnets (2008) to think about the affects of abuse, and in particular the unspeakable and unrepresentable aspects of trauma. Unassimilated trauma, Kemp suggests, ‘is continually re-experienced through flashbacks, re-enactments and other physical and emotional symptoms, amounting to an experience of being haunted’. Trauma here is trapped in repetition and echo, in the stuttering of language, seeking for release. Monk’s poetics ‘are dependent on the suspension of the assimilation of trauma’, generating at the same time the affect of trauma by speaking through, into and around abuse.

Ruth McPhee’s chapter ‘Déjà-vu, Doubles and Dread: The Uncanny and Christopher Smith’s Triangle’ (Chapter 10) examines the interplay of repetition and difference and the encounter with the self as radical and violent alterity. In particular, the author uses theories of the uncanny with an emphasis on the phenomena of déjà-vu. McPhee argues that throughout the film ‘a balance is maintained between presenting the familiar tropes and shocks of slasher cinema in conjunction with the more unconventional temporalities and explorations of subjectivity’. Here, again, repetition carries an element of haunting; drawing on Freud, Derrida and Nicholas Royle, McPhee thinks about déjà-vu ‘as a model for the analysis of cultural memory in relation to representational strategies such as recycling, reprise and recuperation’, to analyse the phenomenon in relation to the main character in Smith’s Triangle, who is haunted by the complex temporality of experience.

Pin-prick imagery in the nineteenth century forms a different affective archive, examined here by Alice Barnaby (Chapter 7). This is the only chapter that does not use a twentieth or early twenty-first-century case study; yet, it makes possible an invaluable reading of pin-pricking, which reveals a great deal in regard to the way in which repetition is used today. Such a contemporary examination of pin-pricking appears in this edited collection because it frames recent critical interest in the relationship between art, industry and female labour. It draws a link between repetition in craft, industry and visual arts, forming an aesthetics of repetition that is connected to the idea of innovation: ‘far from being a mindless task devoid of variation, there is evidence that, within set parameters, [pin-prick imagery] afforded opportunity for innovation and experimentation’. Drawing on Deleuze, Derrida and Baudrillard, Barnaby thinks of the copy not merely as a bland iteration and devoid of meaning, but rather in terms of female desire, agency and identity.

In Chapter 3, Silvia Battista explores repetition in the 2010 performance The Artist Is Present by Marina Abramović. The complex theatrical apparatus of the piece is examined as a repository for the participants’ personal, affective and religious sentiments. A technology of the numinous emerges in this chapter, drawing on Rudolf Otto’s concept of the numinous experience, as well as Foucault’s technologies of the self. This discussion highlights ‘Abramović’s commitment to engage with numinous psychophysical states often induced through repetitive actions and practices’ and situates the work within a long trajectory of performances that use repetition as a key element in terms of space, presence and action. Battista argues that performances such as The Artist Is Present

offer the possibility to observe, analyse and experience those ‘psychobiological, social, cultural-linguistic, [theatrical and performative] processes [and strategies]’ (Taves 2009: 8) through which a public event is transformed into something so special as to verge on the religious. Most importantly, it enables reflection on how religious sentiments and experiences are triggered in secularity, fostering critical engagement with their ontologies and epistemologies.

Performance bears a temporal paradox, Heathfield suggests: ‘it exists both now and then, it leaves and lasts; its tendencies towards disappearance and dematerialization are countered by its capacities to adhere, mark, and trace itself otherwise’ (2012: 27–28). It creates, in other words, its own archive, as it ‘carries with(in) it its means of historicization’ (2012: 27–28). Repetition may function as one way in which performance remains, but remains differently. This is the case with The Artist Is Present, a re-visiting of the 1980 performance Night Sea Crossing, which was a collaboration between Abramović and Ulay. The latter was performed 22 times over 90 days between 1981 and 1987 (Chapter 3). The instances of the event and its iteration persist in memory and remain in testimonies, in material objects and in spaces (Heathfield 2012: 27–28). Yet, when the event uses repetition in its content or structure, those reiterations seem to already form part of the work. This further complicates our experience of them as well as the representations of this experience. This volume makes a clear point about the way in which these instances are remembered and re-visited: the affective memory of the event demands to be re-written, but also fails to do so, again and again. Some of the fragments of the works described here may have been forgotten. Yet, contributors return to these events to restore or repair, to take pleasure in, to resist the ephemeral, to feel the sorrow of what is gone and to come to terms with that sorrow. These processes may never end; they may persist forever. Memory makes possible a repetition of repetition, a remaining of the event, which is always different from the event itself, yet attempts to retain or produce anew some of the emotions it has induced in the first place. Repetition might reach a point when it does not have the ‘courage to end or the strength to go on’ (Beckett 2000: 31). ‘And then one has to wait until one has forgotten it and then you can begin again’ (Stein 1988: 101).

Becoming Other

Returning to repetition again and again may alter repetition, or the experience of the encounter as well as the memory of it. Even with a seemingly static object, such as a painting, things may change. This is what T. J. Clark realizes after observing the same painting again and again for a period of six months: ‘I could hardly believe that each day there were new things to see’ (2006: 9). One could argue that this takes place during most encounters with performance, dance, poetry, film and visual art. Yet, repetition seems to already create the space for such a process of becoming, and indeed to accommodate it. It offers an experience of multiplicity and denies fixed meaning. It is impossible to exhaust its possibilities in a singular viewing that happens once and for all. This is a process identified by Swen Steinhäuser in his chapter ‘Of Secret Signals, Absent Masters and the Trembling of the Contours: Walter Benjamin, Yvonne Rainer and the Repeatability of Gesture’ (Chapter 1). Steinhäuser recounts Walter Benjamin’s experience of the Kaiserpanorama, an elaborate early stereoscopic picture-display of mostly foreign landscape scenes, as described in his childhood reflections Berlin Childhood around 1900. A ringing bell seems to create a unique auditory experience, a rhythm of interruption and discontinuity, while the young Benjamin is observing the images of the picture-display apparatus. Upon hearing the bell, Benjamin decides to return again the following day; as a result, the auditory effect creates the possibility for repetition to take place. However, Steinhäuser argues, ‘given the incompletion of the interrupted experience, a desire for repetition can no longer hope for the simple return of the same’. Repetition requires alterity in a future time or a time yet to come. Steinhäuser makes a connection between this narrative and Epic theatre’s gestures, which are rendered citable by interruption. The author considers the repeatability of such a gesture, drawing on Benjamin’s writing on Brecht, tracing its echo in the dance of Yvonne Rainer and Judson Dance. Steinhäuser examines the compositional devices of interruption and citation ‘by rearticulating it as a politico-pedagogic attitude of radical performativity’. He argues that ‘techniques and devices such as stilling, quotation and repetition highlight the persistence of a past that signals in the time of the present, haunted by its more or less uncanny returns’. Imagining the return to such an experience, Benjamin acknowledges the necessity for alterity and the fact that this moment only exists in its possibility of becoming Other.

As repetition of this experience may never be the same again, the young Benjamin has to say farewell to that which has not quite taken place. This idea is also explored in the last chapter of this volume entitled ‘Farewell to Farewell: Impossible Endings and Unfinished Finitudes’ (Chapter 11), in which I account for the impossible yet desired ending of returning to a particular event. I use three different examples that bring together writing, dance and