Carla Harryman’s Non/Representation and the Ethics of Dispersive Performance

I live in a fabrication near something I have never said before.
 

–Carla Harryman, “Property”

 
In “The Ear of the Poet in the Mouth of the Performer,” an essay-play that works through the politics of poetry-performance in the post-9/11 U.S., Carla Harryman recalls a performance in which she participated in the early 1990s: the wearing of a pin designed by artist Daniel Davidson that bore the deceptively simple message “Iraqi.” Responses to Harryman’s wearing the pin oscillated between “largely friendly looks and pleasantly unanticipated conversations from mostly Arab immigrant and Arab American shopkeepers of various religions and nationalities,” and the confusion of “literal minded American types” who took the pin as a confession, as a “coming-out as Iraqi.” As a performance, wearing the pin was not simply a personal expression of solidarity; it was also a demonstration of the ways in which meaning can mutate in different contexts and for different audience members. Significantly, the power of the performance came just as often in the moments of confusion and misrecognition it created: while the Arabs and Arab-Americans in Harryman’s account may have gotten it “right,” the more “literal minded” observers too found ways of identifying with the performance, though not perhaps in expected or intended ways. Harryman recalls, for example, that one woman took the pin as “an invitation to exchange confidences, hers being that she had an excess of facial hair and that she was terrified that her husband would find out about it.” While the woman was mistaken in her assumption, the identification makes some sense to Harryman, who points out that in this interpretation both women “had something to hide until this private moment of mutual outing, even if I hadn’t been deliberately hiding something like she had” (“The Ear”). Although the woman was interpellated by the performance, the performer was not in control of that interpellation.
 
As wearer of the pin, Harryman felt a political responsibility to the responses it provoked. The purpose of the performance, she explains, was:
 

to diffuse the theater of war and to dramatize the real life conflations that lead to the targeting of Iraqi subjects as enemies. As a performer of the pin, one becomes responsible in a local context to major world events. The performer citizen engages in a dialogic meditation that exceeds the limits of conventional narrative and argumentation as she becomes aware of her personhood stripped of reductive theatrics and narratives of identity. As with much performance art of the 70’s, Davidson’s work is partly about the performer’s experience itself; and like the performance values of the modernist avant-garde, it assertively provokes a response to emerging states of affairs.
 

(“The Ear”)

The performer of the pin circulates, but is not in control of, the meanings of language already embedded in social and political narratives. In this sense, I would argue not that the performer’s “personhood [is] stripped of . . . narratives of identity,” as Harryman puts it, but rather that the pin clasps the performer to already-circulating narratives, which may then be embraced or rejected, identified or disidentified with. Harryman is wearing not a pin that states “I claim solidarity with Iraqi victims of war,” which would be a speech-like assertion of her political beliefs and identity–a self-narration–but rather a pin that appears to declare an identity that is not self-evident. In order to make sense of the pin, observers must interpret it within the range of their own experiences and understandings. And in subsequently interacting with the performer, they project those identifications onto her body in social exchange, thereby enacting new narratives. The performance event therefore takes place in the interaction between the performer and the audience, or, perhaps more accurately, in what the audience does with the performance. The wearing of the Iraqi pin is a speech act with unpredictable effects, and in this sense, both Harryman and her observers become performers of its meaning. Harryman’s role in the performance is one of responsibility to her interlocutors, but it is, in some respects, a non-normative responsibility carried out as listening generously to and considering a range of possible identifications. While she mobilizes the structures, Harryman does not lead the interpretations. And although she hints that the Arab and Arab-American observers got it right, she does not accuse others of getting it “wrong,” but rather of getting it different. In wearing the pin, the performer becomes responsible to this difference.

 
Significantly, the performance must remain peripatetic in order to succeed, since success relies on individual responses not subject to the social pressure of the collective space of the theater. One of the ways Harryman tries to retain this peripatetic quality in the space of the theater is to construct a dispersive theater in which meaning is allowed to oscillate rather than being tied to a single correct interpretation. The oscillation of meaning, Una Chaudhuri reminds us, is “an open space or aporia in the political ‘known'”–the space of revolution (163). Harryman suggests that the ear of the poet is tuned to the oscillation, and in her poet’s theater, it is the job of the performer to keep this oscillation alive. In “The Ear of the Poet,” for example, Harryman juxtaposes the discussion of the Iraqi pin performance with an excerpt from a Gertrude Stein play, leaving the audience to interpret for themselves the relationship between the pieces. While Harryman acknowledges that “the discussion [of the Iraqi pin performance] preceding the extract from [Stein’s] play would infect the semantic meaning of [Stein’s] work–an inference would be brought forth that at this present moment a poet behind a locked door, a no longer living poet, Iraqi, and people are connected and that there is a simultaneity made between the word ‘Iraqi’ in my exposition and the word ‘people’ in Stein’s play”, this is not the “right” or even intended interpretation but rather the result of habituated interpretive practices themselves. Dispersive theater places under scrutiny both the structure of interpretive practices and the very impulse to interpret. The space of dispersive theater is therefore an ethical space; it is a space “where thought itself experiences an obligation to form a relation with its other–not only other thoughts but other-than-thought” (Harpham 37).
 
I discuss this example here at length because it offers a relatively self-contained way into thinking about some of the strategies and preoccupations of Harryman’s poet’s theater, which is both like and unlike Davidson’s performance art piece. Harryman’s use of Davidson as an element in her own essay-play demonstrates her ongoing engagement with intertextuality, hybrid genre, and art as/and analytic discourse, but she also uses Davidson to think through her own artistic practice. Davidson represents the use of performance not merely as a provisional testing ground in moments of impasse,¹ but as a permanently provisional space, “one that in part fulfills an open-ended, non-objective mobile role that is exploratory, improvisatory, and that takes language as a medium as seriously as it does the other mediums of innovative theater that have superseded language” (“The Ear”). Like Davidson, Harryman is interested both in the relationship of narrative to non-narrative and in the way this relationship figures and is figured by physical bodies. Also like Davidson, much of Harryman’s performance is conceptual, though it is usually written as scripted dramatic theater. Moreover, as Harryman’s own commentary above makes clear, in recent years, she too has become interested in the social and political consequences of her artistic experiments. For Harryman, this shift in interest from her own “art activity and its genre excesses” to something else not clearly identified but characterized by “a loss of a sense of form-desire” is precipitated by U.S. militarization against Iraq as a response to 9/11. Viewed through this prism of art-activism, Harryman’s poet’s theater becomes, like the wearing of the Iraqi pin, “a kind of homework assignment” that allows both artist and audience to think through their relationships to form, media, discourse, embodiment, and identity (“The Ear”). Harryman’s discussion of the Iraqi pin project reveals the ways in which discursive conventions and performing subjects sometimes collide and sometimes collaborate. What Harryman demonstrates is that the real and the symbolic are not locked in a unidirectional relationship of mediation, but rather that they influence each other and this influence is site-specific. The Iraqi pin performance, Harryman’s plays, and indeed poet’s theater in general investigates the uses to which meanings are put. While such an investigation recognizes that language is neither stable nor univocal, this recognition is not its conclusion but rather its jumping-off point. Poet’s theater is not therefore deconstructive, as much as it relies on a deconstructive understanding of language.
 
Asking what comes first, the poetry or the theater, narrative or non-narrative, subject or object, muscle or skeleton, Harryman muses, “I would prefer to emphasize the skeleton. I would prefer the movement to be the movement of the muscles lifted by the skeleton. When the muscles are not lifted by the skeleton they become athletic. One becomes aggressive and competitive. The theater becomes a theater of conflict. And somebody has to win” (“The Ear”). While I want to be careful not to tie Harryman’s ideas down to a simple metaphor, part of what she is suggesting here is that bodies are inseparable from the social forces that animate them. While both muscles and skeleton are components of bodies, they serve distinct but overlapping purposes: one mainly structure, the other mainly force. An illustration accompanying the essay depicts a knife held between teeth and lips, a cooperation of skeleton and muscle that can be read, simultaneously, as both defensive and aggressive. This is a depiction not of an oral weapon but of an aural weapon, both spoken and heard, suggested by the ear-in-the-mouth of the work’s title. In the historical moment of the post-9/11 U.S. “War on Terror,” Harryman implies, muscle-force has been recruited into insidious service, sculpting language and narrative into weapons of social conflict. Yet just as both muscles and skeleton are necessary to movement, so narrative is necessary to communication. The solution, Harryman writes in “Toy Boats,” is “to distribute narrative rather than deny it” (107).
 

Language Poetry, Poet’s Theater, and the Body

 
Harryman’s theater practice grows in part out of her participation in the Bay Area poetry community commonly known as “Language” writers, many of whom rework narrative as a political principle. One of the tactics of Language writing is to foreground the conventionalized function of the “I” and of other narrative tools. Such tools mark relationships of location, antagonism, causality, intention, and emphasis and “provide the illusion of movement, direction and location for the reader,” Michael Davidson points out, “but when they lose their indexical function, they point at the conventionalized nature of writing itself” (79). When “I” tell a story from memory, who is the “I” that speaks, and who is the “I” that is spoken of? What is the overlap between the two and in what way does each help to constitute the other? Bringing these questions into the space of embodied performance, Harryman puts further pressure on the conventionalized function of linguistic markers as indicators of identity presumed to be natural.
 
Harryman’s Memory Play (1994) explores the narrative and performative construction of the “I” via memory, played out differently by the play’s three main characters, Pelican, Fish, and Reptile:
 

Reptile:

If I tell you one thing that I remember, you will think I’m an idiot for remembering only one thing. This is one thing that makes theater different from real conversation. If I provide you with several of my most esteemed memories, you will probably believe there are more where those came from, and I will have earned your respect. This will make theater a little more like real conversation.
 

Pelican:

I have a job and it is virtually all I can think about; however, I think this: memory is nothing but words stored up in an inefficient computer. What you will remember of this conversation will be nothing like what went into its construction. Such understanding promotes success in business.

……………………………………………………………………………….

Fish:

I had suffered for a long time from the illusion that remembering inhibited one’s experience. Now the illusion is almost my only memory. . . . [Later,] I will remember something else and not this. I will have forgotten the story to which I currently refer. Each person has his or her own theater. I propose this as an exhibit or a symptom of my personal stage.

(7-8)

Reptile is a chameleon, disguising himself in the camouflage of social discourse. And yet his disguise is not aimed at deception. Although Reptile suggests that whether or not we are respected or maligned depends on the strength of our (storytelling/conversational) performance, he seems to move beyond Erving Goffman’s notion of impression management to suggest that social discourse is all the truth there is.² Pelican, on the other hand, focuses on the misinformation that occurs between what one says and what another hears, and promotes a notion of performance as information processing, mechanical and morally indifferent. Meanwhile, Fish appears to recognize the necessary relationship between discourse (remembering) and experience while at the same time acknowledging that the back story of identity is often forgotten, that identity is assumed without realizing what that identity is built upon. Fish might be taken as an example of contemporary performance studies’ notions of identity and performance: while we may understand that identity is performative, we experience it as natural. Despite their differences, what Reptile, Pelican, and Fish share is a notion of memory as performative, produced by and in narrative.

 
Memory relies, then, on the doubling of creative narrative and social discourse, a doppelgänger which first appears in the stage directions with which the prologue opens: “A bedtime story/conversation in a little tent town out in the salt flats” (7). What one first notices about this direction is its generic ambivalence. While there would be little difficulty producing the visual elements of such a scenic design in performance (a small tent town, salt flats, bedtime), how would the difference-and-sameness indicated by the phrase “story/conversation” be performed? The slash is itself a radically textual performance that suggests the imbrication of social discourse with storytelling, with narrative, and indeed this relationship is the play’s central investigation. W. B. Worthen has argued that “modern drama in print typically frames a dialectical tension between the proprieties of the page and the identities of drama” (62). Harryman’s slash turns this page-stage tension outward, toward social life. Art (story) is different from, but inextricably bound to, social discourse (conversation). Storytelling is both oral and literary art. Harryman’s printed play alludes to the chiasmus of literary textuality and social discourse by putting the play’s status–as literary artifact, as embodied performance–into question. While Harryman makes use of what Worthen has called the “accessories” of modernist dramatic publication–“page design, typography, act and scene numbering, speech prefixes, and stage directions” (13)–she does not do so in order to control the stage performance from the page. Despite Chris Stroffolino’s assertion that Memory Play “works at least as well as a closet drama as it does in theater performance,” the page and stage versions of the play are not correspondent but collaborative, together investigating the performativity of memory (177). While each version can of course stand on its own, the play’s textual-theatrical ambivalence proliferates its identity across genres and across forms of reproduction, undermining the final authority of any single version.
 
In bringing the language of the text out into the space of performance–performing “as language event the fluidity between public and psychological spaces,” as Harryman puts it (“Site” 158)–her plays investigate the social activities of language within a context of actual human relations, of the audience members and performers within a specific social space (that of the performance at a particular moment in time) and in relation to specific objects. Language writing on the page explores language in individual interaction with readers, while the performance of Language writing in poetry readings is bounded by the conventions of a touring authorial performance that rhetorically position the event (albeit falsely) as site- and audience-nonspecific, if not actually transcendent. In contrast to this, Harryman’s poet’s theater emphasizes embodied identities at the same time it deconstructs them. These identities are not incidental, and they are not nonspecific; rather, they are fluid. The character list of Harryman’s play Performing Objects Stationed in The Sub World, for example, specifies a “White woman,” “Child,” and “Black man,” but the author’s notes for performance explain that “[t]he categories of gender and ethnicity are mutable in this play, based on whatever circumstance of the performance” (qtd in “Site” 158). This is accomplished in part by having multiple actors play each character but also by leaving the gap between character and actor visible: “For instance C3, the Black Man, reads the newspaper but that doesn’t mean that C3 becomes a Black Man who reads the newspaper, but rather C3 performs a reading of the newspaper: his identity or identities such that it is or they are, migrates through activities” (“Site” 162). In this way, the objects with which the actors interact “do not serve as extensions or illustrations of subjectivity nor do they appear with autonomous luminosity”; instead, they are “constitutive of an instability of social encounters and uncertain boundaries between interior fantasy and exterior fact, whether they are sentient or inert” (162). This does not, however, preclude psychological depth. Rather, characters are defined not by the moral challenges they face but rather by the communication they perform and are performed by.
 
In Memory Play, the playing through of multiple discursive and gestural registers in the formation of identity drives the action. As bodies and spoken language self-consciously jostle one another in performance, the relationship between discourse, identity, and embodiment takes center stage. Reptile’s lines quoted above appear to interpellate audience members into a self-conscious suspension of disbelief: he explicitly acknowledges our tacit agreement to let one memory in “art” stand in for the multiple memories of “real” conversation.³ In art, he suggests, a single story or image (memory) can take on a variety of symbolisms and resonances; in conversation, however, we may question such overdetermination of a single moment in one’s life. But the “I” who speaks this line is shifty, posing as a social interlocutor and literary-dramatic character simultaneously. On the page, Reptile’s “I” seems to remain consistent, a distant observer of the relationship between theater and conversation. Spoken by an actor onstage, however, the “I” oscillates between actor and dramatic character. Is this line a rehearsed but direct address to the audience by an actor who will soon become a character in the play, or is the actor already in character? And how does this ambiguity position audience members in relation to the play?
 
This last question raises the issue of what poet Joan Retallack has called “reciprocal alterity,” which she conceptualizes as an equilibrium between, on the one hand, the “ethical and epistemological destabilizing principle” that we are never fully knowable to one another or to ourselves and, on the other, community, receptivity, and intention (5). Is the “I,” who–according to Reptile–can earn “your” respect, a “fictional” character or a “real” actor? Either way, of course, the “I” is a construction based in part on the speaker’s performance and in part on the audience’s conclusions in relation to that performance–making both intention and reception important matters to consider. The construction is simultaneously grammatical and epistemological, since pronouns are a necessary part of communication despite their radical insufficiency and contingency. Pronouns suggest independent subjectivity, and in doing so contribute to a model of individualism. In order to “move away from models of cultural and political agency lodged in isolated heroic acts and simplistic notions of cause and effect,” as Retallack urges, we must therefore think through our tools of communication at their most basic level (3). Both Retallack and Harryman propose “a fine new kind of realism,” to quote William James’s remark in a letter to Gertrude Stein about her writing (qtd. Mellow 147). Retallack approaches this version of realism by appealing to the essay form, because, she argues, the essay writes from the position of an “I” understood as selfsame, whereas the lyric “I” of poetry is already understood to be a persona. The theater, however, presents an unusually apt arena for an investigation of representation, for the presence of bodies on stage always simultaneously evokes both the characters being portrayed and the actors “themselves.”

Mimesis and Misrecognition in Mirror Play

 
Harryman’s latest performance work, Mirror Play, revolves around violence perpetrated by nations against other nations or against (its own or other) individuals. Divided into four acts, a prologue, and an epilogue (all appearing in reverse order) but without stage directions or speech prefixes, the stage performance differs widely from production to production. What remains consistent, however, is a web of political and social references–for example, media portrayals of Rachel Corrie, the American peace activist killed defending a Palestinian house against U.S.-built bulldozers operated by the Israeli Defense Forces; images from the second Gulf War of U.S. soldiers raiding Iraqi tombs and Iraqis’ own destruction of Iraqi cultural artifacts; and the 1968 campy intergalactic anti-war movie Barbarella, whose star Jane Fonda was transformed in the 1970s from GI pinup girl to despised anti-war activist and then again in the 1980s to aerobic video icon. Mirror Play portrays an America defined not by physical borders but by complex military, economic, cultural, and political relationships, playing through the ways in which these relationships are constructed and maintained. The play is both radically textual and radically gestural, using paratactic gesture and language as well as architectural space not to reflect the interiority of the subject but rather to help constitute and figure it. In this sense, Mirror Play represents a broad shift in thinking from the concept of an individual subject, seen as a self-sufficient and independent whole, to the concept of the social subject, in which the social (exterior) is a necessary and mutable circumstance of subject constitution (interior). Throughout the play, “wholes”–words, characters, clothes, rooms–are revealed as mere resting points in the ongoing process of meaning-making. What is simultaneously difficult and hopeful about this piece is that it dares to imagine a politics (or ethics) for those who are produced in and by narrative. Mirror Play does not simply reveal or reflect this condition of narrativity; it tries to think a way that we might be active within this condition rather than merely subject to it.
 
The play opens, in one version (see Fig. 1 below),¹⁹ with a simple image of homey domesticity–clothes hanging on a line, blowing in the wind–portrayed entirely in language: “Flying. Clothes flying. Sleeves wrapping / around clouds, cinching them in, dragging / them” (178).²⁰
 
Scene from Mirror Play by Carla Harryman, with Jon Raskin, John Olson, Roham Shaikhani, Elana Elyce, Abbas Bazzi, Mary Byrnes, and Wolanda Lewis. Directed by Jim Cave and performed at the Susanne Hilberry Gallery in Ferndale, Michigan, August 14, 2005. Filmed by Asa Watten. Used by permission.
 

Click to view video

The empty clothes are both human products and human forms, registering simultaneously the presence and absence of human beings themselves. As the sleeves first “wrap” around clouds, then “cinch,” and finally “drag” them, the clothes imply a kind of “domestic” violence, most clearly perhaps a reference to the Clothesline Project, which protests against, and memorializes the victims of a private kind of “domestic” violence against women. But it is also perhaps a reference to that which inspired the Clothesline Project: the AIDS Quilt, originally created to memorialize the victims of AIDS and to protest against their neglect by American society and history. As theater and performance critic Elinor Fuchs has pointed out, participant-created AIDS quilts, in their jumbling of Jews, Catholics, Muslims, and New Age Buddhists with sequins, flags, prayers, a measuring spoon, and much more, perform a postmodern breakdown of master narratives–in direct contrast to the hero memorials of “modern imperial politics” (195-196).²¹ Significantly, in the Detroit production directed by Jim Cave,²² no flying shirts are visually present on stage (see Fig. 1 above); rather, they’re represented as artifacts of language, drawing attention to the ways in which narrative has been inscribed on bodies even to the point of replacing them altogether (as one speaker says in Mirror Play, “Images are crowding. Crowding us out” [207]). If the shirts had been physically represented or staged they might simply have performed an iconic function, but because they are described in language–a reference to a reference–the very textuality of the representation creates not a destruction of visual representation but a recognition of the very condition of representation.

 
Despite the lack of narrative through-line, the play achieves continuity both by taking as its central focus the investigation of the conditions of representation and by returning again and again to key words and images. Cycling back to the image of clothing after several pages, for example, the text meditates on the perspective created by choosing some descriptors over others:
 

…This scheme
Imagines clothing in terms of whole or
complete entities: a shirt, a hat, a shoe, etc.
So there is still much that it cannot describe.
For instance, in the great outdoors, the
clothes rot and decompose. Birds pull at
their threads. The threads mingle with other
things. The thread is no longer a discrete
thing but part of a unit for which there is no
name until the nest is complete. Then the
unit is a nest. I wear a sleeve on my heart.
Note this also. And other harmless events.
(note)
(note)

echo makes a note (192)

To imagine clothing as a finished object–rather than as a composite of that which went into its making or as decomposed parts to be used in the making of other objects–is, the text asserts, a “scheme” rather than an inevitability. If the object that is no-longer-a-shirt-and-not-yet-a-nest has no name, it becomes subjugated, merely a stage in the creation of an “actual” object and meaningless except in relation to the end product (recalling Puchner’s definition of gesture above).

 
From this cluster of images and lines, organized thematically around the impact of language use on conceptual thinking (which is hardly “harmless”), the text suddenly shifts paratactically to a reordered cliché–“I wear a sleeve on my heart”–with no apparent relation to the previous lines. One way a reader might approach this shift is simply to give in to the experience of abrupt change, with no attempt to impose meaning. Habituated reading practices are more likely, however, to coerce a meaningful connection. Is this sentence perhaps another example of language that privileges object over process? What is the relationship of the “I” to the objects (clothing, nest) that came before? And what do we make of the shift in tone from material objects such as shirts, hats, threads, and nests, to symbolic objects, such as a heart and, now, sleeve (which can be worn on a heart only metaphorically)? A nest made out of threads is a home (a physical place) and home is where the heart is (a symbolic place). Emotional vulnerability (wearing one’s heart on one’s sleeve) is replaced with emotional self-preservation (wearing a sleeve on one’s heart). What was formerly outside (clothing) moves inward (to “I”). Here the text mimes its meaning through the generation of interpretive possibilities: any single understanding represents a “scheme,” useful perhaps but certainly not inevitable.
 
But the text quoted above also moves beyond semantic frontiers toward the semiotic border between language and music inhabited by the word “note.” This single word suggests simultaneously a musical sound, different speech modes (command–“note this”–or description), and textual objects (a hierarchical category designator [i.e., footnote] or a casual piece of writing). The use of parentheses on the page–an instantiation which cannot be precisely performed on stage–is a textual convention indicating that the word “note” might be read as a placeholder (as in “I intend to insert a note here”) or as a stage direction (as in “Play a musical note here”). In either case, the note functions as an (explanatory or musical) “echo.” The play’s textual performance on the page, then, is not identical with its performance on stage. The relationship of the text to stage is neither directive nor documentary, neither script nor recording. Reading the text and attending the performance produce experientially distinct plays that nevertheless constitute linked “work” exploring the relationship of textual language to embodied performance. The semantic overdetermination of “note” in the text, for example, is linked but not identical to the overdetermination of the voice, as speech and as instrument, in performance: Both the Detroit and San Francisco productions featured a jaw harp, which produces sound uncannily in between language and music.²³ Working with sound and music at the limits of language, these performances in part explored the ways in which sounds morph into and out of meaning.
 
What is at stake here is an awareness of the multiple processes by which we make experience meaningful. When a speaker asserts at the beginning of Harryman’s play that “the composition of the sky is a matter of knowledge” (178), for example, she suggests both that the sky’s physical make-up (one sense of “composition”) can be scientifically known, but also that this knowledge is itself a matter of narrative construction (a second sense of “composition”). The goal is not to question the makeup of the sky, but rather to suggest that what is known must also take into account how it is known. A few lines later the play suggests that “addicts” to knowledge “suffer atmosphere,” a line which is vocally elongated in performance–“atmosssphhhere”–to suggest both the vaporous air that surrounds a planet and, simultaneously, a fear of the atmos, or vaporosity, perhaps the vaporosity or lack of solidity of knowledge itself. Here, vocalized performance vaporizes our certainty about the meaning of the line, and in doing so, it both mimes and produces its meaning. Mirror Play employs not a poetics of memory as witness but rather a poetics of memory as performative, as productive of the relationships it purports to describe and attend, a strategy that echoes Elin Diamond’s notion of mimesis as the production of truth through a manipulation of the mirroring process.

Dispersive Performance and the Theater of Others

 
According to Jerzy Grotowski, whose efforts to rethink actors’ training have influenced Harryman’s own approach to performance, the defining feature of theater is the performer-audience relationship (15). But in the postmodern era, the audience is notoriously difficult to characterize. In The Audience, theater theorist Herbert Blau discusses the peculiar notion of the postmodern audience, both collective and disparate, joined to one another through a shared experience interpreted in highly individualized ways. Like Harryman, Blau locates the efficacy of postmodernist theater in its challenge to the primacy of ocularcentric knowledge. To position understanding as seeing is, he argues, an ideology that ignores the audience’s original auditory role. Postmodern theater audiences are a product of “the vast seduction of the dispersive media” (14) and marked by division, or what Blau describes as “an ‘original splitting'” that is “not the image of an original unity but the mysterious rupture of social identity in the moment of its emergence” (10). The postmodern audience is therefore not a certainty–not a community to be joined or a position to be occupied–but rather an effect of performance itself:
 

The audience . . . is not so much a mere congregation of people as a body of thought and desire. It does not exist before the play but is initiated or precipitated by it; it is not an entity to begin with but a consciousness constructed. The audience is what happens when, performing the signs and passwords of a play, something postulates itself and unfolds in response.
 

(25, italics in original)

Blau historicizes the concept of a “public” as a modernist notion that conceptualizes the audience as uniform, understandable, and authorizing–that is, as something that can be figured out and won over. In contrast, postmodernist audiences are indeterminate, with each member experiencing an individual response, an individual identification. Blau dubs this the “theater of otherness,” as an alternative to the more traditional notion of a theater of essence (94). This “otherness” does not constitute a counterpublic–it is not the disidentificatory community that, for example, José Muñoz discusses in his important study of contemporary minoritarian performance. Rather, it is an interpretive “community” paradoxically marked by discontinuity and dispersion, and formed in spite of (or perhaps because of, or prior to) the foreclosure of normative identification. But while Blau argues that such theater is marked by an oscillation between eye and ear that creates distance rather than identification, I want to propose that in Harryman’s theater this oscillation forms the basis for an ethics of responsibility toward the identifications we form. In this sense, we might think of Harryman’s theater not as a theater of otherness but as a theater of others, others to whom we are, for better or worse, ethically bound–a theater in which, to borrow Harryman’s language, “[m]e talking fuses to you” (“Property” 16).

 
If the space of performance is, as Harryman argues in “The Ear of the Poet,” a provisional space in which ideas, narratives, and social constructions may be tested, then what’s being tested in Mirror Play is perhaps not only our methods for making sense of a post-9/11 world but also the very idea that making “sense”–a particular cognitive ordering of experience–is the correct goal. If “making sense” is a narrative proposition, then poetry might provide a different paradigm more suitable to the present world’s complex interconnectivities. Poetry might offer, as Retallack asserts, a cognitive alternative to imagining borders and the crossing of lines, allowing us instead to think in terms of fractal geometries and the “swerve,” an unpredictable (form of) change that can defamiliarize, disorient, and even estrange by “radically altering geometries of attention,” resulting in “an unsettling transfiguration of once-familiar terrain” (1). As interruption, digression, and the unexpected, the swerve is produced in and by hybridity, the vitality of which lies in its inventiveness, in its generativity. The swerve is not an abdication of responsibility but rather the recognition that all events are overdetermined, unpredictable, subject to chance. Swerves “dislodge us,” Retallack argues, “from reactionary allegiances and nostalgias” (3). Openness to the unexpected, to generativity, thus becomes a kind of ethics: generosity toward generativity.
 
Placing such generativity at the heart of an ethics of non-normative obligation takes seriously Geoffrey Galt Harpham’s assertion that ethics “does not solve problems, it structures them” (37). The modernist hero narrative, related to the sense of a universal ethical imperative on which ethical discourse has traditionally been founded, has been denounced in the postmodern era as an “ideological vehicle and the legitimation of concrete structures of power and domination” (Jameson 101). The paradox of a postmodernist ethics of non-normative obligation, then, is that while it does not posit a hierarchy of interpretive values, it does rely on the categorical imperative of obligation itself. This imperative may, Harpham suggests, be at the center of Derrida’s notion of deconstruction itself, seeping into it in the form of the subject who is allowed to
 

‘return’ on the condition that it be transformed and modernized–no longer the self-identical, self-regulating subject of humanism, but rather a subject inmixed with otherness. This otherness, Derrida said, would consist not only of the obligation that all people owe to other people, but also of the iron laws, the internal otherness, which we, as speaking animals, harbor within our living consciousnesses.

(Harpham 23)

The paradox of dispersive theater’s non-normative obligation embodies the contradiction Harpham locates in ethics itself: the contradiction between “How ought one live?” and “What ought I to do?,” the contradiction between the distanced laws of generalizable norms and an individual in an actual (and unique) situation (26). For Harpham the key to ethics is not only the obligation but the choice between different ethics (for example, between mercy and retribution). Dispersive theater makes us attentive to these choices, makes us aware that there are choices. This is not to say that all choices are equal, but rather that each choice “violates some law or other, and violates it precisely because it is ‘ethical'” (29). Dispersive theater is ethical, then, not because it offers a moral order but because it reveals the conditions of choice. Mirror Play presents a very postmodern problematic: while the body is materialized through the very act of narrative (including discourse, gesture, and image), narrative is always an imperfect mirror–a necessary framing that inevitably obfuscates, a “view [that] blocks what’s behind it” (Harryman “Animal” 33). This presents a particular obstacle to audience members, who are presented with a range of possibilities for mis/recognition, but it also presents a threat to bodies, for violence–in the form of war, rape, social neglect, and government policy–is justified through such mis/recognitions.

 
And yet, it is the very vulnerability of bodies that leads to claims of “bodily integrity and self-determination” that are, as Judith Butler has pointed out, “essential to so many political movements” (25). “The body,” Butler continues,
 

implies mortality, vulnerability, agency: the skin and the flesh expose us to the gaze of others, but also to touch, and to violence, and bodies put us at risk of becoming the agency and instrument of all these as well. Although we struggle for rights over our own bodies, the very bodies for which we struggle are not quite ever only our own. The body has its invariably public dimension. Constituted as a social phenomenon in the public sphere, my body is and is not mine. Given over from the start to the world of others, it bears their imprint, is formed within the crucible of social life; only later, and with some uncertainty, do I lay claim to my body as my own, if, in fact, I ever do. Indeed, if I deny that prior to the formation of my ‘will,’ my body related me to others whom I did not choose to have in proximity to myself, if I build a notion of ‘autonomy’ on the basis of the denial of this sphere of a primary and unwilled physical proximity with others, then am I denying the social conditions of my embodiment in the name of autonomy?
 

(26)

Here, Butler helps us understand the vulnerability of the body in the public realm, a vulnerability of both its physicality and its identity. This mentally and physically projected “external” body inevitably figures one’s internal subjectivity as well. And yet in figuring this subjectivity as autonomous, Butler argues, we do violence to those others on whose denial that autonomy is based. As Harryman asserts, “I” is not the measure; it is the “interference” (“Acker” 36). But it is necessary interference.

 
Dispersive theater may, in fact, represent a new chapter in the history of anti-theatricality. Anti-theatricality in the twentieth century has frequently indicated, at least in part, a desire to distance ourselves from the influence of the mass audience, who may pressure us respond differently than we might otherwise do. Mimetic acts are, moreover, repugnant because they allow us to enjoy the suffering of others. But dispersive theater employs what might be called a flexible theatricality, whereby the value of the theater collectivity fluctuates between coercion and responsibility, between the awareness that narrative is, at best, imperfect and that meaning must nevertheless be made. Dispersive theater thus embraces the stage, but in a different way, avoiding spectacle and emphasizing the poetic, not as a direct route to the emotions but as a social tool.